FreeCulture.org

An excerpt from the FreeCulture.org Manifesto explains the motivation for this student-generated advocacy effort: "The mission of the Free Culture movement is to build a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, rather than a top-down, closed, proprietary structure. Through the democratizing power of digital technology and the Internet, we can place the tools of creation and distribution, communication and collaboration, teaching and learning into the hands of the common person....We will not be content to sit passively at the end of a one-way media tube. With the Internet and other advances, the technology exists for a new paradigm of creation, one where anyone can be an artist, and anyone can succeed, based not on their industry connections, but on their merit."

Operating within that framework, FreeCulture.org pursues the following 4 key strategies:

• Creating and providing resources for its chapters - student groups at colleges and universities - and for the general public
• Conducting outreach to youth and students
• Engaging in networking with other people, companies, and organisations in the free culture movement, such as the free software/open source community, media activists, creative artists and writers, and civil libertarians
• Participating in issue advocacy on behalf of its members

The FreeCulture.org website illustrates these strategies in practice, and provides information, tools, and opportunities for engagement among those committed to open sharing of scientific and scholarly research findings - and other creations - on the internet. For instance, the Get Involved page provides ideas for participating in the "movement", such as by joining the organisation's discussion email list, chat room, or online communities. Other advocacy ideas are presented here, such as: printing out a free culture flyer from the website and posting it in a public, visible (legal) place; sending an email to one's congressional representative (U.S. residents may obtain contact info here) to let them know that copyright issues matter; encouraging media literacy by contacting reporters to encourage inclusion of a free culture perspective; and starting a free culture chapter at one's school or within one's community (a free-to-download 5-point guide to starting such a club is provided).

ICTs are meant to be a launching point for local action in support of freedom of information. For instance, campus chapters rallied for access to publicly funded research as part of FreeCulture.org's "National Day of Action" on February 15 2007. Working in collaboration with the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), FreeCulture.org chapters organised events within the United States to highlight the importance of taxpayer access to publicly funded research and to rally support for Congressional passage of the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would require federal agencies that fund over US$100 million in annual external research to make manuscripts of peer-reviewed journal articles stemming from that research publicly available via the internet. (For further information about this legislation, click here).

Technology, Rights.

In the words of one FreeCulture.org organiser/participant, "Public access to research will not only benefit students and researchers in the United States, but will also empower scientists in the developing world - who have far fewer resources available to them - to accelerate the pace of biomedical research, particularly in neglected diseases."

Named after the book Free Culture by Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, FreeCulture.org is part of what organisers describe as "a growing movement." As of this writing, FreeCulture.org chapters exist at over 30 colleges across the United States, with many more getting started around the world. FreeCulture.org was founded by 2 Swarthmore College students after they sued voting-machine manufacturer Diebold for abusing copyright law in 2003.