Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog

The first Open Knowledge London meetup will take place this Wednesday at the London Knowledge Lab. The meetup should be great opportunity for informal discussion of open knowledge projects and issues. If you’d like to participate or present, please add details to the wiki page!

• When: Wednesday 30th April, 19:00-21:00
• Where: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald Street, WC1N 3QS.
• Wiki: http://okfn.org/wiki/LocalGroups/LondonGroup

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Dr. Paolo D’Iorio recently invited me to attend the first meeting of an EU funded Working Group “devoted to analyzing the current debate on the legal, economic and social conditions for setting-up open scholarly communities on the web”. The meeting was part of COST:

COST – European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research – is one of the longest-running European instruments supporting cooperation among scientists and researchers across Europe. COST is also the first and widest European intergovernmental network for coordination of nationally funded research activities.

Action 32, of which Dr. D’Iorio is Chair, is called “Open Scholarly Communities on the Web” and has two aims:

• to create a digital infrastructure for collaborative humanities research on the Web; and
• to establish and foster the growth of Scholarly Communities that will provide feedback to the IT developers regarding the needs and expectations of humanities researchers and will serve as a core group of early adopters.

Talks included:

• Paolo D’Iorio (CNRS-ITEM, Paris), How to build a Scholarly Community on the Web
• Maria Chiara Pievatolo (University of Pisa), Copyright in Europe. History and perspectives
• Thomas Margoni (University of Trento), How to access primary sources in Europe. The legal framework
• Annaïg Mahé (URFIST, Paris), The market for SSH Journals in Europe
• Jennie Grimshaw (British Library), Negotiating spaghetti junction: legal constraints on archiving government e-documents in the UK
• Christine Madsen (OII, Oxford), The significance of “marketing” digital collections: the case of Harvard
• Yann Moulier Boutang (Professeur de sciences Economiques - Université de Technologie de Compiègne, Directeur adjoint de Laboratoire de l’Unité de Recherche EA 22 23), Economic model(s) of Scholarly Communities: Open Source or Creative commons?
• Francesca Di Donato (University of Pisa), The evaluation of science. From peer review to open peer review
• Eric Meyer and Ralph Schroeder (OII, Oxford), Open Access and Online Visibility in the Age of e-Research

Notes and comments

• For many humanities subjects, having something like the public domain calculators would help to facilitate the growth of open resources for scholarly communities built on works in which the copyright has expired.
• Paolo’s presentation of Nietzsche Source and the Discovery project gave a compelling vision of how communities might grow around a resource for corpus based scholarship - with users having their own virtual workspace with annotations and notes that could be shared with other users. The ‘Scholarsource’ system would have stable URLs to support accurate citation, and robust ontologies to facilitate exploration of the material. Licensing that permits re-distribution is also a good preservation strategy.
• The term ‘open’ was often not used in the sense of the Open Knowledge Definition. Several projects used licenses with non-commercial restrictions. While some participants assumed that scholars and institutions would often prefer that their work was not exploited commercially - it would be great if public domain sources such as documents, images and records, could be published under an open license. An approach which recommended open licensing for material that had not been enhanced (scans, text files …) could help to stimulate the growth of a commons that would encourage greater experimentation and collaboration than one which restricted certain kinds of re-use (cf. 7. and 8. in the OKD).
• The importance of a close working relationship between scholarly communities and technologists. It is crucial that technical development is informed by the needs and working practices of researchers. This is something we’ve been thinking about in relation to Open Shakespeare and Open Milton. Open licensing allows developers to experiment with scholarly material to develop new tools and applications that could be of unanticipated value (e.g. semantic approaches, text analysis or visualisation).
• Legal, technological and social obstacles to building open scholarly communities. We have various legal mechanisms and emerging technologies to facilitate such communities. Sometime the most hard parts are social - in growing user base, increasing participation and so on. Value and limits of ‘build it and they will come’ approach.

