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This month the Open Knowledge Foundation is five years old. Over those last five years we’ve done much to promote open access to information — from sonnets to stats, genes to geodata — not only in the form of
specific projects like Open Shakespeare and Public Domain Works but also in the creation of tools such as KnowledgeForge and the
Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, standards such as the Open Knowledge Definition, and events such as OKCon, designed to benefit the wider open knowledge community. (To find out more about what we’ve been up to in the last year, read our latest annual report [1]).

While we have achieved a lot, we believe we can do much, much more. We are therefore reaching out to our community and asking you to help us take our vision further.

Our aim: at least a 100 supporters committed to making regular, ongoing donations of £5 (EUR 6, $7.50) or more a month.

These funds will be essential in expanding and sustaining our work by allowing us to invest in infrastructure and employ modest central support. To pledge yourself as one of those supporters all you need to do is take 30 seconds to sign up to our “100 supporters” pledge at:

http://www.pledgebank.org/support-okfn/

(You also can act on the pledge right now if you wish, just visit:
http://www.okfn.org/support/)

We will always be a not-for-profit organization, built on the work of passionate volunteers. But with these additional funds, we believe we can make our efforts go much, much further. Please consider becoming a supporter and help us take our work forward.

Regards,

Rufus Pollock
Board Member, Open Knowledge Foundation

[1]:http://www.okfn.org/board/reports/2009/

### What will the money be used for?

These funds will be essential in expanding and sustaining our work by:

1. Allowing us to employ modest central support to:
 * Co-ordinate voluntary work
 * Apply for substantial grant funding for specific projects
 * Put on special events

2. Allowing us to upgrade and maintain our technical infrastructure
(servers etc)

### What have you achieved over the last 5 years?

Among other things: we’ve started projects that have allowed Shakespeare and Milton to enjoy a rebirth in the digital public
domain, begun the huge task of cataloging public domain sound recordings, and opened a raft of economic and historical material.

We’ve also developed tools, standards and events which have benefited the wider open knowledge community: Knowledgeforge stores the parliamentary data for theyworkforyou and publicwhip, the Open Knowledge Definition provides a standard for what “openness” is, Open Data Commons is developing the data license to be used by Open Street Map, and our workshops and annual Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) bring together individuals and organizations from across the open knowledge spectrum.

More information can be found in:

 * http://www.okfn.org/projects/
 * http://www.okfn.org/events/

And in our annual reports available from: http://www.okfn.org/board/

The Institute has a position available for a (junior) researcher to work on an ongoing research project on Open Content licensing. IViR is legal partner of Creative Commons NL, which has received substantial funding from the Dutch Ministry of Culture for a variety of Open Content related activities, including legal research.

Full details are available here: Jobs.ac.uk | University of Amsterdam

Full details at the Open Knowledge Foundation site - OK London local group.

### Post-Event Information

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

http://okfn.org/okcon/2008/after

If you’ve blogged the event or have pictures or the like, please let us know and we’ll link to it. We are also able to host any further documentation in our repository.

### Open Knowledge Local Groups

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!

And of course your participation is needed to make everything happen:

### Get Involved

If you’d like to get involved in any of the OKF’s projects or
activities, please see our participate page:

http://okfn.org/participate

Our projects rely on volunteers for their development – from CKAN and KForge to Open Shakespeare, Open Economics and Open Text Book. Whether you’re interested in research, communications or technical work, whether you have a few minutes or a few hours to spare, we’d love to hear from you!

While OKF projects may be available without financial cost to you, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have any costs:

### Support the Open Knowledge Foundation

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation. All our services and software are provided openly and for free. Running and developing projects costs both time and money (for example, our hosting costs alone run to around a €1000 (£700/$1500) a year). Your support
helps the Foundation to continue and expand its work. For more information, please see:

http://okfn.org/support/

I’ve crossposted below the announcement of the new set of legal tools on the Open Data Commons site. The original post is here.

_____

The new Open Data Commons set of legal tools are now available for comment. There are two documents for you to review:

Public Domain Dedication & Licence (PDDL)

Community Norms

We’ve created a FAQ for some of the initial questions here. A FAQ addressing some of the in-depth legal issues of the PDDL will be forthcoming.

The current draft PDDL is compliant with the newly released Science Commons draft protocol for the “Open Access Data Mark” and with the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Definition.

Read the protocol here and read the announcement on the Science Commons blog here. The Open Definition is available at http://www.opendefinition.org/.

You can read the Creative Commons announcement here, and read about their new implementation of the protocol, CC ∅ here.

UPDATE 17 Dec

Please note that the Open Data Commons Database Licence and the Factual Information Licence are on hold during development of the new legal tools (the PDDL and Community Norms) but not forgotten.

The licences first started out as based on US law, and then the US licences became the “generic” licence, and the licences were ported to meet the jurisdiction-specific legal needs of countries all across the globe. The Scotland and the England and Wales versions were released in 2005.

I’ll be at the London celebration, which will be a the holiday party with BBC Backstage and and the Open Rights Group. Details about the event are here.

COMMUNIA Workshop: “Technology and the public domain” (18/01/2008)

Organized by the NEXA Center for Internet & Society of
the Politecnico di Torino (Italy) this event takes aim
at the international debate about the “digital commons” and the
complex relationship between technological innovation and today’s
mass usage of digital technologies. The Workshop provides an
opportunity for experts and innovators in digital technologies to
meet with other stakeholders, opinion leaders, and policy makers in
order to deepen and share their understanding of the role of
technology in shaping the present and future of our digital commons.

After the opening plenary talk at 9:15 on “Technology, the law and
the public domain” (by Rishab Ghosh, MERIT, University of Maastricht)
the workshop will continue for the entire day with three different
topic sessions, addressing technology issues, software tools and
formats, and infrastructure matters — all of them related to the
development of the “digital commons” as a general mainframe, and the
science commons in particular.

The list of confirmed speakers includes Keith Jeffery (Current Research
Information Systems, president ERCIM), Nathan Yergler (CTO Creative
Commons), Robert Horvitz (Open Spectrum Foundation), Philippe Aigrain
(Society for Public Information Spaces), Xavier Serra (Universitat
Pompeu Fabra), Juan Carlos De Martin (COMMUNIA Coordinator), Andrea
Glorioso (NEXA Research Center for Internet and Society).

A wrap-up session and closing discussion is scheduled at 16:00.

The workshop will take place in Torino (Italy), at the Aula Magna of
the Politecnico of Torino at the Lingotto (Via Nizza 230).

Admission is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required.

More information and program details: http://ws1-2008.communia-project.eu
Pre-registration: http://ws1-2008.communia-project.eu/phorm/reg-form.html
Media inquiries: press ]AT[ communia-project.eu

Open Knowledge (OKCon) 2008: LSE, London, 15th March 2008

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.

It looks like what will happen is Wikipedia will version up to a new GFDL that will allow for integration with the CC-BY-SA licence.

Video and transcript of announcement here.

Wikimedia resolution on updating the licence here.

The cases will be marked with a new Creative Commons mark — CC-Ø — that signals that there are no copyrights or other related rights attached to the content.

This appears to be going beyond the public domain dedication in copyright to cover ‘other related rights’. No word on further details.