It’s no secret that academics are an important source of inspiration for Students for Free Culture – after all, our name comes from a book by Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig. Since the initial stirrings in 2003, SFC has looked to the research and advocacy of professors from disciplines as diverse as law, media studies and computer science; however, our relationship has always been informal, albeit fruitful.

In the hopes of taking this to the next level, today, we are announcing the first members of our new SFC Faculty Advisory Board. We have reached out to a number of intellectual leaders who will provide guidance and vision for Students for Free Culture through semiannual conversations with the organization. Over the next couple weeks, we will be announcing the members of this group.

In this week’s group, we are joined by some fantastic folks, so without further ado, here are the first four members:

Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law @ Harvard Law School; Director, Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics

Professor Lessig has, for more than a decade, been one of the leading thinkers on the intersection of technology and law, especially copyright. He co-founded Harvard’s Berkman Center and Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. He is the author of Remix (2008), Code v2 (2007), Free Culture (2004),The Future of Ideas(2001) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). In recent years, he has shifted his focus to “institutional corruption” in American public life. You can follow his Twitter here.

Michael R. Nelson, Visiting Professor @ Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture and Technology Program

Professor Nelson teaches courses on innovation and Internet policy. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, he was the Director of Internet Technology and Strategy at IBM. Prior to joining IBM in 1998, Professor Nelson was Director for Technology Policy at the Federal Communications Commission, a Special Assistant for IT at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and a staff member of the Senate Subcommittee of Science, Technology and Space. Until recently, he served as the Internet Society’s Vice President for Public Policy and recently became Chairman-Elect of the Technology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Trustee of the Institute for International Communications. You can follow his Twitter here.

Edward Felten, Professor of Computer Science & Public Affairs @ Princeton University; Director, Center for Information Technology Policy

Professor Felten teaches courses at the intersection of computer science and public policy. In addition to publishing widely in fields from encryption to government transparency, he started the popular Freedom to Tinker blog. Professor Felten served as a government witness in United States v. Microsoft and later work revealed that the Sony Rootkit patch made user’s computers more vulnerable to attack. His research, such as into the failures of electronic voting machines or digital rights management, is notable for its real-world applicability.

Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture and Communication @ NYU

Professor Coleman is an anthropologist who studies the ethics of digital collaboration and the role that media and law have in sustaining political activism. She has conducted ethnographic research on hackers in the Debian community and has a forthcoming book entitled “Coding Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software.” Her new research will focus on peer-to-peer patient activism online.

[Felten photo licensed CC-BY by Joseph Lorenzo Hall | Lessig photo licensed CC-BY via Wikimedia]

It’s that time of the year again… Nominations for the coming term’s SFC Board of Directors is now open!

Please see the following details about who is eligible to be nominated, how to nominate, and what to do if you are a nominee:

Who is eligible?

In order to be a candidate for the SFC Board, nominees must either be a current member of a SFC chapter or currently serving on the Board, per our Bylaws.

How to nominate someone:

Let the person you are nominating know that you are doing so.  Then, visit the Nominations page to make your nomination official by filling out the nominee’s information using the template provided.

To accept a nomination:

Once your sponsor has added your information to the wiki, you can accept the nomination by updating your bio and statement.  In order for your nomination to be considered accepted, you must write at least “Nomination Accepted” before the close of nominations at Midnight PDT on April 25, 2010.

On campaigning, etc.

Nominees will have until April 25th to add to and finalize their bios and statements on the Nominations page.  The statement is an open forum for information relevant to your candidacy and an opportunity to address questions, thoughts, or concerns from the SFC community to board nominees.

Nominations close at Midnight PDT on April 25th, 2009.

Adi Kamdar, the President of Yale Students for Free Culture, was recently featured on the BBC for a story about Yale’s switch to Google Apps for services such as GMail. The change to cloud computing, especially at the education level, raises important questions about autonomy, privacy and functionality. Adi and his chapter have been raising public awareness through venues such as an opinion piece in the student newspaper:

And for all the benefits of Gmail, there are some very real concerns. As students, we need to know that Yale has signed a contract with Google guaranteeing certain provisions. Right now, the transition to Gmail depends on Google’s generosity to provide this service without cost or advertisements. If Google decides to charge in the future, what are the ramifications for Yale? We have not heard how much control, if any, ITS and the University will have over backups, data security and migration. We don’t know where the Gmail servers will be located and what privacy protections legally apply in that jurisdiction. At Brown, for instance, mail can be stored in “datacenters outside the borders of the United States” according to the university’s Web site. In addition, no one has told us how much access Google and its data mining algorithms will have to Yale e-mail. Even if Google and ITS do have all the answers, we are entitled to at least ask the questions.