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We are currently in the process of organising an informal, hands-on workshop for those who work with, or are interested in, open-source visualisation technologies:

• http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenVisualisation/Workshop
• http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenVisualisation

The event will take place somewhere in central London on a weekend in May. If you are interested in participating, please add your name to the wiki page and specify which dates you are free on the event’s doodle page.

We hope it will be a good opportunity to learn a bit more about visualisation software packages, to exchange ideas, and possibly to start to work on some new projects! If all goes well, we’ll arrange to meet up on a (semi) regular basis!

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We’re pleased to announce that audio, images and slides from OKCon 2008 are now available at the Post-Event Information page.

Most of the material can be obtained from the OKF subversion repository.

If you’ve blogged the event or have pictures or the like, please let us know and we’ll post a link from the Post-Event page. We are also able to host any further documentation in the repository.

Many thanks to all of you who came to speak, present and participate! We had a great day and very much enjoyed the talks, demos and conversations that took place throughout the day.

We’ve now set up a wiki page for local Open Knowledge groups - to arrange meetups, forums and other activities:

• http://okfn.org/wiki/LocalGroups/

In addition to the Cambridge group, which has been around for a few years, we are in the process of creating groups in London and Oxford. If you’d like to get involved in any of these, or you’d like to set up your own local group - don’t hesitate to get in touch!

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Our second annual Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) is taking place tomorrow. Like last year, the event will bring together individuals and groups from across the open knowledge spectrum for a day of seminars and workshops. Though we’re nearing capcity, there are still a few places left for last minute registrants!

Details

• When: Saturday 15th March 2008 10:30-18:30 (doors open 10am)
• Where: Clement House (D602), London School of Economics, London, UK (getting there) (another map)
• Programme: programme page
• Registration: register page
• Wiki: http://okfn.org/wiki/okcon/

Speakers

Session 1 (1045-1200): Transport and Environment

• Gavin Starks (AMEE and dgen)
• Tom Steinberg (MySociety)
• Dr Muki Haklay (Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London)

Session 2 (1200-1315): Visualization and Analysis

• Liz Turner (Freelance Designer and Visualizer Extraordinaire)
• Gael Varoquaux (Mayavi2 - the next Generation Visualization Toolkit)
• Martin Albrecht (SAGE the Open Source Mathematics Engine)

Session 3 (1415-1530): Education and Academia

• Erik Duval (ARIADNE)
• Lisa Petrides (OER Commons)
• Dr Martin Brett (Cambridge University History Department and the Ivo Project)

Open Space

• 1540-1640 (Room 1): Open Media
• 1540-1640 (Room 2): Remixing, Peer Production and Open Knowledge
• 1645-1745 (Room 1): Law, Licensing and Policy
• 1645-1745 (Room 2): Versioning, Packaging, and Structuring Open Material
• 1750-1830 (Room 1): Kept free for spontaneous contributions and breakout sessions

A more detailed schedule can be found at the Open Space wiki page

Theme

‘Open Knowledge’ is material that others are free to access, reuse or re-distribute and may be anything from sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata. In recent years we’ve seen the growth of successful open knowledge projects - from peer reviewed journals to community edited encyclopaedias - but what impact can open licensing have in education, research and commerce? Is sharing the key to scaling? What kinds of business models are available to open knowledge distributors and how is open knowledge applied in different institutional and professional contexts?

Furthermore, there now exist large and growing amounts of open material but what kinds of tools are available to analyse and represent it? How can we sort, search, store it to maximise its visibility and reusability?

We’ve also witnessed in the last few years the rise of web-based services — from social networking sites to online spreadsheet packages. While we have definitions for open software and open knowledge, what is an open service and what kinds of new services can be built using open knowledge?

Organizers

OKCon is organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation in partnership with the LSE Information Systems and Innovation Group.

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Last week I went to the first COMMUNIA workshop on Technology and the Public Domain in Turin.

