Blogs about Our Philosophy

Independence within the Electoral Commision

Helen King — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:13:27 +0200

My new friend Aslam Rafee (CTO of the DST) has been hanging out in our office this morning before Open Everything this afternoon. He has pointed out one of the most incredible pieces of democracy I have ever seen. The so called ‘Independent Electoral Commission’ do not allow you to access information through their site if you do not have propriety software.

The (not so) welcome page:

So much for human rights and access to knowledge…

Open Everything Cape Town this Friday!

Mark Surman — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:32:52 +0200

I met with The Amazing Philipp Schmidt over the weekend to prep for Open Everything Cape Town. The event is happening this Friday at Bird's Boutique Cafe. It's an amazing venue. High ceilings and tons of light. And scrumptious homemade everything.

We spent about an hour going over the agenda. Philipp and Helen (also co-organizing) have done amazing job getting people to present at the event. The speedgeek list looks like this:

Couchsurfing by Mandy Messina

27 Dinners by Dave Duarte
UWC's Rip. Mix. Learn. by someone from UWC
Mail and Guardian Thought Leader by Matthew Buckland
Siyavula / FHSST by Sarah Blyth
QuirkE Marketing by Rob Stokes
Dabba / Village Telco by Steve Song
Ultimate Holiday Planner by Terence Lapidus
Missing Link by Rich Mulholland
Creative R&D by Steve Kromberg

Also, we're likely to have an insider view on how the South African Government's open source adoption project happened ... and how it's rolling out. I promise to podcast if it happens.

If you're in Cape Town and interested, make sure to sign up on the wiki ASAP. It feels like there is alot of buzz around this event. And space is limited.

del.icio.us tagging - what we are reading today

Helen King — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:53:47 +0200

We have an internal Shuttleworth Foundation IRC channel which mainly consists of comments, banter, understanding where people are, soliciting opinions and, most importantly, links to interesting things we are reading. These readings inform our current thinking and shape our ideas. To share them at large, we have tagged them in deli.icio.us under SFreads (what the Shuttleworth Foundation reads). The RSS feed is to the left of this post, and will be on the front page of our website.

Insights into allsorts

Helen King — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:48:02 +0200

This week, the team went on an Insights training course, which whilst a lot of it can be taken with a pinch of salt (how you can fill out 25 questions and define the exact characteristics of each complex individual I will never know) there was a lot of truth found.

You are plotted on a map and assigned a colour, each colour represents a personality type (as with Myers Briggs and so far, not that inspiring), the part that I liked was that you were able to see which colours were assigned to your team members and then there were explicit statements of what each person liked, and did not like and if you want a positive result from any interaction a simple list of do’s and do nots.

I was an ‘Inspirer Motivator’ - which whilst is a lovely sunshine yellow colour and is ‘out-going, can develop and maintain contacts, able to create enthusiasm, verbally effusive, optimistic and sees the good in others’ there are obviously some down sides!

Broadly speaking, strengths are:

Outwardly directed energy ensures a fast friendly pace.
Becomes involved in many activities.
Will look for the good in people and events.
Participative and involved team player.
Can be bubbly, effusive and spontaneous.
Ability to see options and alternatives.
Will try anything at least once.
Has an outgoing nature and builds relationships quickly.

Weaknesses:

May take criticism of her work personally.
Generally speaking, she is speaking generally!
Will set unrealistic deadlines for herself and others.
May ignore others who contribute in a less energetic style.
Easily distracted from the routine.
Does not enjoy working or being alone for long periods.
Generates so many ideas that chaos often ensues.
Can appear insincere.

Value to the team:

Sees the “big picture”.
Creates considerable activity.
Can organise the social calendar.
Is seen as a good team builder.
Exudes high drive, direction and sociability.
Boosts self-esteem in others.
Brings a fresh outlook.
Is innovative and imaginative.
Leads by personal example.

