It just keeps going, and going, and going…

The latest issue of Time magazine has an article on Cereality and other cereal cafes. Cereal Solidarity and FreeCulture.org are mentioned (second page) as evidence of a backlash against Cereality’s iron-fisted policing of their business model. The article is mostly sympathetic to Cereality–we kind of come off as loony radicals. But any press is good press, right?

To respond to part of the article:

“Freeculture turned Cereality into a poster child for anti-patent protest,” Roth says. “We’re just two guys trying to protect ourselves from big companies that could steal our intellectual property.”

However absurd the cereal wars may appear, Roth says he is simply trying to act before the really big guys muscle in on his highly expansible idea. “Starbucks could easily start selling cereal, catering to a sophisticated palate, to complement their coffee,” says Laurence Knight, president of Fletcher-Knight, a marketing consultancy based in Greenwich, Conn.”

The problem is that patents were meant to apply to inventions (which need protection to be profitable), not business models (which should produce profit all by themselves). What’s more, they aren’t “property”–they’re a government-granted monopoly, a privilege. It makes about as much sense to say that Cereality should own the idea of having a cereal bar as to say that Jamba Juice should own the idea of having a smoothie bar. (Coincidentally, Cereality sells smoothies, too.)

Cereality sees Starbucks or other big chains as threats, and they’re probably right about that. They have every right to try to grow quickly, create buzz, and use other sound business measures in order to avert that threat. In a competitive market, that’s what you have to do to survive. But Cereality does not have the right to shut others out of the market entirely. That’s just uncool.

We have a FreeCulture.org Flickr group… please join it and post pictures of your chapter! You can also add the tag “free culture” to your relevant pictures to help people find them. Finally, if you’re proud of your free culture photos, you can add one of these badges to your website and show them off.

www.flickr.com More photos in FreeCulture.org

Notes from the entirety of the FreeCulture.org National Summit 2006 are now available on the wiki. Go find your favorite speaker, or else skip straight to checking up on the State of FreeCulture.org as elaborated by Nelson.

Today on May 17, 2006 at 5:17pm 30+ ucsc students participated in a face to face peer to peer (f2fp2p) free exchange of information. A few days ago distinct and individually crafted flyers began to circulate via person to person exchanges. The 517 flyers seeded the date and the idea of sharing decorated and unlabeled mix cds with others.
The flyers also encouraged participants to re-mix the propaganda and re-distribute it. Audio spots and flyer variations were created and the event info circulated on the social networking sites. Participation was varied, from mix cd, to mp3 DVD’s to pieces of artwork. At 5:17 pm students congregated and delighted in the free exchange of information. Check out more images of the event here.

What makes the internet truly great? The fact that on the internet, everyone is basically equal. The lowliest blogger has the potential to reach just as many people as the most powerful and well-funded news organization. One a website catches a person’s attention, that person can visit the website from anywhere in the world, however they want whenever they want. To quote our manifesto, “With the Internet and other advances, the technology exists for a new paradigm of creation, one where anyone can be an artist, and anyone can succeed, based not on their industry connections, but on their merit.” That’s what makes the internet such a powerful force for free culture and democracy.

Unfortunately, that cultural democracy is threatened by the companies that own the wires and pipes through which the internet travels. They want to pass a law that would give them the ability to discriminate between websites based on who pays them more money, and make it difficult or impossible to reach the websites of people who don’t cough up enough cash. This would take us right back to the world of old media, where only a few corporations have the power to reach the masses, and the rest of the population has no voice.

We have signed on to an effort to Save The Internet, to ensure that net neutrality is preserved, and that network owners don’t get the power to play favorites and decide what websites you’re allowed to reach.

We’re in good company… the latest addition to the Save The Internet coalition is rock band R.E.M.! Together with hundreds of other artists, businesses, non-profits and others we will be fighting for your freedom online. Please join us and act now!

