[FC-discuss] FreeCulture.org is now Students for Free Culture

[Timothy Cowlishaw]

On 3 Oct 2007, at 08:18, Conor Schaefer wrote:

> That said, I would absolutely support an "artists for free culture"  
> organization, and would myself sign up. Crosbie, are you interested  
> in getting the ball rolling on that yourself, or would you need help?

I'm about to begin drafting a 'free art manifesto', and was  planning  
to do this collaboratively on a wiki / iCommons node so that any  
interested parties could get involved.  If anyone feels like they'd  
like to be involved with this, let me know! I'll make a proper  
announcement / call for participants (with more detail about the  
project) soon when it's a bit more ready.

On a more general note however, I'm a little disappointed by this  
decision. While I recognise the value of having student focused FC  
chapters at Unversities, intentionally limiting FC.org (who I,  
rightly or wrongly ,have viewed as a sort of general 'umbrella  
organisation' for the FC movement) to campus-based chapters seems to  
be excluding a large proportion of (y)our supporter base. Since the  
bylaws were ratified by your campus-based chapters many who had been  
active FC.org supporters were excluded from the decision-making  
process by virtue of being non-students or students of universities  
without an FC chapter (both in the US and Internationally), and to  
systematically vote what is (as far as i can tell) a significant  
proportion of FC's supporter-base out of the organisation (without  
giving them a chance to voice their own views on the matter) seems  
rather counter-productive.

Cheers,

Tim