What I learned at Virginia Tech
May 7th, 2008 by Nelson PavloskyAs our loyal readers may know, I visited Free Culture at Virginia Tech on April 23rd, SFC’s 4th birthday. It’s always a pleasure visiting Students for Free Culture chapters because each one is different in subtle (and occasionally dramatic) ways, each one has their own way of approaching free culture activism, and I always learn something new from them. Today I’d like to share with you my observations of FC @ VT and how they go about running an SFC chapter.
Demographics
Virginia Tech is one of our several technology-centric chapters, founded by people who are interested in open source software and who run Linux. Due to poor representation of women among the computer-science-y demographic, Virginia Tech also suffers from a lack of ladies, although there were two female members present while I was there. As our chapters have matured and broadened their scope to cover more issues, they have drawn in many other sorts of people from different walks of life. Many of our newer chapters were founded by people (many of them women) who are more interested in art and remix culture for example, or in open access publishing and access to knowledge. Apparently VT had a member who joined because of his interest in music, and who was involved with the radio station and was putting together an FC radio program of some sort, but who dropped out of the chapter due to personal reasons. Free Software is the primordial soup from which the broader Free Culture movement emerged, however, and Linux users and open source advocates will always be one of our core constituencies. That’s perfectly fine, as long as they’re not the only people involved!
I encouraged the FC @ VT folks to try to do events and activities that target different demographics than their own, and it seems likely they’ll do more to expand their appeal next school year.
Frets on Fire
On the other hand, open source software is pretty darn awesome! Above is a picture of me playing Frets on Fire towards the end of the FC @ VT meeting. Frets on Fire is an open source clone of Guitar Hero, which can use either actual Guitar Hero guitar peripherals, or any keyboard you might have lying around. It’s more entertaining to watch someone play guitar on a computer keyboard ;-) Given that the music industry has decided that Rock Band is a new way to release music and make money from licensing, it’s great that open source efforts like Frets on Fire give anyone the power to release their music as a track that people can play, or for fans to transcribe the music of their favorite band…. it’s problematic if the only way to release such interactive music is with the permission of Harmonix or RedOctane.
Frets on Fire is impressively pretty and plays well, and it’s a good sign I think that an open source project which requires the skills of programmers, musicians, graphic designers etc. can be so successful. Let’s face it, in the digital age many creative endeavors now require software and programmers, and open source software will only become more important. It’s great to tie it into music and art with projects like Frets on Fire.
Choice of meeting space, equipment
Although my talk took place in a larger lecture hall, FC @ VT apparently normally has its meetings in this smaller classroom in the computer science department. I know that chapters don’t necessarily get to choose where they meet, as sometimes they have to simply make do with whatever space is available, but a chapter’s meeting space definitely affects the feel of a meeting, so it’s definitely worth considering what you want your chapter’s meetings to be like. The circular arrangement of the seating in this room lent the meeting something of an egalitarian, communal aura, which I liked.
It’s also important to make sure that the room has all of the equipment and furniture that you want. In this case the room had a screen and a projector, although unfortunately the projector decided not to cooperate that day, so they had to substitute a large computer monitor from next door. Testing equipment ahead of time is essential! The chapter members informed me that they have been doing a number of showings of public domain movies on campus, but they used to have serious trouble with the showings because they would download the movies from Archive.org and the downloads would sometimes be corrupted or incomplete, and they would not discover this until the showing itself. Now one of them tests all of the media that they want to use well before the day of the public event. If this had been a public event, hopefully they would have tested the projector before the event as well ;-)
Group discussion, per the wiki agenda
As the circular seating arrangement might have suggested, one of the main items on the agenda was a group discussion, about news in the free culture realm. Talking about the free culture issues in the news is really important, both to keep your members up to date and informed, and to debate and wrestle with various ideological and ethical problems that may arise… it’s good for everyone to know the issues inside and out. Unfortunately, sometimes chapters can get so wrapped up in the business of organizing activities that they never get a chance to think and discuss, and at that point it’s sometimes good to get less ambitious and slow things down a bit. How will you ever get new recruits up to speed, or keep them interested, if you’re just working all the time?
