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!

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