Digital Rights Network

This is an email written back in February 2005 during a discussion of why activism on open knowledge/digital rights issues was as active as it could be (and specifically why there wasn't an EFF UK).

1. I think it /is/ essential that there is *more* coordination on digital rights/open knowledge issues.

2. Doing this through a large member-funded organiziation is difficult. Why? Because even if building such an organization were the optimal strategy it would take time and significant amounts of money. Money, in particular, is not /currently/ ubiquitous.

[Aside on EFF: My understanding was that EFF in the US was started off with a load of funding from various well-off high-tech entrepreneurs and that its core work is still funding driven rather than member-driven. Moreover the EFF model was, and continues to be, strongly oriented around litigation - a high-profile and costly activity which is suited to specialists]

The creation of such an organization may be the eventual path to go down but doing so and obtaining the necessary funds is something that I don't think should be the focus for the *time being*. I also feel that an analogy with the environmental movement is revealing. There much of the momentum orginally came from, and continues to come from, grassroots activisim. While there are now some very seriously funded orgs (member and nonmember) they flow from these activist bases.

3. My suggestion: Play to our strengths, namely, a lot of actual and potential grassroots activity (though currently mostly unorganized/ucoordinated) along with a lot of general concern in the 'digital community'. How to proceed:

1. Encourage individual projects on specific areas
2. *But* put major effort into providing means to form coalitions and bring together these different groups/projects over issues of common interest.

This way there are no fights, no issues about everyone having to have the same system, the same goals etc. Realistically there are going to be times when privacy fanatics and DRM-nuts are going to make common cause and times when they're not. Trying to put all those issues under one umbrella is going to be hard. I feel there is a definite analogy with opensource here. Coordination good, single path bad.

Concrete ideas for doing this:

1. Common resources
   1. Provide technical resources and infrastructure common to all the groups
   2. Provide common institutional infrastructure and knowledge (e.g. campaigning howtos, suggested roles, press howto, MPs howto, engage volunteers howto etc)
2. Coordination Structure
   1. Accept that projects won't want to go under a common umbrella or have commons goals.
   2. Provide methods by which these different groups can meet (regular F2F meetings, specific mailing lists)
   3. Communication channels between different groups. E.g. so you can find out who is running a particular project or campaign? is it active? Are there other groups (in another part of the country) already who would have valuable knowledge
   4. Suggest creating an explicit coord group which other projects can contact
   5. An information clearing house (not essential - heavily tied to the coord group)
   6. This coord group could take on executive activities as required

The Open Knowledge Foundation Network (http://www.okfn.org/) is a stab at providing the basic technological and institutional infrastructure to do item (1). The Digital Rights Network (DRN or maybe DRN-UK) subproject on OKFN could fulfill several of the other roles such as:

1. Blog news and share event notices
2. Take on the role a coord service (the mailing list drn-coord)
3. To provide a place to start hammering out some goals and strategy (initial reason for its creation)