Welcome to the University of Calgary Free Culture webpage! We're gradually getting everything to work and developing a community around this site, with the intent of becoming a SU club by the end of the this semester. If you're interested in joining, create an account on the site! We'll send you occasional emails with what we're up to, and we can work towards the 20 people needed to be a chartered club. What is Free Culture? "Free" means two things here: to use the traditional GNU comparison,"'Free' as in beer" and "'Free' as in speech." The former refers to things—whether they be art, software, information, or indeed, culture—that doesn't cost anything monetarily. The latter refers to legal ability an individual has in using those things. A good example is open-source software. Linux distributions don't cost anything to download, and you can play with the source code as much as you want. This last distinction is important; traditionally, software companies have made the source code of their software a confined secret. By open up source code to everyone, it evolves and literally explodes. Culture is alike in many ways. The Public Commons refers to the large body of freely-available ("Free" in both senses of the word) work available in the public domain. This has a far greater reach than copyrighted work, which cannot be reused over and over and over again. Think of hip-hop. Wouldn't it be so much easier if turntablists were just able to mash together whatever samples they wanted, and not have to seek copyright clearance from dozens of different authors? What if people started creating new music and adding it to the Internet with a Creative Commons-style license? What if everyone who had a wicked song idea was able to let even, say, a hundred people listen and remix it. And what if that those people each let a hundred people do the same to their work? The potential reach of that one work is magnified at an exponential rate. No wonder Nine Inch Nails has been releasing source versions of their songs for quite some time now... The Free Culture movement seeks to create a larger understanding of the Public Commons in hopes that more people will contribute to it and embrace the idea of open release—as opposed to closed, as with copyright. It also seeks to demonstrate both the positive social and economic benefits of these ideas while exposing the inflexibility and outdatedness of current distribution models. This group at the U of C works to demonstrate the benefits of Free Culture at the University of Calgary campus while suggesting alternatives as the campus becomes increasingly digitized. We see technology in the university progress in one of two ways: either in an open source progression in which secure, flexible, industry-standard software is used, or a regression to mediocre proprietary software, such as happened with the current and enduring PeopleSoft Student Centre nightmare. Give us some feedback! Information is beautiful; let's make a whole bunch. |
