By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Graham Attwell[Edit][Delete]: JISC publishes Guidelines on Open Source, The Wales-Wide Web [Edit][Delete] February 24, 2006

Greetings from Anchorage, Alaska, where the sun is shining and the air is crisp. Today finds me pensive, reflective and hopeful, thinking about the Spirit Sands in Manitoba, about birch trees and the beaches of Fremantle, about community and culture, about reaching out and living within. And about how, maybe, things are getting better. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Tim Lauer[Edit][Delete]: Scuttle: Open Source Social Bookmarking Tool, Education/Technology [Edit][Delete] January 26, 2006

I talked about del.irio.us last week, an open source alternative to the del.icio.us social bookmarking tool, but noting that it was offline, contemplated authoring my own. Maybe I don't have to, if this open source tool does the job. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Larry Sanger[Edit][Delete]: Toward a New Expert Internet: An Open Letter to the Academic Community Online, Digital Universe [Edit][Delete] January 24, 2006

Tomorrow I am off to Saint John all day to talk about learning networks, so the newsletter will be a bit late. Today I lead off with an item from Larry Sanger, who is trying to start an expert-written online encyclopedia. In his new blog, Digital Universe, he writes, "My claim is that experts could be mobilized online in the way that ordinary netizens have been mobilized by Wikipedia, to work on content projects far larger and more important than an encyclopedia--and that this suggestion has revolutionary potential. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Michael Geist[Edit][Delete]: IDRC Launches Open Archive Initiative, January 11, 2006

You don't hear about the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) much, a Canadian aid agency, but it has been around for a long time (they were a fixture, and a lot of help, when I was involved in development education in the 1980s with the Arusha Centre). But as Michael Geist writes, "In 2004, it provided financial support to Creative Commons South Africa, playing an important role in making that initiative a reality. Now it has set its sights on a major new open archive that will provide full Internet access to the IDRC research archive". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How resilient is “open”?
Brian Lamb, Abject, April 21, 2013
More on the influence of wealth and power on history, open content and open source. "It’s not as if “closed” systems are particularly resistant to the influence of money and power. But resting assured that “openness is the best disinfectant” is likely to fail us as well". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Getting Found, Staying Found
Public Knowledge Project, 2019/01/29
This is a document published by the Public Knowledge Project (who make Open Journal Systems) to help open access journals publicize themselves. Of course, a lot of the advice is relevant for other open access projects in general. A note on navigation: it isn't obvious when you go to the document - there's no 'next page' or anything like that. I spend several minutes looking for the link to download the document before I realized that the menu on the left hand side is your only navigation. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Little People Can Be Invisible in the Open
Maha Bali, Reflecting Allowed, 2019/01/25
Maha Bali writes, "powerful people’s voices are louder, get heard, used, perpetuated, even when they’ve been influenced by little people" and raises in particular David Wiley's being credited for use of the term "OER-Enabled pedagogy" without any mention of the larger discussion that led to this new terminology. Wiley agrees "she (and many others) are definitely omitted from the discussion here about how the term came to be" and outlines the rather lengthy discussion that led to the new term. I think Mali's experience is quite common. But when it comes up in my own life (and it does, a lot) I say this: "you can change the world, or get credit for it. Not both." So just remember: the people getting the awards and the accolades are almost always not the people who did the work, they're just the ones getting the credit. More...