Newsletters/2

[okfn-announce] Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 2 Tue Jul 10 11:43:51 BST 2007

Welcome to the second Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter. Scroll below for information about:

* Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) * Guide to Open Data Licensing * Open Text Book * iCommons 2007

COMPREHENSIVE KNOWLEDGE ARCHIVE NETWORK (CKAN)

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Last week we launched the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN for short) which you can find at:

http://www.ckan.net/.

CKAN is a registry of open knowledge packages and projects — be that a set of Shakespeare’s works, a global population density database, the voting records of MPs, or 30 years of US patents.

CKAN is the place to search for open knowledge resources as well as register your own. Those familiar with freshmeat (a registry of open source software), CPAN (Perl) or PyPI (python package index) can think of CKAN as providing an analogous service for open knowledge.

We've got over 40 items listed so far. If you come across any useful open knowledge packages, or you maintain an openly licensed resource that you would like to share, we hope you consider registering it on CKAN.

CKAN 

GUIDE TO OPEN DATA LICENSING

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Over the last month we’ve been working to produce a Guide to Open Data Licensing. As the name should make clear this is a guide to licensing data aimed particularly at those who want to make their data open.

At present it is roughly divided into two sections. The first section deals with the practical question of how to license your data. The second section discusses what kinds of intellectual property-like rights exist in data in various jurisdictions.

This guide is very much in an ‘alpha’ state and we’d welcome corrections or contributions. So please, check it out and feel free to make changes!

Open Data Licensing 

OPEN TEXT BOOK

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We recently released Open Text Book, a place to list and keep track of news about textbooks that are open in accordance with the Open Knowledge Definition — i.e. free to use, reuse, and redistribute.

The recent iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia, saw many people express an interest in open text books. Information about the questions and issues raised can be found on the WikiEducator Free Textbooks page. Join the Free Culture freetextbooks mailing list if you want to get involved!

The domain name was kindly donated to us by Steve Coast of Open Street Map.

Open Text Book  WikiEducator Free Textbooks  Free Culture freetextbooks mailing list 

iCOMMONS 2007

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iCommons 2007 took place last month in Dubrovnik and brought together many free culture groups and open knowledge advocates from around the world. Our reflections on the conference can be found on our blog.

iCommons OKF blog post  iCommons 

FURTHER INFORMATION

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If you would like to know more about what we are up to, please take a look at our active projects page.

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

If you are interested in participating in any of the OKF's projects, please see our participate page, or join the OKF discuss list.

http://www.okfn.org/participate/ http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss

For further news and comments, see our blog:

http://blog.okfn.org