The poet Verandah Porche, a New England treasure, will be reading from her new collection Sudden Eden. The book party is being held at a Cambridge home (parking will be permitted) on Wednesday, April 24 from 7:00-8:30 p.m. Please call 617 354 6237 for the address.

Calling all progressive organizers! RootsCamp MA (April 6-7, 2013 at 1199 SEIU in Dorchester) shakes up the traditional conference model. No need to submit workshop proposals in advance. Instead attendees decide an agenda together each morning of the conference. This is cross-issue progressive movement building, where all attendees bring what they know and what they are curious about.

The Free Software Foundation has just announced the line-up for its upcoming LibrePlanet 2013 conference, to be held in Cambridge, MA at the Harvard Science Center on March 23-24.

LibrePlanet is where global free software community members and newcomers meet together to learn from each other, share accomplishments and face challenges. This is the fifth annual LibrePlanet conference.

This year's LibrePlanet conference is designed for all experience levels. Whether you're interested in learning more about what free software is and why you should use it, or whether you've been contributing code to free software projects for years, you will find plenty to do at LibrePlanet.

A conversation with actor and playwright Harlan Baker about labor history and his one-man play "Jimmy Higgins: A Life in the Labor Movement", ending with with a reading by Harlan, of an excerpt from a speech by Eugene Debs.

Here's another upcoming event likely to be of interest to Open Media Boston viewers.


After two successful debut shows at Jamaica Plain's Spontaneous Celebrations on February 4, Over The Line, a "high concept / low budget / multimedia / psychological rock opera about ideology, indoctrination, unwritten rules, and inner transformation" returns for a repeat engagement on June 2. Written by Brian O'Connell, known for his kinetic bass playing with Uncle Sammy, Gordon Stone, The Grass Gypsys, and Gary Backstrom. Brian is also an active supporter of local peace, solidarity, and occupy efforts and organized several Bush era anti-war benefit parties at Spontaneous Celebrations called "Assembling Peace".

Open Media Boston viewers will doubtless find this new documentary interesting.


The Boston Area Beer Enthusiasts Society (BABES) is pleased to present the first Bay State screening of The Love of Beer, a documentary celebrating the women at the forefront of the Pacific Northwest beer community. A panel of women in the craft beer industry will follow the film. A total of 1,989 breweries operated for some or all of 2011, of which 1,940 were craft breweries. While the industry is expanding rapidly, growing 13% by volume and 15% by dollars in 2011, women within the industry are a vast minority.

The “winter that wasn’t” in Boston, tornadoes ripping through Springfield, hurricanes ravaging Vermont, record-breaking heat waves in Russia, wildfires in Australia, floods in Thailand: when do isolated incidents start to form a pattern? Every time we hear about another weather anomaly or unprecedented natural disaster, it becomes increasingly clear that climate change is not a future problem — it’s happening right now.
Calling attention to how climate change is already affecting us is the purpose of 350.org’s “Connect the Dots – Climate Impact Day,” an international day of protest and education designed to shine a spotlight on the connections between extreme weather and climate change.

Just a quick blurb to encourage Open Media Boston viewers to drop by the Harvard Book Store tomorrow (Monday) night at 7 p.m. to check out “the discussion and celebration of the new #19 issue of The Baffler with John Summers, Chris Lehmann, Thomas Frank, and the rest of the Cambridge crew”. That’s right, for those of you keeping score, The Baffler - one of America’s only serious left-wing magazines of arts and criticism - was recently bought by local academic John Summers, moved from Chicago to Cambridge, and will now be coming out on a regular basis for the first-time ever ... thanks to a newly-inked five-year $500,000 deal with MIT Press.

The Harvard Book Store event is free and open to the public.

On Tuesday, March 27th at 4:30, in the main Brookline Access Television studio on the third floor of the High School's Unified Arts Building next to the Green Line D Train Brookline Hills stop, BATV will be hosting a live-audience session of the Ethos Roundtable on Innovations in Community Media, with a focus on community cable public, educational, and governmental (PEG) access centers.

The noted South African choral group Soweto Gospel Choir will be performing at Symphony Hall this Sunday, February 12th at 3 p.m. Anti-apartheid movement veterans, human rights activists, and music lovers take note. And it's not just great music, it's for a good cause.