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!

Related posts:

1. Dead knowledge: why being explicit about openness matters When I think of the amount of knowledge that is ‘dead’ because of a lack of explicitness about its ‘openness’ I am always surprised by the number of examples. Consider the following two: Example 1: Everything2 and h2g2 Years ago,...
2. Talk at Law 2.0: Openness, Web 2.0 and the Ethic of Sharing Yesterday I was at the SCL’s “Law 2.0? : New Speech, New Property, New Identity” talking on Openness, Web 2.0 and the Ethic of Sharing. The full text of my talk is inline below, there are companion slides up online...
3. Open Knowledge Web Buttons: Get Them Now Over the last couple of years we’ve done a lot of work to get a clear and clean definition of what open knowledge is in the form of the Open Knowledge Definition. This provides a core set of principles defining...