|
home · blog · an update from heather ford: action plans for openness
An update from Heather Ford: Action Plans for Openness
But how do you know when you’re being “open”? Is it by using a Creative Commons licence to enable others to copy and remix the work that you publish? Is it by being transparent in the way that you work? Is it by sharing the methodology behind the work that you produce? Is it by inviting comment and suggestions before you publish, or is it by inviting people to create products with you?
I’ve just come back from a networking lunch at the Shuttleworth Foundation in Cape Town. The Foundation invited its grantees to meet one another and to learn about what the Foundation does as a whole, where they’re going, and how all the projects that they support fit together.
As Helen King, ED of the Shuttleworth Foundation said: “We’re not perfect at this yet, but we really are trying to build openness into everything that we do – including letting our grantees in to developing new processes for reporting and review, and facilitating the sharing of information between our grantees.”
I believe that this is a key insight – not to consider openness as something that the gifted few of us have already arrived at (by using a Creative Commons licence for everything that we publish, for example) but as a much larger process (that none of us have essentially arrived at yet) to develop open processes that stimulate participation and innovation, improve quality, and are wholly transparent, and then to make the documentation of those processes themselves available to all.
Instead of informing openness as simply a way of ‘tagging’ information and creative works, we’re interested in how we share information about ‘how’ people share in ways that can lead to these positive outcomes. Only when we share the ‘how’ will be able to develop a movement that is inclusive, and that enables outsiders to understand and start to experiment with open principles and processes.
For this reason, we’ve decided to apply this philosophy to a global project that will be launched at the iCommons Summit in Sapporo this year to develop a tangible resource that will enable us to truly enable others by showing ‘how to understand’, ‘how to help’, and ‘how to participate’ in debates around openness.
What we’re going to attempt to do is what many members of the environmental movement have begun to enable. When I asked Tom Chance the other day: "How do we do it?" (in relation to 'greening' the iSummit and making sure that it complies with what the experts believe is important and useful in keeping things sustainable), his answer was not just: "Buy carbon credits." His answer was to point me to a comprehensive checklist of practical and positive steps that I could take to understand and gauge the iSummit in relation to green issues.
And so, at this year’s iSummit, instead of developing another declaration (not that declarations are not important – they have been instrumental in gathering momentum around the open access to research movement and the emerging open education movement) we aim to develop a practical checklist that will accompany existing declarations with a practical list of steps for the implementation of our agenda for open education, open business, open culture, open research and open environmentalism. This checklist will enable individuals, organisations, communities and companies to develop Action Plans for Openness and will, in the future, hopefully form an essential accompanying document for audits that determine one’s capacity to enable participation, collaboration and remixing.
In the next few weeks, we’ll be discussing this project within the iSummit track lists and getting feedback. Even if you can’t make it to Sapporo, please make sure you add your voice to these debates to build Version 1.0 of this Action Plan for Openness. We believe that it will have a major positive impact on the world’s understanding of the importance of the open sharing of intellectual property.
Best wishes,
Heather
tags:
other letter update april checklist-for-openness
|
| |
add a comment: you must be logged on in order to comment. please log in or register at iCommons.org and add your comments afterwards.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
iCommons.org taking some down time
iCommons.org will be unavailable for a few minutes for server maintenance on Friday, 9 May between 3:00 and 5:00 GMT.
So don't be alarmed when you can't get your hit of Commons news, we promise we'll be back in a flash! more
|
send
printer-friendly version
