The first preliminary meeting of the Core Team will occur on Monday, February 25th at 10:00pm Eastern Standard Time in our IRC channel, #freeculture on irc.freenode.net. (For help using IRC, go here.) There will be an agenda for the meeting on our wiki and, once the meeting is over, minutes + an IRC log on the same page. (Chapter members should feel free to add anything they want to discuss at the meeting to the agenda.)

As the bylaws state, Students for Free Culture is supposed to have a Core Team. The Core Team is the people who make all the decisions in the org that are too low-level for the Board and require more frequent meetings–i.e. whether or not we should sign on to a petition, what our next national campaign should be, what projects we should direct our volunteer efforts toward, etc.

Becoming a voting member of Core Team is pretty easy. You must 1.) be a member of a SFC chapter and 2.) attend two consecutive meetings. (See the bylaws for more info)

Obviously, we haven’t had any meetings yet, so there won’t be any binding votes taken at the first meeting. However, we’ll be talking about our goals for the semester and getting pending issues out on the table so we can vote on them at the second meeting. We’ll also be starting to think about who should be the chair and vice-chair of the Core Team so we can get that out of the way soon.

It should be noted that Core Team meetings are *NOT* for making assignments/volunteering, except perhaps for the simplest, easiest tasks (e.g. “Christina, could you email Helpful Partner Org to inform them that we have decided to sign on to their campaign?”). This is partly to keep the meetings focused and partly a reflection of the fact that Students for Free Culture benefits from the volunteer work of many people who are not members of chapters and thus ineligible to vote. However, I expect that many Core Team members will be participants and leaders in Volunteer Team meetings as well. Thus, Volunteer Team meetings will take place after each Core Team meeting, plus additional meetings when appropriate. (More on that later, perhaps after this first Core Team meeting.)

See you all on Monday in IRC!

Some of you may know that lately have been working on new bylaws, and in particular holding an election for the first Board under those bylaws. Before I announce the winners, I want to thank all the candidates this time around, and I also want to emphasize that presence on the Board does not diminish your ability to contribute to Students for Free Culture. Quite the opposite - local chapters and the Core Team, both of which have comparatively little bureaucracy and low barriers to entry, are were the majority of day-to-day actions of Students for Free Culture lie.

Let me also thank Benjamin Mako Hill for letting us use his Selectricity software. You can read his acknowledgments here.

Our five board members are:

• Elizabeth Stark
• Fred Benenson
• Brendan Ballou
• Christina Ducruet
• Kevin Driscoll

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