Free Culture For Students (FC4S)

This is a project to encourage Free Culture in UK universities.

Contents

  1. Free Culture For Students (FC4S)
  2. Starter pack
    1. Pack contents
    2. Assembling & sending the pack out
  3. The Competition
      1. Comments
  4. Timetable
  5. Misc

Starter pack

The first phase involves putting together a FC-UK starter pack, which provides information and encourages students to start official local groups, or for existing student groups to gain that status.

The idea is to:

  • Establish some new FC-UK local groups.
  • Do a big splash for publicity.
  • Build a relationship with organisations who collaborate on this project (so far Fading Ways Records, LOCA Records and the National Union of Students).

Pack contents

The pack will be an A4 folder of promotional material for Free Culture aimed at university societies.

So far we have:

We could also try for:

  • Creative Commons & iCommons - Tom has contacted a slew of people there, but this has stalled

  • Wikimedia - Tom has contacted Alison Wheeler but they aren't responding any more
  • Magnatune - Tom has contacted John Buckman but got no response

  • Duke university comic: http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/

    • (+) very professionally done
    • (+) nice introduction to idea of public domain, fair use etc
    • (-) might be a bit technical (and a bit too US oriented)
    • (-) BY-NC-SA license

  • A PDF copy of Lessig's 'Free Culture'? --TimCowlishaw

Assembling & sending the pack out

We will have a first packing party in Reading on the weekend of the 26th/27th August. We need to:

  • Print 150 x 3 (estimate) A4 sheets.
  • Buy 150 folders.
  • Buy stamps, envelopes.
  • Get some money to cover all of this.
  • Get the addresses of every students' union. Tom is chasing the NUS for this.
  • Stuff, seal and post.

The Competition

Get some clean sample tracks / acapellas and some interesting judges for a music remix competition. Ideally it would be an inter-town mixoff, with Free Culture groups rallying local artists to take part, supplementing the inevitable odd entries from around the world. This could tie nicely into the university groups idea, giving us a high-profile, cool-sounding project for them to get involved with, and giving us a basis for the inter-town theme. Otherwise it would just be a UK national mixoff competition.

This requires:

  • An enlightened musician or record company willing to donate some tracks under BY-SA for remixing. We'll need good legal clearance for this. The more famous the better. Just asking for samples may make it easier to get the material, and be easier (or perhaps harder?) to remix well.
  • Some good judges.
  • A name musician for any of the above.
  • A repository for the results. Remix Commons?
  • Masses of work promoting it to the media, arts organisations, etc.

The music could be followed up with competitions to produce CD artwork, music videos and other associated materials.

Given the large amount of extra work that this would involve it would be a really worthwhile but optional extra.

Comments

  • What about other media types such as film (might be bandwidth issues) --RufusPollock

Timetable

End of June - Commitment for materials, samples cleared from artists and judges interested

End of July - Samples and judges on board, competition details finalised, design finished, printing started.

End of August (21st) - Packing party, send stuff out.

September onwards - Promote competition like crazy, do support work with potential new local groups

Misc

This is a good example: http://wiki.freeculture.org/index.php/Activist_Packet

Creative Commons will give us lots of badges, stickers, CDs etc.

We need to get this done for the start of autumn term / semester 2006.

We will need a graphic designer.

  • I know a student who is pretty good as this sort thing and might be willing to contribute some time over the summer

  • I'd be more than happy to help with this -- TimCowlishaw

We will need some money from somewhere, or at least sponsorship from the printer for a logo on the package.

We'll need some reasonable samples. We can of course go through people like LOCA, Magnatune, etc. but it would be good if we could get some bigger names. TomChance has asked Clare Hooper who works in the London Sinfonietta for help.

  • we might also be able to use public domain sound recordings ... (tie-in with PD Burn)

Cheaper printing has longer lead times.