COMMUNIA coordinator Juan Carlos De Martin and Rishab Ghosh of MERIT, University of Maastricht gave opening talks. I was on a panel with Kaitlin Thaney of Science Commons, Nathan Yergler of Creative Commons and Keith Jeffery of euroCRIS. My slides are available at:

• http://m.okfn.org/files/talks/communia_20080118/

Other talks directly related to open knowledge included:

• Xavier Serra (Music Technology Group, Pompeu Fabra University) - on automated metadata production for sound, and the freesound project (content is currently licensed under CC Sampling Plus, but there are plans to introduce other licensing options)
• Simone Brunozzi - on BeeSeek, a peer to peer open-source search engine
• Séverine Dusollier (FUNDP - Centre de recherche informatique et droit) - on setting up a positive legal definition and regime for the public domain

Seeing as though there look to be many areas of common interest between the OKF and the COMMUNIA network, I suggested in my talk and thoughout the day that:

• We should work together to create a set of ‘public domain calculators’ - or algorithms that can help to determine whether or not a given work is out of copyright in a given jurisdiction (such as we’ve been working on with Public Domain Works and the Open Library);
• We should work together to pool open metadata - whether this be bibliographic metadata, or metadata for databases or large collections of knowledge resources (such as are listed in CKAN).

This is a great opportunity to strengthen the community of individuals and organisations with an interest in open knowledge and the public domain across Europe. I look forward to seeing the launch of the Working Groups!

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• OKCon 2008 - ‘Open Knowledge: Applications, Tools and Services’
• where: London School of Economics, London, UK
• when: 15th March 2008 (1030-1830)
• www: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/
• register: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/
• wiki: http://www.okfn.org/wiki/okcon2008/

Following on from the success of our inaugural conference last year, we’re pleased to announce that the second Open Knowledge conference (OKCon) will take place on Saturday 15th March 2008.

The event will bring together individuals and groups from across the open knowledge spectrum for a day of seminars and workshops around the theme of ‘Applications, Tools and Services’. Three main sessions will focus on ‘Transport and Environment’, ‘Visualization and Analysis’ and ‘Education and Academia’. In addition there will be an ‘Open Space’ suitable for presentations and demos of general open knowledge related work.

The event is open to all but we encourage you to register because space is limited. A small entrance fee is planned to help pay for costs but concessions are available.

More Information

‘Open Knowledge’ is material that others are free to access, reuse or re-distribute and may be anything from sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata. In recent years we’ve seen the growth of successful open knowledge projects - from peer reviewed journals to community edited encyclopaedias - but what impact can open licensing have in education, research and commerce? Is sharing the key to scaling? What kinds of business models are available to open knowledge distributors and how is open knowledge applied in different institutional and professional contexts?

There now exists a vast amount of open content and data but what kinds of tools are available to analyse and represent this wealth of material? How can we sort, search, store it to maximise its visibility and reusability?

We’ve also witnessed the rise of web-based services — from social networking sites to online spreadsheet packages. While we have definitions for open software and open knowledge, what is an open service and what kinds of new services can be built using open knowledge?

Want to give a presentation or demo? Want to help out?

If you have a presentation, demo or workshop you’d like to give, or would like to help out with OKCon 2008 please either post on the wiki (link above) or let us know by email on info [at] okfn [dot] org.

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A few weeks ago, Rufus and I attended the annual Gerald Aylmer Seminar, jointly organised by the National Archives and the Royal Historical Society. The topic for the event was ‘Digital Horizons: how the digital revolution changes the relationship between historians and their historical sources’.

