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:

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

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!

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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.