Author Archive for Elena Blanco

Top 10 IP and licensing tips when licensing open data and open content

Published by Elena Blanco on August 8, 2011 in Guest and Legal. 0 Comments

This guest post has been contributed by Naomi Korn and is based on a series of 10 Minute Blog entries that Naomi has written for the JISC funded OER IPR Support project, for which she is the Project Director. Naomi is the co-author, together with Charles Oppenheim of Licensing Open Data: A Practical Guide.

Editor’s note: This post addresses IP issues surrounding open data and open content rather than open source software. Whilst open data and content is outside OSS Watch’s remit it is, of course, pertinent to the world of open source software and we welcome Naomi’s thoughts and expertise.

1.    Identify the IPR and other legal issues which maybe associated with the data and content you wish to license. For example, even if there are no underlying IPR issues in your data and content, you may be constrained by contractual terms and conditions underpinning the supply of data etc. from third parties to you. You can read more about this at http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/Projects/TransferandUseofBibliographicRecords.aspx

2. Don’t forget to identify all the layers of rights. There may be more than one layer of copyright materials, other types of IP (such as Performers’ rights) as well as other legal issues (such as Data Protection etc) which will need identifying and managing.

3. Decide how ‘open’ you wish to license your data and content. Issues that may need to be addressed include: – controlling use for non commercial uses only vs. allowing commercial exploitation by third parties and encouraging BCE etc – requirements for attribution vs. the resulting possibility of attribution stacking – controlling reuse and repurposing but sacrificing potential interoperability when blending with content, data as well as software licensed under more open terms.

4. Remember that the more ‘open’ the use and repurposing of your content and data, the greater the risk if you have not cleared all the rights.  This is particularly pertinent for in copyright materials for which the rights holders are either unknown or cannot be traced (so called ‘orphan works’). In these situations, the OER IPR Support Risk Management Calculator can be used to establish an indicative risk score which can be used to help inform decisions relating to risk management.

5. Risk Management is increasingly important in the provision of access to open content where it may not be clear who created what and who owns what rights (if any). An organisation’s relationship to risk management should be supported from the bottom-up, by a realistic understanding of the nature of the work and its proposed use, and by the top-down recognition that an organisation’s understanding and acceptance of necessary risks, needs to be agreed, captured in policies and where possible, mitigated. This is an important component in the development of an appropriate corporate governance framework to support the delivery of open content and open data.

6. Consider how the licensing of your data and content relates to the licensing of other types of materials such as open source software, and whether one broader licence, such as the Open Government Licence which covers data, software, content etc might be more beneficial than multiple licences.

7. Clear permissions with any third parties (as per 1 above), making sure that permissions that are sought are either the same or more than the permissions that you then grant under your selected open licence – never less! The support video profiled on the OER IPR Support webpages can provide more insight about this issue.

8. Remember, open licences are often irrevocable, global and in perpetuity, so make sure that you are happy with what you intend to do with your data and content before you licence it out. Worst case, openly licensed resources can be removed from the web etc., but permissions granted up to that point cannot be revoked.

9. Get permissions in writing, such as emails etc from any third party rights holders. Verbal permission is not adequate.

10. Extract key information relating to third party permissions and store in a suitable system which is centrally accessible to prevent the ’siloing’ of core rights management information. This is particularly important if projects are funded for a specific period time, such as JISC Projects, but where the permissions to use the materials may be subject to certain limitations and/or crediting requirements etc, as well as ensuring that there is a place to record rights holders contact details in case further contact is required.

OSS Watch Open Source Junction 2, Oxford, 5-6 July 2011

Published by Elena Blanco on July 19, 2011 in Business, Community, Event and Mobile technology. 1 Comment

This guest post was written by Sam Jordison, who also wrote the live blog at Open Source Junction 2.

Following on from the platform built at Open Source Junction 1, this two day conference at Wolfson College Oxford developed the theme of industry-academia collaboration on open source mobile technologies. The focus this time was on  context-aware mobile technology.

So what is context-aware mobile technology? Over the course of the two days, there arose a number of interesting definitions taking the notion of context beyond the simple idea of location based services and into the lives of end-users, taking into account such things as their emotional state, habits, patterns of social interaction and the way they use their time.

