On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 05:01:08PM +0100, Tom Chance wrote: > Good luck. I look forward to seeing you actually *doing* something along > these lines, rather than periodically belittling anyone who would rather > spend their free time doing something else, then directing vacuous grandiose > statements about history books and the public sphere at anyone who dares > explain themselves.
Well said. It's the constant drudgery that makes the mailing lists really hard for me to use. I'm just going to throw out some ideas and news about what I (and CNUK) am doing. For those who don't know, CNUK was formed in 2004. It lives at http://cnuk.org/ What is CNUK? Good question. I never thought I'd be too interested in something like 'free culture', but I never thought I'd be interested in 'free software' either, and a few years later, I am pretty much using only free software and finding it helps and actually helps get the things I want to do, done. So, what is CNUK? Well, I'm a comedian, in that, I do comedy. Since 1997, I and a group of others (some more involved than others, some ducking in and out of projects) have been writing and producing our own comedy shows. We've tried to get stuff commissioned occasionally, but it's often a question of resources, and without the experience or money, we're not going to get picked up. This is less of a problem than it might sound, as we're resourceful enough to get good ideas done if they require it. Anyway, in 2004, we began working on a new show, which would mix elements of original, short (sometimes very short) sketch comedy with edited inserts of other peoples material. We were sampling, we were trying to make a mashup. Around that time, I got a copy of 'Free Culture' from the FSF as a gift - I'd been doing stuff for them for about a year at this point, after finding that we could get a lot of cool stuff done with Free Software, and the politics of the whole thing really appealed to me. I founded CNUK as seperate off shoot, and encouraged others from the group to join in and join me. This has been largely unsuccessful due to various people moving, changing jobs and moving on, however a couple of people have hung around and we're starting to get momentum again. I'm nearing completion on my novel, we're editing our first DVD feature and preparing to launch our remix culture film project with the book. In addition to this, as a result of moving to Leeds and not really knowing many people, I joined the local Flickr group and formed a project on Flickr to get people submitting photos of Leeds - this is doing okay, but could use more people, but the Flickr group in Leeds is a bit tardy and we don't meet up too much. We're going to be launching some cool little projects in the near future, including a series of video podcasts for the comedy site, Twaddle.org (one of ours) and the sampling themed site, sampleme.org - having a group like FCUK is very important to me, and to the proliferation of ideas like ours working in the UK. I don't want to see this group fold due to a lot of infighting - we're all here for very different reasons, but I prefer to stay quiet on the lists for the fear that David Berry will launch into a tirade against something we did and make us not want to do this anymore, or worse, make us want to do this alone - something I don't believe we can do as well. I've got a pretty clear idea in my head of what 'free culture' is, at its most basic level, and it amounts to what could be called in a nutshell, 'GPL for creative works' - something I believe CNUK would be able to sustain. I am not keen on the Open Rights Group, as they are just the same people who seem to be involved with everything, and often, I don't see them sticking up for the same idea of free culture that I share, instead, there seems to be a culture of more restrictive licensed works being given oodles of publicity by Creative Commons. Creative Commons are obviously free to do what they like, but I personally would like to see someone take their BY-SA license, give it a different name and encourage people to do use that, and ignore CC entirely. iCommons, after what Tom's told me, and what I read in his article in GNU/Linux User/Developer, has the potential to do something cool, and thankfully, it's not the same old people doing the same old stuff, and actually might appeal to regular people. I think we could learn a lot from the GNU project and the FSF (I'm a volunteer for the GNU project, their chief webmaster - they don't pay me.) - but we need to look at what they've done - they've taken a problem (the erosion of a community built on the principles of sharing) and used that to build a system that promises to make some significant changes to the socio-political world, but more than that, it's created groups of people who meet up, over a beer, and talk and discuss and rant about things, but it's done in the spirit of fun. We need that. Recently Tom and I did just that. Rob and I also did just that. I got more out of those brief liasons in the pub than I could ever get from mailing lists. I get far more out of talking to Tom and Rob on Jabber than I get from updating a wiki. Our website is a mess, I will take it as an action myself to get that fixed. I think having a wiki is nice - it's a useful part of the site, but it doesn't have to *be* the site. Let's make a habit of getting together, regularly, all over the place, and talking. Let's have a regular meeting, once a week, on IRC. If you can't come, it doesn't matter, you can just have a look over the transcript if you like, but it really shouldn't matter, as you can just come to the next one, or to the next meeting face to face. I'd love to have something in Leeds, there's a great place, called The Common Place - http://www.thecommonplace.org.uk/ that seems pretty much ideal for our needs. I'd love to have an event there, get lots of local people involved. So um, yeah. Meeting later, yeah? Oh, and if anyone wants to reply to any of this, on or off list, feel free, but please, no huge rants, David/anyone else, as we should remember people do this stuff for fun, for love, for friendship, and not to get nasty emails. Laters, matt -- Matt Lee Chief Webmaster, GNU Project - http://www.gnu.org/ - Free as in Freedom Free Software Foundation - Free Software, Free Society - http://www.fsf.org/ _______________________________________________ fc-uk-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/fc-uk-discuss
