Florida Free Culture held its first meeting on Thursday night. I have to admit I was nervous: I hadn’t prepared anything to say, and I didn’t know if anyone would show up. Luckily, things turned out well.

Earlier Thursday, Eldo and I tabled on Turlington Plaza for the first time. We’d bought a tri-board and sketched out a design, but didn’t have it ready by the time we were scheduled to table. So I took the board to the CSE lab, figured I’d slap something together. Well, it was so windy walking out there, I realized a tri-board would fall over anyway. Took the tri-board back, returned to CSE, printed out a paper banner, set up Eldo’s laptop to play the Creative Commons Wired CD, and chilled. Turlington was a bit dead that day, but there was a bit of interest. It was cool just to know people would be seeing our name for the first time.

Eventually the laptop’s battery died. We got the bright idea that, “Hey, if you can print a 9′ banner for $3, why not print a giant Tux?” Then we figured, “Why not put the Firefox and Creative Commons logos on there as well?” So, after crashing the XP machine a few times, and $3 later, we had a totally unwieldy, but awesome, giant piece of paper.

I think something like 17 people came to the meeting. It seemed to be the posting on the Honors listserv which brought the most people out. The crowd seemed to contain roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, a good sign. When speaking, I tried not to assume much and explain everything as if the audience hadn’t heard of these things before — which may have been the case for some people, but I think for most of the people there my version of things was a bit over-simplified. Aside from showing J.C.’s video, and a few remarks from Eldo and the crowd, the entire meeting was mostly just me talking. That sucks, because it’s boring, but I suppose it’s sort of neccesary for the first meeting ever: someone just has to relay a lot of background information in as short a time as possible. Next meeting should be much more interactive.

Besides talking about FFC and FreeCulture.org, we had nominations for officers. A few people were already interested in running for office, which is a good sign. There was also a general feeling that we should create a discussion mailing list and schedule a meeting in April. The discuss list has since been created; you can sign up for it from the right-hand sidebar on the front page of the FFC site.

Some pictures follow on the next page: