Difference between revisions of "Archive:Local projects"

Revision as of 04:43, 20 September 2005

Here are some suggestions of projects your chapter can pick up at any time to educate, to help the movement, or to strengthen your chapter.

Parties

I was serious when I said that we need to do more parties. All of our local groups should throw a party of some kind this semester, there's no point to activism if we don't have any fun. Free Culture Swarthmore is planning a LAN party... get creative!

Campus radio stations

Guest host a Free Culture radio show of CC-licensed music

Free Culture Campuses

Make your school free!

• Free software on campus computers
  • Both official college computers e.g. in library or computer lab and on personal computers of students & faculty
  • Firefox can be huge
  • Create list of OSS replacements for programs students & educators commonly use
    • Targeted at Windows/Mac users -- if you use *nix, BSD, etc., you're probably already well-versed in free software
    • Office suite
      • OpenOffice (Win, Mac)
      • AbiWord (Win, Mac)
    • Web browser
      • Firefox (Win, Mac)
    • E-mail
      • Thunderbird (Win, Mac)
    • Text editor
    • Graphics editor
      • GIMP (Win, Mac)
    • IM/chat
      • Gaim (Win)
      • Adium (Mac)
    • A/V playback (MP3, video files, etc.)
    • CD ripping/burning
      • CDex (Win) ripping
• School documents in open (non-proprietary) file formats
  • Registrar forms, class readings/handouts, course catalogs, lecture videos, etc.
  • .pdf and .doc are two of the biggest offenders... what else?
  • No Flash or other proprietary formats on college Web sites
• No anti-p2p, port blocking, etc. software on campus network
• Responsible patent practices
• Divestment from companies that abuse IP law
  • If you maliciously sue over phony/weak allegations of copyright/patent/trademark infringement, you won't be doing business at this school!
• CC licensing for college publications, research, media, etc.; open source licenses for college-created software
• Digitizing public domain library collections

Digitize public domain literature

• Collaborate with your campus library: What are our most valuable collections? What collections make us unique? Digitize them (if not already online) and post to Project Gutenberg.
• Work with other campus organizations. Work with the Hispanic Student Association to digitize a travelogue of Mexico, the Black Student Union to scan a slave's autobiography, etc. Be creative! Find students at your college who would like to donate their time to work on something that interests them.
• Does your school house unique collections of public domain photographs, artwork, sheet music...? Find a Web site that specializes in that and digitize for them.
• If you can't/don't want to digitize, volunteer as a proofreader at Distributed Proofreaders. (Join the group "Free Culture".)
• This can be an excellent way to make a good name for FC and improve the reputations of our schools.

Be the Media

• shortwave (HAM) radio
  • Amanda's blog entry 6 Jan 2005
• low-power FM radio
  • An FM Broadcast Transmitter For Your Home Slashdot, 7 Jan 2005
• publishing content under CC licenses
  • The Creative Commons Publisher makes it stupidly easy to host your own Creative Commons content on The Internet Archive.
  • Torrentocracy is testing out an easy-to-use content delivery system for individuals called Prodigem that allows people to publish their stuff via BitTorrent.
  • free CC image galleries
• blogging / citizen journalism
  • RSS feeds
  • trackback
  • South Korean news source that's entirely citizen-written: Oh My News
• guest host a radio show
• public access TV