[Foundation-l] A "New York City Free Culture Alliance"?

[Pharos]

On Feb 17, 2008 8:27 PM, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Pharos,
>
> I think it sounds like a great idea. It's cool that NY is big enough
> to have multiple such interested groups. IIRC there is also an art
> museum in NY that has an encouragingly open attitude towards access
> and digitalisation of their archives - they did some competition or
> something with Flickr? Does that sound familiar?

Check your e-mail archives for November 20th or so, when we exchanged
some notes on this.  The museum is the [[Brooklyn Museum]], which is
the second largest art museum in NYC.  The Flickr project you recall
is http://www.flickr.com/groups/brooklynmuseumbrooklynbridge/ , and
they also had a Youtube project at
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/vvc/ , which is what
originally made me think they might be open to something like this.

Unfortunately, our proposed free-licensed visitor photo contest is on
hold for now, because they want to wait until their project for a
digital catalog of their whole collection is finished first.  That
should happen by September or so, and then hopefully we can restart
discussions.

> On 17/02/2008, Pharos <pharosofalexandria at gmail.com> wrote:
> > And the name will probably be something broader too- something like
> > "Open New York Alliance", probably.
>
> That's a little bit *too* broad, isn't it? Open what? Access, Minds,
> Relationships, Borders? :)

At -least- the first two :)  We want to appeal to the mainstream, I
think, and maybe work with organizations that wouldn't normally
consider themselves part of the "free culture movement".  I know Free
Culture Columbia has in the past tried to make a connection with the
New York Civil Liberties Union.  And I'm hopeful of cooperation with
non-technology-oriented cultural institutions.

Anyway, I see it as New York City itself being "open", in the sense of
a cultural center thriving in an open information environment.

And I've already got a tagline: "Working together for open source,
open access, open education, and an open information society."

Thanks,
Pharos