Archive for October, 2006

Linux Installfest!

Gainesville’s Linux Users Group, GatorLUG, will be having a Linux Installfest on Saturday, November 4th at Fiber Optics Plus from noon til 6pm.

This is a great opportunity to bring an old computer back to life with Linux. If you’re interested in installing Linux on your desktop or laptop, check it out! Linux experts will help you get up and running and answer any questions you might have.

Fiber Optics Plus (117 NW 16th Ave.) on Google maps
More info on the GatorLUG site

Volunteer meeting Monday

We’re having a volunteer meeting on Monday, Oct. 30 at 6:30 pm at Leonardo’s Pizza by the Slice, at the corner of W. 13th St. and W. University Ave. (This is across from campus, next to the Kangaroo gas station.) Here’s a map for people who like that stuff. In case the location doesn’t make this obvious, you will be able to get food here.

We’ll be reviewing the projects people have been working on, taking questions from new volunteers, preparing for the faculty IT showcase, and working on our budget request for the Spring, plus whatever other random stuff comes up.

If you’ve never gotten involved before, there’s no better time than now. This crazy ship runs entirely on volunteer power, so come help out. At least, eat pizza and pretend to help.

Website changes

We’ve been tinkering with the site a bit. If anything abruptly breaks, please forgive us and let us know.

So far, we’ve made the sidebar much less cluttery and had some minor stylistic changes. The biggest change will be shifting a lot of our content from WordPress “Pages” to our wiki.

Let us know what you think! Comments, criticisms, and suggestions are all extremely welcome. Remember, Free Culture is about participatory culture!

Gavin at sustainability conference

Florida Free Culture president Gavin Baker (that’s me) will present a talk at the Campus & Community Sustainability conference. The talk is on Thursday at 10 am in Grand Ballroom A of the Reitz Union. The abstract and slides are here.

Standards for participation

[Editor’s Note: It has become apparent that this document is needed. I didn’t think we would run into situations that require this, but I guess we do.]

Free Culture is a community. Everyone who participates in one of our activities, from the oldest member to the newest to the guy who just came for the punch and pie, is part of that community. Everyone is welcomed in.

Community is built on mutual respect. Members of the community respect other members’ differences in background, opinion, knowledge, skills, point-of-view, etc. Community members demonstrate respect by acting with patience and understanding.

Free Culture invites participation and feedback in its activities. For the sake of the community, participation will take place within certain boundaries; chief among these is common courtesy. For the sake of time and allowing everyone to participate, questions and comments may be limited (e.g. to after the main presentation, or to one question per person). Dissent or criticism are welcome as long as they remain respectful of the presenter(s) and guests. Trolling is not welcome. Continued disruptions will not be tolerated.

Keeping questions relevant to the topic at hand is always appreciated.

If you disagree with someone, often the best choice is to continue the conversation in private, e.g. after the event or via email. There are no circumstances in which shouting, name-calling, personal attacks, etc. are justified.

If you so strongly disagree with an activity that you cannot contain yourself, you are welcome to excuse yourself. Criticisms can be raised after the fact with a more composed state of mind.

If you have any questions as to the ground rules or appropriate behavior for any given situation, simply ask any officer and we will be glad to help you.

This is our community. If you want to join us, it can be your community, too. Please help us keep it clean.

Meeting Monday with guest speaker Sanam Dolatshahi

Meeting
Monday, Oct. 23
6:30 pm
Reitz Union rm. 276

Our guest speaker this week is Sanam Dolatshahi, known as “Iran’s first female blogger”. Now a graduate student at UF, Sanam will discuss Internet censorship, blogging, freedom of speech and human rights. Sanam was featured in the Spring 2006 issue of communigator, the College of Journalism and Communications’ magazine; she blogs in English and in Farsi.

Old news: RIAA lawsuits

Don’t know how I missed this, but on August 7 the Gainesville Sun ran this story by Lise Fisher: Music industry lawsuits against file sharing questioned. The story quotes two UF law professors and notes that two suits against alleged filesharers were filed in Gainesville this year, one in April and another in July.

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