When communicating with me do:

Keep the conversation lively.
Don’t be too serious, dull or severe.
Omit unnecessary and intricate details.
Provide for both flexibility and structure within the meeting.
Use colourful and bold language in conversing.
Maintain a positive and open stance.
Be spontaneous and harmonious.
Be clear on completion details.

When communicating with me, don;t:

Speak too slowly or hesitantly.
Be mundane, boring or dismissive.
Expect her to respond favourably if you dictate to her on policy or procedures.
Take issue with her demeanour or jaunty disposition.
Leave her out of the picture.
Limit her range or scope of activity.
Be dismissive of her feelings and emotions.
Appear slow, sluggish or too formal.

Open Education at OSCON 2008

Mark Surman — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:09:08 +0200

Danese Cooper has organized what promises to be an excellent conversation about open education at OSCON in Portland. Mark Shuttleworth will be part of the mix. Karien and I prepared some quick background notes for Mark re: what think is exciting in this space and the specific work we're doing. I figured it would be useful to share here:

1. A growing number of people are creating open, collaborative learning content. This is exciting. It not only increases access to knowledge, it also adds more creativity and collaboration to the classroom.

The Open Courseware Consortium now has 200 member universities

Leading sites like Connexions, Curriki and OER Commons house over 45,000 open educational resources

Commercial entrants like Flat World Knowledge are stepping in and driving innovation

2. While it draws on the values and techniques of open source, open educational content is different. That's the point of the Cape Town Declaration: to define the principles that should guide open education.

The Declaration calls for open approaches to content, technology and teaching

1600 people and 165 organizations have signed the declaration since January

Signatories include everyone from Jimmy Wales to Desmond Tutu to Peter Gabriel

3. It's also important to do bold, concrete experiments where we figure out the techniques that make open education work. That's why we're creating a set of free, collaborative textbooks for South African schools.

Will cover all core subjects in South African curriculum from k-12

Focus is not just free beer: the aim is to get teachers to create collaboratively

Helping to build a platform standard by working with Connexions at Rice University

Other open edu co-conspirators on the panel: Brian Behlendorf (who will hopefully talk about the super cool and disruptive Seneca / Mozilla open source course model); David Wiley (inventor of the first open content license and open ed super hero); and Bobbi Kurshan (fearless leader of the Curriki revolution). If you're going to OSCON next week, this panel is a must see. Sadly, I won't be there myself.

Kusasa project cancelled

Helen King — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:51:46 +0200

We are not afraid to take risks on new ideas or projects and we are not afraid to tell the world when they have gone wrong and failed. The Kusasa project has failed. Essentially we could not reconcile the original vision of the project with the practical realities we faced in South Africa.

We started the project, back in April 2006 with an incredible meeting (and sometimes clashing) of minds in London, we had Alan Kay of the Squeak project and Squeakland educational software platform, Guido van Rossum of Python fame, and James Dalziel of the LAMS project, to name but a few. We essentially decided that we wanted to produce children from the education system that could, as Mark Shuttleworth’s blog states:

Learn a set of tools quickly and efficiently. In life, the set of tools we apply to the problems we face changes every few years. So it’s not the specific SET of tools you learn, its the ability to grok a new toolset, figure out when to use, and do so efficiently that counts.

Break problems into simpler pieces, solve them using familiar tools. The whole process of analysis is about taking a big hairy problem that is new and unfamiliar, and teasing it into pieces that look solvable based on tools that you already know.

Put those simpler answers back together to make an answer to the big problem. This is the synthesis part - taking the results of your analysis and making them meaningful in the real world.

We also wanted this to be a programme that would be very easy to replicate and use as they wished. To be simple and easy, peer-to-peer taught and evaluated. To enable the teacher, not to be the holder of the domain specific knowledge, but to be able to facilitate the learning.

It has become apparent that the project success depends on teachers developing skills we did not initially anticipate and due to learner abilities the project used illustrated stories to introduce and role model effective thinking, which whilst the right thing to do, strayed from the original vision.

It is important to shout about our successes, and to acknowledge our failings and whilst the project has failed, the materials produced are fabulous and pedagogically sound. I would encourage those using them to continue to do so and those in environments that do not have the same constraints as we have to take them and add to them. You can find them on the website and are all licensed openly.

