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The Community Blackboard
The Boston Globe has a column by Ellen Goodman about a community blackboard, a monument put up not for a dead president or war hero but to free expression. Read more about the project.
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It's good to see our little monument here on Slashdot. Here's the story behind this uniquely Charlottesvillian creation.
Sometime around 1995 or 1996, the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Speech had the idea that we should have a monument to free speech. They created a board, and asked for submissions from the public sometime in '98ish, IIRC. They got a lot of submissions, some quite creative, but the best one (and thus the winner) was the idea of having a chalkboard. Well, the board selected that one, though surely they knew full well that they were opening a can of worms.
City Council, as you can imagine, was not thrilled with this. The location of this monument was to be directly in front of city hall. It hadn't occurred to them that they were setting themselves up for a 60' wall; they were thinking maybe a small sculpture or something. So the topic was debated before council, and the general consensus was "what if somebody says something bad?"
Council finally voted on it a few weeks ago, and it, fortunately, passed. It very nearly didn't. The tricky thing about a proposal like this is that there's no turning it down. Once the genie is out of the bottle (to use the GPL comparison), anybody voting against it can be derided as being anti-free speech. Perhaps not fairly; one could be opposed to it for asthetic reasons, as Councilman Toscano was. (I think he actually voted against it for those very reasons.)
My mother (a commentator for NPR) had a reading at the TJ Center just last week, coincidentally. I spoke with the director of the center about this very topic, as it's a hot one in town. We talked about some of the practical problems.
What if somebody erases somebody else's writing?
Tough. We can't very well pass a long against erasing other people's ideas. In fact, that would accomplish the very opposite of what is intended by this monument. (BTW, I call it a "memorial," because of Charlottesville's serious First Amendment violations, like the youth curfew. So everybody has to accept that whatever they write could be erased immediately afterwards.
What if it's used for commercial purposes?
That's speech, too. Let it happen. It would be great if it were so popular and oft-visited (people don't tend to congregate by City Hall, save for during Fridays After Five) that, say, Trax started writing their weekly line-up on that wall. That would be OK.
What if people write hate-speech? What if the KKK writes nasty things?
They get to do that. Other people also get to erase it.
People will inevitably spray-paint it. Won't it be ruined quickly?
Perhaps, but there's an easy solution. This chalkboard will have a surface that is spray-painted on. If it gets defaced, it's easy to cover over the defaced area so that people can keep writing.
Will it ever be fully erased? By whom?
It hasn't been fully decided how often to erase it, whose job that will be, etc. Mostly because nobody knows how popular it will be. Could be daily, could be weekly, could be monthly.
What if somebody says something defamatory?
What if somebody puts up posters that are defamatory? There are laws in place to handle this. No problem.
The timeline for this is that it should be in by the end of 2002. The City is in the process of changing the whole layout of that area of downtown, so I think that they want to roll this work into that. Waiting until 2002 gives the TJ Center time to raise money, too, which is important. If anybody is interested in donating to this project, you can find contact info on their site. BTW, this is all recreated from memory, so I apologize for factual errors and such.
-Waldo
Point a webcam at it, and have it take a picture every 5 minutes....then it would be free speech to the entire world...
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
To a certain extent I believe them. On the other hand, maybe it won't be so bad, at least at first. When some kid finds out that he can write "my teacher is a weenie" and nobody will punish him for it, he'll have learned what "free speech" is all about.
And some mornings, there will be 4-letter words written accross the wall in 6 foot tall letters. And maybe somebody will stop by on their way to work and erase them and write a poem up in their place.
All in all, it'll be a fascinating experiment. And even if it "fails", due to vandalism, it still will have encouraged people to think about freedom of speech in everyday terms, which has to be a good thing overall.