FreeCulture.org depends on its local chapters, but without an national organization to serve those chapters, many of those free culture campus groups would not exist today. The national organization, which we created to provide resources and guidance to these local groups, does need work, and has seen some sad periods of inactivity in recent months. In order to ensure that existing chapters survive, and that new ones are born in the future, we must also secure the future of the national organization.

To strengthen the national organization, and give our chapters the help they need to have an amazing semester this coming fall, we have a crafty plan which we have already begun to put into effect:

Provide FreeCulture.org chapters with free web hosting

As a reminder of how useful the national organization can be, we are now offering free web hosting to all of our registered chapters. We already offer mailing lists and wikis, and we plan to offer blogs and other software in the future. Our most successful chapters have been using such tools since their inception. Wikis can be used for writing agendas for meetings and taking minutes at them, collaboratively editing documents such as the chapter’s constitution, or perhaps planning events and assigning tasks to various members. Blogs can raise the profile of a chapter, bringing its activities to national attention, and also make the club more attractive to prospective members at their school by making their activities more transparent. Mailing lists are essential for announcing meetings and events to members.

These web applications can be enormously helpful when organizing a chapter and trying to communicate with other chapter members, but it can be very difficult sometimes for chapters to get their own:

• School webhosting can be full of restrictions that make it difficult to run software, and getting school hosting in the first place can require wading through bureaucracy. We have very little bureaucracy at FreeCulture.org, and since we have our own (virtual) server, we can give chapters the freedom to run whatever software they want.
• Hosted services like Blogger frequently use proprietary software. We use only free software on our server, so you can rest assured that our hosting is ideologically pure. More importantly, even hosted services that use free software (like Wordpress.com) seriously limit your ability to customize your site, while we can let chapters go crazy editing their sites and we can install any plugins / themes that they want. We also won’t force annoying advertisements on our chapters or their readers.
• Some chapters in the past have used one of their members’ personal off-campus hosting. This can end badly when the hosting member graduates and the current members lose access to the site, or nobody left in the club is still computer-savvy enough to update the site’s software. I’m confident in saying that our hosting won’t disappear, since it is hosted on Joi Ito’s rack in Japan, and our sysadmin Asheesh Laroia has been hired by Creative Commons upon graduation, so he will be able to continue to support us for the indefinite future. Even if Joi and Asheesh were to vanish and our free hosting dried up, we would have sufficient funds to pay for hosting for our server for years, even if we never get any more income, and we could continue to provide the same services to our chapters. Also, since we have the entire organization to draw sysadmins and programmers from, we will always have some people competent enough to run our website and server (or at least more than any individual chapter could ever field). When you host with us, you don’t have to worry about updating your software, because we can update the software for all of our chapters’ websites automatically in one go.

While chapters are as always free to run stuff on their own, we believe that providing hosting for our chapters will allow them to focus on the important business of activism on their campuses, instead of struggling to produce and maintain their websites.

Bring new chapters into the fold, and reopen communications with old chapters

We have developed an inexcusable e-mail debt over the past few months, for which I personally apologize. A number of people have e-mailed us about wanting to start new chapters, and over the past couple of weeks I have cleaned out most of this e-mail backlog, responding to them and helping them get their chapters rolling. (Of course, people keep e-mailing us, so this job is never done!) Webhosting is only one of many services we plan to provide for our chapters! We’ll be shipping care packages full of pamphlets, buttons and other goodies as usual over the summer to our registered chapters, and we intend to provide plans and “starter kits” for events and activities which other chapters have carried out successfully in the past.

We will also work on bringing together our chapters, both old and new, to share their ideas and experiences in a number of ways. We will be starting to have online meetings again as the semester winds down, and as Elizabeth noted, we are having a national conference at Harvard University on May 26 which we hope representatives from many of our chapters will be able to attend. I would also like to have some smaller get-togethers over the summer in various cities, perhaps like the photo scavenger hunt and BBQ that our USC chapter sponsored recently.

It’s worth reminding people of some ways that we already connect our chapters together:

• The Discuss list - We have a mailing list where FC members and other interested parties debate free culture and related issues of the day. Very high traffic! But also lots of fun. You can sign up for it here, and/or you can read posts to the mailing list in a blog-like format on Gmane.
• Our IRC channel - We hold most of our online meetings in our IRC channel, an internet chat room based on open protocols. It’s located at #freeculture on irc.freenode.net, where many open source software projects also have their IRC channels. It can be easily accessed using a web browser through our web IRC portal, if you don’t have an IRC client. Some of our geekier members hang out there frequently, even when we don’t have meetings, so feel free to stop by and say hello!
• Copynight and CC Salons - We encourage our members to participate in these monthly get-togethers, especially over breaks when they’re not on their home campuses. It’s a great way to meet students from other chapters, as well as other free culture activists from various walks of life.

