Free Culture Swarthmore's LJ Community

For those who are still watching this community, I recommend that you subscribe to the new LJ feed for our SCCS-hosted blog, freecultureswat. If you go to our site now, it looks *very* pretty, thanks to the efforts of Miles Skorpen '09. If you want to get an account to post to the blog, just talk to me (or leave a comment here).

Last semester, when we invited Eben Moglen to Swarthmore (see Eben's speech), Nathan wrote up these directions and sent them to Eben, just to prove that he's a geek. Don't try to actually use these to get here unless you're a geek too.

switch (transportation_method){
    case airplane:
        transport(airplane, PHL);
        if (feeling(important)) {
            transport(cab, Swarthmore); }
        else {
            transport(SEPTA_R1, Center City);
            transport(SEPTA_R3, Swarthmore); }
        break;
    case train:
        transport(Amtrak, Philadelphia 30th St);
        if (feeling(important) && liking(traffic)) {
            transport(cab, Swarthmore); }
        else {
            transport(SEPTA_R3, Swarthmore); }
        break;
    case car:
        get_directions(Mapquest);
        transport(car, Swarthmore);
        break;
}

Visit us sometime, and help us debug our pseudocode!

CELEBRATING THE CULTURAL COMMONS
Student group hosts week-long Free Culture Fest to raise awareness of copyright and digital media issues( Collapse )

5:45pm upper level Sharples

Should Free Culture sell itself as a social movement for bottom-up governance and cultural development or should we focus on avenues such as creative commons and strengthening individual freedom of speech?

The promised update: 7:30pm Saturday in the SCCS video pit (Tarble basement, follow the signs) we'll show the short. From 8pm - midnight we'll have pizza and party away in the Media Lounge across the hall from the movie showing.

Btw awesome meeting tonight. Admin meetings are much more interesting when we're actually working out events. Also, planning separate social meetings for free culture discussion is great. Right now they're set for Thurs dinner after propaganda meetings.

Here's where I flip out and jump up and down and scream, "hell yeah!!"  I'll post something more coherent later after I'm done partying and I've read the decision.
* http://eff.org/
* http://eff.org/news/archives/2004_09.php#001961
* PDF of court decision

You are invited to a showing of Kate Duffy '05 's short Amid the
Dead, a fascinating zombie film set in Swarthmore, on the evening of
Saturday October 23. Why are we showing a zombie movie?  Because Kate had the wisdom and foresight to release her movie under a Creative Commons license!  Exact time and location TBA. It will be followed by merrymaking with Free Culture Swarthmore, free food, free drink and free... idle chatter. Oh, and free help with remixing video and audio on the
creative commons.

It seems that we have settled on a final meeting time of Tuesdays at 10pm in the SCCS Media lounge, with meetings for different "task forces" at other random times throughout the week.

The propaganda team will meet on Thursdays at 4:30pm in the SCCS lounge.  I forget when the open source software advocacy team is supposed to meet, I'll post something when we figure that out.

We're planning a "free culture fest" for the week of November 15th-19th, which will be HOTTT.  We've invited some exciting speakers, some of them Swarthmore alumns, and we've got other grooviness in the works :-)  We need your help to get speaker funding etc., so please come to the next meeting!

Don't forget about our next meeting, in the SCCS media lounge below Tarble on Wednesday at 10pm!  If you want to help create flyers etc. for the meeting, please meet in Mertz 1st lounge at 2:45pm on Tuesday.

Our next campaign on campus will be a return to our roots as open source geeks :-)  We would like to help people who are being forced to upgrade from Windows 98 and Windows ME to switch to Linux instead of buying a newer Windows.  Get off the Windows upgrade treadmill, don't pay for another Windows bugfix.   Use a virus-free open source operating system!  Linux is a free alternative to Windows made by a community of volunteer and paid programmers around the world, and not owned by any one company.

There is a common misconception that Linux is ugly, that it's text only and not user-friendly at all.  This has become completely false in recent years: Linux looks like Windows.  Look at this snapshot that I just took of my Linux desktop.  In some ways, Linux is easier to use than Windows, although it can be more difficult to install and set up.  Fortunately, we've found a way to make trying out, using and installing Linux easy and painless: Knoppix.

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Alright, you free culture geeks... wish you were a powerpoint guru like Lawrence Lessig?  There's no denying that the man makes a mean slideshow.  Well, here's your chance: we now have the original powerpoint and movie files from Lessig's presentation at Swarthmore in April.  Can you do a better presentation on free culture than Lessig can?  Take this piece of free culture and build upon it :-)

Update: You may also want the font that Lessig uses, P22 Typewriter.