The Basement Interviews

The Basement Interviews is a blog-based open-access book of interviews conducted by journalist Richard Poynder with leaders and thinkers from the growing number of free and open initiatives.

Introductions to the interviews are published on the blog Open and Shut? The full interviews (including the introduction) are then available as downloadable PDF files, which are being published under a Creative Commons licence. This licence permits you to copy and distribute the interviews as you wish, so long as you credit Richard Poynder as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use the interviews for any commercial purpose.

The interviews:

• Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg (March 2006)
• Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement (March 2006)
• Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative (March 2006)
• Jay Rosen, proponent of Open Source Journalism (March 2006)
• Lawrence Lessig, leader of the Free Culture Movement (April 2006)
• Cory Doctorow, cyber activist and specialist in copyright and digital rights management (April 2006)
• Vitek Tracz, seminal open access publisher (May 2006)
• Harold Varmus, Nobel laureate and co-founder of open access publisher Public Library of Science (June 2006)
• Richard Jefferson, leading advocate for the Biological Open Source Movement (September 2006)
• Michel Bauwens, creator of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives (September 2006)
• Joe Trippi, campaign manager for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid, and advocate for open source politics (2006)
• Stevan Harnad, OA advocate and self-styled archivangelist (July 2007)
• Peter Suber, de facto leader of the Open Access Movement (October 2007)

More interviews will follow. Please note that while these interviews are made freely available to all, they are written by a freelance journalist who makes his living from writing. To assist him to continue making work available in this way you are invited to make a voluntary contribution. The suggested figure is $10 per interview, but feel free to contribute as you think appropriate. This can be done quite simply by sending a payment via PayPal quoting the email address richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

If you point anyone else to the interviews please consider directing them to this page, rather than directly to the PDF files themselves. If you would like to republish any of the interviews on a commercial basis, or have any comments on them, please email the author at richard.poynder@journalist.co.uk

Further details about The Basement Interviews project are available here.

Richard Poynder would like to acknowledge the help of the Open Society Institute, which provided a small upfront grant to enable him to get started on the project.