Here are some belated jottings…

Opening talk by Natalie Ceeney, Chief Executive of The National Archives

• She described the differences between digitised and ‘born digital’ sources.
• Fine Rolls Henry III is an exemplary digitisation project. It publishes rolls from 1216-1248.
  • N.B. Access is free, but copyright page says: “© Crown copyright images reproduced by permission of The National Archives, London, England. […] Images may be used only for purposes of research, private study or education.”
• Your Archives wiki allows users to contribute their knowledge about archival sources.
  • N.B. Terms and conditions of use stipulate that material may be used for personal/noncommercial purposes, and for online sources users must link to the wiki rather than reproducing/redistributing content.
• Majority of the material the NA is currently archiving is already in digital form (e-mails, document files, etc.) - albeit dispersed in different places, and in different formats.
• There is a vast amount of material being produced. NA are soliciting for advice from historians to help predict trends in historical research in order to help them decide what kinds of material to focus on and prioritise.

Richard Boulderstone, Director of e-Strategy and Information Systems at the British Library

• Asked whether future of historical research was digital and interactive.
• Current cost of digitisation at the British Library is around £1/page.
• There are a limited number of funding sources: JISC, Google, Microsoft, Heritage Lottery Fund, patrons, international, government and EU sources.
• Procedure for digitisation includes: selection, OCR, metadata, hosting, rights clearance.
• Emphasised the importance of the ‘look and feel’ of the products of digitisation.
• Alluded to Conference of European National Libraries survey on digitisation from 2006, which said 4.7m items had been digitised of over 400m physical items held. British library has digitised 230k items and projects a figure of 17m for 2012.
  • It’d be great to see the sources for these figures. I’ve had a quick look around CENL, TEL, EDL and other sites without success.
• Newspapers account for 41% of digitisation efforts. He suggested that it could be fruitful for various EU newspaper digitisation projects to work together.
• UK has relatively little funding for digitisation projects, compared to other EU countries. Funds from JISC and Microsoft.
• Digitisation is in its infancy. Problems with storage and interoperability. Copyright issues.
• ArXiv as an example of a successful digital archive project.
• European National Libraries will have digitised 4% of holdings by 2012.
• Reiterated main issues with digitisation: funding, standards, copyright, technology, interoperability.
• Rufus asked about copyright of products of digitisation and Richard said that the British Library were asserting full copyright for economic reasons.

Tim Hitchcock, Co-author/director of Old Bailey Online

• Spoke about the impact on historical research and research methodology of different technologies of storage, retrieval and classification.
• He described how the material that is available strongly affects the kinds of areas historians choose to study and cited art history as a good example of this - increased availability of a wide variety of images has led an increase in the diversity of research.
• New ways of organising and searching material (such as tagging/keyword searching) open up research and collapse traditional disciplinary boundaries (e.g. as in Dewey/Library of Congress classification schemes).
• More possible to re-construct the biography of an ordinary individual from various digitised sources (such as Old Bailey Online).

Historians from the University of Roehampton, the Institute of Historical Research, and the Centre for Contemporary British History spoke of specific experiences using and providing digital resources for historical research.

Many of the participants I spoke to afterwords agreed it would be great to see more open digital resources for historical education and research!

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Last week I went to the OpenLearn 2007 conference hosted at the Open University. A lot was packed into the couple of days, and there was representation from different OER (Open Educational Resources) groups from around the world. There were an abundance of new projects, papers, groups and initiatives mentioned, and a recurring sentiment was that it is difficult to keep track of all the things that are happening!

In terms of coverage: on-the-fly notes from conference bloggers are available from OCHRE and other blog posts should appear at the OpenLearn blog aggregator. I think the OU also intend to release video/audio footage of the conference.

Below are some musings from the event…

Towards an ‘open participatory learning ecosystem’

John Seeley Brown’s talk started the conference with the idea that ‘we participate therefore we are’, with respect to learning. His He emphasised the advantages of a collaborative, participatory approach to education. The architecture studio - where all of the models are on view and everyone is able to listen to appraisals of everyone else’s work - was used to convey the paradigm of collaborative, ‘open’ development, and, indirectly, the value of ‘releasing early and releasing often’.