In a talk entitled ‘Context Aware Applications: Industry Landscape And Commercial Opportunities’, Nick Allott, the founder of Nquiring Minds Ltd, said context was ‘all about probabilities’ and relationships, good examples being Amazon’s suggestions that ‘if you like X then you’ll like Y’ or the idea that if your friend installs a security system, you are more likely to trust it. Julian Harty, ‘tester at large at eBay’, in his talk ‘Smartphones In Context’, asked delegates to think in terms of interaction with the outside world. ‘Do you know how many sensors your smartphone has?’ he asked. The answer he said was almost certainly likely to be more than 10; including a light sensor, a sound sensor, a compass, rotation detection, accelerometers, GPS. All of these sensors work with the context in which they are placed – and can be used to create new contexts. Elsewhere, the idea of context was touched on in talks also encompassing business and academic integration, licensing, best practice in running open source projects, financial issues, dealing with huge amounts of data  – and ensuring that  data sources are reliable.

Context, it seems, is a broad issue – but the over-riding theme was the importance of engagement; whether that be with other programmers and contributors on open source projects through mailing lists, or between developers and the wider public. Such engagements have the power to change the world – and the way we see it. More particularly, the aim of the conference was to foster engagement between industry and academic people, to help them understand each other’s interests in context-aware mobile technologies.

One of the main ways this latter aim was encouraged was in show-casing a diverse range of projects and ideas from both industry and academic speakers through a wide range of presentations. Indeed, the very first presentation from Gabriel Hanganu tackled the idea head on. He acknowledged that there are perceived barriers between the worlds of academia and business, especially relating to the different drivers in each sphere. Profit and practical production motivate business. Ideas, research and journal production push academics. But Gabriel pointed out that academics are not as slack when it comes to entrepreneurial thinking as is often supposed -  while business can really profit from academic thinking. There is plenty of common ground – and when it comes to software development, the practices and procedures relating to open source can help bridge gaps. (More on that later.)

Roland Harwood, co-founder of 100% Open built on this idea of the usefulness of partnerships with his talk about open innovation collaboration. He highlighted a large number of examples of successful collaborations, and showed how even traditionally less open companies like Lego have benefited by enabling a broad community to use their code, and unleash their creativity. Mindstorms, thanks to its fan built ideas, has now become Lego’s best selling product.

As well as generating nifty new revenue streams, new technology can also provide a fascinating new insight into the way the world works. Steven Gray from the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis gave a fascinating run through his work on a number of game-changing projects, the most famous of which is Tweet-O-Meter, a program that uses geo-location data from Twitter to show when and where people are sending tweets. The data can be aggregated around maps to show interesting things. So, for instance, in London they can trace where there are roadworks and traffic jams because people are tweeting about them. They have also spotted that people tweet a lot on railway lines and at Heathrow airport as they take off and land and that parks are particularly free of activity during winter. They can see cities waking up and sleeping. CNN used the meter during the Japanese tsunami to show how people reacted to the news (since lots of people in Tokyo used their mobiles as landlines were down). They could also see the news spread to San Francisco.

Another clear demonstration of how mobile technology can be used to trace events in the physical world came in the form of the Nature Locator, described by Mike Jones  from The Institute of Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol. This emerged from a JISC-funded project that facilitated development of an Android and iOS apps to support citizen science. The app allows members of the public to submit photographic and geo-location evidence of leaf damage by a non-UK-native moth to the Conker Tree Science project – and has generated masses of important and useful scientific data.

The useful practical applications for such technology were clearly demonstrated by Serge Pawlowicz from the Centre of Geospatial Science in the University of Nottingham and his talk on a Particpatory HealthGIS that uses geospatial data and public participation surveys to help in all kinds of health research, for instance, tracing the sources of viruses. ‘It works!’ he said.

