We’ve recently been in conversation with various individuals about starting a project to map open projects and groups. People who have been particularly keen include:

• Panagiota Alevizou, London School of Economics
• Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation
• Juan Carlos De Martin, COMMUNIA
• Heather Ford, iCommons
• David J Patrick, Linuxcaffe
• Mark Surman, Shuttleworth Foundation and soon of the Mozilla Foundation

We’ve put a few notes about the project on the OKF wiki at:

• http://okfn.org/wiki/MapOfOpenness

A tentative description of the projects reads:

A versioned database of open projects, open initiatives and the organisations and individuals behind them. A publicly editable directory and knowledge base of information about these projects and groups. A visual interface to explore and analyse the material.

Related developments include:

• Michael has blogged a bit about the initiative here, and has made an ‘Open’ category on the P2P Foundation wiki – including “descriptions of nearly 400 open concepts and initiatives, a list of open definitions, a directory of podcasts on the topics to learn more (and soon: a directory of video webcasts)”.
• Heather has put a diagram – which she used in her iSummit ’08 keynote speech – on her blog.
• Mark started a page on the Open Everything wiki for starting to gather examples of different kinds of open projects.

We’d love to have a wiki-like registry (like CKAN) with a visual interface for exploring the material – perhaps using something like Prefuse or Processing.

If you have any thoughts – or you’d like to get involved – please get in touch on our discuss list or at info at the OKF domain name!