[sudo-discuss] Fwd: [FC-discuss] After 9 Years of free culture advocacy, Students for Free Culture is now the Free Culture Foundation

Mon Apr 22 15:10:01 PDT 2013

Plus, no one really seemed to get the Berkeley 60s reference to the Students for a Democratic Society.

It would make some sense to make stronger connections with the Free Culture Forum fcforum.net in Europe, which has been impressively successful over the years.

sent from eddan.com

On Apr 22, 2013, at 3:02 PM, Matthew Senate <mattsenate at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Free Culture Foundation <webleader+rss-bot at freeculture.org>
> Date: Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 2:15 PM
> Subject: [FC-discuss] After 9 Years of free culture advocacy, Students for Free Culture is now the Free Culture Foundation
> To: discuss at freeculture.org
> 
> 
> We are excited to announce the _Free Culture Foundation_ — the new name
> of the organization formerly known as _Students for Free Culture_. This
> change reflects the evolution of the organization over the first nine
> years of its life to support free culture advocacy in communities beyond
> students, to emphasize coalition building with existing free culture
> organizations, and to renew our commitment to free culture as an issue
> of social justice.
> 
> **1. First, this change reflects an expansion of our activism to non-
> student communities.**
> 
> Although our organization was started within colleges, universities, and
> high schools, we have grown to involve the work of many non-students.
> Many of our members and leaders have graduated and continue to
> participate in the organization.  We want an organization that not only
> retains its members but has room for those who graduate and still wish
> to be organize around free culture. Many non-students have joined and
> support our advocacy and activism. To acknowledge the fluidity of
> student status as well as the valuable contributions of non-students to
> our organizations, we have selected a more inclusive name that reflects
> the breadth of our constituency.
> 
> That said, with dozens of student chapters that have been established
> around the world over the years, our roots and our base will remain in
> the academy. A new name and an increased commitment to non-students does
> not reflect a retreat from our strong commitment to students and to
> student activism in free culture. Although we plan to support local and
> non-academic chapters, our organization will continue a strong emphasis
> on campus organizing.
> 
> Just as we have outgrown our name, we have outgrown our old
> institutional structure. With the support of Joseph Dempsey, we are in
> the process of filing as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
> 
> **2. Second, as the institutional landscape around free culture has
> evolved over the last nine years, we aim to reflect a changed position
> in an ecosystem of free culture organizations.**
> 
> There are many organizations that carry out invaluable work benefiting
> the free culture movement: the [Free Software Foundation][1],
> [Electronic Frontier Foundation][2], [Mozilla Foundation][3], [Wikimedia
> Foundation][4], [ Open Knowledge Foundation][5], [Public Knowledge][6],
> [Creative Commons][7], and many other organizations have been founded,
> grown enormously, and changed, over the last decade. Today, the broader
> free culture movement does much more than our initial goals of promoting
> free software and free cultural works. The Free Culture Foundation seeks
> to fill a space between these organizations and bring them together.
> 
> A decade ago, the free culture movement focused on exploring
> possibilities and setting goals. After nine years of work in the broader
> free culture community, we can affirm a strong commitment to successful
> models of free culture put in practice by organizations like the
> Wikimedia Foundation, the [Definition of Free Culture Works][8], the
> open access movement, and the Free Software Foundation. The free culture
> movement has also grown in breadth. Our work no longer involves only
> promoting increased use of free software and free cultural works. With
> our strong history of organizing, we aim to build upon, complement, and
> fill some of the spaces between the many other organizations to support
> a broad range of free culture issues.
> 
> **3. Finally, we seek to reiterate a renewed commitment to free culture
> as issue of social justice and to connect more effectively with other
> activists and movements working on these issues.**
> 
> As [our annoncement][9] of support for the [Empowermentors
> Collective][10] reads, "It is imperative that we acknowledge that there
> are systemic structures of control embedded in our society which
> permeate our movement. Refusing  to do so in an effort to
> compartmentalize and focus on our own goals is detrimental to our
> success. We cannot afford to be an isolated, inward-facing movement." We
> do not live merely in coexistence with media and technology, but we live
> in and through them. They continuously influence how we communicate,
> frame our understandings of ourselves, and mediate how we experience the
> world.
> 
> In our continued advocacy, we want to emphasize that free culture
> reflects not only an approach to sharing but an important way to promote
> autonomy. Our movement should be grounded in the needs of those most
> exploited by private ownership over technology, information, and media.
> Songs, films, books, and apps do not need freedom, people do.
> 
> In these next steps, there remain many critical open questions and
> unfilled needs. We invite all free culture activists to participate in
> this ongoing evolution and expansion of our organization and our
> movement over the coming months. We encourage existing or former
> participants to reconnect. To join our community, please subscribe to
> our [discussion list][11].
> 
>    [1]: https://www.fsf.org/
> 
>    [2]: https://www.eff.org/
> 
>    [3]: https://www.mozilla.org/foundation/
> 
>    [4]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/
> 
>    [5]: http://okfn.org/
> 
>    [6]: http://publicknowledge.org/
> 
>    [7]: https://creativecommons.org/
> 
>    [8]: http://freedomdefined.org/
> 
>    [9]: http://freeculture.org/blog/2013/01/31/announcing-the-
> empowermentors-collective-a-group-for-women-of-color-and-queer-people-
> of-color/
> 
>    [10]: http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Empowermentors
> 
>    [11]: http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> 
> URL: http://freeculture.org/blog/2013/04/22/after-9-years-of-free-culture-advocacy-students-for-free-culture-is-now-the-free-culture-foundation/
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