LFI Course Materials 4/Week one

Week 1: Introduction

• Real time lecture: July 16th, 9-11 Pacific/12-2 Eastern on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/9129428892

• Welcome everyone! We’re so thrilled to be starting Library Freedom Institute with such an excellent cohort! This week, we’ll be getting acquainted with the course, including curriculum, technology, goals, and each other.

Course overview

Course themes

• WE ARE STILL IN A PANDEMIC
• LFP mission and history
• Surveillance capitalism
• Harm reduction
• Power on the internet
• Privacy strategies and tools
• Individual vs collective action

LFP background

• Brief LFP history and who we are
• How LFI came about
• LFI to LFP

Outcomes for this cohort

• Learn to use privacy software that can be installed on patron machines or library workstations
• Teach your own train-the-trainer workshops to other librarians in your region.
• Approach members of your community regarding privacy concerns and teach privacy-related community workshops.
• Use your new role as a Privacy Advocate to influence policy and infrastructure.
• Encourage community engagement with privacy policy issues
• Work with your small group to develop a privacy plan that can be implemented in your library or others

Final projects

The final project will be a comprehensive privacy plan for a library. Every group will work together on components of the final project. This final project should choose from and expand on the following components:

• A library privacy policy and/or example vendor agreement
• A privacy class
• A privacy program that isn't a class
• A display about privacy
• A flyer or poster about a privacy concept
• A staff training
• Something focused on privacy work outside of the library walls, like a letter to a legislator
• Other ideas that the group wishes to add can be submitted when the group submits their roles, or can be added later

Your final project should be practically-focused and should reflect your own interests! You can see examples of the last cohort's final projects on the LFP website.

Small groups for final projects (TBD)

• Small group work proved to be really difficult in the third cohort because of the pandemic. Let's discuss how we want to organize our final projects, whether small groups might work for some of us and some other method might work for the rest.

Syllabus and weekly layout

• Undergo intensive training (4 months, 5 hours/week)
• Weekly commitments: lecture, discussion, readings, tasks, small group work.
• Tasks are things you’re expected to complete every week. There aren’t other assignments except for the final projects you’ll present with your small group. We’ll check in every few weeks about the status of those projects, and when that happens you can share drafts or just outlines or thoughts.
• Let Alison know if you need to be absent from one of the real-time lectures, or if you need to miss a whole week for any reason.
• Review code of conduct.

Class technology

• Discourse messageboard: libraryfreedom.chat (register an account)
• Zoom video/audio chat/recordings (Zoom meeting ID 912-942-8892)
• Riseup mailing list: [email protected]
• Wiki: libraryfreedom.wiki (register an account)
• Vimeo archive of lectures: https://vimeo.com/libraryfreedominstitute

Please note that all class technology is publicly accessible! That means that the mailing list archives, messageboard, and wiki can all be viewed by anyone. I’ve set it up this way so that the materials we create can easily be shared, but also, I understand that sometimes we might want to talk amongst ourselves, so I’ve created a “private” category on the Discourse messageboard that’s only viewable to our group. You can use this category whenever you want to talk about something that you don’t want the whole world to see.

This week only!

Readings

We won't be discussing these readings until week 2! But there are a lot, so you have two weeks to read them.

The Surveillant Assemblage, Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson

A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow (read before reading The Californian Ideology)

The Californian Ideology by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (read after reading A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace)

Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace by humdog

Simone Browne keynote at the Scholar and Feminist conference (video)

The History of Surveillance and the Black Community

None of Your Business (review of Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Sad by Design by Geert Lovink

Another Network is Possible by April Glaser

A Brief History of the Internet (from Internet Society)

The Ten Biggest Revelations from the Edward Snowden Leaks

Guest lecturer

No guest this week; Alison will lead the lecture

Discussion

• What are your personal goals for this course?

Tasks

• Lecture, readings and discussion forum
• Create libraryfreedom.chat and libraryfreedom.wiki accounts (let Alison know if you need training)
• Read through materials on libraryfreedom.wiki
• Start readings for next week