Today the Free Knowledge Institute is officially launched in the Netherlands:
The Free Knowledge Institute (FKI) is a non-profit organisation that fosters the free exchange of knowledge in all areas of society. Inspired by the Free Software movement, the FKI promotes freedom of use, modification, copying and distribution of knowledge in four different but highly related fields: education, technology, culture and science.
From their press release:
The Free Knowledge Institute (www.freeknowledge.eu) is an initiative
from three Amsterdam-based professionals who currently work for Internet
Society Netherlands. In the past years the association coordinated the
large-scale EU-project SELF which embraced the same objectives. The need
to share knowledge freely has become so important that the institute now
turns into an independent organisation.
“More and more governments realise the benefits of free knowledge and
free information technology”, says Wouter Tebbens, the president of the
new institute. The Free Knowledge Institute intends to be a knowledge
partner helping to show the way in available free knowledge and
technology. “That way, we can elaborate on the existing pool of free
knowledge and free software, which is growing enourmously. Look at
projects such as Wikipedia, Linux, and the internet itself”, Tebbens
states. “Why reinvent the wheel yet again?”
Its main lines of activity are Free Knowledge in technology, education,
culture and science. Free Knowledge in education focuses on the
production and dissemination of free educational materials; Free
Knowledge in IT mainly refers to free software, open standards and open
hardware; Free Knowledge in culture includes open content; and Free
Knowledge in science includes open access and anti-privatisation of
scientific knowledge.
We’ve certainly got a lot in common and having already been in touch with Hinde ten Berge, vice-president of the FKI, we hope to find ways to work together in the future.
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
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