Cc-uk mailing list

[Alex Melichar <alexmel AT blueyonder.co.uk>]

<de-lurking>

Hi all,

I thought everyone here would be interested in this, tangential though
it is to CC Scot.

www.pledgebank.com/rights

"I will create a standing order of 5 pounds per month to support an
organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK but only
if 1000 other people will too."

— Danny O'Brien

Deadline to sign up by: 25th December 2005.
150 people have signed up, 850 more needed

All started by Danny O'Brien - see blog posting "getting out more"

http://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2005/07/25#1122278040

getting out more»

Ran back to the UK for a week to speak at OpenTech and to foment. The
amount of interest in a British digital rights organisation took me by
surprise. There was a strong sense that there's both loads going on in
the UK and Europe behind the scenes to fight for these issues, and
also that folk were hungry to find out more about it.

The pledge is a start to fixing that. If you haven't already seen it
on Boing Boing, a gang of the usual suspects have effectively agreed
to start a membership-funded digital rights org in the UK, if a 1000
people pledge a fiver a month by Christmas.

The "fiver a month" figure came from the "Where's the EFF UK?" debate
audience. In the question and answer session, the audience themselves
suggested and took a straw poll as to who would pay that much. Most of
the audience put up their hands. The pledge stats suggest that the
audience lived up to their promise.

What can you do with a monthly budge of 5000UKP a month? Well, at the
risk of sounding "Just Five Pounds Will Free This Poor DRMed Document
And Let It Roam Free In One of Our Free Range Open Standards", we did
some back of the envelope calculations after the talk, and agreed we
could do something: Probably two staffers and an office.

One would act as a media conduit. Half our problem in the UK right now
is that the press just don't have anyone in their address books that
they can confidently call about on these issues. As Rufus said, most
of the time they just run music industry press releases as news. The
biggest lesson for me with NTK was that your best way to influence the
agenda, and generate support, is to generate stories, and point people
to the right experts. Just having someone at the end of a phone,
handing out quotes and press releases, and pro-actively calling
journalists to make sure they know what's going on, putting them in
contact with all the other orgs in this area in the UK, is half the
work.

The rest of the job is actual activism (one person can do a lot, if
they don't need to cram all their white paper writing, research, and
lobbying between contract coding sessions, and finishing their
university degree) and bootstrapping more funding.

Which is, actually, the most important part of this hypothetical
venture. Twelve months of research into other sources of funding apart
from pleading on PledgeBank would, I'm sure, help build and firm up
the financial side of any group - and help build a network of support
for the many expert, targetted organisations that already fill the UK
cyberrights landscape.

Anyway, do think about signing the pledge. It'll be a grand
experiment. If it fails, it will fail in a way that reveal plenty of
new data about how to make something like this work. And if it
succeeds: well, we'll all be in for a fun ride.