The Open Knowledge Foundation is seeking an Editor for Open Text Book!
October 31st, 2009
We are seeking an Editor for Open Text Book, one of the highest ranked sites on the web for finding textbooks that you can freely use, reuse and redistribute:
This is a volunteer position requiring a one to two day a month commitment. If you are interested in contributing to the world of open education in general and open text books in particular just get in touch.
More Information
The Open Knowledge Foundation is looking for an Editor for its Open Text Book project. The project was launched in 2007 after Steve Coast of Open Street Map donated us the domain name. It aims to be a curated one stop shop for open textbooks - that is textbooks anyone is free to access, redistribute, reuse and build upon.
Recently there has been a sharp rise in interest in open textbooks. Earlier this month, a bill was proposed to make all Federally funded textbooks in the State of California available under an open license. Last year saw the start of a student led campaign to make textbooks open - which is currently supported by over 2000 college professors. There now are a plethora of open textbook projects around the world - at different educational levels, for a variety of different subjects. Its an exciting time for open textbooks!
The Open Text Book project aims to be, in the first instance, a simple registry to make it easy to locate open textbooks from many different sources. We have also begun to archive copies of some of the books in a repository. There is plenty of room for expanding the project in the future.
Responsibilities
We anticipate the Editor will spend one to two days a month on the project. This is a volunteer position and the Editor can be based anywhere in the world. The Editor will be responsible for:
- Adding new textbooks to the registry on a monthly basis, and curating the repository of mirrored textbooks;
- Checking the legal status of the textbooks to see that they are compliant with the Open Knowledge Definition;
- Attending virtual meetings with the Working Group on Open Textbooks;
- Giving input on the design of the Open Text Book website, and on the future of the Open Text Book project.
Get in touch!
If you are interested in the position, please get in touch, and let us know:
- Your name, affiliation, and website (if you have one!)
- Why you think you’d make a good Editor
- Your ideas about the future of the Open Text Book project
If you know anyone who you think might be interested to hear about the position - please point them to this post! You can also help spread the word by microblogging the following Identi.ca and Twitter posts:
Related posts:
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- Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 13 Welcome to the thirteenth Open Knowledge
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October 31st, 2009 at 5:54 pm
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October 31st, 2009 at 7:09 pm
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November 1st, 2009 at 4:00 am
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November 1st, 2009 at 4:04 am
Is OKFN also promoting the use of semantic tagging (e.g. RDF) for such resources? That would make for an automatic archive by search engines of self-identified open textbook content (defining the specific license within the semantic data). Some might identify incorrectly, but that would be an excellent start.
November 1st, 2009 at 2:39 pm
@Chris: Good suggestion. We plan to make a dump of the textbook listing available in several formats on a regular basis and providing it in RDF format should be no problem.
November 1st, 2009 at 4:39 pm
[...] ## SEEKING AN EDITOR FOR OPEN TEXT BOOK ## http://blog.okfn.org/2009/10/31/the-open-knowledge-foundation-is-seeking-an-editor-for-open-text-boo… [...]
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:16 pm
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November 3rd, 2009 at 4:57 am
[...] 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment Jonathan Gray has a new post at the Open Knowledge Foundation blog about an editor position. The editor would spend a few hours attending virtual meetings and [...]
November 4th, 2009 at 12:20 am
[...] The Open Knowledge Foundation is seeking an Editor for Open Text Book! [...]