[Cialug] Fwd: [SFD-announce] Celebrate Free Culture with us on May 19th 2012

[Barry Von Ahsen]

Dear all,

It is with great pleasure that we are announcing a new celebration in
the lines of Software Freedom Day focusing on Free Culture. Over the
years SFD gradually promoted Free Culture next to Software Freedom and
we believe it is now time to have a specific event for Free Culture.

Why is that so you may ask?

We feel for starter that the audience and participants are quite a
different audience from the people interested in software. In fact
artists from the Free Culture movement often use proprietary software
for plenty of reasons and wouldn't feel compelled to participate in SFD
(or event know about it). Then the format should probably be different.
While SFD tries to showcase Free Software and explains all the great
things you could do with it, a day to celebrate Free Culture should
definitely showcase Free Culture work, that is:
- exhibitions
- concerts
- movie projections
- surely more

What we have envisioned is a day where all the Free Culture artists
around the world could walk in the street and play, act or showcase
their work and explain to people what Free Culture is and why they have
chosen to contribute to the movement. Of course there could also be some
amount of discussions and debates, but we should definitely stay away
from long presentations and make it a real festival where the general
public would come and simply enjoy the show while learning about those
artists.

The side idea is also to give free culture artists one international day
where they can unite and make themselves heard all together. We are
seeing way too many attacks on culture these days with copyright
extensions and abuse of consumer rights of fair use, or lobbyists trying
to lock away public funded work for example.

So 2012 will be the first year and we will start contacting various Free
Culture supporting organizations to get their support. In the meantime
we have launched the Culture Freedom Day website at
http://www.culturefreedomday.org and hopefully should have the
registration and the wiki up and running fairly soon.

So if you have any connections with Free Culture Artists, Art schools or
universities, art galleries, pubs that organize live music, restaurant
which do photo/painting exhibitions maybe you should talk to them to see
how they feel about organizing a CFD event.

Discussion about CFD will be happening on the CFD forum at
http://www.culturefreedomday.org/forum and we also have an IRC channel
on Freenode @ #cfday for the geeks among us.

So thank you all to spread the word, 'identi.cate', twit, blog and tell
your family and friends!


-----------
Digital Freedom International (newly renamed to encompass our new
activities)

PS: and SFD will still happen on September 15th 2012!


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