Whilst there have been a lot of people who have been key to driving this project forward, Sam Christie and the Bright Sparks team have been fabulous.

June 2008

Helen King — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:55:00 +0200

We are finally starting to get under the hood of the foundation. We have published the first in our ‘How we work’ series on Open Licensing and have been getting some great feedback. As we know, we are not perfect, but we do have a clear policy on what we want to do and very real ideas and opportunities to get there. Every agreement we enter into, be it with a service provider or in the form of a donation ensures all material and resources are open and will remain so, they are also free from technical protection measures.

We are now working on deconstructing our fellowship programme - watch this space.

Telecommunication

Helen King — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:54:34 +0200

Very excitingly, we hosted the first Village Telco workshop. It exceeded all expectations both in the calibre of the people attending and the very concrete outcomes that emerged. Details of the workshop and its results are on the newly hosted website. One key result of the workshop is a plan to create a new device that merges the functionality of a low-cost mesh access point and an analogue telephony adaptor (ATA).

The week following the Village Telco workshop, Steve and Jason attended another wireless workshop at CSIR, this time funded by IDRC and focus on creating a Wireless Africa Alliance that would network low-cost wireless entrepreneurs across Africa. The Village Telco and the results of the workshop got a very good reception.

Communication and Analytical Skills Development

Helen King — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:53:09 +0200

The Teachable Agents (TA) project is under way. In June two training sessions were held with natural science teachers as well as computer lab teachers from all of the participating schools. The teachers learned how to create concept maps using the Betty’s Brain TA software. The software has also been implemented at all of the schools.

Steve presented at the 3rd International Conference on eLearning 2008 conference in Cape Town on Kusasa: Developing analytical thinking skills. About 130 delegates from 20 countries attended the conference to share and discuss e-learning at school and tertiary education levels. The Kusasa presentation was well received. Two papers of particular interest to us: Developing Critically Thoughtful, Media-Rich Lessons in Science by Philip Balcaen of the University of British Columbia, Canada, and Technology-Assisted Reading for Improving Reading Skills for young South African Learners by Gerda van Wyk and Arno Louw, both from the University of Johannesburg.

Steve is currently overseas presenting at the ED-MEDIA 2008 (Austria) and Games, Learning and Society 2008 (USA) conferences.

On the Kusasa project we have seen a shift in emphasis from development of materials toward implementation. Much of the work during June has focussed on dealing with site-specific technical and organizational issues and on incorporating these learnings into our system approach.

The evaluation approach seeks to mirror the approach of Kusasa and correspondingly is developmental, iterative and continuous. Feedback is provided to, in the first instance, the Kusasa project team and to educators. Already this kind of feedback is proving valuable and has led to changes in the pacing and structure of the implementation design.

Technical efforts have focussed on understanding Edubuntu deployment scenarios and on improvements to the VMware virtual machine that we use for project deployment. The review group constituted to review new development work is now up and running and the first of these reviews has taken place. The material under review has been published on the project wiki.

Intellectual property rights

Helen King — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:52:32 +0200

During June the Foundation made detailed submissions on two draft Bills. As 2009 is an election year, South African government departments are attempting to put all their pending Bills through Parliament in the next term. As a result the next few months will be a very busy period of responding to legislation which affects access to knowledge.

The Foundation made a detailed submission, including draft wording, to the Department of Trade and Industry on exceptions and limitations to copyright for teaching and learning for inclusion in the Intellectual Property Amendment Bill before it is brought before Parliament.

The Competition Amendment Bill is currently before Parliament. The Foundation made a focused submission to the Parliamentary Committee on a single critical issue. The competition authorities should be given clear power to curb anti-competitive conduct in respect of intellectual property rights.