Ben Butchart, an experienced software engineer from EDINA (a JISC-funded national academic data centre providing online data services to academic institutions) continued this theme, explaining that the uses of HTML5 caching technology has opened up all kinds of new possibilities for developing useful technologies for geo-dependent projects (such as geology projects) even in isolated locations where signals are unreliable. At the other end of the spectrum, Tim Fernando gave an overview of how useful context-aware technology can be to residents of Oxford, and the success of Mobile Oxford, a campus-wide mobile service providing information on everything from bus times to library book availability to gigs.

Such projects can also be extended to provide useful information to and further engage with the wider public (end-users) by inviting them to contribute to location-based media platforms. So said Mick Lockwood from Salford University who demonstrated this in his talk about Maxamundo. He explained that using OpenStreetMap and a range of open source software, and getting user contributions helped him become ‘able to fulfil a dream’ even if he was just an ‘amateur hobbyist’. He’s now built up a detailed overview of Manchester and its attractions (a great many of which appear to be pubs) and the Maxamundo platform even becomes the subject of a sociological project. This latter project was run by Yuwei Lin, also from Salford University, who gave a fascinating account of the way it worked against open source development methodologies after Mick had finished speaking, explaining that Maxamundo has started to fulfil many of the functions of social networking sites, contextualise city lives, and re-order personal stories on a map.

The conference even explored the imaginary plane as well as showing so much about mapping the real world. Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis described how Wikitude, an augmented reality app that overlays virtual images and information over the real world (as revealed in, for instance, smartphone camera viewers), has the potential to alter the way we interact with, well, everything. Current uses include navigation devices for driving and 3D gaming, but the potential is limited only by the imagination of the huge community that can be harnessed to create new ‘worlds’ to overlay the context provided by the phone.

Elsewhere, one of the most impressive examples of context-aware engagement came from Samuel Carlisle and his colleague Matt Gaffen and their talk about Sukey. Sukey, we were told, exists to keep demonstrators safe and mobile during protests. It was created in 2010 in the aftermath of the occupation of UCL and most particularly in response to the police tactics used during that winter’s student protests, whereby protestors were ‘kettled’ for long periods of time and had their freedom of movement restricted. (The name comes from the nursery song, ‘Polly put the kettle on, Sukey take it off again’.) Sam said that they started putting out maps of protests that started giving them upwards of 60,000 hits in just a few hours – which inspired them to produce a proper app.

Using information crowd-sourced from the app, alongside information in Twitter streams, Sukey attempts to put out the most relevant and useful material surrounding demonstrations. So, for instance, they show where the police are forming kettles, where streets are blocked and also provide compass directions designed to help people on the ground get out of trouble. It’s run by volunteers in their spare time and it’s not for profit, so the use of community engagement was vital in making it work… And work it did; providing helpful information to thousands of protestors, and even acting as a conduit for advice and information from the police themselves. The application also received widespread media coverage and helped inform the wider ongoing debate about police tactics. A clear demonstration of just how quickly and effectively free-at-point-of-use software can change our society.

Many of these projects are already successful and those in their infancy are already demonstrating real potential, but at Open Source Junction 2 there was no shying away from the challenges they face. Speakers made it clear that taking contributions from large numbers of people – whether they be citizen scientists or developers sharing in an open source project – is not always easy. The team behind Sukey, for instance, have to dedicate a lot of energy to combating spam and false information. The Nature Locator has had to deal with a lot of incorrect data. Checks and balances are going to play an increasingly important role, it seems. W3C fellow Dave Raggett, meanwhile, highlighted the fact that ’simplicity is hard’, explaining the need for good communication paths based on trust relationships, an easier way to manage security and logins across a number of platforms than we have at the moment and suggesting, cleverly, that it would be better if users could check the credentials of the website – as well as the website checking them out and for there to be support for pseudonymous identities that reflect the real world. No easy tasks – although we can at least take solace from the knowledge that he and others are working on them.

It was also emphasised that open innovation isn’t a panacea in every case. It can offer a fantastic way to cut costs, save time and maximise the potential of developers. Ross Gardler outlined a number of open source business models that can help you make sure ‘your company doesn’t go bust because it’s spending so much maintaining software’, ensure long term sustainability for projects and ideas, and open up many opportunities for commodotisation. But it was also emphasised that there are all kinds of procedures to follow and tough decisions to make to ensure the smooth running of projects – and that they remain sustainable in the long term. Just how careful projects have to be to follow the correct processes was clearly demonstrated in talks from Sander van der Waal concerning best practice relating to open source projects (emphasising the need to have a good management structure in place, transparent updates and progress reports via mailing lists) and a look into the complications surrounding patents, licences, Intellectual Property Rights and European law from Rowan Wilson.

