Introductions

Hello everyone. My name's Holmes and I just started at the Free Software Foundation as a campaigns manager. I'm still getting set up, so I'll hold off on a longer post. But here's a quick introduction to me and what I'm hoping to focus on in my work here.

First off, here's my background. I've been a GNU/Linux user off-and-on since I was 14, and since around that time I've had a serious interest in the political impact of technology. This interest led to a cascading sequence of projects:

• The Worcester Computer Co-op, a project to set up community computer labs using donated computers and free software in my hometown of Worcester, MA.
• Downhill Battle, an activism campaign to make the music business better by allowing p2p (or more generally the internet) to dethrone the major record labels.
• >OpenCongress.org, a website (and free software) whose goal is to enable mass participation in the US legislative process.
• Participatory Culture Foundation / Miro (formerly known as Democracy Player), a project to build a platform for online media distribution that--by being non-profit, easy-to-use, highly decentralized, and free-as-in-freedom-- can make mass media more open to participation.

Some of my medium term goals at FSF are:

• To make patent-unencumbered Ogg Theora video a ubiquitous part of the web.
• To put a stake through the heart of the semi-functional, non-free, DRM-infected, carrier-centric cellphone market.
• To make buying a laptop with GNU/Linux as easy, as satisfying, and as recommendable (to a friend or relative) as buying a Mac.

All of this, of course, is impossible to do alone.

So I'll be looking for partners who share specific goals. And I'm looking forward to working with everyone here at FSF, with the massive community of FSF supporters, and with the even more massive numbers of people who care about freedom and the public interest, but who are still figuring out how these values apply to, for example, web video or the cellphone in their pocket.

I'm holmes at fsf dot org, and I'm holmesworcester on identi.ca.