We hope to encourage volunteerism, get more people involved in the national org, provide more social opportunities inter-chapter, and better recognize the work our volunteers do.

Improve diplomatic relations with other orgs, build partnerships

Collaboration is an important part of free culture, and it only makes sense for the various organizations in the free culture movement to work together. FreeCulture.org has been a bit of a loner at times in the past, and I think we need to open up more lines of communication. To jumpstart this process, a few FreeCulture.org student activists will be meeting in Washington, DC with a number of free culture-friendly groups about a week from now in the offices of Public Knowledge, to see how we all can advance free culture among students and the wider population.

Revamp the national website

FreeCulture.org’s front page has been kind of ugly and text-heavy for a while, so we’ve got some volunteer designers working on making it prettier, and we’re almost done! Our new theme needs a little tweaking to work in Internet Explorer, but it should be done within the next few weeks. We will do our best to make it standards compliant, with validating HTML/CSS. We’ll also update our text/content, a process which is long overdue.

Solidify our organizational structure

FreeCulture.org began as a loose confederation of local clubs, and while there was some benefit to not having any more bureaucracy than necessary, the time has come (or came a long time ago) for us a more formal structure for making decisions on the national level and implementing them. About a year ago we created a board of directors (which I “sit” on), but we simply accepted all who applied for that responsibility without holding elections or having any democratic, representative process. We also did not formalize any bylaws which would explain how the board of directors (or the rest of the organization) would function. We intend to rectify both of these problems in the coming months.

We have a draft of bylaws for FreeCulture.org which we will post for people to comment on in the next week or two (perhaps using the same software as the GPL v3 comments process), and we plan to have the chapters officially approve those bylaws in the next couple months. Once the bylaws are approved, we can hold official elections for a new board of directors.

Seek funding and non-profit status

This is something we’ve attempted multiple times in the past, but I’m confident that with a stronger national organization we will finally be able to succeed. In order to better serve our chapters, we will actively seek grants and funding. (This could also enable us to hire an employee as suggested below.) It would also make it easier to get funding if we were a tax-exempt non-profit, or sponsored by an organization that is a tax-exempt non-profit. If we were 501(c)3 ourselves, our chapters could use our non-profit status to help with their own fundraising. (We could even theoretically provide microgrants to our chapters.) We will look into both options once again in the coming months.

Hire an “executive director”

After a few years of experience, we have come to the conclusion that there are a number of boring duties around FreeCulture.org that nobody wants to volunteer to do (e.g. reading and responding to e-mail, writing grants). Volunteers can do these jobs (somewhat unwillingly), but they are always unavailable at inconvenient times… students will have exams to study for or papers to write at precisely the time that that some emergency strikes the organization. (We are not immune to Murphy’s Law.) It seems that it would be best to hire someone who can (a) work reliably (at least a regular part-time employee, if not full-time), (b) do the boring jobs that volunteers don’t find fun, (c) help organize our volunteers and make sure important jobs get done on time. An employee could also hold down an office, receive physical mail and run our shipping operations, and “man the phones” to ensure that there is always someone to call in the case of a free culture emergency.

FreeCulture.org will of course continue to be chapter- and student-based, but by “professionalizing” our central operations, we can have a lot more impact than all of our chapters working in isolation or left to self-organize. The person hired would most likely be a recent graduate or someone taking time off from school, which (1) keeps down costs, (2) offers experience for the individual, and (3) keeps the org close to students. We are making changes, but we’re not abandoning our fundamental grassroots nature… we’re just trying to become better at the fundamentals.

Sadly, our funds are currently extremely limited, and we can’t actually afford to hire an employee at the moment. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, because nobody wants to write the grants that would allow us to hire someone to do boring things like writing grants or applying for 501(c)3 status. We may have a fundraiser at some point to support initial funding for someone who can write grants etc., so stay tuned.

(I say “executive director” because there is some debate about what the proper title would be. I don’t really care what the job is called, so long as someone gets it done.)

Back to you

What do you think of our crafty plan? Leave a comment or e-mail us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.