In spite of such challenges, another clear advantage of open source development became clear over the course of the two days – how much it can help in academic and business collaborations, just as Gabriel had hinted in his opening talk. Camille Baldock from Softwire explained to me that while there is plenty of desire in the business world to tap into the academic knowledge base and expertise, such collaborations remain rare, thanks to perceptions about the different cultures and priorities found in the two ‘tribes’. But, as Gabriel  repeatedly stressed during the day, in software projects, developers can offer an alternative common ground in the form of the clearly defined work practices associated with open development.

Another thing that wasn’t in doubt at the end of the conference was how much participants did have to give each other. The ’speed dating’ session invited delegates to write down three things they could offer a potential partner  – and three things they wanted in return. Ross Gardler got the ball rolling. He offered: a wide network from working in real open source, guidance on sustainable models, and practical experience on making things happen. He said he wanted: real projects before they go to market, innovation companies to work with, and introductions to more useful people. There followed a fast and furious twenty minutes with a huge array of services offered and requested. Offers included, contacts and development from the London Mobile Developer community, an open invite to hackdays – including organising them, a strong network for industrial partners in the telecoms, students and resources, expertise in security, 3D Printing knowledge and (let’s not forget!) another conference in September – TransferSummit, co-organised by OSS Watch. Wants included, ideas and products to sell, the promotion of open source, partners, funding opportunities, opportunities for future consortia.

These connections were further aided by the format of the event, with numerous other such interactive sessions built in. As well as the ‘offers and wants’ session, delegates were invited to ’self pitch’, giving a 45 second overview of their mobile app’s interests and invite feedback. They also took part in a ‘3 minute joint venture’  session in which they were invited to pair up with someone they hadn’t yet talked to and spend three minutes coming up with an idea for a joint venture. (Highlights included a mashup of eBay and location-based sales, using targeted marketing on people walking down the street, and AID – Am I Dying – a mix of a virtual patient project in St George’s with an intelligent clothing company… ). There was also plenty of space for informal conversations over breaks, drinks and dinner saw many start to form those connections.

In short, there were many successful interactions building from the platform established at the first Open Source Junction. Even the fact that the attempt to put geo-location technology into practice on a country walk resulted in all delegates getting soaked in a rain storm and two chased by a bull didn’t dampen spirits. People were exchanging details, forming links throughout the two days and I’m told many are discussing opportunities in more detail now. There was the feeling that a community was forming. Let’s hope it continues to grow and prosper, and watch out for the next OSJ3 planned for November.

An open letter to OSS developers: thank you!

Published by Elena Blanco on May 23, 2011 in Community and Guest. 0 Comments

This guest post is contributed by Donna Reish, who writes on the topic of best universities.

Dear OSS developers,

I wanted to write to say thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for the hours you put into your projects. Thank you for developing them and updating them. Thank you for keeping them free! And thank you for thinking up and creating the tools that make my job easier.

As a freelance writer, I cannot earn a living without having excellent tools: a working computer, pens and paper, internet access, image-editing abilities, and a word processor. The health of my business depends on how well these tools work for me as I complete my projects.

At the same time, I’m appalled by the cost associated with some of the options out there. Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Office Suite are both quite expensive, and I have a hard time justifying diverting my money to pay for those when my income is already squeezed as tightly as it is.

Instead, I have found that products created as openly as possible and provided for free have done wonders for my business. I’m speaking, most specifically of course, about OpenOffice.org, which, as you well know, has a writer program that more than allows me to accomplish all of my basic writing tasks.

I think one of the beautiful things about open source applications, like OpenOffice’s word processor, is that they integrate with other applications almost seamlessly. In the case of word processors, I can save a document that I’m working on in such a way as to allow someone with Microsoft Word to read and edit it just as easily. When I coordinate with my clients, I don’t have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to make the file a certain kind in order to help them read it or edit it. As someone who doesn’t quite know how computer programming works, I treat such compatibility like a miracle on earth!

