Create open source communities instead of walled gardens of intellectual property rights – to create a global knowledge commons and to maximise collective intelligence.

Replacing Control With Ecologies of Care | Autistic Collaboration

Our Glossary, Field Guide, Library, Pillars, Gallery, and Courses steadily expand in depth and breadth. We’re building a knowledge commons and a space of openness, at the edges.

For me this space of radical openness is a margin a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a “safe” place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.

Living as we did on the edge we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the centre as well as on the margin. We understood both.

 Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness, bell hooks 

The writing on Stimpunks.org that isn’t quoted from elsewhere is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Rights to the images on Stimpunks belong to the individual artists/photographers unless a license is stated in the image caption. Many, but not all, use CC BY-SA.

Under CC BY-SA,

You are free to:

• Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
• Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
• for any purpose, even commercially.

Under the following terms:

• Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
• ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

• No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Source: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International(CC BY-SA 4.0)

How to Attribute Us

Fair use applies. We quote widely using block quote citations with the title of the piece and a link back. That’s all you need to do for fair use.

If you use our work more extensively, here’s an attribution example using the recommendations from Creative Commons.

“The Five Neurodivergent Love Languages” by Stimpunks Foundation is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

What is a Free Cultural Work?

Stimpunks.org is a free cultural work.

Freedom Defined names four necessary characteristics of a free cultural work:

1. Freedom to use the work itself. This is the most basic thing a free content license allows: when you get a copy of a work under one of these licenses, you can use it however you want. This means without restrictions based on the kind of use: you may use it for commercial, political, or religious purposes, for example, or make unlimited copies in different formats to use on different devices. (This is why the NC licenses aren’t considered licenses for Free Cultural Works.)
2. Freedom to use the information in the work for any purpose. In addition to being able to simply share a free cultural work, you should also be able to use the information it contains. For example, if it’s a research paper or educational course, you should be able to build on it for your own research and teaching. If you are using something functional, such as a hardware design, you should be able to reverse-engineer it to figure out exactly how it works.
3. Freedom to share copies of the work for any purpose. When you get a copy of a free cultural work, you can make and share as many copies as you want, wherever you want. This means you can put it on your blog or website, include it in books, share it on file-trading networks, sell it in stores, give it away on CDs–there is no limit on how many copies you can make or where you can copy them, and you can use them for any purpose, even commercially.
4. Freedom to make and share remixes and other derivatives for any purpose. You can edit, remix, and transform a work under a free culture license however you want, and share those remixed copies as freely as the original. For example, you can build upon the original by making translations, mashups, fanfiction, and any other kind of derivative work you want, and share those remixed works freely, or even sell them. (This is why ND-licensed work isn’t considered a Free Cultural Work.)

Understanding Free Cultural Works – Creative Commons

Everything is a Remix

Next in a punk sensibility was its love affair with pastiche. As the true postmoderns they were, punks drew freely from highbrow culture, lowbrow culture, and places in between, picking and choosing as they went, bound by no formal ideology.

In practice, however, punks consciously or unconsciously drew on previous youth cultures, with methodologies and ideologies marked by pastiche and bricolage. In other words, punks borrowed freely from previous youth cultures and dominant society, melding these elements into a new form of expression.

“We Accept You, One of Us?”: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism in an Uncertain Era, 1974-1985

…punks viewed the pedestrian actions of everyday life as potential expressions of art and ideology.

The vast majority of the time, however, female punks took a pastiche approach, drawing inspiration from many areas of popular culture. According to journalist Kristine McKenna, “punks rejected the Academy and drew instead from ‘low’ sources: graffiti, underground comics, advertising, car culture, the tarot, blaxpoitation, bondage and pornography, surf culture, fifties industrial films, Mad magazine, and the universe of American detritus that winds up in thrift stores. It all got tossed in the blender.” As this quote suggests, there was no single, agreed-upon guise in early punk. Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s described the early Masque scene: “Everyone was kind of into the whole homemade thing, ‘cause … you couldn’t buy real punk clothes like they could in London.”

“We Accept You, One of Us?”: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism in an Uncertain Era, 1974-1985

We’re building a knowledge commons and a space of openness, at the edges.

Licensing Considerations

If you want to reproduce, republish, or reprint creative work, you must seek written permission—this includes posting photos to your social media accounts.

Reprinted with permission: Requesting permission to reproduce published material | LegalZoom

When using others’ photography, graphic design, and other artworks:

• We need an Media Release form or Photography contract or public license declaration such as Creative Commons.
• For hired work, who is the copyright owner, Stimpunks or the artist? Is this a “work for hire“? There are norms both ways, and we can’t assume. If this is “work for hire”, spell it out in the contract.
• If the artist is owner, under what terms is Stimpunks allowed to use the work? “All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.” for example? Specify this in the contract and/or by using a Creative Commons license.
• Is the artist willing to give the public some rights via a Creative Commons license?
• Get attribution details (TASL: Title, Author, Source, and License) from the artist.
• In image captions and descriptions, include the attribution and license declaration.
• We may need a model release.
• We have to maintain proof of license. Add signed contracts to our “Business Papers” folder. “Make sure to keep a record of the permission you were granted ready to produce. … In most cases, you’ll be granted a nonexclusive copyright license. This means you have the right to use the portion of the work you requested permission to reprint, but you have no other rights to the work. Those exclusive rights remain with the copyright owner.“
• Here’s the license we use on our stuff and why we use it.

Further Reading