On the chapters section of our web site, you’ll now see a dynamically generated map showing the locations of all our chapters, which extend beyond the United States’ borders, reaching places like South America and Africa. I won’t say much more about geographic diversity (since Nelson just discussed the spread of free culture), but I will talk about a subject that doesn’t seem to get enough attention on our blog — the code that runs our site.

As you’ve probably noticed, the interactive map of our chapters is an embedded Google Map, made possible by the fact that Google allows third-party websites to access its maps web service, along with all its features, through an application programming interface (API). Because the Google Maps API is free for virtually anyone to explore and use, all sorts of possibilities emerge for using the technology in creative ways — like displaying criminal activity reported in Chicago, visualizing Craig’s List real estate data, and in our case, showcasing the geographic spread of FreeCulture.org chapters.

Superimposed on our map are markers next to the exact geographic locations of all our FreeCulture.org campuses. Each marker contains the name of the chapter and a link to its website, if it has one. The map allows you to zoom in, making it easier to distinguish individual chapters that are part of large clusters, and zoom out, so you can see some of our international chapters. There are also two dropdown menus — one listing all the US states and the other listing all the countries that have FreeCulture.org chapters — that let you select the area on which you want to zoom in.

What happens behind the scenes is fairly straightforward: whenever someone accesses the chapters page, all the information about the chapters is pulled from a MySQL database, and included in that information are the geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) of the chapter’s school. These coordinates form points on the Google Map,
while basic chapter information (name and link to the chapter’s web site, if there is one) fill up the markers that accompany the points. Since the map itself is displayed with JavaScript code, we use Phoogle Maps, a PHP class that provides a wrapper for the Google Maps API. In pseudocode:

$google_map = new PhoogleMap();
for each $row in the database table with the chapters information
{
  $marker_note = $row['chapter_name'];
  $google_map -> addGeoPoint($row['latitude'], $row['longitude'], $marker_note);
}
$google_map -> printGoogleJS();
$google_map -> showMap();

We’ve stored the latitude and longitude coordinates of the centers of different countries and the 50 US states. When you select a particular region from one of the dropdown menus, the zoom level is changed and the map is centered on the selected region. Again, in pseudocode:

if a $state has been selected
{
  $google_map -> zoomLevel = 12;
  $google_map -> centerMap($state latitude, $state longitude)
}
or if a $country has been selected
{
  $google_map -> zoomLevel = 12;
  $google_map -> centerMap($country latitude, $country longitude)
}

You can see that the code isn’t that complicated, but the end-result is pretty functional. That’s one of the advantages of opening up an API to a web service: interested developers get to flex their creative muscles and come up with some really cool ideas, or at the very least accomplish something that otherwise may have been really difficult to do. Like musical remixes, these mashups of technology often spur a lot of ideas and a lot of innovation.

(By the way, if you have any comments or suggestions about our map, feel free to let us know!)

In our efforts to advertise our campus chapters, and document the spread of the free culture movement, we have been trying to put together a map of all of our chapters to display on the chapters page, where we list our chapters and provide contact info for each one. Elisabeth Strawser-Booth from UFlorida has provided us with this lovely map while we work on something a little more ambitious… We are currently developing an interactive map of our chapters to put on our chapters page. It will most likely be based off of Google maps, and when you click on each chapter you will get its name and a link to its website (if it has one). It will let you zoom in to separate out the chapters that are mushed together in Elisabeth’s map, such as the clusters of chapters in Philadelphia, NYC, Boston, and Claremont. It will also let you zoom out to see our international chapters, including schools in Canada, Peru, and South Africa.

