[Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

[Georg von Zimmermann]

Dear “Wikipedians”,

please allow us to introduce a project we have been working on for
about a year now:

Explaining the importance of the open-source movement for a free
internet or the importance of Wikipedia (i.e. free content in the form
of factual knowledge) here would be like carrying coals to Newcastle.
The question, however, is why has *subjective* open content been
neglected so far? In the realm of user reviews and ratings we have
pretty much forfeited to closed systems like Amazon or Ciao.

That's why we created OpenCritics.com. The idea of OpenCritics is to
develop an open platform for freely licensed reviews. Published
reviews are then not only available for visitors of certain websites,
e.g Amazon, Ciao, etc. but can be copied freely. This also helps
against the trend towards internet monopolies.(Please find an
explanation and more advantages of this on:
http://www.opencritics.com/sp-dsp-user_idea )

We started off with movie reviews; book reviews and more will follow.
The ratings are published both on all participating websites as well
as on OpenCritics.de (in German, other languages will follow).

Who we are:
---------------------

Our office, the development and my computer are financed by a private
limited company. Eventually, I  would be pleased if our company could
move into the direction of a non-profit organization and funding
through donations. However, I do have doubts about that since this is
even difficult for Wikipedia.

The second best (realistic) alternative is to do what many
Linux-distributors, companies like Zend etc do: The content will
remain free and open while the project is financed by consulting and
support for commercial users.

We are still a small team, mainly in our office in Hamburg ,with very
different backgound (juristic, webdesign, journalistic and two
students).

How to help:
-------------------

We are especially lacking a prominent team-member known even outside
the world of free-internet-geeks who could help us let the little
project rise above the attention threshold. Maybe you have an idea who
we could contact?

In the meantime we are happy about every blogentry (example:
http://de.creativecommons.org/freiheit-fur-die-user-ratings/ [in
German]) and  appreciate critical feedback!

Kind regards
Georg