OxPM: Volunteers needed to build organizing tools

[David Tannenbaum]

Hi all,

I've just started working with an organization called the Union for the 
Public Domain that is organizing to preserve the public domain in a 
broad range of sectors. We are creating tools tools for online 
organizing, and I was wondering if anyone on this list might be 
interested in helping? We are building the tools primarily with Perl and 
MySQL and particularly need people with expertise in those areas.

The Union for the Public Domain (UPD) is a non-profit membership 
organization whose mission is to protect and enhance the public domain 
in matters concerning intellectual property. UPD has a very broad 
mission and we plan to work on a whole swathe of issues, from software, 
to access to textbooks, to webcasting, to essential medicines. There are 
a lot of groups working on these issues now, but they rarely leverage 
each other's power in numbers. We are hoping to build some coordination.

The other goal is to broaden the circle of activists working on IP, to 
include the more general public, which is affected by IP law and threats 
to the public domain, but doesn't really understand either enough to 
care (yet). We want to make the issues palatable so people understand 
them, and create a "politics of IP," much like there is now a politics 
of environmentalism.

The board of directors as it stands now includes Richard Stallman, Jamie
Love, who runs a group called the Consumer Project on Technology, Robin 
Gross of IP Justice and Robert Weissman. The group was first started 
approximately 8 years ago, but has been dormant for nearly as long, and 
I've been hired part-time to restart it. We need all the help we can get.

We have a website (http://www.public-domain.org) and a listserve, but 
not much else at this point. We want to be as creative as possible in 
using online tools to mobilize the grassroots. The most pressing 
projects are:

- Setting up a database of members, volunteers, media outlets, allies, 
that would be accessible via a web interface, and could do things like 
generate action alerts to members based on their geographical location 
and other relevant characteristics. We are likely to use Perl and MySQL 
to do this.

- Setting up tools that let people send an e-mail to the relevant
"target" (their EU representative; WIPO country delegate, etc).

- Setting up a mechanism for accepting donations, whether that means
going through a third party or processing them ourself.

All of the resulting software, scripts, etc, will be free.
If anyone is interested in collaborating on these projects, you can 
e-mail me off list at updinfo at public-domain.org. I'm based in the UK and 
would love to meet people in person as well, though e-mail is of course 
good too.


Yours,
David

-- 
David Tannenbaum
Coordinator
Union for the Public Domain
davidt at public-domain.org
+44 (0)7816 392 758
http://www.public-domain.org