[fc-uk-discuss] fc-uk meeting on saturday 10th of december in london

[Tom Chance]

Quoting Ed Griffith-Jones <Ed at acrewoods.net>:

> Quoting adnan hadzi <a.hadzi at gold.ac.uk>:
>
>> maybe, somebody should be in charge of managing the drafting of the 
>> constitution?
>
> I agree that somebody has to take charge - otherwise it will never 
> get written. Would you be interested (I am doing the collecting 
> society campaign)? This is of fundamental importance to Free Culture 
> UK.

Wasn't David in charge of this? If anyone else wants to take over then go for
it.


>> does it mean (not having more drafts of the constitution) that we 
>> won't meet this saturday? and, if we postpone, what would be the new 
>> date?
>
> We also need to meet again. Any ideas as to when?

We ought to think about the purpose of any meeting first. Looking back 
over the
past few months I think our approach to the first congress in October was
totally mistaken. It was worth trying, but it's really unlikely that we'll get
the sort of grassroots *online* network that we want by running three heavy
campaigns. The work  we decided to do is way too geeky, way too boring, to
attract many people online or locally. It's not sufficiently
development-oriented to get 'traditional' activists involved. We were in a
hinterland before Congress, and condemned ourselves to stay there during
Congress :o)

We haven't got enough people with enough free time to even run *one* 
really good
campaign.

In my opinion, we should:

1. Convince CC-UK with their new office and full-time staff to take on the
collecting society campaign, and then support them fully.

2. Convince ORG to work on copyright extensions, support them fully and return
to it later on if anybody feels like there's something constructive we can
contribute.

3. Continue working on the PD Burn campaign by getting legal advice (as 
Rob has
suggested) so that we can tie together all the research done so far by Rob and
Rufus. Then set some targets and deadlines over the next 6 months so that, by
June or so next year, we have a really good guide to the public domain in the
UK and the basis for an archiving strategy and a public awareness campaign.

4. Run a simple, low-effort lobbying campaign with a good chance of 
success. For
example, we could follow up the letters about BBC Radio3's classical music
downloads. That's really easy. We can try to get lots of people to 
write emails
to them; we can try to get a meeting with them to discuss it in person; we can
make links with classical musicians who might be supportive of us. Most
importantly then: it's not a lot of work, it would have a really good impact,
and it has a chance of success which we can publicise well.

5. On a personal basis, try to make more links with local arts organisations,
interested academics, schools, youth groups etc. and either:
  a) Educate people about and discuss with them free culture issues
  b) Form proper local FC-UK chapters that work on these issues and 
possible run
a Remix Commons 'franchise' (http://www.remixcommons.org/get_local)
Because this really is, IMO, the way forward. Engage with people on 
their level,
on their turf, rather than hoping that people will latch onto some abstract
discussions about licensing and copyright terms. I've spoken to so many people
who were really interested in free culture stuff, but only when I started off
talking about their angle on it (e.g. cut-up writing techniques, electronica
music, local band scene publicity).


So if we met and (god forbid!) everybody agreed with my assessment, I'd 
suggest
our agenda should revolve around:

(i) How can we offload the collecting societies and copyright campaigns onto
CC-UK and ORG?

(ii) What are the jobs, and who will take them, for PD Burn?

(iii) What is our strategy, what are the jobs, and who will take them for the
lightweight lobbying campaign?

(iv) What can/should we do locally? What exactly does 'free culture' mean to
people already practising art in a pretty free way? Is it just about 
licensing,
or certain forms of practise, or lobbying, or discussion, or what?


What do people think about all of that? I'm more and more in favour of what
Andreas said at Congress: we should focus on local work, and nationally 
just be
a loose informal collection of groups and individuals who work on really
low-intensity, common-interest campaigns.

Regards,
Tom

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