We’re having a BBQ on Australia Day, Tuesday January 26 – just a casual way you can meet up with other people who want to stop Internet censorship, and find out what you can do to help us do that. We’re at Orleigh Park in West End from 11am till about 4pm.

We’ll have a few sausages and some bread and sauce at the BBQ, but bring your own drinks and most of your own food.

We’ll have some posters up to make it easy to find us, but we’re not here to get into people’s faces on Australia Day. What we want to do is make it easy for you to do some things to help us, and we’ll be chatting with you about those things at the BBQ. We’re also aiming for a big rally of our supporters in February where we set people up with the tools they need to organise small public meetings in the suburbs to discuss Internet censorship with people who don’t already agree with us – these meetings are where we’ll try to win those people over to our point of view. The BBQ is part of our lead up to that.

The BBQ is at Orleigh Park in West End – click here for a Google Map. You gan easily get there by public transport – either catch a 199 bus from the Cultural Centre bus station to the very end of the line, or catch a City Cat to the West End ferry terminal. If you check out the Google Map, you’ll see both these services stop right at Orleigh Park. You can also click here to use the Translink journey planner to find out public transport timetables.

EDIT: Speakers at this Thursday’s meeting will be Mark Newton and Liberal Senator Simon Birmingham. Please come along for a great night.

Are you in South Australia (more specifically, near Adelaide) and want to get involved? This Thursday January 14th there will be a anti-censorship meeting at Adelaide University.

This meeting is intended to be an informal think tank to both discuss some of the upcoming anti-filtering endeavours on the horizon by other groups within Australia that we can assist, and to bounce ideas off members.

Come along from 5:30pm for a 6pm start in the Flentje Lecture Theatre, which is in the Plaza Building. (map of Adelaide University) Take the North Terrace level entrance to Plaza at H9 — signs will be posted in advance.

Don’t forget to go over to the Facebook Event page and let them know that you’re coming.

At Monday’s planning meeting, Josh Happy, who was there, has said he’d like to get a group of 5 to 7 people together to go and talk to Members of Parliament about our opposition to the Government’s plan to censor the Internet.

Leon wants to go and see Wayne Swan, the Federal Treasurer and Labor MP for the seat of Lilley (Ascot, Clayfield and Hamilton, to Brighton and Shorncliffe, and west to Chermside and Kedron.

Not everyone who wants to go to see Mr Swan needs to be in the seat of Lilley, and it would be great if this group started seeing other MPs as well and got some real experience in putting the case against censorship.

If you’d like to be involved, contact Josh via email at phantom_strider@hotmail.com or call him on 0429 088 098.

The Mandatory Internet Filter - No Substitution for a Relationship With your Child

This illustration was done by Natalie Perkins, also known as @definatalie on Twitter.

One of the things that’s come out of our first couple of planning meetings is that WE NEED CONTENT!!!

We need pictures, videos, tunes – anything that can help us spread the word that internet censorship is a bad idea. So if you’ve got any ideas, please turn them into reality and we’ll post them here.

Please do what Natalie’s done and licence your work under a Creative Commons licence – preferably an Attribution/No Derivative Works licence. That means you’re giving us (and anyone else) the right to use the work as long as we (or they) give you credit and don’t change your work. If you want to make sure no-one makes money off your work, use an Attribution/Non-Commercial/No Derivative Works licence. And if you need to know more about how to licence your work under Creative Commons, click here.

Thanks very much Natalie for coming up with this illustration – won’t you please do something for us too?

This is a report of what was said at Monday’s meeting. Not everything here will be things the organising group agree with, but it’s important that everyone who couldn’t go gets a chance to have their say too. We must let everyone’s voice be heard.

Organisation

We need a wider organisation for other issues as they come up – we’re proposing “Australian Internet Lobby” as a name for that.

We will keep “Stop Internet Censorship” as name for the campaign – this is clearer than “No Clean Feed” or “Open Internet”.

Great Australian Internet Blackout during week 25-29 January 2010

The New Zealand Blackout campaign (against a planned law saying you could have your internet cut off if you were accused of illegal Internet filesharing) was a big success and reached the mainstream media there.

Anything we do with people who agree with us has to be based on going beyond online services like Twitter and talking to people who don’t already agree with us and trying to win them to our point of view.

On the Saturday before that week (Sat Jan 23rd) we will be planning to do roadside stalls in the suburbs promoting our campaign, talking to ordinary people.

Australia Day, January 26th

Protests and rallies have been proposed. We prefer the idea of an informal BBQ which won’t be as confronting. We’re planning to have this at Orleigh Park in West End. It will also be a way for us to get our own supporters motivated.

Main purpose of Australia Day BBQ (and rally we plan to hold in mid-Feb) is to build up our own supporters and set them up to go and meet with others and try to convince them to oppose censorship

General Strategy Discussion:

Two important points that came out of this article by “Liberal hack” Tim Andrews are that we should talk about how this is a Nanny State plan, and also about the taxes it will cost and the costs it will impose on business.

Some of the things discussed included:

• We need to work out what our single key issues are
• We need powerful ideas to convince others to our point of view
• How are we going to make sure ideas in the meeting don’t disappear?
• Specifics on a media/communications strategy

We also need people to:

1. Spread the word about our meetings and events – watch our Facebook group and/or this blog for details
2. Edit the Wiki with campaign ideas
3. Create content for the campaign

If you couldn’t make the meeting please let us know if you have any ideas or want to help out – just leave us a comment.

Thanks to everyone who came along to tonight’s Stop Internet Censorship meeting at Brisbane Square Library. It was a bit of a hassle getting into the building but now that we know the score we can communicate how it works a bit better than we did.

I have to be honest here and say that I had some feelings of disappointment at the end of the night. I felt like what we thought you expected from us, and what you really expected from us were two different things. There were times where there was some frustration that we hadn’t brought to the meeting the things you wanted, and that the things we were talking about weren’t interesting to you. And to me, that is disappointing.

Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. I think tonight’s meeting was very important and that a lot was achieved. I’m certainly not disheartened at the passion and commitment being shown by the group in attendance.

What we seem to have here is a mismatch in expectations. And that always leads to expectations not being fulfilled.

So I’d like to lay down what I expect from the group. I’m not speaking on behalf of the other organisers of this, just me.

What I expect from everyone, including myself is:

• Commitment. Commitment to work towards fighting this issue to the hilt.
• Cooperation. We all need to put our ideas into the melting pot, but realise that we have to come to a consensus sooner rather than later.
• Passion. This is the most important one. What we need to give is our passion. If your passion is creating wacky YouTube videos, let’s see them! If you are a graphic artist, use your skills to create amazing imagery to get the Australian public thinking. Think you can raise $100,000 for a television ad campaign? Do you work for a video production company? Work together to make it happen.

I see my role as a conduit to help bring people together to work on this issue, using their skills and ideas to bring about one result: no internet censorship.

Now that I’ve been honest and upfront with you, be honest with me. What do you want from me? Yourself? The Group?

The floor is yours. Or drop by the wiki.