Shuttleworth IP Fellow Andrew Rens gave a keynote address on openness to the Workshop on Open Standards for XML documents in Government, organised by the Departments of Science and Technology and Home Affairs, held at the Tshwane University of Technology. Other notable speakers included Rob Weir, Co-Chair of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee, and Patrick Durusau, Editor of the OpenDocument Format (ODF).

It has been extensively covered in the press in South Africa and the DST has a coherent overview as does Tectonic.

In other open standards news, ISO put the standard for Microsoft’s OOXML document formats on hold in June. After member states, including South Africa, filed four complaints against the standardisation of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) document format, the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in Geneva have responded by postponing publication of
the revised specification. As the ISO announced, the planned ISO/IEC DIS 29500 cannot be published until these complaints have been heard.

Open and Collaborative Resources

Helen King — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:51:52 +0200

June was Cape Town Book Fair month. Mark Horner participated in a poster session where he presented some of our ideas on print aggregation. The presentation was very well received, with some saying the poster ’stood out for its sheer gumption’. We’ll keep you posted on how this plan unfolds.

Philipp Schmidt (Rip-Mix-Learn, UWC), Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Eve Gray (OpeningScholarship, UCT) have been sharing their findings and learnings from Rip-Mix-Learn and OpeningScholarship with the broader education community.

On 24 June Philipp and Cheryl (UCT) offered a pre-conference workshop on OER at the International Conference of e-Learning (ICEL) 2008. The workshop wiki will be on-going for at least a month after the conference.

On 27 June Cheryl presented a paper, Paradox, Promise and Problem: A Social Realist View of the Potential of Open Educational Resources at the University of Cape Town, at ICEL 2008. This paper was based on findings from the OpeningScholarship project.

Also on 27 June, in a different continent, Eve presented a paper on African Universities and the knowledge economy at ELPUB 2008 in Toronto.

Philipp attended the MIT Open Courseware Consortium (OCWC) meeting in April in China with our support. At this meeting Philipp was elected to the board of the OCWC. As part of our desire to share as much information and ideas as possible, Philipp wrote a blogged about his experience there and ideas for the future.

The Foundation along with partner OSI just launched Open Education News, a group blog, lead by David Wiley, which gathers, sorts, analyses, synthesises and disseminates news related to open education, much like Peter Suber’s Open Access News does for open access.

Peter describes Open Education News as a “welcome development. The Open Ed movement has needed this for a long time.” David’s introductory blog on Open Education News and Peter’s blog on the launch highlight the growing momentum in this area.

Yin-ing and yang-ing open everything

Mark Surman — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:00:11 +0200

Writing up Open Everything Toronto debrief notes, I realized that striking the right yin-yang between impressive and surprising examples of 'open' will be one of the most critical factors for future events.

Open now has it's fair share of large scale success. Linux. Apache. Wikipedia. 70 million CC photos on Flickr. While increasingly commonplace and obvious, these examples are unquestionably impressive. They show that open works.

On the flip side, we are seeing values and tactics commonly associated with open source trickle out into all sorts of new places. Embroidery. Tinkering. Office space. Teaching. Salad. These examples are surprising, and intriguing. They show that open is spreading.

Many people came to Open Everything expecting to talk about one or the other of these things. Our aim was to give them was a mashup of both. We succeeded most in the speedgeek sessions. At two ends of the impressive vs. surprising spectrum:

Creative Commons 101 - Speedgeek from Myles Braithwaite on Vimeo.

Marcus Bornfreund gave a super compelling but very basic talk on how
Creative Commons licensing works. Surprising? Not really. However,
Creative Commons is an impressive, established part of the open world
we are building. It illustrates some basic principles (remixing) and
tactics (hacking the law rather than waiting to rewrite it), ideas that
were new to many people at the Toronto event.

Unconferencing public policy from Myles Braithwaite on Vimeo.

Mark Kuznicki talked about 'unconferencing public policy'. Mark and
his fellow Metronauts are basically applying the BarCamp model to get
people involved in redesigning the Greater Toronto Area's transportation network. Impressive? Yes, but still small scale. Surprising? Absolutely, and also pushing the envelope.
With the Mentronauts TransitCamps, we see open culture and tactics
stretching not only beyond digital goods into real world processes
(this is BarCamp's claim to fame) ... but also beyond tech into public
policy.

