22 Apr
2013
22 Apr
'13
3:02 p.m.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Free Culture Foundation <webleader+rss-bot(a)freeculture.org>
Date: Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 2:15 PM
Subject: [FC-discuss] After 9 Years of free culture advocacy, Students for
Free Culture is now the Free Culture Foundation
To: discuss(a)freeculture.org
We are excited to announce the _Free Culture Foundation_ — the new name
of the organization formerly known as _Students for Free Culture_. This
change reflects the evolution of the organization over the first nine
years of its life to support free culture advocacy in communities beyond
students, to emphasize coalition building with existing free culture
organizations, and to renew our commitment to free culture as an issue
of social justice.
**1. First, this change reflects an expansion of our activism to non-
student communities.**
Although our organization was started within colleges, universities, and
high schools, we have grown to involve the work of many non-students.
Many of our members and leaders have graduated and continue to
participate in the organization. We want an organization that not only
retains its members but has room for those who graduate and still wish
to be organize around free culture. Many non-students have joined and
support our advocacy and activism. To acknowledge the fluidity of
student status as well as the valuable contributions of non-students to
our organizations, we have selected a more inclusive name that reflects
the breadth of our constituency.
That said, with dozens of student chapters that have been established
around the world over the years, our roots and our base will remain in
the academy. A new name and an increased commitment to non-students does
not reflect a retreat from our strong commitment to students and to
student activism in free culture. Although we plan to support local and
non-academic chapters, our organization will continue a strong emphasis
on campus organizing.
Just as we have outgrown our name, we have outgrown our old
institutional structure. With the support of Joseph Dempsey, we are in
the process of filing as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
**2. Second, as the institutional landscape around free culture has
evolved over the last nine years, we aim to reflect a changed position
in an ecosystem of free culture organizations.**
There are many organizations that carry out invaluable work benefiting
the free culture movement: the [Free Software Foundation][1],
[Electronic Frontier Foundation][2], [Mozilla Foundation][3], [Wikimedia
Foundation][4], [ Open Knowledge Foundation][5], [Public Knowledge][6],
[Creative Commons][7], and many other organizations have been founded,
grown enormously, and changed, over the last decade. Today, the broader
free culture movement does much more than our initial goals of promoting
free software and free cultural works. The Free Culture Foundation seeks
to fill a space between these organizations and bring them together.
A decade ago, the free culture movement focused on exploring
possibilities and setting goals. After nine years of work in the broader
free culture community, we can affirm a strong commitment to successful
models of free culture put in practice by organizations like the
Wikimedia Foundation, the [Definition of Free Culture Works][8], the
open access movement, and the Free Software Foundation. The free culture
movement has also grown in breadth. Our work no longer involves only
promoting increased use of free software and free cultural works. With
our strong history of organizing, we aim to build upon, complement, and
fill some of the spaces between the many other organizations to support
a broad range of free culture issues.
**3. Finally, we seek to reiterate a renewed commitment to free culture
as issue of social justice and to connect more effectively with other
activists and movements working on these issues.**
As [our annoncement][9] of support for the [Empowermentors
Collective][10] reads, "It is imperative that we acknowledge that there
are systemic structures of control embedded in our society which
permeate our movement. Refusing to do so in an effort to
compartmentalize and focus on our own goals is detrimental to our
success. We cannot afford to be an isolated, inward-facing movement." We
do not live merely in coexistence with media and technology, but we live
in and through them. They continuously influence how we communicate,
frame our understandings of ourselves, and mediate how we experience the
world.
In our continued advocacy, we want to emphasize that free culture
reflects not only an approach to sharing but an important way to promote
autonomy. Our movement should be grounded in the needs of those most
exploited by private ownership over technology, information, and media.
Songs, films, books, and apps do not need freedom, people do.
In these next steps, there remain many critical open questions and
unfilled needs. We invite all free culture activists to participate in
this ongoing evolution and expansion of our organization and our
movement over the coming months. We encourage existing or former
participants to reconnect. To join our community, please subscribe to
our [discussion list][11].
[1]: https://www.fsf.org/
[2]: https://www.eff.org/
[3]: https://www.mozilla.org/foundation/
[4]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/
[5]: http://okfn.org/
[6]: http://publicknowledge.org/
[7]: https://creativecommons.org/
[8]: http://freedomdefined.org/
[9]: http://freeculture.org/blog/2013/01/31/announcing-the-
empowermentors-collective-a-group-for-women-of-color-and-queer-people-
of-color/
[10]: http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Empowermentors
[11]: http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
URL:
http://freeculture.org/blog/2013/04/22/after-9-years-of-free-culture-advoca…
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