To listen to the BBC piece on the topic, check out their site within the next week or Adi’s blog.

The following is a guest post from Nick Shockey of SPARC.

Last Wednesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a Request for Information on the issue of Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research. Executive action stemming from this RFI could potentially open all federally funded science research to the public for free online access.

This has the exciting potential to greatly advance the goals of your Open Education Campaign. Not only could the more than $60 billion in research the US government funds annually be made available to all, but the government would also be endorsing openness as an academic ideal, sending a strong signal to publishers, universities, and various other stakeholders that this is the new standard.

With all the work Students for Free Culture has done on the issue of expanding access to educational materials, you are in a unique position to appreciate the tremendous impact executive action could have. Opening up all federally funded research to every student in the country (and world) would break down strong barriers to access that currently force students to settle for the materials their library can afford rather than what they truly need. A student’s education should be limited only by curiosity rather than the rapidly escalating journal prices that put the complete scholarly record out of reach for students at all but the most well funded institutions.

So what can you do to make public access a reality? The answer is that you can do a lot.

• First, you can take the time to respond to the questions in the RFI (the full text can be found at here) by submitting a comment to the Federal Register by January 7th (email comments to publicaccess-at-ostp-dot-gov).
• Second, there is a rotating set of questions on the Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog which changes every ten days – you can respond thoughtfully to the questions as well as other people’s comments right in the comment section of the blog (the first round ends December 20th, so don’t wait!).
• Finally, you can encourage other students and advocates to comment as well.

A strong student response in favor of a mandatory public access policy will truly help ensure that such a policy becomes a reality and that it follows SFC’s ideals of openness as closely as possible. I can’t wait to see the impact students make on this groundbreaking process and look forward to your responses!

Nick Shockey
Director of Student Advocacy, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

As many of you know, following the Free Culture 2008 Conference, Students for Free Culture began the Open University Campaign – an initiative to increase collaboration, sharing, and openness at the level of higher education. With the academic year about to begin, we want to invite all interested parties to assist the with project; after all, we wouldn’t be very genuine if we didn’t do this in an open manner ourselves!

About the Open University Campaign

In October 2008, Students for Free Culture drafted and adopted the Wheeler Declaration which declared that:

“An open university is one in which:

1. The research produced is open access;
2. The course materials are open educational resources;
3. The university embraces free software and open standards;
4. The university’s patents are readily licensed for free software, essential medicine, and the public good;
5. The university’s network reflects the open nature of the Internet,

where “university” includes all parts of the community: students, faculty and administration.”

Out of this agreement has grown the Open University Campaign, of which a major goal is to produce objective, reliable indicators of individual universities’ levels of openness. A primary method through which this will be accomplished is through “report card” style profiles of leading institution of higher learning, similar to College Sustainability Report Cards. Students for Free Culture has already begun this work by defining principles of measurement, researching available resources, and developing surveys to be distributed to universities.

What Will the Open University Report Cards Entail?

Mirroring the Wheeler Declaration, the Open University Report Cards, as currently envisioned, will evaluate schools on five topics:

1. Open Access: Are faculty required to make their scholarship open access? Is the university press publish open access materials?
2. Open Educational Resources: Does the university create OERs? Does the university use OERs?
3. Free and Open Source Software and Standards: Does university computing use FOSS? Are students and faculty required to use proprietary software?
4. Intellectual Property: Is IP revenue transparent? Is IP used to promote innovation, or restrict knowledge?
5. Network Management: Is the network neutral? Is user privacy respected?

Establishing credible criteria under which schools will be assessed will be essential to creating a respected resource. For example, Which schools’ open access policies are currently lacking important criteria? Or, To what extent should a school actively support FOSS? The volunteers currently involved with the project are working through these questions on the wiki page, and we encourage you to join the conversation.

What the Open University Campaign Needs

In order to make this a successful endeavor, Students for Free Culture needs your involvement!

• Are you a student who can research official university open access policies?
• Are you passionate about FOSS and can develop a questionnaire for IT administrators about FOSS policy?
• Are you statistically-inclined and can handle data on universities?
• Are you a web developer who could create a public website for the Open University Report Cards?
• Are you a graphic designer who could create posters to raise awareness on campuses?

