Free content roundup, 2007-12-18
Well, news is creating itself faster than one can write it down within Wikimedia at the moment, but I have no interesting comments to make yet so here are some pointers to interesting free content stuff happening elsewhere.
- Some SVG-map thing has been released, but it requires Internet Explorer, is not freely licensed, is documented in Japanese, and the demo picture causes IE to crash. So that whole exercise ended up being far less interesting than I’d hoped. (Does anyone know if there’s any crossover between these people and ja.wp?) [via svg.org]
- The Open Translation Tools event was recently held in Zagreb, Croatia, hosted by Aspiration Tech who do some interesting things, and I think have some connection to the enterprise wiki engine Socialtext, although at this time I can’t figure out what that connection is. Anyway, I have been on the mailing list for it and been insanely jealous and not attending, because it seems like it was an incredibly cool and interesting bunch of people who attended. And relevant, I might mention, to the translation challenges Wikimedia features all over the place. Hopefully next time…
- Looking for open content medical image databases? Best start at the midr.org wiki for describing them, then. [via Peter Suber’s Open Access News]
- One account of how to organise a conference program. (140+ submissions down to 64.)
- The ever-reliable Heather Ford has a iCommons 2007 wrap-up.
- There is something called the International Open Source Network which is nonetheless based in Asia, and is somehow supported by the United Nations Development Programme and maybe other people too. And Lawrence Liang has written an open content primer for them. At 30-odd pages it’s not a light read, but it is very readable: it covers copyright myths, has historical anecdotes, a table comparing textbook prices in Indonesia to the United States (relativising the prices according to each country’s GDP, textbooks in Indonesia are roughly ten times as expensive compared to the US, so for an Indonesian buying a textbook that costs around $90 in the US, it is as if an American was paying over $1000 – how accessible is that education?). There is a case study comparing Wikipedia to some traditional fonts of knowledge. Overall it has an excellent global perspective so I think it is well worth a flick through; I doubt any Wikimedian would not learn something new from it. (And it’s CC-BY! :D) IOSN also has a collection of FOSS primers and if they are anything like this one they should be very useful. [via Open Access News]
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