[Foundation-l] Opinions/suggestions for "outside" members of the board?

[Andre Engels]

On 2006/6/19, Sue Reed <sreed1234 at yahoo.com>:
> I'm sure I could do a google search for Richard Stallman and find out who he is, but as a newer member of the Wikimedia community, I have no clue who he is. The "needs no introduction" assumes that everyone is of a certain level regarding whose who in the world.

According to Wikipedia (first paragraph of a much longer article:

Richard Matthew Stallman (frequently abbreviated to RMS) (born March
16, 1953) is the founder of the free software movement, the GNU
Project, and the Free Software Foundation. An acclaimed hacker, his
major accomplishments include Emacs (and the later GNU Emacs), the GNU
C Compiler, and the GNU Debugger. He is also the author of the GNU
General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL), the most widely-used free
software license, which pioneered the concept of the copyleft.

> I know who Larry Lessig is because of his connection to the John Edwards campaign in 2004, but otherwise I'd be lost as to who he is to.

Again from Wikipedia, but this time a bit deeper in the article:
He is founder and chair of the Creative Commons and a board member of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

And on those organisations:
The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to
expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to
build upon and share.

The Creative Commons website enables copyright holders to grant some
of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety
of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public
domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the
problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.

The project provides several free licenses that copyright holders can
use when releasing their works on the Web. They also provide RDF/XML
metadata that describes the license and the work that makes it easier
to automatically process and locate licensed works. They also provide
a "Founders' Copyright" [1] contract, intended to re-create the
effects of the original U.S. Copyright created by the founders of the
U.S. Constitution.

All these efforts, and more, are done to counter the effects of what
Creative Commons considers to be, in the words of chairman of the
board Lawrence Lessig, a dominant and increasingly restrictive
permission culture, "a culture in which creators get to create only
with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past".[2]
Lessig maintains that modern culture is dominated by traditional
content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their
monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular
cinema, and that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these
restrictions.[3][4]

and:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a non-profit advocacy and
legal organization based in the United States with the stated purpose
of being dedicated to preserving free speech rights such as those
protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution in
the context of today's digital age. Its stated main goal is to educate
the press, policymakers and the general public about civil liberties
issues related to technology; and to act as a defender of those
liberties.

-- 
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels