> From: Gavin Baker > The heart of FC.o is that is a *student organization*. Our primary > purpose should neither be to formulate the precise legal and ethical > philosophy for a free culture, nor political success in legislatures > (and executive decisions, and the courts). Our primary purpose should be > to engage students on these issues.
Sorry old chap, but I don't think this is going to be sustainable. You have a big problem in terms of the remit you chose for yourself when you called your organisation FREECULTURE.ORG Nominative determinism will dispense with your petty qualification of being a student organisation, and it will also disregard your laudable but ultimately futile aspiration to be inclusive of all dispositions toward, and interpretations of, 'free culture'. Perhaps you should start students-for-a-more-permissive-cultural-environment.org ? Or just studentculture.org or even studcult.org for short? (the domains are available) > There is nothing wrong with this internal discussion, but we should not > aim to arrive at some final conclusion and then start making everybody > else march in line. As an organization, we are organizers or > evangelists, not philosophers or theologians. The last thing you'd want to do would be to exclude anyone eh? Better not arrive at anything concrete in case anyone is offended or disagrees? It can't go on like that forever. At some point you have to state your organisation's principles, rather than pretend a nebulous affinity with anyone who thinks we should have more cultural freedom, but isn't quite sure why. Well, ok, you can't state your principles until you've understood why you need to do so, i.e. to let people know what you stand for. > P.S. In the final paragraph, rather than "march in line," I was going to > say "goosestep," but I was afraid that would invoke Godwin's law. It can be a daunting prospect to be anywhere near the head of a rapidly growing organisation - especially if one feels responsible/culpable for its direction. It may seem that either you're Ado1f Hit1er and are to develop a dictator complex, or you're Dr. Frankenstein and will soon realise it's all gone terribly wrong... 99% of the time it's fine. Don't worry. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