Another open sourced application that I’ve found incredibly helpful for my freelancing business is GTD-free, an open sourced productivity application that basically helps me implement the ‘getting things done’ method of personal productivity management. When I freelance, I often juggle multiple projects, many of which have different deadlines and requirements. I need to have a great method of keeping all of it tracked in one place. I used to use a Moleskine notebook, but I found that the exercise of constantly writing down things was getting to be a task in and of itself. The switch to this application made my life so much easier.

Finally, I know I owe open source developers a lot, but if you have better suggestions regarding productivity apps, feel free to share your comments! I’ve been really happy so far with the tools I’m using, but I’m always looking for ways to improve.

Anyhow, these are some of the real world benefits for which the work you do is indirectly responsible! Thank you again.

Sincerely,
Donna Reish

Editor’s note: Donna’s letter is an excellent example of someone acting in the evangelising role. The evangelist is an important role within an open source community and is discussed, along with all the other community roles, in the OSS Watch briefing note ‘Roles in open source projects‘.

Daniel Pink’s Drive: open source model is key to future development

Published by Elena Blanco on November 16, 2010 in Business, Community and Guest. 0 Comments

This guest post is contributed by Alvina Lopez, who writes on the topics of accredited online schools.

What continues to surprise me most about open source software (OSS) development is how the particular mindset OSS embodies has seeped into an incredibly diverse range of discussion that transcends software itself. Daniel Pink’s latest book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is the latest example of how OSS has served to concretely demonstrate truths about human behavior.

The basic gist of Pink’s book is that business models of the 20th century have it all wrong in terms of what drives employees to perform better. Pink argues that for workers whose jobs require creative skills the kind of work that represents an increasing majority of jobs in America and the UK now that repetitive tasks are being more frequently outsourced, money is a poor motivator. Rather, by delving into the latest research in neuroscience and behavioral science, Pink suggests three things that motivate creative production: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Pink defines autonomy as having greater freedom at work. Given the chance to be self-directed, Pink demonstrates, workers will approach tasks they’ve designed themselves with greater enthusiasm. Pink cites the company Google, which requires that all employees spend 20% of their time working on whatever they feel like doing. Google has noted that some of the company’s most innovative ideas have grown out of their 20% rule. Mastery, according to Pink, is the desire to become highly skilled and knowledgeable in a specific skill or set of skills for its own sake. The final piece of the motivation puzzle is purpose: knowing that what you are spending your time doing is reaping tangible benefits for others.

When looking at Pink’s scheme, it comes as no surprise that he offers the open source software revolution as the golden model of true human motivation in action. Those of you in the OSS camp know full well the personal fulfilment derived from working on a project in which you are given an opportunity to join a community, collaborating with others freely and openly, working on your own time to master your craft, and helping others out in the process.

Although many open source software developers subscribe to the open source mindset, Pink points out that few look at the bigger picture. In an interview published on OpenSource.com, Pink noted:

‘I think that people who are involved in open source sometimes don’t realize how extraordinary it is. [...] If you had presented it in business school to some strategy professor saying, “I’ve got this new business model for creating software, and here is how it goes: A bunch of people around the world who don’t know each other get together and work for free. And these are highly skilled, technically able people who decide to do really tough, sophisticated work for free, and they give away their product”, it would have seemed ludicrous. And the fact that it worked and it worked so well, and the fact that it has challenged if not toppled other software products that are created in the more conventional way, ought to give us some hints about how we structure firms, how we organize workers, and I think deep down what really motivates people to do amazing things.’

In the final analysis, Pink’s book about motivation demonstrates why OSS is so successful, and how the model can inspire and inform both businesses and individuals seeking fulfillment through work. It’s an engaging read that will remind you why and how OSS plays such a pivotal role in the development of expanding human capability.

Guest post: Paul Anderson interviews Jono Bacon

Published by Elena Blanco on November 3, 2009 in Community, Event and Guest. 3 Comments

This post is by Paul Anderson, EPSRC Computer Science Writer of the Year 2007.