In Closing…

The Open University Campaign recognizes that scholastic advancement occurs most readily in an environment of sharing, openness and collaboration. By providing a cross-index of leading universities, the project will add important comparative measurements to encourage increased academic openness. Our hope is that these resources will provide a platform from which openness activists can endeavor to improve the scholastic environment.

Join us by jumping into the wiki, signing up for the Open University mailing list, or emailing board (at) freeculture (dot) org with suggestions or questions!

“Seed”, Manky Maxblack, BY-ND

Year One is a project to help new (and re-new-ing) chapters survive their first two semesters. It is loosely structured around a series of meetings and movie nights that will make connections among chapters and bring new members up to speed on the thornier issues of free culture past and present.

Year One is aimed at new chapters but is open to all who would like to participate. To get involved, drop me an email: kevin /at/ freeculture.org.

Here is a partial list of chapters being (re-)organized this semester:

• University of Alabama, Birmingham
• Case Western University
• University of Illinois/Urbana Champaign
• European University Institute, Florence
• Middle Tennessee State University
• University of Southern California
• School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• Yale

For more information on the project, take a look at the (always in progress) Year One wiki page.

It’s been about six months since the Free Culture 2008 Conference—time flies! Berkeley is happy to report that the conference was a great success. We got some good press, made some great connections, and generated a little money for the national organization. We were also treated to a barn-burner of a talk by Larry Lessig and finally got everyone together in one room. We’re so grateful to everyone who made the trip and can’t wait for the next event; we hope you had as much fun in the Bay Area as we do on a regular basis. Get hyphy.

What follows is an extremely tardy wrap-up post—call it a post-mortem. Many folks wondered where to find resources, so read on to see what’s available online.

Videos of the conference are now available in three ways. First, check out Free Culture @ Berkeley’s Blip channel (http://freecultureberkeley.blip.tv). Like any good video site, Blip will let you embed the videos on your blog and also download them for archival. They’re available in OGG at archive.org—search “free culture.” Alternately, you can check out FreeCulture.tv on Miro. The videos are licensed CC-BY, so go nuts—spread them all over the world, chop and screw them, burn them on DVDs and sell them. Just make sure SFFC gets a shout out. If you’d like source files, drop us a line at berkeley@freeculture.org.

Also, Alaskan FC-warrior Jacob Caggiano has some great interviews from the conference up on his Vimeo page.

Some great summary posts were written by Tim Hwang, Kevin Donovan, and others (if you’re ever in Mexico and need a Spanish translation of Lessig’s speech, look no further).

Lastly, you should also check out the fc2008 Flickr pool (just watch out: we share #hashtags with FurryCon 2008). I’m particularly fond of the lewd dancing at the afterparty—thanks again to Lone Wolf, ripley, Kid Kameleon, and Refusenik for spinning on the one’s and two’s.

By now everyone who needs reimbursement for travel should have received a check. If you haven’t, contact berkeley@freeculture.org and we’ll check the status. We apologize again for the delay in processing; the travel grants made possible by our generous sponsors Google and Mozilla required that we work with UC Berkeley’s business services, resulting in a longer-than-average reimbursement period. It’s definitely something that SFFC will be working to improve on for future events.

Speaking of future events—it’s about the right time to start plotting the next one. What should we focus on? Who should be there? What are our goals? Speak your mind in the comments!

(photocred: thanks, mecredis!)

I’m pleased to announce that the new FreeCulture.org bylaws have been approved by our beloved chapters. The bylaws require no quorum and simply that 3/4 of the votes given by registered chapters be in support of their approval. (Earlier today I misunderstood those bylaws and thought that 3/4 of the chapters must actually vote. I’d like to apologize again for that. That’s probably the first substantive misinterpretation of the bylaws, and I wonder if it will be the last.)

The votes are: 13 for, 1 against, and 4 votes I couldn’t count in the real total. This brings to a close a hard process that I dropped out of because it was so hard, and it should set the stage for more clarity in the role and activity of FreeCulture.org. Here are the votes I received in no particular order:

Chapters voting for the bylaws were: UNC Chapel Hill, Swarthmore College, Brown Free Culture, the American University in Cairo, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NYU, Virginia Tech, University of Southern California, Chadwick Free Culture, Seattle University Law Free Culture, Florida State University, Northeastern Free Culture, Free Culture 5C.

Chapters voting against the bylaws were: Harvard College.

Groups not yet registered with us but sending in votes (all were for ratification) claimed to represent: Northwestern University, Monterrey, University of Chicago.

Chapters voting late (all were for ratification): Columbia University.

It’s been a pleasure receiving your votes, even as I am now embarrassed that I urged some of you to vote under the misunderstanding that a quorum of 3/4 of the chapters was necessary.

