Progressive activism/Hacker coalition and copyleft

[harel barzilai]

Hello,

I'm not very familiar with the "gnusenet" but based on reading the
description of the groups hopefully this is the right place to ask --

1. First, I'm looking to build a coalition of ethical programmers and
activists for progressive/"radical
demoratic" social change. Is there a usenet newsgroup, mailing list,
web forum, or other places
you could refer me to?

The "radical democratic" part refers to seeking programmer partners not
for reform
projects (worthy as those certainly are) like software for nonprofits
dealing with "symptoms" like
homelessness/hunger, but rather instead, for software projects that
change
the power balance and system itself -- an example would be the GNU
project itself
which led to a new operating system GNU/linux, or ogg vorbis, etc
(another example would
be the invention/implementation of gnutella and freenet and other
decentralized techologies
not controllable by central governmental/corporate entities. I have
some other ideas
I'd be happy to share but don't wish to make those proposals the focus
of attention
here)

The focus would be nonviolent and would not be illegal excepting for
facilitating civil disobedience roughly in the spirit of the civil
rights movement.
The above are just to give some general parameters as general
background..
A bit more background -- I've been a supporter of GNU since the late
80s
(contributed as a non-programmer, as a user, some ideas for features
for emacs
back around 1991..)

..regardless of how you feel about the parameters outlined, I'm not
looking
to convince anyone, just hoping for a few helpful pointers of people,
organizations,
newsgroups/maliinst lists/forums where such a coalition might either
exist
in some form or which would be the proper place for a Call for
Collaboration to
be posted.

2. My second and only partially related question -- can someone advise
me on copylefting some general ideas. I'm hoping my ideas are not
copyrightable, not patendable...but in case they are, is there a way
of pre-emptively copylefting them so that a corporate/commercial entity
doesn't grab the ideas and try to own/control them? Obviously I don't
want to spill the full details here precisely to protect against
that..but
let's say I had some ideas like a gnutella with a few technical
specs..or
I had some ideas basic to today's social networking...or...there are
some
other ideas and applications of existing technology...Is there a way of
protecitvely
pre-emptively copylefting it so it remains in the public domain? Or a
place
where I can get some descriptions (understandable by non-lawyers like
myself)
about the scope of which types of ideas are safe from patent/copyright
(my understanding is that in today's surreal world, the answer is "very
little", hence the first half of this latter question).

Many thanks in advance for leads and help with these issues.

I'm happy to take responses by email to barzilai at gmail dot com
or to this group.

Harel