Jono Bacon is the community manager for Ubuntu, a popular distribution of GNU-Linux. Based on his experience Jono has just written a book, published by O’Reilly but available under a Creative Commons Licence, about community and open source. Originally from England, these days he is based near Berkeley, California. Paul Anderson from Intelligent Content caught up with him on a recent visit to London.

Q: You’ve just published a new book, The Art of Community, what’s the key message you are hoping to get across?

The Art of Community essentially teaches the reader how to build a productive and enjoyable open source community. It starts with a bird’s eye view of the social science behind the concept of ‘community’ and then gets into how to build a strategy for a particular community. The book then delves into each of the elements that go into the delivery of that strategy such as processes, governance, tools, running events, dealing with conflict, and how to hire a community manager.

Q: So why is the idea of community so important for open source?

I think that there are ethical benefits and there are pragmatic benefits. The ethical benefits of working through a community seem fairly obvious to me. They are things like it helps to reduce elitism, providing an opportunity for everyone to get involved, and it provides opportunities for people to gain experience. On the pragmatic side, a community that has been harnessed effectively can deliver some really interesting things. For example, on one of the projects I worked on we decided to open it up for translations [of the documentation] and within two weeks we had 17 languages.

Q: In the book you argue that a ’sense of belonging’ is important.

Yes. The way we build community is to create a sense of belonging. When people feel that sense of belonging in the community then they feel like they are part of something, they feel it is their ‘place’, their home. And when they have that they feel like contributing back to the community.

Meritocracy is very important part of this. This is where people build up reputations based on the merit of what they actually do. It is the only way that a distributed community can really work. When anyone is in a meritocratic environment they fundamentally feel a sense of principles and they really treasure the premise of equality.

Q: Ubuntu operates a code of conduct. This seems to be an important thing to get right.

When you build a community the first thing you need to do is build a set of principles. You need to say this is the culture that I want to instil and for open source software that means a culture of openness and transparency with freedom to contribute. You want people to be respectful and polite but not too restricted in their communications with each other.

The Code of Conduct we have in the Ubuntu community is essentially to provide a charter of reasonable interactions. So what it does is say: ‘every contributor to Ubuntu should follow this conduct’. It is a very basic set of ‘don’t be an idiot’ instructions. I believe that documents like this can hold tremendous value and it is held in very high regard in the Ubuntu world. This kind of thing helps build a sense of belonging.

Q: This raises the issue of managing the community, or as you describe it in the book, ‘Governance’.

Governance is having some kind of official structure that takes decisions on behalf of the community, like a Management Board or a Council. One of the mistakes that a lot of communities make is to believe that they need an explicit and very expansive governance structure in place, otherwise they are not real community. And this is not true.

Ubuntu has quite an expansive governance structure in place. We have a community Council and a tech Board at the top, and then various team councils that report to them. But this is because the Ubuntu community is huge and we need this to deal with the scale of what we’re doing. If you’re a smaller project you just don’t need that.

Q: You also talk at length about process workflows and tools.

Yes, I think it’s really important to get this right. On the workflow side of things the focus is on identifying ways in which people can work together on common problems, for example bug tracking. How do you handle bugs? How does the team triage them when they come in? Who fixes them? All these are part of the community workflow, they are really important and the book has a lot of ‘hands on’ stuff about these issues.

I think that tools need to be applicable to do the job. One of the problems for a lot of communities is that they want to have something like a public website, so what they’ll do is agree that they need a website, but then have a long and drawn out debate about which content management system they should use. What happens is that they spend more time bickering about tools than actually doing something good like having a basic project website and actually getting people to visit it.

What I recommend in the book is that they just pick something, it doesn’t matter too much what that is. In a year’s time they will want something different. The first six months of a community is the most critical time and a team needs to be built – a sense of excitement, a sense of belonging needs to be built up. You don’t get that by spending the time bickering about tools like a CMS.