The thing is: the impressive examples on their own can be boring.
Most of us have heard them all before. The surprising examples alone
are intriguing, but unproven and sometimes even trivial in the global scheme of things. Yet, when you look at large scale examples like Wikipedia side-by-side with the huge diversity of
emerging experiments, open everything comes to life. Something huge and multidimensional is
going on here. A playful yin yang dance between impressive and surprising helps to explain this. It makes it real, and understandable.

The Toronto dance wasn't perfect. The speedgeek
was good, but we could have used more of the 'surprising' in other
parts of the event. It was a bit too tech. Having called the question,
I don think this will be hard to improve on in future events. Of
course, new examples on the surprising side are always welcome. If
you've got 'em, post 'em.

May 2008

Helen King — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:09:00 +0200

May 2008 was a really great month at the Foundation. We went through what seemed like a spring clean of our thoughts, processes and communications.
We spent some time going into the next phase of our theory of change and, helped by our trusty designer Eugene, have started to make real progress on how we [...]

Telecommunication

Helen King — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:08:34 +0200

We continued working towards democratisation of the telecommunication infrastructure by defining and organising the key players and stakeholders in the Village Telco initiative together. We will have a workshop next month and have commitment from all to participate fully. This will be the first time they have all been together and we are very much looking forward to shaping the project further.

Connected Cities
Steve Song met with Leon Van Wyk, head of Telecommunications Department for the City of Cape Town and was hugely impressed with the progress, stating:

Cape Town is poised to become the leading city on the continent in terms of high speed information infrastructure. Let’s hope many others follow their model.

This was also his first (of many) post featured on Techleader.co.za.

During the last quarterly review with the Trustees, Mark expressed his wish to help find some real, concrete and effective changes that he could propose in the Presidential International Advisory Council (PIAC). Consulted widely, Steve has met with Tracey Cohen (ICASA Councillor) and Paris Mashile (Chair of ICASA) amongst others to validate ideas for policy change . We have some exciting ideas and the draft is being internally reviewed by the trustees before being proposed in the official forum. Once the proposal parameters have been defined we will open it up for review.

Steve and Jason gave a talk about the Village Telco and Freedom Toaster at the Bandwidth Barn , organised by CITI, attended by entrepreneurs, government representatives (local and national), and VeloCITI participants .

New blog postings

Tinkerless or tinker more?

How To Be Transparent in Fibre Optic Cable Deployment

Open edu-thing

Mark Surman — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:48:32 +0200

With Open Everything Toronto a week behind us, blog reflections, notes and photos are starting to trickle online. One of the highlights so far: Amanda Yilmaz's write up of the Seneca Open Source Course session.

David Humphrey and his colleagues at Seneca run a number of courses that throw computer studies students into the deep end of communities like Mozilla, Open Office and Fedora. They don't work on theoretical code. They work on the real thing with real open source contributors. From the notes ....

The biggest point of this Mozilla course is to show students the skills
they need to get into a large open source community. This is not quite
as chaotic as you may think. It starts with a look at the tools you
need to work in an open open source community. This includes some
technical skills, like how to develop for Mozilla and communicate using
IRC. But it's also about how to work within this big, distributed
meritocracy, how to function within this environment.

With help from interviewers Nora Young, Tonya Surman and Michele Perras, Dave provided an under the hood look at how these courses work ... and what students learn from working inside an open source community.

The practical benefits of Seneca open source course model are pretty clear. Students
learn the soft skills needed to work on large scale open source
projects, and distributed projects in general . They also get to
contribute to a real product that ships to tens of millions of people
(one of Dave's students wrote the animated PNG module for Firefox 3).
Mozilla, Open Office, et al get a small cadre of well briefed and
mentored young programmers to work on small tasks that no one else in
the community is picking up. It's a nice bargain all around.

