Challenges to free culture

Below area few of the outstanding content problems we need to solve as a society before we can seriously talk about a free multilingual commons of creative, collaborative, and educational works. A start:

 1. describe the future - unifying projects that disagree on details and
methodology.  get support for a vision from groups who still need viable
business models to transition.
    TODO: Find a suitable affiliation, pray to Mnemosyne, write.
 CONNECT: Current prominent visions and visionaries

 2. free literacy - focus on literacy, numeracy, and early education:
provide a definitive set of free materials (beautiful, musical, and
comprehensive) in every language to bootstrap access to knowledge.
    TODO: Gap analysis; create/relicense materials; add i18n and beauty.
 CONNECT: Tens of thousands of literacy efforts of different flavors.

 3. distribute indexing - Make searching and publishing free materials easy.
Amplify finding/sharing freely licensed content.  Broadcast the need for
core metadata, including origin, language, and license. Distribute
organizing and tagging materials across a [literate] community.
    TODO: Find/design good interfaces to an aggregated search, get support
from existing search platforms, work with the quirks of existing sites.
 CONNECT: Searchers and taggers Searches & collections across archival
sites.

 4. free language learning - develop great free language & cultural
learning: text, audio, visual materials, language exchanges online, flash
cards and other tools.  Match interpreters to multilingual chats and
conversations.  Bootstrap access to knowledge across language barriers
and unmediated cultural exchange.
    TODO: Free or write material, polish free learning tools.  Develop
a translator matching system/site/interface to let people contribute 15
minutes of translation a day to helping others communicate.

 5. distribute localization - publish guidelines for internationalization
and cultural norms. polish up an open source toolchain for translators. set
up a localizers & translators site to match polyglots to chunks of their
favored projects.
    TODO: Define how l10n is identified and split up; code missing tools.
Create a global translation memory, get translator networks to use and
contribute to it.  design a site/interfaces to this distributed system;
coordinate with 4.
 CONNECT: Millions of amateur and pro translators, localizers, linguists.
          Existing networks of translators, overlapping software toolsets.

 6. distribute creation - complete free tools for collaborative creation of
text, images, music and scores, animation, and video.  Track changes, diffs,
histories.  Highlight the need for widespread use.
    TODO: Gap analysis, need assessment.  Microgrants for free tool and
content development.  Patch existing sites to use these new tools.
 CONNECT: A world of creators.  Overlapping toolsets.

 7. promote digitization - make digitization cheap and available everywhere;
and digital publishing natural.  Creators unused to digital sharing or
collaboration can see no benefit to digital formats.  Amplify the above
efforts by spreading interest in/awareness of digitization and curation of
local and cultural works.  Work with long-term international scanning
efforts to provide scan centers & scanning/curation training in every
country.
    TODO: Take existing programs, identify future economies of scale.
Describe the need (see 1.), create & localize training materials.
 CONNECT: National, corporate, and non-profit efforts