(One thing I’ve learned from this, which I secretly already knew, is that the chapter registration system is confusing. Sorry about that, too.)

UPDATE: Nelson sez: If you’re wondering why passing the bylaws was good/important, you might want to check out Gavin Baker’s comments on the bylaws.

Hi Everyone-

My name is Brendan Ballou, and I’m from the Free Culture chapter at Columbia. Some of you may have already heard about EFF’s onion router (Tor, http://tor.eff.org/). Basically Tor is a program that prevents outside parties (your university, your ISP, the RIAA, etc) from tracking your movements on the web (all of it – including file sharing). It’s an incredibly useful tool – one in fact that Chinese dissidents use to keep information from the Chinese government.

Last semester we modified Tor to run only over the Columbia University intranet. Our modified program, the Columbia University Local Area Tor (CU-LATOR) ran much faster than the standard version, and now we want to expand to other universities that participate in Internet2 (to maintain network speed). If you would be interested in having your school participate in this larger, nation-wide uni-tor (we’re working on a name), please email me, because the more schools that participate, the faster the network will run and the safer all our information will be. You don’t need to be a coder to be involved, we just need boots on the ground to help publicize the program and get people to use it. You can check if your school participates in Internet2 here: http://members.internet2.edu/university/universities.cfm

However, if you are a coder we need your help too. Our version of Tor is shaky on windows boxes – so if you’re interested in improving the program for windows email Ron Gejman at rsg2119@columbia.edu.

This is a fun project, and an important one too. We hope we can get your help in keeping students’ data safe and private.

Best,

Brendan Ballou

bcb2114@columbia.edu

Get ready! Thursday, Feb. 15 is the National Day of Action for Open Access. Several of our chapters across the country will be hosting events — here they are:

• University of Florida (Gainesville, FL)
  Tabling: 11 am – 3 pm, Reitz Union Colonnade
  Panel: 7 pm, CSE room E221 (co-sponsored with UAEM)
  Speakers: Gavin Baker, Free Culture; Ashley Wills, UAEM; Stephanie Haas, Digital Library Center
  Contact: Gavin Baker
• University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA)
  Panel: 3 pm, Annenberg Center for Communication, 734 West Adams Blvd.
  Speakers: Cory Doctorow, Sasha Chock
  Contact: Cameron Parkins
• Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA)
  Tabling: during lunch and dinner, top of dining hall (Sharples)
  Panel: 7:30 pm, Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall
  Contact: Nicholas LaRacuente
• Emory University (Atlanta, GA)
  Event: 4:30 pm, press conference at Woodruff Library North Entrance
  Contact: Brian Pitts
• Emerson College (Boston, MA)
  Tabling: 11:30 am – 12:30 pm, around 80 Boylston St.
  Contact: Erin O’Brien
• Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)
  Event: Handing out Open Access bookmarks to students throughout the day and distributing them to Harvard’s major libraries. Holding a forum the following week and submitting an Op-ed to the Harvard Crimson.
  Contact: Elizabeth Stark
• MIT (Cambridge, MA)
  Event: Placing pricetags on journals at the MIT libraries and distributing Open Access Bookmarks to students and libraries throughout the day.
  Contact: Mako Hill
• Northeastern University (Boston, MA)
  Event: Handing out Open Access Bookmarks to students and distributing to libraries throughout the day.
  Tabling: 2-4 pm, Main Library
  Contact: Christopher Budnick
• University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA)
  Tabling: 11 am – 1:30 pm, Locust Walk
  Contact: Steve McLaughlin
• Reed College (Portland, OR)
  Tabling: 11:30 am – 2:30 pm, in front of the cafeteria
  Contact: Max Berger
• Chadwick School (Palos Verdes Peninsula, CA)
  Tabling: 12:30 – 1:45 pm, Main deck (outside Christensen)
  Contact: D. Parker Phinney
• New York University (New York, NY)
  Will publish audio/video from the Taking Action on Open Access event.
  Contact: Fred Benenson

The following chapters have also said they’d be participating — contact them for details:

• University of Evansville (Evansville, IN)
  Contact: Andy Scudder
• Franklin & Marshall College (Lancaster, PA)
  Contact: Ben DeRogatis
• Hamilton College (Clinton, NY)
  Contact: David Riordan
• Claremont Colleges (Claremont, CA)
  Contact: Karen Rustad
• Columbia University (New York, NY)
  Contact: Brendan Ballou
• University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC)
  Contact: Erin Watson