Now, take a look at Elisabeth’s map, and keep in mind that FreeCulture.org is only two years old! It’s really great to see the geographical diversity, considering that two years ago this was just a bright idea at Swarthmore College, right where Pennsylvania meets New Jersey. One exercise that I find interesting is to compare our map to the red state / blue state maps from the last presidential election. The red state / blue state divide is a silly one, and it presents a false picture in many ways, but it’s understood that in red states at least a narrow majority voted conservative (ignoring possible problems with electronic voting machines). If we consider “red states” to be more conservative than blue states, then it is gratifying to see that we have chapters in a number of red states, even if our major urban centers are in blue states. Since FreeCulture.org hopes to be a mainstream movement, it’s important that we have as broad a base of supporters as possible, and include people from all walks of life. I’m told that our chapters in the South, such as UFlorida, have a number of conservative members. This would be an impossibility at a predominantly liberal school like Swarthmore, where people who are considered moderate elsewhere in the country are right wing relative to the student population. At any rate, I’m glad to see that this movement is catching on in places that I’ve never visited, and winning the hearts of people who aren’t carbon copies of me.

What’s next on the agenda? There’s a disturbing absence of chapters throughout the western United States, and the west coast is seriously underrepresented. We’d like to do what we can to fix that, so we’re hoping to hold next year’s national summit on the west coast if one of our few chapters there can handle it. Every time I speak somewhere, someone asks me whether we have a chapter at Berkeley or Stanford, and I have to say, “No, unfortunately… yeah, it’s pretty weird, I don’t understand it either.” Those are the logical places for a movement like this to spring up, somewhere near Silicon Valley and a center of high-tech culture, given how important digital technology and the internet are to the revolution in creativity that we are experiencing… but Swarthmore got there first, and that’s just the way history worked out. We will have to redouble our efforts in the coming months to help chapters get running in underrepresented areas of the country. If you are from the western US, and you would like to start a chapter, or you have some information regarding the eerie silence from your area, do let us know!

Naturally, we’d also like to build our network out into the rest of the world outside the United States, even if our early attempts will have to face significant language barriers. In the future we will require people with language skills and contacts outside the US to aid us in our mission, but right now we’re focusing on getting things right in our own country before expanding further. You can expect to hear from us more frequently over the next few months once exams are over… good luck with finals, if you have them!

Google is running their Summer of Code project again this summer. (We wrote about the project last year.) For those who don’t know:

Summer of Code 2006 is a program that offers student developers stipends to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects. Google will be working with a variety of open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several hundred projects over a three-month period. The inaugural instance of the program, which took place last summer, brought together 400 students and 40 mentoring organizations from 49 countries. We’d like to include even more organizations and participants this year.

We may not always agree with the actions of Google (or anyone else, for that matter), but it’s hard to argue with paying students to work on free software. Each student accepted to the program will receive a $4,500 stipend for their work, with $500 going to their mentoring organization. Mentor projects include projects such as Apache, Creative Commons, LiveJournal, FreeBSD, the GNU Project, Ubuntu, OpenOffice.org, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Needless to say, this is a great opportunity to help out free software projects and encourage young developers to code F/OSS. The applications are due by Monday at 5 pm Pacific time, so if you’re interested, hop on it!

The Swarthmore Phoenix ran a good article (Free Culture summit unites movement) in its last issue, but I am somewhat disappointed that the reporter was not able to attend any of the events. I suppose I shouldn’t be too upset, since the Phoenix did get to interview Lessig last time he came here, but the FC Swarthmore members quoted are really not the most interesting people who were at the conference.

Although we were not able to record video or audio of the various talks and workshops due to a technological comedy of errors, we did have a number of people who were taking notes, among them Justin from FC Carleton and Elisabeth from Florida FC. You can see their feedback on our mailing list, and you can read Justin’s notes and Elisabeth’s notes on the national and Florida FC wikis.

Finally, I’d like to link to a blog post by Tim Burke, a history professor here who is very supportive of free culture: Kaavya Viswanathan, Christopher Paolini, and Remixing. Tim Burke argues that while all creativity does build upon the past in some way, not all of it is best characterized as “remixing”: some works are more “original” than others in the mind of any ordinary person, and you ignore this common sense intuition at your own peril. He suggests that the free culture movement needs to recognize the difference between obviously derivative work and indirectly derivative work when communicating its message. What do you think?