However, the most interesting bit was Dave's riff on how these courses turn assumptions about teaching and learning totally on their head:

The key to teaching this course is being willing to humble oneself.
Mostly, I teach things I don't understand. I need to go in there and
show my students that I am willing to try things, fail and learn from
others. I need to show them how to be lost, how to drift, how to get
back on your feet. This is the experience they need to work in open
source. And it's an experience that I can't give them through the
'professor as expert' model.

and

Seneca can do this, whereas a school like Stanford can't. This is
because we are a pragmatic community college. Professors like me don't
need to focus on journal papers or use IEEE curriculum. We can focus on
teaching and learning.

What Dave and his colleagues have created is not just a nice co-op program. It is a radical and disruptive educational innovation. Using open source community and collaboration as a springboard, the Seneca model takes the teacher off the dais and throws him into the peer learning pit with his students. It also emphasizes experience (what did you learn from having your code ignored or rejected by the module owner?) over achievement (please hand in your coding assignment!). These are not things that most higher ed institutions value, or even tolerate. Yet, they are central to the way we learn and work in the 21st century.

For me, this is the big picture potential of the Seneca model: infecting higher education with open source ways of working and learning. Certainly, this is already happening across the open education movement. However, few people in open education have connected their day-to-day teaching into the rough and tumble world of a large scale open source software project. If we want to invent more open, participatory ways of teaching and learning, I suspect this sort of connection is worth a great deal.

Open everything. Right here. Right now.

Mark Surman — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:45:19 +0200

Today, Toronto kicks off Open Everything: a global series of six (or more?) events about the art, science and spirit of open. We've got 60 amazing people registered who come from computer programming, community development and everywhere in between. It's gonna rock.

If you are wondering what we're going to talk about, check out the Open Everything Toronto wiki or the list of speedgeeks. Also, you may be interested in my hastily compiled welcome notes:

Welcome. It is amazing to be in a room with 60 people willing to take an afternoon off to talk about the art, science and spirit of open. Really, this is something I could have only dreamed of a year ago. What's even better is that this is the first of six Open Everythings. Similar conversations are already planned for Berlin, Cape Town, London, Singapore and Cortes Island in Bristish Columbia. We are onto something very big and very important.

Let's start our conversation with a couple of questions. How many people here use Linux? How many have heard of Linux? How many have heard of Wikipedia? In the end, almost everyone. Linux and Wikipedia exemplify what we are hear to talk about today: the idea of openness. And, along with it, principles like transparency, participation, creativity, remixability, community.

The fact that these two very different things – an operating system and an encyclopedia – both embody these principles is not an accident. In the early 1980s, Richard Stallman and others started talking about something called 'free software'. Stallman wrote a definition that outlines four principles: the right to run, study, distribute and improve any piece of free software.

Famously these principles inspired projects like Linux and Wikipedia. They have also helped shape the open source software movement and, really, the Internet as a whole. But what isn't so famous is huge explosion of other endeavors built on open principles like these.

A few months ago, I looked on Google and Wikipedia for places where people were using the concept of 'open'. In 30 minutes I found about 15 examples. Obviously, some of these examples used 'open' was being well before the idea migrated from software: open systems; open societies; open standards; open space meetings. There are also fields that are taking their inspiration much more directly from things like Linux and Wikipedia: open education; open content; open innovation; open policy making; open design; open media; open philanthropy. And, then, there were a few surprises: open ethics; open religion; open fitness.

Some of this is fluff and fashion, of course. However, there are increasing examples of people very seriously and effectively applying open source thinking – intentionally and unintentionally – beyond software and encyclopedias. Here are three examples: The Open Architecture Network, an online community that shares building designs with the aim of creating low cost, innovative housing solutions for the world's poor. The MIT Open Courseware initiative and the Shuttleworth Foundation's own Siyavula project, which are using open source techniques to develop and share learning materials. And BarCamp, which is like an open source conference model for techies, making it easy for people to design events on the fly and for the model to be replicated in different cities around the world. You will hear about many more examples as a part of today's Open Everything event.

