[plug] Culture Freedom Day

[Luke John]

Hi PLUGgers,

I was going through the mailing list archive for Software Freedom Day
and came across the following.

BEGIN MESSAGE ------------->
    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!
-------------> END MESSAGE

Whilst this isn't strictly Linux or Open Source, the free culture
movement does share similar goals with the open source movement.

Does anyone know any arts groups in Western Australia who may be
interested in hosting a Culture Freedom Day event in Perth?

Kind Regards
Luke John