Hello Massachusetts based compatriots! Between an established proto-chapter, several academic institutions with alined goals, and several luminaries living and working in the state, a reasonable argument can be made that Massachusetts is the free culture capital of the east coast. We should totally leverage that. I'd love to see Massachusetts join Florida and California, becoming the third state to release the majority of government works into the public domain. I think it's doable, but I think it will take time, and possibly lobbyists and money and volunteer hours. In other words, I think it's a worthy long term goal to work towards. In the mean time, I'd like to put free culture on the Governor's agenda, albeit in a comparatively minor role. The Governor's official Flickr stream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/massgovernor) releases all work under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. The fact that it's a CC license at all shows that someone, somewhere in the administration is trying. What I'd like to do is create a petition asking the administration to release their photographs under a CC-BY (or CC-BY-SA) license, instead of an NC one. I think it's an eminently achievable goal. The way I see it, we need a few things to make it happen: 1) Research: We need to know exactly what we're asking for. Are we asking for an executive order, or something less formal? Would this apply to future administrations? Who in the Massachusetts State bureaucracy should we be handing this petition to (i.e. whose responsibility does this fall under, since I doubt it's going to go straight to the governor). Also, we would do well to create a list of people we'd like to have sign the document. 2) Petition writing: The petition needs to be well written. It needs to explain our argument clearly and concisely. We need to point out the benefits of making such a change. It needs to be professionally worded and not sound like a rant. You get the idea. 3) Rallying: Before we even release the petition to the public, we're going to want to make sure that all the signatories we want are on board, and we're going to want them to be signing it they day that the petition goes public, or even before then. Momentum is important. Momentum and a list of names with cachet is even better. Is anyone else interested in this? Does anyone have any ideas? I'd really like to run with this, but I can't do it on my own. Sven Manguard _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-boston mailing list Wikimedia-boston(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-boston