The video and audio for the talk on the British EFF is now out, and you can now download it on your electronic download-accordions. (It’s 135MB for the video, 20MB for the audio).
As ever, the real meat is in the audience questions. If you fast forward past the panel to 38m:20s, where the questions begin, you’ll get in quick succession: Stefan Magdalinski (creator of FaxYourMP and other dandy projects) giving a fine rant on the stinginess of British dotcom millionnaires, followed by ex-MP Richard Allan explaining what digital rights activists should do to attract the attention of Parliament. Then we have an interesting discussion on the US EFF’s fund-raising. Suw Charman asks a rather pointed question based on some chats we’d had in San Francisco about needing a central clearing house for info in the UK digital rights world.
Then I try and wrap up the talk. At 48 minutes, you can see me going “okay, well, let’s think about this some more over a leisurely couple of future conferences”. Cory talks me into taking a few more questions, the first of which is Stephen Coast, who took the poll of people to see who’d pay a fiver a month. And at 52:09 or thereabouts, I capitulate, and suggest the Digital Rights UK Pledge.
I’ve been having phone calls and chats with a few people over the week. The plan is to have some sort of short description of the narrower aims and how the organisation will be structured when the pledge ends. There’s a strong image forming of what the organisation will be like. It’d be a bit foolish of me to start talking, though, about the envisaged nanotechnology giant robot research project folk have planned until we actually have a list of potential costs and overheads. Keep watching the skies; expect the mundane.
In the meantime, if you work in the digital rights arena in the UK, and you think you’d benefit from some extra help, write. Clearly one of the first orders of the day is to build up an up-to-date contact database: for the fledgling org, for other people, and for the press. Just mail me at danny@spesh.com and say hi. I might not have the chance to say hi back yet, but I’ll forward it onto the sinister big brother monitoring project.