Well, I hate to add a post above PC’s great follow-up piece on FOSS, but anyone who wants to “talk turkey” in a post doesn’t get to stay at the top of the blog roll for long. 
Some wonderful stuff is going down on the MediaReform website that was set up last month by a group of activists, academics, and random folks who are concerned about media in Canada. They’ve been getting a fair amount of help from the American group FreePress who have have been doing some really great work in the US on issues like media concentration, net neutrality, and supporting small & local media outlets. This could be the Canadian version — a bringing-together of some of the activists who work on those and similar issues in this country.
The main organizing tool so far, from what I can tell, is their online forum. People are posting all sorts of great content and trying to use the forum to spread the word about a variety of things that are going on right now (CRTC, independent media, ongoing meetings to try to start something, local initiatives, etc.) SO if you’re interested in such things, please have a wander over the site. Sign up, post, participate! There’s a lot of representation from Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, and it would be great to bring people from across the country into the discussions! If you do join, please introduce yourself and let everyone know where you’re from. And if you’re a librarian, let them know about that, too!
I hope you all get a chance to check it out and help build some momentum. As Robert McChesney (soon to be replacing Gandhi as the most quotable activist) says, “Regardless of what a progressive group’s first issue of importance is, its second issue should be media and communication, because so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not imposible, across the board.” Good stuff.
-SIO
PS - Not that any of you would be so rash as to be on Facebook or anything, but there’s MediaReform.ca group there, too, which acts primarily as a landmark to direct people to the forum’s website. It’s a great way to get other people involved, though…just invite them to join the group and hope they drift on over to the forum! Not that any of you are on Facebook, of course, knowing all about the privacy issues. Please note that I did not actually link to Facebook in this post. This is not an endorsement.