What made the discussion especially interesting to me is that all of the topics had been written down in the agenda for the meeting, on the chapter’s wiki. Here’s the agenda for the meeting I attended after my talk. Students for Free Culture provides free mailing lists, blogs, and wikis to our chapters, and each chapter uses its webspace differently. Some chapters do not use a wiki at all, and the ones who do use it have very different styles. The way we used the wiki at Free Culture Swarthmore, and what I recommend to each chapter when we give them a wiki, is to create a wiki page for each meeting, collaboratively write the agenda for the meeting on that page beforehand, and then take minutes on the same page during the meeting.
I must say, however, that I don’t recall ever putting FC news / group discussion topics on the agenda for meetings at my chapter. Normally there’s a lot more work/business on the agenda, and the VT members noted that their agendas usually have more business on them as well, but since it’s the end of the semester there wasn’t much left to do. Even more interestingly, they actually commented on the agenda items a bit on the wiki before they even arrived at the meeting, treating it like a forum. This made everything very well organized, and everyone had the facts right at their fingertips in the forms of the relevant news articles etc. while they were talking. The funny thing was that with such a detailed agenda that many of the members had obviously looked over and commented upon before the meeting, there wasn’t really much of a need for minutes, and they dispensed with minutes almost entirely at this meeting, only taking a few notes at the end of the agenda during the “open floor” section. This may be a model worth replicating at a chapter near you!
Showing a documentary in pieces
FC @ VT had another innovation that I had not seen before, in the way that they showed documentaries during their meetings. They decided that they wanted to watch Good Copy Bad Copy during their meetings, but that they didn’t want to devote an entire meeting to just sitting and watching a movie. Also, their attention spans were likely to give out before the end of an hour-long documentary ;-) So instead of watching the movie all at once, they split it into 15 minute sections and watched it serialized, one section at each meeting. We were watching the third out of four sections the day I was there, and indeed most everyone seemed to be paying attention pretty much the whole time, occasionally making remarks about what was on the screen. Once the section was over, they had a brief discussion afterwards as well. As long as you don’t forget what happened the last week, this seems like a perfectly reasonable way to show a documentary for a club which meets weekly.
Also, I highly recommend Good Copy Bad Copy, it’s quite entertaining! My main complaint is that since much of the movie takes place in other countries, much of the dialogue is in subtitles, and the subtitles are a little hard to read. I recommend showing this movie on a large screen under ideal movie-showing conditions, otherwise you’ll be straining your eyes to read the darn subtitles. (Hint: a far-away computer monitor is not ideal.)
EFF decoder rings
Some people do not understand the EFF decoder rings or why we included them in the care packages. To be honest, the EFF just sent us a truckload of the things, and we ended up using them as packing peanuts to get rid of them. It’s fascinating how the decoder rings have been a smash hit on some campuses, such as UW Madison and Virginia Tech, and left others completely befuddled.
In case you are among the confused, let me explain the point of the decoder rings clearly: There is a spinny thing on each decoder ring, and on one side of the spinny thing you can see a number, and on other side a letter. In order to encode some text, you spin the ring until you see the letter you want to encode, and then you write down the number that you see on the opposite side of the ring. To decode text, you simply reverse the process, searching for the number that is encoded, and then writing down the letter that it is paired with. The reason that the decoder rings say “Circumvention Device” on them is because they are a subtle dig at the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which included “anti-circumvention provisions” that made it illegal to circumvent encryption on copy-protected content, e.g. to decode the scrambled data on a DVD without permission, and it also made it illegal to distribute “circumvention devices” which make it possible for people to e.g. back up their DVD collection (resulting in tools like DVD X-Copy being driven off the market). Theoretically the DMCA could even make these decoder rings illegal, although it is unlikely that a copy protection scheme would ever use a simple rotation algorithm to encode the content. The DMCA anti-circumvention provisions embody serious threats to freedom of expression, scientific research and security research, academic freedom, and other important rights.
Now that I’ve explained the joke to you, it’s probably no longer funny, but crucially it seems that many people at chapters like Virginia Tech are either (1) geeky and well-informed enough to know what the DMCA is and get the joke, or (2) really excited about the idea of decoder rings, regardless of their purpose or why they are there. It’s nice to see people who have enough of their inner child left to appreciate nifty but practically useless little widgets like these decoder rings, and I’ve seen a number of chapter members passing ring-encoded messages to one another, both in person and online. While we are saving the world, let us not forget how to have a good time. 18-12 _ 25-7-11 _ 20-3-17 _ 1-8-3-4 _ 14-5-18-15 _ 25-7-11 _ 1-7-20-6!
