Saturday and Sunday April 20-21 I attended the annual conference of Students for Free Culture held at the New York Law School. At the end of the conference there was an organizational meeting in which the board proposed and got approval to change the name of the organization from “Students for Free Culture” to “Free Culture Foundation”. This is because the organization has always been open to non-students, and the new name is supposed to be more welcoming to more people.
In addition to the name change, this was supposed to signify a change in professed philosophy as much of the work done by members of the group had nothing to do with students. The organization was also seeking to position itself in such a way to differentiate its specialty to what it already does well – it supports local community meetups for persons to come together with no particular expectation of a particular professional background (such as coding, information science, or publishing) and be able to discuss issues related to the free culture / open knowledge movement. In the past year about sixty such meetups had been organized in perhaps twenty cities in the United States, and all had gotten encouragement and done work under the banner of “Students for Free Culture”.
If I had time to support this group I would want to set up a list of resources available to grassroots community organizers in the United States who either want to host a local coffeehouse meetup or who want to table at a conference. Right now lots of people do these things, and I feel that it would be helpful to them to have a pack of downloadable files which they can print and distribute on paper to promote the standard causes of the most prominent organizations in the larger movement.