Sponsorships for FSCONS Conference at end of October
I wrote before about what a great Free Software + Free Culture conference would look like. In response to my, “Is anyone interested in this,” I chatted with Mirko Lindner from CC Sweden, the upcoming FSCons conference in Sweden seems to get most of these ideas right!
One of my favorite “get it done” people, Michelle Thorne from CC, wrote a nice plug for the conference on the CC site:
Free Culture, Free Software, and Free Content will join forces under the banner of “Free Society” at FSCONS on October 24-26 at the IT University of Götheborg, Sweden. The orgnaizing trinity, Creative Commons Sweden, Free Software Foundation Europe, and Wikimedia Sverige, see FSCONS as a chance to reach out with their respective communities and build joint projects with like-minded activists and organizations.
A strong speakers lineup provides the rhetorical food-for-thought in the Free Culture track. Mike Linksvayer (Creative Commons) asks, “How far is free culture behind free software?” as he charts key indicators and historical factors in the progress of each. Eva Hemmungs Wirten argues that the digital commons extends back to nineteenth-century London, while Oscar Swartz keynotes the events with the warning that Sweden’s controversial “Lex Orwell” may usher in “The End of Free Communication”.
In chatting with Mirko, he mentioned that they are still seeking travel sponsorships for the conference. In putting together Libre Graphics Meeting over the last three years, it is pretty obvious that the most important thing that a conference like this can do is provide travel sponsorship to the people making free culture happen. It gives the much needed face time that developers don’t get and provides a source of collective memory making to further focus development and personal relationships.
If you can help support the conference corporately or personally, please do contact Mirko and the other organizers to make a nod. Yes, I know this comes at a problematic time with the global economy, but please, contribution brings stability 
Free is a difficult concept when most of the individuals involved are tenured academics who will use the freely generated knowledge to advance their careers and salary packages in the institutionalized environment of tertiary education.
I propose that those people who are organizing this conference forego their salaries and pay people to attend who have the expertise and knowledge obtained from practice in the first instance and who do not work inside academic institutions.
Turn the paradigm upside down. Those who are practitioners and experts in the field should be paid to attend universities conferences and the funds used to pay tenured positions used to organise and to pay those pracitioners presenting. No academic should present!!
Consider this as a model because this is not a free conference, there are costs at all sorts of levels in this organisation and suggesting that it is free is untruthful and an incorrect use of the word.
It is debasing the word the same way that derivatives have debased the world economy.
Comment by Ralph Kerle — October 14, 2008 @ 9:23 pm
Ralph, Free is used in the context of the free software and free culture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
But, yes, Free is overloaded massively. And, yes, a pure academic conference assuming things are free as in free money, is a false statement. I don’t however believe anyone at this conference is riding this tip and are instead looking for ways to further free and open source software movements.
There are plenty of conferences like you propose though where non-academics are paid to speak.
Comment by jon — October 15, 2008 @ 2:31 am
What is free culture? There is always a cost in producing culture. It is never free. There are components of culture, conversation and listening that maybe free. However, there is a cost to havew that conversation and that listening to occur - education and knowledge creation and production culture. That is not for free.
Comment by Ralph Kerle — October 17, 2008 @ 6:16 am