2005-07-25»
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.