This is a summary of a project I discussed at the 2011 Students for Free Culture Unconference. I’d like to thank SFC for putting the conference together, and for inviting me to publish this post on their blog.

No society that kept its laws secret could ever be called free. No government that hid its regulations from the regulated could ever stand in our tradition. Law controls. But it does so justly only when visibly. And law is visible only when its terms are knowable and controllable by those it regulates. . . .
-Lawrence Lessig, Introduction to Richard Stallman’s Free Software, Free Society.

More must be done to increase the availability, and the visibility, of justice.

Whatever more is, I decided to be one of the people doing it. That decision is behind both my application to the David A. Clarke School of Law (DCSL) and my insistence on the creation of an Illustrated Law Journal (ILJ) while there. My passion for the idea of collecting, editing, and publishing visual illustrations of laws and legal concepts stems from the beliefs articulated in the following stanza from DCSL founders Edgar and Jean Camper Cahn’s Credo, This I Believe, that informs DCSL’s mission.

And I believe the day will come when the monopoly
      over law and legal knowledge -- the lawyers' monopoly
      the law schools' monopoly -- will be broken
When men and women and yes, even children will know that which
      is expected of them and that which they can expect of others:
            to refrain from harm
            to honor their word
            to respect the dreams of others and the right of others
                 to dream in their own way
	                                         This I believe

The opportunity to know what is expected of you, and what you should expect of others should not require a law degree. We can make the text of laws more freely available to people distributionally, but until those laws are also available conceptually, there’s room for injustice in impenetrably worded, opaque laws.

What is it?

A periodic online and print journal – each issue covering a single legal topic – that will help jurists understand their work, and interested laypeople understand the laws that affect them.

What sorts of things will go in?

It could be anything that clearly illustrates a law or legal concept. Some of the things I expect we’ll publish are venn diagrams, flow charts, cartoons, and street sign type images.

What does the Journal Need? (non-exhaustive)

• A website where the editorial process can take place.
• Illustrations and ideas for illustrations of laws and legal concepts.
• While we do have several ideas for topic areas, we’d love to have more, especially from non-jurists

Where can I learn more and contribute?

The ILJ has a google group here, documents here and an Identi.ca group at !ILJ.

Public Knowledge is hosting World’s Fair Use Day at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. on January 12th.

World’s Fair Use Day (WFUD) is a free, all-day celebration of the doctrine of fair use: the legal right that allows innovators and creators to make particular uses of copyrighted materials.

The event has a great line-up of artists, policymakers, and pundits including:

• Representative Mike Doyle (PA 14th)
• Dan Walsh of ‘Garfield minus Garfield’
• Marc Hosler of Negativland
• DJ Earworm
• Mike Masnick of Techdirt
• Brett Gaylor of ‘RIP: A Remix Manifesto’
• Nina Paley of ‘Sita Sings the Blues’
• Chris Burke, a machinima artist
• Eliza Kreisinger, a mash-up artist
• Jonathan McIntosh, a mash-up artist

If you can’t make it to the free event, it will be webcast; it looks great, so we encourage you to check it out!

Free Culture X is coming up very quickly and we’re working hard to finalize the preparations for the event held at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. on February 13-14th. As you know, on the first day, Jonathan Zittrain will be giving the keynote address and there will be panels on open educational resources, open access and access to knowledge, campus technology policy, and university patent policy.

In the meantime, students interested in attending should investigate travel funding from their universities. The SFC Board is working hard to secure donations, but we need your help. Most schools provide money to registered student groups and many departments have discretionary funds to support educational opportunities for students. Look around and apply early because these things can take time; and don’t hesitate to contact the Board if we can provide any documentation to help!

Secondly, to make this a success, we’ll need volunteers to help with both pre-conference and during the event. We have set-up a mailing list to coordinate planning and encourage you to sign up for it here.

Finally, we would like to hear ideas for the second day’s workshops. If you have ideas, send them out to the FC X mailing list or add them to the call for workshop proposals and we’ll collect them.

Free Culture X – the 2010 Conference of Students for Free Culture – will be held February 13th and 14th in Washington, D.C.

In October 2008, hundreds of students, activists, coders and scholars gathered at UC Berkeley for Free Culture 2008. Between illuminating panel discussions and productive unconference sessions, the free culture community networked and planned for the future. It was there that the Wheeler Declaration was conceived to form the basis for SFC’s current advocacy around opening higher education.

