Matc2007 Proposal

= Mellon Award Technology Collaboration 2007 Proposal =

TableOfContents

The proposal was submitted and can be viewed at: http://matc.mellon.org/2007_nominations/the-open-knowledge-foundation/kforge

KForge
KForge is an open-source (GPL) system for managing knowledge and software projects, catered to facilitate collaboration and information sharing. Rather than reinventing the wheel it reuses existing best-of-breed tools such as Subversion (versioned storage), Trac (task tracking), MoinMoin (wiki), Wordpress (weblog/CMS), integrating them with the system's own facilities (projects, users, permissions). It also provides a complete web interface for project administration as well as a fully developed plugin system so that new services and features can be easily added. Its code has been publicly available since mid-2005, and since its first official release in December 2005 it has been regularly updated with the latest major release (0.12) in January 2007.

Implementations
It was originally conceived to support KnowledgeForge, a free open knowledge service which hosts a variety of projects including:


 * 5GB of UK Parliamentary data accumulated by theyworkforyou.com and publicwhip.com (popular websites promoting understanding of the British political process)
 * Geodata and geospatial metadata management tools
 * The largest open repository of cave surveying data in the world
 * A complete open set of Shakespeare's works along with ancillary material, a variety of tools and a python API
 * A collection of works by Ivo of Chartres maintained by members of Cambridge University, West Texas A&M University, with support from the Stephan Kuttner Institute for Medieval Canon Law, University of Munich.
 * The Public Domain Works database maintained by Free Culture UK, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Open Rights Group.

KForge has been reused in other software projects, such as the development of an application to assist with brain scan research at the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University.

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN)
Kforge was developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation, through a mixture of work from its volunteers and supporters, and around $20k over two years from philanthropic funding sources. The Open Knowledge Foundation is a small not-for-profit organisation dedicated to promoting open access to information. KForge is part of its strategy to develop core infrastructure for open knowledge producers, users and consumers. This strategy includes intitatives such as the Open Knowledge Definition and CKAN (the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network) -- a registry of Open Knowledge packages.

Community, Collaboration and Leadership
An ethos of collaboration is at the core of the Open Knowledge Foundation, in its day-to-day operations and within its long-term roadmap. The Foundation recently organised the Open Knowledge 1.0 conference in London, which brought together academics, civil servants, and representatives from media groups and NGOs to discuss the social, technological and legal aspects of open knowledge -- particularly focusing on componentisation and reuse.

Its various projects are instigated and supported by a community of developers and knowledge specialists committed to meritocracy and openness. Its advisory board includes Dr. Tim Hubbard, head of the Ensembl genome annotation project (Sanger Institute and European Bioinformatics Institute); Paula Le Dieu, Director of Open Media at Magic Lantern Productions (ex-Director of Creative Commons International); Professor Peter Murray-Rust, co-creator of the Chemical Markup Language and research group leader at the Department of Chemistry, Cambridge University; John Naughton, Professor of Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University; Professor Peter Suber, Senior Researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC); and Benjamin Mako Hill, researcher at MIT media lab and longtime active member of the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community.

The future of KForge
The Open Knowledge Foundation is committed to the continuing improvement of the KForge system and of the associated KnowledgeForge service. However at present the Foundation does not have the financial resources to directly fund development work, and thus the project's progress is dependent on the voluntary efforts of of the Foundation and the wider KForge user community. An award from the Mellon Foundation would be an invaluable contribution to increasing the pace of progress and would enable work to commence on extending and improving database support, as well as on planned new features such as distributed storage of large datasets, plugins for a wider variety of versioning systems and integration with the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network.

Further Information
KForge KnowledgeForge The Open Knowledge Foundation

Criteria

 * 1) Is in public release (not just development) as an open source project, with source code actually available
 * 2) * OK. Code in public repository since mid 2005, first official release (0.9) in Dec 2005 and 0.12 released in January 2007
 * 3) Provides a direct and demonstrably significant benefit to one or more of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s traditional constituencies. These constituencies are: higher education, with a special emphasis on the arts and humanities; libraries and scholarly communications; performing arts; conservation and the environment; or museums and art conservation.
 * 4) * KForge: several groups using it
 * 5) * KForge runs http://www.knowledgeforge.net/ which currently hosts:
 * 6) ** publicwhip/theyworkforyou datasets
 * 7) ** sesame: cave data
 * 8) ** Ivo of Chartres data
 * 9) ** public domain works database (OKF + Open Rights Group + Free Culture UK)
 * 10) ** geometa: Jo Walsh (osgeo ...)
 * 11) Meets the Foundation’s strict standards for excellence
 * 12) Includes the development of intellectual property that is freely available to the academic community under one of the approved open source licenses.
 * 13) * GPL

[snip]

Nominees will be evaluated based on the importance to our constituencies of the open source project being supported and the importance of the organization’s support to the success of the project. Preference will be given to projects that benefit more and larger constituencies, demonstrate exceptional promise or performance, and meet particularly urgent needs. Furthermore, preference will be given to organizations whose relationship with an open source project exhibits some or all of the following characteristics:


 * Successful recruitment of organizational partners into a sustained, collaborative development relationship
 * Appropriate Software Foundation?
 * Successful efforts to increase the benefits of the project by integrating or collaborating with other open source development projects, including the adoption or encouragement of open standards
 * Reuse of core code developed in other projects e.g. scanbooker for MRC/CBU (and maybe now Berkeley)
 * Strategic contributions playing unusually creative or vital roles in beginning, sustaining, or completing the project
 * Initiated project, long-term vision ...
 * Voluntary assumption of a recognized leadership role in the implementation or governance of the project
 * Project initiators

Nomination Ideas
Sections:
 * 1) Overview (what the project is)
 * 2) OKF's role
 * 3) Relate to the Criteria

1. Overview

 * See http://www.okfn.org/kforge/overview/
 * http://www.kforgeproject.com/
 * Originally conceived to support the knowledgeforge.net service it was designed for easy independent reuse for software and knowledge development projects.

OKF's role

 * Instigated project
 * Some funding and own volunteer effort
 * Project vision

Relation to Criteria
...