Recently I’ve been trying to become more acquainted with the various open-source/free-culture endeavours and communities. For those unacquainted, the world of digital openness is generally vast and a little disjointed.
Here I’m posting a “linkdump” of all the resources I could find so far:
Well known groups / leaders
- Electronic Frontier Foundation: Digital rights activism/awareness groups based in US.
- Open Rights Group: Digital rights activism/awareness groups based in UK (spin-off of EFF).
- Free Culture Foundation: previously Students for Free Culture
- Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN): Focused on Open Knowledge/Data
- Creative Commons: Focused on liberal licensing of creative works and awareness
For me, FreeCulture’s manifesto beautifully sums up the general feeling in this space:
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 — and with a truly active, connected, informed citizenry, injustice and oppression will slowly but surely vanish from the earth.
IRC Channels
- #cc (creative commons)
- #okfn (focus: open data)
- #libreplanet (focus: free software)
- #openrightsgroup
- #eff
- #freeculture
Other groups/resources
- Public Knowledge
- Wikimedia
- Free Software Foundation
- Question Copyright
- FreeCulture subreddit
- Radio Free Culture
- The Internet Archive
Local meetups/chapters
- CC runs ‘Salons’ in various locations (Heard: Reboot impending)
- OKCon, an Open Knowledge Conference (this year: Geneva)
- OKFN Meetups
- FSF Meetups
- ORG-London
- OKFNLabs (into open data + maships/viz)
Anything I’ve missed? Please post a comment.
Thanks for reading! Please share your thoughts with me on Twitter. Have a great day!
http://commonsmachinery.se/ may be interesting.