Now, a little more than a year later, Students for Free Culture will be convening the international free culture community for two days of networking, learning and acting. Free Culture X, the 2010 conference of SFC, will take place on February 13th and 14th at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

The vision is to bring together student activists and free culture luminaries to discuss, among other topics, free software and open standards, open access scholarship, open educational resources, network neutrality, and university patent policy, especially in the context of higher education.

In the coming weeks, we will announce the schedule and other logistics, but in the meantime, the Board of SFC wants to hear from you. If you have ideas, suggestions or would like to be involved, be in touch (board-at-freeculture-dot-org).

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!)

Saturday October 11th
Feeling So Free @ Blake’s On Telegraph
8:00pm-2:00am
18+ (Bring the above flyer to get in after 10pm.)
21+ to drink
No cover

Three srsly sick DJs (and me!) on two floors:

DJ Ripley (Baltimore Club/ Dancehall/ Dubstep)
Kid Kameleon (Mashit/ XLR8R)
Refusenik (Thug Rave)
Lone Wolf (Hip Hop)

Video artist or VJ? We’d like to have your video running during the party. Get in touch with me via kevin//at//freeculture.org if you’re interested!

WE HAVE LOTS OF MONEY. WE WANT TO FLY YOU TO CALIFORNIA!

For our upcoming conference in Berkeley, we’ve been blessed with some sponsors who have given us money to fund students to travel from far away to the conference. We still have some of that money left!

So if you are a member of a Students for Free Culture chapter, or are trying to get one off the ground, we would love it if you would come. We would love it so much we can offer to pay (as per our travel funding guidelines) for your flight to Berkeley. It’s been a joy working with the Berkeley team and the other SFC people organizing the conference. It takes place very soon: October 11-12.

So dear all of you students working to promote Free Culture, wherever you are – join us in Berkeley in a week. Get in touch with us by emailing conf08 at freeculture.org.

(My thanks go to others on the conf08 team for reaching out to get this funding!)

Do you have a project or group you’d like to exhibit at the Free Culture conference this October? There will be on-going exhibition space for which we can provide you with a table, chairs, and power. Space is limited, however, so please put your name up on the Exhibits and Booths wiki page soon.

In other conference notes, the conference wiki is lighting up! In particular, I started a Friendly Couches page for travellers to coordinate low-cost, hi-fun lodging.

Save the date!

Students for Free Culture Conference 2008

October 11 and 12
Berkeley, CA

Lots and lots of work to be done between now and then but it’s exciting to have a date and a location! (Especially one that is not in the Northeast US!)

We are currently raising money to fly out as many people as possible. Any ideas for funding sources are deeply appreciated!

Since the Board has been elected we’ve been meeting a lot IRL and putting our heads together to figure out the next steps of the Students for Free Culture organization. Here are the links to the minutes from our recent meetings:

• Board Meeting 04-27-2008
• Board Meeting 03-08-2008

We’ll be updating this page on the wiki: Meetings with future links to minutes so keep an eye out there if you’re interested in following SFC’s board meetings in excruciating detail.

But if you’re not interested in digging through the minutes here are a couple of things we’ll be working on over the next couple of months:

• New T-Shirts are on their way.The wonderful Patrick Moberg of BustedTees has graciously agreed to create some new art for shirts that we’ll be printing soon. He’s done a great job and the designs are almost done, so we’ll be releasing more info about that soon. We should have the t-shirts printed and ready by the end of the summer.
• The Fall 2008 Students for Free Culture Conference. Mark your calendars for October 10th-13th 2008 as we’ve scheduled Columbus Day weekend for our next big conference. We’ve chosen Berkeley, CA as the location for the summit and we’ll be raising funds to make sure we get the right people there to learn, help, and grow the organization and their chapters.
• Incorporation. Thats right, you heard it here first. SFC will soon be an official non-profit entity. This will allow us to file for 501c3 status and solicit tax free donations. Creative Commons‘ original counsel Diane Cabell has been an enormous help through this process and we should be done with it soon.

As always, please feel free to contact anyone on the board, or leave a comment here if you’d like to give feedback about our ideas.

Thanks & Good luck with finals!