Last weekend I flew across the country from NYC to Berkeley, CA to participate in the Free Culture 2008 conference. Students for Free Culture was founded in 2004 by students at Swarthmore College, with its mission being to promote a bottom-up, more participatory culture by focusing on activism and advocacy in the realms of balanced intellectual property rights, communication and free expression, creativity and innovation, and public access to knowledge. I founded the SFC chapter at my university about a year ago.
The conference was full of as much free culture goodness as you can possibly cram in 48 hours. Following is a an uber-ultra-condensed account of the happenings at FC2008:
Day 1, Sat Oct 11:
Lots of great panels, talks and keynotes by people like Lawrence Lessig (Stanford law professor and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, author of Free Culture and Remix), UC Berkeley iSchool’s Pam Samuelson and Mozilla Foundation’s John Lilly. See the full schedule (PDF)
Day 2, Sunday Oct 12:
Unconference day: At UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall. Student-focused sessions hashing out a multitude of issues. Some excellent discussions took place, and I highly encourage you check out the notes for the sessions on the UC Berkeley chapter’s wiki. What was incredible is that the day remained unprogrammed until the end of the first day! The energy and enthusiasm of everyone was simply amazing. A strong emphasis was put intochanelling this energy into tangible action (what Lessig called for and termed “picking fights”), in addition to globally expand the shpere of advocacy and activism through localizing causes and contextualizing relavant issues.
Thanks to the organizing team for putting together such an awesome conference. I am sure that the momentum for action formed at FC2008 will be carried forward and further built upon to solidify the focus and objectives of the free culture movement.
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