I asked someone why they wanted to come to open everything. The response: “I don't know, but I am violently intrigued.” That's a nice way of putting it. There is no question that the explosive growth of open source thinking is violently intriguing. So much so that I can't stop thinking about it.

However, I think we are ready for more than just intrigue. While still revelling in the playfulness of open, it's also time to admit that this is serious business. It is serious business that is genuinely (and quietly) reconfiguring economics, knowledge and power everywhere on the planet.

When I first started thinking and writing about this stuff less than 10 years ago, both Linux and Wikipedia were fringe phenomena. They were just for geeks. Now, Linux – a piece of software created by a loosely coordinated group of people spread around the world and working for single company – is edging into the mainstream. It not only powers a huge percentage of the computers that run the Internet, but it also serves a simple, low clutter operating system for mass market, low cost laptops now being introduced by companies Asus and HP. Even more clearly a mass success, Wikipedia is now in more than 250 languages with 2.3 million articles in English alone. This huge public asset was produced with money or the market. It was produced almost completely by volunteers driven by passion ... and a healthy dose of ego. The crazy open ideas of 10 years ago are the mainstream of today.

More important for today's conversation: we are not only seeing a growth in the number of areas where people are applying open source thinking, but we are also seeing some of these new experiments gain real traction. My favourite example is what open has done to photography. On Flickr alone, there are now almost 70 million photos under a Creative Commons license. Much of this is just pictures of my kids (literally, my kids). However, it also includes a ton of useful stuff that people can use for presentations, mash up into new media products or just put up on their wall. In terms of Education, MIT has not only put all it's curriculum up online, but that curriculum is being widely used and event adapted. OOPS in Taiwan is actively translating large quantities of MIT Open Courseware into Chinese. And, in meatspace, BarCamp, an intentionally amateurish and self organizing idea, has spread to every part of the world, from Azerbaijan to Malaysia to Slovakia. I looked at the BarCamp wiki today, and there are camp-like events already planned in over 90 cities for the second half of 2008. Just like Linux and Wikipedia, these Open Everythings are going mainstream.

As someone who thinks this is a good thing, I have two big questions: How will we know an Open Everything when we see one? and How can we do this better?

It's easy to pull out things like the Free Software Definition or the Open Source Definition to test if a piece of software is open. However, we can't just apply the same tests to a piece of architecture, or curriculum or public policy. We can't just say am I free to 'run' this law or this building. We need a set of principles broadly define the essence of open, and that we can apply much more broadly to the world. Having thought about it a bit, my guess is that the essence of open probably includes things like transparency, participation and remixability. But there are probably more and better words needed here.

Similarly, the best practices of running an open source community are becoming increasingly clear and well documented. Modular ownership. Good infrastructure for reporting bugs and submitting patches. Open and constant communication. All of these things are essential. And, only some of them work well when you port them over to areas of endeavour like education. From the business process perspective, we need to start asking what are some of the core techniques that work across different domains and what things are specific. We also need to look at ways to cross pollinate. My guess is that people skilled at facilitating open public policy process and open events have just as much to teach to open source communities as the other way around.

For me, these are two critical things to be thinking about: the essence and practice of open. We need to look for examples, identify patterns and share our approaches. As we go, we need to wikify, videotape and blog about what we're concluding. And, literally or figuratively, we probably need to write a book that explains the essence of open.

Our job here today – and my invitation to all of you – is to do exactly this: to help write the book on open everything. My promise and the promise of the people running other Open Everythings is to collect, share and steward the ideas that come up in these conversations. We want to take these ideas somewhere useful and inspiring, to loop back to you and to keep you involved. As a part of the bargain, your job is simple: think hard about Open Everything for the next few hours, and make some new friends while you are doing it.

We've got an amazing squad of bloggers and documenters for the event. Watch their progress on the Toronto wiki and on Flickr. I will also post highlights (plus a hypertexted version of the above) tomorrow. Should be fun. Spread the word.

