F&M Free Culture

Special thanks to Elisabeth for taking such great notes!

• Budapest Initiative & Open Access
  • Open access to scholarly research
  • online distribution
  • “use copyright to guarantee access to knowledge”
  • want college/library to sign on
  • costs of this system could be included within research grants
  • some research is public, some is private. Then that research is publiched in private journals and sold back to the people who want access
  • when research is submitted to private journals, those journals often get the copyright (which makes it difficult/impossible for researchers to publish in both private and open access journals)
  • Decision: We reached consensus on the Budapest inititive; all present agreed that we should sign on in support as F&M Free Culture and work to get the College and/or the libraries to sign on as well.
• Campus Free Culture Discussions
  • Idea is to have student/faculty discussions on Free Culture, a la BMC Free Culture
  • Topic ideas:
    • Open Access
    • economic basis of copyright
    • free culture campus
    • does the College have a responsibility to provide resources to those not directly affiliated with it?
    • are copyrights and patents fulfilling their purposes?
    • technology law vs. copyright law, use and abuse
  • Possible cosponsorships:
    • CLAS
    • College Republicans
    • College Democrats
    • Floyd Institute - economic organization
    • the libraries
    • Econ department
  • Possible professors:
    • Tony Chemero
    • Robert Battistini
    • Jeff S??? (Shimeta?)
    • Ken Krebs
    • David Merli
    • Michael Murray
    • Sean Flaherty
    • Zeshan Ismat
    • library rep (Lisa Stilwell?)
    • James Strick
    • Roger Thomas
  • Decision: All present liked this idea. We’re going to start talking with professors and trying to find a good time to have our first discussion. Everyone please talk to your professors!
• Other issues discussed:
  • Free Culture Tour
  • F&M Free Culture conference?
  • Bringing back the TV Club (to provide access to ATS libaries… Could this just go online?

As you may have noticed, textbook prices are out of control.

short newspaper story for those in a hurry
http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/2/72005c.asp

longer newspaper story for those who want more details
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/ci_2547892

Make Textbooks Affordable home page
http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/textbooks.asp?id2=14226
(includes sections on action for students and action for faculty)

Feb 2005 report on textbook prices from the State PIRG’s
http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/newsroom.asp?id2=15618

– the links are from our fearless Swarthmore leader, Nelson Pavlosky.

There is a common sense, participatory answer to this problem, open source. Open source doesn’t only take care of the ‘free as in beer’ problem but also the free as in freedom. Textbooks have long been criticzed for their bias one way or another and open source textbooks are also a natural answer to this dilemma. People of all stripes would have input which would minimize bias and maximize the comprehensiveness of the textbook.

Here are some pertinent articles:

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000276.html

California Open Source Textbook project
http://www.opensourcetext.org/

A cc: licensed project
http://www.opentextbook.org/

Wikibooks (one of the most successful and robust projects)
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

This is a great topic for Franklin and Marshall College along with other FC groups because it has vast important on our local college community.

Here’re the awesome minutes that Elisabeth took at tonight’s meeting.

• The spotlight on the F&M homepage has gotten us some good publicity, and may have even sparked a new group at DeSales University
• Free Culture Tour
  • we need $500
  • everyone should check out the Free Culture Tour website
  • where should we host Colin?
  • we need to get exact dates
  • should we emphasize lecture aspect or concert aspect?
  • looking into a co-sponsorship with Ben’s Underground
  • Nick will get dates to Elisabeth, who then see what’s going on at Ben’s then
• Video project
  • want to make a video about all the FC groups
  • deadline for raw footage is Feb. 13
  • ideas - interviews, what’s specific about F&M FC
  • to be used in Free Culture Tour
• Remember Ben’s idea of a free culture campus?
  • maybe we should try to participate in new technology committee
  • try to CC orchestra performances?
• Get yourself in the Facebook Free Culture group!
• After several takes, we managed to say (though not together) “Hi, we’re Franklin & Marshall Free Culture!”
• Much fun was had by all

Last Decemeber, Franklin & Marshall Free Culture hosted a “Network Policy Information Session,” an open forum that invited members of the College community to ask questions about campus network policies. We were fortunate enough to have two representatives from Computing Services join us to discuss issues ranging from network freedom to security to online privacy. John Hoh, Director of Computing Services, took the brunt of the questions, which included inquiries about DMCA take-down notices, concerns about private information stored on College servers, and whether or not students are allowed to run services on their machines.

John Hoh, Director of Computing Services answered students’ questions about network freedom at F&M.

Mr. Hoh, with assistance from Matt Richard, the Network Access & Security Coordinator, also gave a general overview of how the campus network is laid out. He explained the multiple levels of redundancy and the hot-swappable spare components that keep the network chugging along 24/7.

So what did we learn about our network policies? In short, F&M has in place a number of reasonable network policies designed to ensure reliable access to all members of the College community. Specifically, we discovered:

* Users are allowed to run any services they wish on their computers; no ports are currently blocked save for those used by the major Windows worms. Students are given lengthy DHCP leases to publicly accessible IP addresses.

* The College prioritizes network traffic using Packeteer; 3MB/s out of 20MB/s of the College’s direct connection to AT&T is dedicated to P2P traffic, which was extremely valuable when we needed to seed Night of the Living Dead via Bittorrent. Packeteer was installed after P2P traffic began using over 99% of the network’s bandwidth, which made web and e-mail usage practically impossible.

* The College has received about 40 DMCA notices this semester about students distributing copyrighted works on file-sharing networks. No “false-positives” have been reported, and all have been complied with. In absolutely no cases was any student information given to the party claiming infringement.

* The guys running our network just want to make sure it’s available to everyone on campus. The two guiding principles for networks users are: abide by federal and state laws, and don’t impede the rights of other users of the network.

Score one for sensible policy!

What do others think are essential components of network freedom?

Welcome to WordPress. This is the first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!