The New Freedom

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A few weeks ago, I went to the Free Culture 2008 Conference in sunny Berkeley, California. The conference lasted two days. The first was for keynote presentations, and the second was for the ‘unconference,’ a self-organized gathering about key issues for the organization. The result is that Students for Free Culture has finally solidified its goals and has a roadmap for changing our college campuses into Open Universities.

The first day was quite good, lots of interesting talks from big players like Lessig, and I got to chat with some really interesting people (Ron Paul’s campaign manager?! That might need its own post…). The day was followed by a night of after-partying with awful music and even worse dancing.

The second day was much more interesting.

To give you some background about my background, I’ve been involved with Students for Free Culture for a few years now. I got the Boston University chapter off the ground and I’ve been involved with FC-related activities throughout Boston/Cambridge and on the internet. However, I’ve always been rather disappointed in the organization. It doesn’t do anything! It doesn’t stand for anything! The critical portait of an organization composed of the geek-chic sitting around with their iPhones, Twittering away their privacy and whining about the RIAA sadly isn’t too far from the truth.

My pal Tim Hwang had posted a similar criticism on his site:

What I’m trying to say isn’t anything like that Free Culture hasn’t been doing anything worthwhile. It’s just stalled on the national level as the times have changed. […] In promoting widespread action, staying at the forefront as technological issues spill outwards into different innovation communities, and taking aggressive and coordinated public action — the national organization as a whole has been quiet.

There are already so many organizations like Creative Commons and the EFF that are working for the things that Students for Free Culture want, and they have more time and resources than us. We are an organization which exists for the sole purpose of saying “We agree!” The biggest failure in my view was when the SFC failed to do anything prevent that passing of the Campus-Based Digital Theft Prevention Act, a corrupt, bullshit piece of legislation that essentially gives big media companies some control over college networks.

So we have decided to change our tactics. We are still in agreement with other digitally progressive organizations, but now we have our own agenda.

The largest theme of the unconference was open access in education. We are interested in copyright reform, of course, but we can’t do anything as students. However, we can work for changes in academia, the area where we do have some influence.

For instance, our main project at Boston University is trying to start an OpenCourseWare platform. I thought we were the only students trying to start one from the ground up, but Kevin Donnovan is trying the same thing at Georgetown, so we got to share notes. I also met Zac McCune, who is majoring in Hipster Studies at Brown. He’s doing an experiment in wikifying himself, which includes all of his course notes. We talked about starting a new OpenCourseWare project, OpenCourseNotes. I made a mock-up site but I’m still looking for a parter or two to help out with content management; I simply don’t have enough time for the projects on my plate as it is, yet alone with this, but I’d still like to do it if other people are willing to help out. (If you’ve got time and interested and a some skills, drop a comment or send me an email!)

Ultimately, all the congregates reconvened at the end of the day to have the big discussion about our flaws as an organization and what we should do about it. The result was what has come to be known as the Wheeler Declaration, the 5 points that Students for Free Culture stand for, things that we can fight for on our own campuses. These are the five points of the Wheeler Declaration, things that define an Open University:

The research the university produces is open access.

This means not publishing in journals which require expensive subscriptions, but in journals which allow access to all who want to read them. This is very important for curious minds, for science and for business. More information on this is available at The Public Library of Science.

The course materials are open educational resources.

This means that professors and students have a place to share their educational works under open licenses. The best example of this is MIT’s OpenCourseWare, but there are plenty of others.

The university embraces free software and open standards.

This means not forcing students to use proprietary software if there are Free alternatives and allowing compatibility with open standards for documents. More information on this can be found over at the Free Software Foundation.

If the university holds patents, it readily licenses them for free software, essential medicines, and the public good.

This means that the university does not place restrictions on the manufacture of generic drugs for the thirld world or prevent open source software developers from coding by using patent enforcement. Universities Allied for Essential Medicines has more on this as well.

The university network reflects the open nature of the internet.

This one might seem the most simple (just be a neutral ISP, don’t spy on us or filter our traffic), but it might be the hardest because of the law I mentioned earlier. The law doesn’t require binding action and may not come into play. It’s a wait-and-see issue with the new administration coming into the White House and I think that SFC should make it a point of contention early on. As Lessig said, we should be picking some fights and trying to snatch some of the low hanging fruit.

So, now we all have things that we can be working for on our own college campuses. We need to make a lot of noise and do a lot of nagging at the bureaucracy. We might have to set up our own servers and supply our own bandwidth to get the ball rolling, but we can’t sit on our asses anymore! We have specific goals and we can all help each other in working to achieve them.

I’m excited and you should be too!
Hope to see you all again next year,
Rich

PS: More photos on my Flickr and those tagged with #fc2008

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