Minutes from a conference call.
Present
- Tom Chance (facilitator)
- Rufus Pollock
Matt Lee (CNUK)
- Edward Griffith-Jones
- Andrea Rota
Agenda
Contents
Should FC-UK be a youth movement or should we work with all ages?
- matt - there aren't enough people nationwide for a youth-only movement
- rufus - Nelson (FC-US) proposed: anyone can be member but confine leadership to under 30, forces young blood to come in
- ed - 30 is arbitrary, also campus groups may have mature students who may want to lead, don't see point
rufus - so we're suggesting no age limit, all can participate & lead
- matt - if people get elected democratically into leadership positions whether young or old then that's ok. In all likelihood would end up with a youth based org naturally.
- andrea - shouldn't limit ourselves, no reason to, we should experiment with a more open model
How do we want to work with FC-US?
- matt - CNUK already work with their web stuff, helping out on a technical level, day to day admin stuff, that seems to work well
rufus - individually we can assist in projects. We can synchronise FC-UK and FC-US activities where it makes sense, and otherwise talk with them. Just as our local groups will be relatively autonomous, UK & US ought to be autonomous and allow cooperation to emerge
- matt - FC-US have close links to Larry Lessig, downhill battle and others, which would be useful for us
- ed - we can learn from their work so far, how we can build up FC-UK
What is CNUK? How should FC-UK work with CNUK?
matt - CNUK is a group that was founded last year. It's based in Exeter though not Exeter-specific, a national group who work together on free culture projects. Flexible notion of membership - whoever does stuff is sort of part of CNUK. CNUK works online & offline. Not a whole lot to it, lots of stuff in the pipeline, not yet nailed down exactly who's involved, what they're doing, etc. Launch party in Exeter to get local people to come to a FC/CC showcase. CNUK should be autonomous, work with FC-UK where it makes strenght but be able to go off and do their own thing.
- rufus - that is the whole point of FC-UK, allow groups to come and affiliate with FC-UK, which works as an autonomous collective
matt - agree, CNUK as a project & CNUK as organisation are different things, CNUK wants to be part of FC-UK but also do their own stuff, benefits everyone
rufus - we can look again to P&P and other networks, be very open but focus activity
- matt - it's important that everyone involved with FCUK has an equal say in what happens
- rufus - some kind of executive will probably emerge, those who do most stuff
- andrea - prefers loose structures, once in a while decide on how we are going rather than setting up some structure
Website + campaigns
- rufus - the web site system is currently a bit crude, it uses subversion and templating system. It gives us flexibility to use different technologies for different areas of the site, e.g. we can use ruby scripts, static html, etc. all using same template. We currently have a small number of pages
- matt - we need more content, more info on what we're about, it's a bit wordy
- ed - can rufus send out details to everyone so we can edit the web site?
- rufus - yes, I'll do that soon
- rufus - PDBurn campaign needs work to make it happen, 14+14 needs announcing, groups are being set-up but we need to work on that too
- tom - how will we get prorammers and contributors?
rufus - it's about a week's work to code the PDBurn stuff up. We need to determine the specs scalable, spend 30 mins a week or every day contributing. We should start with music to give a smaller target & latch on to 50 year thing.
- ed - strange to start with music or film rather than just everything
tom - academics, for example, would probably love a database with books, poetry, papers etc. in there, good for local groups especially with many students & academics in them
- matt, ed - people could put up everything but we'd focus on music and film in terms of promoting it
- ed - so long as people can put up anything, focus sounds good
ed - CC campaign should include in this something about collecting societies who don't pay artists for CC stuff. We could have info about it and it be part of a lobbying govt or collecting societies. Or we could help Neil Leyton from Fading Ways Records who is trying to set-up an alternative EU/CC performers' rights society. Ed will propose this formally when rufus folds Creative Friends into FC-UK list
Writing submission frr creative archive group
- rufus - CA license group launch in April. There's room to move them away from their CC-incompatible restrictive license to something more free. We could write a submission for their forum and have people sign onto it, could change their license terms or have more discussion in future. We can draft it on the wiki
Mailing lists
- ed - we have coord and discuss, we're supposed to be promoting open participatory culture yet our main mailing list, with most interesting discussion, is closed
- rufus - closed list can become a magnet for discussion, we have to avoid this. Everything should be on discuss unless sensitive
- matt, less mailing lists and online discussion the better, maybe we should look at downhill battle's discussion space
- rufus will stop posts to coord until it's needed
Future meetings, congress
- ed - how are we going to organise the first meeting? how frequently will we have conference calls?
- matt, rufus - a fornightly conference call
rufus - we should all be at WSFII, have congress on Saturday and on Sunday have a fc stream that focuses on projects not vague issues
Action Points
- Talk to FC-US about how we can cooperate
- Write the Creative Archive letter
- Edit the web pages to be less wordy
- Ed will write a proposal about the collecting society component of the CC campaign
- Specifications need to be drafted for PDBurn
- Programmer(s) needed to code PDBurn site