Welcome to the June edition of the Free Culture events newsletter. Free Culture is a movement that extends the logic of free software into the world of art, advocating free creativity, sharing and remixing. There will be thousands of events with this ethos going on around the world, but the listings below are brought to you by activists and advocates of the free culture movement. You can add your events and reviews to this newsletter on the Free Culture UK newsletter wiki.

Europe

Remix Reading open media lab

Welcome to the second newsletter listing and reviewing free culture events around the world. Free culture is a movement that extends the logic of free software into the world of art, advocating free creativity, sharing and remixing. There will be thousands of events with this ethos going on around the world, but the listings below are brought to you by activists and advocates of the free culture movement. You can add your events and reviews to this newsletter on the Free Culture UK newsletter wiki.

Europe

Upcoming events

When I think about American presidential elections, three things come to mind: money, corporate power and disenfranchisement. One of the big political stories of our time is the decline of party politics, especially for the young. But another story is that of the internet revitalising democracy, empowering and connecting citizens in a new, vibrant space. Often Utopian, theoretical and romanticised, this vision of the future was made real in the race for the Democratic presidential candidacy recently in America by Howard Dean.

Each summer brings a round of free software conferences, but the sunniest this year was aKademy 2005, the KDE Project’s annual summit for users, administrators and developers with ten days featuring over 60 presentations, numerous workshops and over a week of chaotic coding. Held this year in Malaga, Spain, it included a Users and Administrators Conference, a Developer Conference and a Coding Marathon.

Interviews are a mainstay of the media. For journalists, they’re an excellent way to check facts, get some nice quotes or structure an article. For free software projects looking for coverage, they’re an easy way to write your own article and get it published. But getting the most out of an interview can be a fine art; journalists can misunderstand or even misrepresent what you say, and you can ruin or make your image in the eyes of the audience. The third article in this series suggests some strategies to adopt to make every interview a marketing success.

Opportunities and hazards

It is a common assumption that companies who distribute free software will promote it, leaving the community to concentrate on the meat of the project itself (including code, documentation, graphics, and so on). But this is untrue; companies generally devote few resources and little expertise, leaving communities to fend for themselves in the big scary world of media and marketing.

GNU/Linux is growing all the time: new software is being created; new copies downloaded or bought; new users are discovering free software for the first time. With this growth we have seen the rise of polished distributions, sales-minded distributors, “XX” software is being released, and so free software is gaining commercial success in many fields. Even governments, from Peru to the UK, are now racing to use free software. But governments seem to be the only ones who are talking about switching specifically because they want free software, not just stable, secure and powerful software.