Nelson’s mini-tour of SFC chapters: UW Madison
April 15th, 2008 by Nelson Pavlosky
I have just completed the first stop on a little mini-tour I am taking of Students for Free Culture chapters, beginning with UW Madison this past Saturday, continuing with Georgetown tomorrow on April 16th, and concluding with Virginia Tech a week from tomorrow on April 23rd. I would have blogged this earlier (i.e. before the first stop) if my laptop’s hard drive hadn’t died, but better late than never!
I spoke this Saturday at the brand spanking new Students for Free Culture chapter at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, along with former SFC board member and co-founder of our U Florida chapter, Gavin Baker. We were both guest speakers at a symposium called Culture of Sharing, where we also led breakout sessions (mine was on Open Source and ended up being a free software installfest) and co-hosted a post-conference workshop on how to start and operate a Students for Free Culture chapter. Our UW Madison chapter’s co-founder, Angela, was kind enough to take notes for the chapter-starting workshop and send them to us, so some of that material may end up in a “how to start a chapter” kit someday. It resulted in a short article in campus newspaper The Daily Cardinal and positive blog coverage on sites like the UW infolit Community, and a good time was had by all :)
If you’re from UW Madison and you’d like to join their chapter, you should sign up for their mailing list.
Here’s a picture of me and Gavin with the founding members of the UW Madison chapter. From left to right: Chris, Justine, me (Nelson), Angela, Gavin, and Hannah on the bottom.
Some of the new UW Madison recruits expressed some interest in guest-blogging, so if we’re lucky you may see some of them on here in the near future!
April 16th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Thanks for an inspired talk and a great conference. I’ve heard feedback from many involved that they have been given much food for thought, especially those who were exposed to notions of free culture for perhaps the first time.
Particularly inspiring was your discussion on notions of originality as a false construct, as well as the cycle of creativity; is the latter available online in graphical form, perchance? I’d like to share/discuss it with friends.
I’ve been following this brouhaha with J.K. Rowling and her total freakout at the notion of the Potter lexicon/encyclopedia with bemusement; does she really think that her well-worn tropes of boy wizards, magical schools, characters named “Trelawney” (c.f. Philip Pullman) were acquired in a vaccum? Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy Potter as much as the next nerd, but her claims to utter possession of the Potter phenomenon in the culture are spurious and silly. It seems to me a great illustration of just these sorts of situations. This morning I was looking at a book of Tolkien criticism, another author whose oeuvre has made a massive splash in the popular culture. What if Tolkein were still alive in today’s hypersensitive climate of ownership? Would he be in court, suing the scholars who’d put that work together?
Okay, that’s enough soapboxing for now. Thanks for coming to Madison.
:o)