April 2008

Helen King — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:59:00 +0200

At the Foundation, we aim to drive innovation, we pilot projects, we comment and cajole in policy discussions and we slowly move forward to a better, more connected, more educated and prosperous South Africa (and Africa and the world). There is rarely a silver bullet, more often than not elements of any initiative work [...]

Sharing without borders

Helen King — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:40:00 +0200

At the Foundation, we want to drive innovation in education and technology. How we get there is not such a simple statement. We work in removing barriers (internet that is too expensive, IP regimes that are too restrictive), accelerating great ideas (the Freedom Toaster, Open licences, OER’s), and investing in clever people (our [...]

Communication and Analytical Skills Development

Helen King — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 11:30:00 +0200

Steve is currently overseas presenting at the ED-MEDIA 2008 (Austria) and Games, Learning and Society 2008 (USA) conferences.

February 2008

Helen King — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 11:30:00 +0200

Structure:

Each monthly report will be broken up into 5 different posts. One general post about how we are and what we have been up to and 4 based on investment area (telecommunication, IPR, communication and analytical skills and open and collaborative resources). Each post will be tagged appropriately and all posts from the same month will be categorised as such (this month’s is February 2008).

Education trends:

Each month the Institute of Futures Research publishes a paper about developments in education or technology globally. This month’s Education Trends shows an alarming rate of attrition in the South African education system. Only about a quarter of those that enter the education system matriculate. Given the skills gap we are currently facing in this country, it does not bode well for the next generation.

When reading figures like this, it only strengthens my resolve that we must make systemic change. That is why it is imperative that we face this crisis and start to think about how to solve it, and think about how to solve it now. Building more schools, having feeding programmes and looking at security issues are all vital areas to intervene, yet they do not ask the tough questions. What next? What is beyond? How can everyone benefit? What sort of society are we building? We must allow those with potential and motivation, to have access to, and permission to use, information that could make a difference.

Intellectual Property Rights

Helen King — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 11:28:00 +0200

It has been extensively covered in the press in South Africa and the DST has a coherent overview as does Tectonic.

Open and Collaborative Resources

Helen King — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 11:26:00 +0200

Also on 27 June, in a different continent, Eve presented a paper on African Universities and the knowledge economy at ELPUB 2008 in Toronto.

Reporting meaningfully

Helen King — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 10:05:00 +0200

The Shuttleworth Foundation’s mission is to drive innovation in education and technology. Philosophically, we do that by: accelerating great ideas and removing barriers. Practically that means we pilot projects and pedagogies, and back excellent people to drive help drive our agenda.

The way we do business, entertain and educate has changed due to the communication afforded through technology. Shouldn’t everyone, including those that have the least (and hence the most to gain) be able to benefit?

Open is a very important word to us at the Foundation. Open source, open standards, open licenses, open access. Ultimately all of these things allow the developing world to participate in the wonderful knowledge economy that has transformed the worlds of those with access.

Currently we are focused on: telecommunications (everyone must have access to be able to participate), intellectual property (everyone must be able to participate legally and freely), open and collaborative educational resources (learners need to have access on their terms, and in their context) and communication and analytical skills (new skills that are needed to be able to participate meaningfully).

We believe that innovation happens within these areas quicker and more efficiently if we share. Regularly, those that are at our offices in Cape Town have lunch together to discuss an article, watch a TED talk (a recent and welcome addition), review books and ideas in these areas. We also use this time to debrief and solicit ideas from the team about particular issues. One such lunchtime concentrated on the first in a series of papers we are going to release about how we work. We will be highlighting our successful (and not so successful) processes and practises and inviting you to learn and help us learn in the process.

Out of that meeting, we began to focus on how we report on the activities within the Foundation. We report on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis (to internal stakeholders, trustees, and publicly, respectively). This involves a lot of thought about what has happened and some thought on what we have learnt from it – but not enough and not shared widely enough for anyone else to benefit.

With this in mind, I am going to start blogging the monthly reports. These reports are made up from all within the Foundation and is simply re-purposed to ensure they are readable. We hope you enjoy!