Completely agree that it would be great to branch out, Tim. I think through OLPC, iCommons, and some other projects we've had a decent amount of contact with people interested in tech and development, but there's definitely room for a lot more outreach. One movement that is trying to bridge the gap between development and free culture is the A2K or access to knowledge movement, which has mainly been spearheaded out of Yale. There's also an upcoming A2K conference in Geneva that I'll be attending (one of my first reactions was that they need to hold events in the developing world as well). In any case, I'll be working on that pro ject next year with Yale, and hope to be able to promote cooperation between the development and free culture communities.

-E

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 4:55 PM, Tim Hwang <tim.r.hwang <at> gmail.com> wrote:

At least speaking from Harvard FC's experience and some of the talking
I've been doing with other SFC groups, I've been thinking lately that,
strategically, one really promising thing to pursue much more
aggressively in the future is to build up partnerships with
pre-existing communities that are already poised to be part of Free
Culture without actually being part of it. As a whole, chapters (not
surprisingly) seem to have created good outreach to the techie world,
but on a whole we've got less consistent relationships with the world
outside of that.

I think that the international development community might be great
space for this kind of teaming up on projects. They're plugged in with
a massive ecosystem of organizations who are dealing with a bunch of
intellectual property issues (pharmaceuticals, technology transfer,
cultural product distribution) where restrictiveness is causing real
problems. These are natural allies, and I think Free Culture can play
a big role A) as a connector to the tech world and B) in helping these
groups join up with Free Culture more generally.

In any case, been scheming up some stuff for HFC in the fall. I know
we already have some existing connects with Gavin and the UAEM
(http://www.essentialmedicine.org/) folks -- but wanted to see on the
list if any of the the chapters had any protips/experiences to impart
or had ideas on FC-friendly orgs worth getting in touch with/teaming
up with. Alternatively, if you want to join up with us on projects in
this vein next year -- let me know!

Best,
Tim
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