He said that ‘tinkering’ is an important form of learning - and suggested we are experiencing a new wave of tinkering as a result of open software and content. He also described a vision of a world where learners are also educators in an ‘open participatory learning ecosystem’. Central to this vision is the notion of a culture of sharing, remixing, blending, and modifying which is enabled by open licensing practices. In his view, the combination of eScience, eHumanities, OERs and web 2.0 is creating a ‘perfect storm of opportunity’ for such an ecosystem to flourish.

Two examples he gave of were the Faulkes Telescope Project, which gives students remote access to astronomical apparatus to perform experiments and pool/analyze their data, and Decameron web, a user generated portal for resources dedicated exploring Boccacio’s work. I was reminded of what the OKF set out to do with Open Economics and Open Shakespeare - i.e. to create open knowledge ‘exemplar’ projects with open material and open ‘tools’ to allow users to explore and analyse the material. Also I’m sure open datasets such as those listed on CKAN could be the basis for interesting ’social learning/research’ projects, by being integrated with visualisation tools (we’ve blogged about this before).

There was also discussion of new user-focused and user-led ways of collecting data for education and research. Patrick McAndrew told me about the Biodiversity Observatory, a joint project of the OU, Imperial, the Natural History Museum and 12 other projects to allow the public to contribute data about British wildlife. I wonder what kind of license they plan to make user-contributed data available under! Vijay Kumar spoke about iLabs - an architecture developed by MIT to allow students to gain remote access to laboratories.

Conceptions of ‘Openness’ and licensing practices

It was clear listening to the different talks that there were various different conceptions about what the ‘open’ in OER meant. There was certainly a strong sense that it is fundamentally related to liberal/open licensing practices (as opposed to just cost-free access) but it often seemed to have wider connotations than this. Erik Duval said that to him openness meant ‘removing barriers’ - including legal barriers, poor findability, and inconvenience to the user. Removing socio-economic obstacles to access, allowing access to source files, and creating a culture of inclusion and participation were recurring themes. I would be interested to hear more about how more people involved in OER felt about the Open Knowledge Definition!

Regarding licensing practices, speakers rarely made distinctions between different types of Creative Commons licenses. The term ‘open content’ was often taken to include material available under a license with noncommercial restrictions. In conversations I had about licenses with noncommercial restrictions (notably with people from MIT and the OU) - I was given the impression that many organisations were not opposed to the commercial usage of educational resources in principle. Commonly cited reasons for adopting one included wanting to incorporate other material available under noncommercial sharealike licenses (especially that which had been donated by other commercial organisations), the reluctance of content contributors (publishers, authors, educators, researchers…) and other parties, and wanting to prevent people mirroring with ads.

It would be great if more OER projects started using licenses requiring only attribution, or attribution sharealike so as to impose minimal restrictions on re-use! The absence of noncommercial restrictions could allow people to experiment with new models for sustaining the development of educational materials.

Repositories, registries and metadata

Chris Pegler gave an interesting talk about the wide range of repositories that now exist - from informal personal repositiories to national, international and discipline-specific repositories. She also discussed the continuum of ‘user concerns’ and the different kinds of technologies available to aid different kinds of repository usage - from rights management and metadata standards to search facilities and RSS feeds. She used Jan Hylén’s taxonomy from his 2006 paper on OER for the OECD to analyse a range of repositories and uses.

Erik Duval gave a talk about ‘open metadata for open educational resources’ - alluding to his experiences with:

• ARIADNE - “A European Association open to the World, for Knowledge Sharing and Reuse”
• GLOBE - a global alliance aiming to make educational material accessible worldwide
• MELT - which “has been designed to provide users of learning content in schools with access to more useful types of metadata that will allow them to find resources that fit their needs, language, cultures and preferred ways of teaching and learning”
• MACE - an EU project “aimed at improving architectural education, by integrating and connecting vast amounts of content from diverse repositories, including past European projects existing architectural design communities.”

