Jon Phillips, Creative Commons' Community and Business Development Manager has a great idea on his personal blog:
Free Culture Conference (”Get your FreeCon”) would be a meeting of specific projects to hash out interrelationships and collective trajectories for the coming year. We have had great success with the Libre Graphics Meeting which is not about people hand waving and armchair philosophizing about every single person’s movement, but specific projects coming together to their roadmap, challenges for interoperability, and real hacking on projects more than just declarations.
What would it take to put on a proper Free Culture Conference and who would need to be present. I would say:
Free Software Foundation
Creative Commons
Wikimedia Properties
Gnome Foundation
Open Courseware Consortium
Internet ArchiveAnd the list keeps going on…please add to, as this is just off the head…the number of companies that would be interested in this intermixing would be quite high IMO. I’m particularly interested in this being a place for companies interested in Open Hardware and Specifications to intermingle (aka, Openmoko, VIA, Intel)
The idea is that this is a place where project roadmaps are compared, integrations resolved (like Wikipedia BY-SA compatibility), and real hacking would take place. Also, this conference would be 2-3 days max and marked with conversions of projects to more liberalized licensing as affirmations each day to pump up participants. The goal of the event would be to produce actual statements showing resolutions with implementation to back them up, and to announce the next 5-10 free culture priorities for the year.
Is anyone interested in this?
I would attend. Great idea for a conference. If it is 2 or 3 days, I would run half of it like a Bar Camp. Empowering the community to choose some topics and activities.
Other possible participants:
NOSI
Students for Free Culture
If interested, head to Jon's blog and add your feedback.