Q. Widening things out a little, where do you see the general situation with open source today?

I think we are in good shape. What we are doing is building a new IT industry with open source, building a new approach to software and I think we have made tremendous progress. Just look at Linux. I first got involved in 1998 and we have made so much progress in the intervening years. I look back to those days when I actually needed a soldering iron and a steady hand to get Linux working on my PC! We have made huge progress in terms of writing software, making it useful and integrating it with systems.

This week is Ubuntu Open week which includes a series of tuition sessions and the whole ubuntu community is joining in. If you’re interested in getting a taste of what’s involved, now is the time to see for yourself. 

Feast or famine

Published by Elena Blanco on July 7, 2009 in Community and Development. 0 Comments

Sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking that OSS Watch publication production line has stalled. It can seem like we haven’t published any of our own material on the website  for a while even though we have been blogging.  And then a few articles pop out in quick succession. Take the last four weeks for example.  We have published a case study on EduApps, a case study on TexGen, a substantial article on the open development method, and a report from an OSSWatch workshop looking at business and sustainability models around free and open source software. Why has there been a recent flurry of publications?

Very early on in OSS Watch’s history we decided that we would take the quality of our written outputs very seriously, perhaps more seriously than anyone expected us to.  All documents that we write adhere to a stringent authoring and publication workflow that has been designed to offer the best quality assurance that we can muster.  Some of our documents are drafted by one individual, others are written collaboratively from the start.  Some others are commissioned from external authors.  However all documents move to final draft status collaboratively, all members of the team comment on the first draft and the document is refined iteratively until consensus is achieved.  And this is where the process takes as long as it takes and, as a result, you may observe a famine if several documents are moving through this iterative process.  We believe that this process really does need to take as long as it takes as we use it to iron out not only factual issues but also to come to team consensus on matters like bias and advocacy.  Settling these big issues using argument and counter argument can take time, changing a view or position through discussion often requires a period of reflection.  However, we feel (and hope) that this process makes our documents better.  And because this process is not artificially bounded several documents may appear at the other end in quick succession.  A publication feast.

Once a document is published our workflow doesn’t stop there.  The Web is littered with “write once, review never” information.  You know the sort of thing, a topical article written three years ago that still turns up in a Google search and gives outdated information because no-one has ever updated the information within it.  Since OSS Watch strives to be an authoritative source of information on matters relating to open source, we don’t think that outdated information is acceptable, particularly if other organizations and services rely on it.  So all our documents are reviewed every six months.  We check not only facts and links but we also check for relevancy and for missing content, ie has something happened since the last review that should be mentioned.  Sometimes we retire a document that is no longer relevant and this is then preserved in an archived state.  Sometimes we completely rewrite a document. However most times we tweak and refine each document at each review and we often add new information.  This review process is time consuming and all OSS Watch staff are involved in reviewing documents each and every month.  Is it worth all the effort? We think it is.

And finally, we don’t want our documents to be the result of a collaborative process involving just the members of OSS Watch.  We welcome comment and feedback from you.  We often develop documents in the OSS Watch wiki, a public resource where all collaboration is welcome to get the document to its first draft and and where you can see the status of all wiki documents being developed for publication on the website.  Even, and perhaps especially, when a document has entered the formal QA process and has subsequently been published on the website we welcome comments, just drop us a line at info@oss-watch.ac.uk.

Richard Stallman talks to OSS Watch

Published by Elena Blanco on June 27, 2008 in Community, Development, Software and Strategy and Policy. 0 Comments

Sometimes you get a bit of luck and last month OSS Watch certainly got a bit of luck in that we managed to secure an interview with Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation and commonly regarded as the Father of Free Software.  Stallman was speaking at a couple of events in Manchester at the beginning of May and Paul Anderson of Intelligent Content was able to catch Stallman between engagements for an interview on OSS Watch’s behalf.  Paul has worked with OSS Watch on a number of projects to date and his credentials as EPSRC’s Computer Science Writer of the Year for 2007 made us hopeful that we would be able to draw out Richard Stallman’s views on areas of interest to us and our community. We weren’t disappointed.

Check out Richard Stallman on the road less travelled to find out Richard Stallman’s thoughts on the use of free software in education, the responsibilities incumbent on institutions producing software, and the current move towards Web 2.0 and Software as a Service.