On Monday, April 16, I’ll be hosting a workshop on media ownership at 6 pm at the Civic Media Center (1021 W. University Ave.). The workshop is in preparation for the upcoming FCC hearing on the subject in Tampa on April 30. The goal is to get lots of thoughtful and passionate citizens down to Tampa for the hearing to have their say. For more information, visit StopBigMedia.com.

For more information, come to the meeting on April 16, or email me, grbaker@ufl.edu. There will be a carpool for those interested in attending the hearing.

Please spread the word widely about this meeting.

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Update: The game doesn’t start until 9:21 pm! That’s plenty of time to come to our awesome meeting beforehand! Go Gators

Our meeting Monday will be our last general meeting for the academic year. The meeting will take place at 6:30 pm on Monday, April 2 in the Johnson Lounge, Reitz Union room 121. Refreshments will be served.

We will have elections for our officers for the 2007-08 school year. All offices will be up for elections (i.e. President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary, Public Relations Director). Any student who has been to two meetings this year is eligible to vote. Similarly, anyone who’s been to two meetings this year is eligible to run for office (assuming you’re in good standing with the university). This meeting will count toward that requirement, so if you’ve been to a previous meeting this year, you’ll be eligible to vote and/or to run for office. If you have any questions, we’ll discuss them at the meeting.

After the elections, we’ll have a talk on Net neutrality by Dr. Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay, a professor in UF’s department of Decision and Information Sciences. Dr. Bandyopadhyay is the author of a recent study that concluded that abandoning Net neutrality would discourage ISPs from improving service.

For a summary of the research, see this UF news story. For more information on Net neutrality, visit SaveTheInternet.com. (FreeCulture.org is a member of the Save the Internet Coalition.)

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Professor Shubho Bandyopadhyay will be discussing his research on net neutrality. Using game theory models, he counter-intuitively found that broadband providers would be more likely to improve Internet service if they were barred from charging for preferential treatment.

His talk will be at 6:30pm on Monday, April 2nd in the Reitz Union room 121 (Johnson Lounge). For more information about the research, see the story from UF’s news site. For more on net neutrality, see SaveTheInternet.com.

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A reminder: CopyNight Gainesville for March has been moved to Thursday, March 29. Join us at 7 pm at Tim and Terry’s (1417 NW 1^st Ave.) for a lively and convivial discussion.

One subject we’ll be discussing is the future of Alachua Freenet. As previously mentioned, AFN is discontinuing its free dial-up Internet service for the community, which has resulted in a lot of soul-searching and hand-wringing. We’re offering this month’s CopyNight as a forum to share opinions and discuss our vision for connectivity in the community.

Afterwards, you can head downtown to the Kid Koala show at Common Grounds (210 SW 2^nd Ave.). Doors open at 9 pm; tickets are $10. Put a little remix culture in your life thanks to this renowned turntablist.

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Due to Lewis Black’s performance on Wednesday, March 28 — the previously scheduled date for March’s CopyNight meetup — we’re moving the event to the following day. (A lot of us are Lewis Black fans.)

We’ll still be at Tim and Terry’s at 7 pm, it’ll just be a day later. Be sure to join us on Thursday, March 29 for an enjoyable evening.

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Hope you had a good Spring Break! There are three events this week you may be interested in.

Florida Free Culture meeting

Tomorrow, March 19th, Florida Free Culture will be showing a video of a talk by Eben Moglen, a lawyer at the Free Software Foundation, about free software. It’s a very eloquent statement about software and society, so we hope we’ll see you there.

Where: Turlington room 1315
When: Monday, March 19, 6:30pm

AlaCloud.net meeting

There will be an AlaCloud.net meeting at the Civic Meeting Center on
March 20th at 6pm. Come by if you’re interested in community wireless networks!

CMC: 1021 W. University Ave.

GatorLUG meetingprogramming contest, but there will be many others just hanging out. Come by if you’re interested in free and open source software.

Virtually Cuban: 2409 SW 13th St.

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Nelson Pavlosky sued a multi-billion dollar corporation and one of the largest manufacturers of electronic voting machines - and won! He also founded an international student organization, FreeCulture.org, dedicated to intellectual property policy reform and grassroots creativity. Come hear about how he created an important legal precedent protecting freedom of speech on the Internet and spawned a movement!

Nelson will be speaking on Monday, March 5 at 6:30 pm in Turlington room 1315. Free and open to all!

If you’re that sort of person, you can RSVP on the Facebook event.

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