First Open Knowledge London Meetup on Wednesday 30th April
April 28th, 2008
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
Open Visualisation Workshop in London
April 17th, 2008
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:
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!
OKCon 2008 Documentation and Open Knowledge Local Groups!
April 2nd, 2008
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:
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!
Basque Translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
March 11th, 2008
We’ve just added a Basque translation of the Open Knowledge Definition - thanks to Gotzon Egia.
If you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, or if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info at the OKF’s domain name.
Following on from a spate of fresh translations of the Open Knowledge Definition last week, we’ve just added translations in Spanish and Catalan - thanks to Ignasi Labastida i Juan of CC Spain and CC Catalonia.
Once again - if you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, of if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info at the OKF’s domain name.
Polish Translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
February 29th, 2008
We’re on a bit of a roll with translations of the Open Knowledge Definition! We’ve now got a Polish translation thanks to Jarosław Lipszyc.
Again - if you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, of if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info at the OKF’s domain name.
Danish Translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
February 28th, 2008
We’ve now added a Danish translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) to opendefinition.org - thanks to Peter Froberg.
We look foward to adding more translations in the near future. If you would like to help out translating the Definition into another language - please don’t hesitate to get in touch on our discuss list.
Open Definition Advisory Council launched
February 15th, 2008
We are pleased to announce the launch of an Advisory Council for opendefinition.org. The Council will be formally responsible for maintaining and developing the Definitions and associated material found on the Open Definition site - including the Open Knowledge Definition and the Open Service Definition. As many of you will know, these definitions aim to provide clear and succinct sets of conditions for ‘openness’ in knowledge and services.
Jordan Hatcher of opencontentlawyer.com has kindly agreed to be Chair of the Council, which includes:
- Paul Jacobson, iCommons
- Paul Miller, Talis
- Peter Murray-Rust, Cambridge University
- Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation & Cambridge University
- Rob Styles, Talis
- Peter Suber, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) & Earlham College
- Luis Villa, Columbia Law School, GNOME Foundation & Open Source Initiative
- Jo Walsh, Open Knowledge Foundation & Open Source Geo-Spatial Foundation
- John Wilbanks, Science Commons
More detailed biographies are available on the Advisory Council page.
It is our intention that the overall development of the material on the site will continue in the same community based and collaborative manner. The Council’s role will be to provide oversight, guidance and input into this process, not to replace it.
This is fantastic news for the definitions projects!
First COMMUNIA Workshop - “Technology and the Public Domain”
January 25th, 2008
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:
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!
Response to ‘The Future of Bibliographic Control’ draft from the Library of Congress
December 19th, 2007
A couple of weeks back we blogged about the ‘Future of Bibliographic Control’ draft report from a working group at the Library of Congress. Since then, we’ve submitted to the group a brief, collaboratively edited response to the draft and an appendix with some additional detailed comments.
The response was drafted by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Aaron Swartz of the Open Library and was co-signed by over 150 groups and individuals, including:
- Lawrence Lessig, Founder, Creative Commons
- Brewster Kahle, Founder, Internet Archive
- Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO O’Reilly Media
- Tim Spalding, Founder, LibraryThing.com
- Peter Suber, Senior Researcher, The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
- John Wonderlich, Program Director and John Brothers, CTO, Sunlight Foundation
- Paul Miller, Rob Styles, Terry Willan, Talis
- Rick and Megan Prelinger, Prelinger Library & Archives
- … and librarians, system librarians, catalogers, assistant librarians, library support staff, library users, library school lecturers and students, consultants, academics and software developers from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, the Ukraine, the UK and the US.
Many, many thanks to all of those who helped to publicise this, and to those who co-signed the response! We hope that the working group consider amending the draft in light of our comments in January.