He stressed the importance of open metadata and spoke of ARIADNE’s work on ‘attention metadata’ - or metadata generated automatically from users’ clickstreams, and Kuleuven’s work on automatic metadata generation.

Finally Giovanni Fulantelli spoke about ‘OpenLOs’ (open learning objects), and the EU SLOOP (’Sharing Learning Objects in an Open Perspective’) project. He described the importance of treating metadata as dynamic and changing information that is essential in supporting the evolution of learning resources.

Its good to see the work being done on metadata for OER (though it looks like some of the data that’s being made available has NC restrictions - and is hence not ‘open’ as in the OKD). It’d be fantastic to have more discussions with members of the OER community about how CKAN should be able to handle metadata!

Update, 2007-11-14: As ibbo commented below, there were many interesting discussions of Learning Object Metadata (LOM) and of LOM standards, such as the 2002 standard, IEEE 1484.12.1. We’re certainly keen to keep track of developments in this area!

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The iCommons conference in Dubrovnik, where I’ve been for the last few days, finished yesterday. This has been a great event (a big well done to Heather Ford and all the other organizers) and I’ve had the chance to talk to a very large number of interesting people — renewing old acquaintances and making new ones. Thanks in large part to generous sponsorship the conference was also able to bring together a very good selection of the ‘Free Culture’ groups from around the world.

All of the sessions were good but particular highlights included:

• The excellent panel on the philosophy of the commons which debated, among much else, whether having definitions of ‘Freedom’ or ‘Openness’ are useful or are just an obstruction (perhaps unsurprisingly given my prior, I still think definitions like the open knowledge definition or the free cultural works definition are valuable though I think we need to be very careful about distinguishing between a definition and a campaign).
• A very considered talk from Yochai Benkler (I was particularly struck by the vehemence of his “If you take anything from my work it is that I am not a techno-determinist”).
• The presentation from the Dutch National Archives (Beeld en Geluid) in which they announced that they have received an 173 million Euro grant in order to digitize their archive and make it available to the public. This is a massive undertaking covering 100 years of content including 137,200 hours of video, 22,510 hours of film, 1,239,000 hours of audio and 2,900,000 photos. A particularly interesting extra detail here was the fact that they had done a proper ‘economic’ study based on willingness-to-pay estimates, prior to obtaining the grant, which had indicated that the project would deliver societal benefits well in excess of its costs.
• And last, but not least, a conversation with Joi Ito and others on the nature of happiness (the question of the relationship of happiness, sharing and the increasingly networked nature of society seemed to come up frequently over the last few days).

Other important information included internal CC rumblings indicating that there will soon be a CC communique on the question of database rights along the lines that, where they exist, they should be waived and the licenses should be restricted to copyright. Personally, I’m still undecided on whether this is the best approach but conversations with John Willbanks and Jamie Boyle during the Summit have given me much food for thought. Another piece of big news was Lessig’s announcement that he is going to start reducing his current commitments on ‘Free Culture’ and ‘Open Knowledge’ issues — for full details see this summary of his keynote address.

There still remains a very great deal to be done in all of the areas covered by the Summit — from open education to film to sustainable business models. I also think we are going to have to be clearer about the fact that Creative Commons does not necessarily equal ‘open’ (non-commercial no-derivatives anyone?) and that the set of CC licenses are too broad to define a coherent ‘commons’ — far too often one heard people saying things like ‘my site takes CC content’ as if this defined a clear standard.

However this is to expected at such an early stage and when one contrasts this with the situation 2 years ago when it wasn’t even clear that iCommons would be anything more than the international license coordination group it is clear we have already come far. I will certainly be interested to see how the ‘movement’ (if we can yet call it that) will evolve and develop — I’d like to see greater prominence given to other areas of knowledge, after all the ‘commmons’ of data is as important as the ‘commons’ of culture — but events such as these mark important steps on the way to a more ‘open’ future.

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