Hi everyone,
This Friday's office hours will feature Mike Godwin, the Wikimedia
Foundation's Legal Counsel. If you don't know Mike Godwin, you can
read about him at <http://enwp.org/Mike_Godwin>.
Office hours this Friday are from 2230 to 2330 UTC (3:30PM to 4:30PM
PDT). Mike will also be taking the following Thursday from 1600 to
1700 UTC (9:00AM to 10:00AM PDT).
The IRC channel that will be hosting Mike's conversation will be
#wikimedia-office on the Freenode network. If you do not have an IRC
client, you can always access Freenode by going to
http://webchat.freenode.net/, typing in the nickname of your choice and
choosing wikimedia-office as the channel. You may be prompted to click
through a security warning. Go ahead.
--
Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
~~ Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010: Call for Proposals ~~
* where: London, UK
* when: Saturday 24th April, 2010
* www: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/
* last year: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/2009/
* cfp: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/cfp/ (deadline: Jan 31st 2010)
* hashtag: #okcon2010
## Introduction
OKCon, now in its fifth year, is the interdisciplinary conference that
brings together individuals from across the open knowledge spectrum for
a day of presentations and workshops.
Open knowledge promises significant social and economic benefits in a
wide range of areas from governance to science, culture to technology.
Opening up access to content and data can radically increase access and
reuse, improving transparency, fostering innovation and increasing
societal welfare.
This is a time of great change. In addition to high profile initiatives
such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and the Human Genome Project, there is
enormous growth among open knowledge projects and communities at all
levels. Moreover, in the last year, many governments across the world
have begun opening up their data.
And it doesn't stop there. In academia, open access to both publications
and data has been gathering momentum, and similar calls to open up
learning materials have been heard in education. Furthermore this
gathering flood of open data and content is the creator and driver of
massive technological change. How can we make this data available, how
can we connect it together, how can we use it collaborate and share our
work?
Join us to discuss all of this and more!
## Topics
We welcome proposals on any aspect of creating, publishing or reusing
content or data that is open in accordance with
http://opendefinition.org. Topics include but are not limited to:
### Technology
* Semantic Web and Linked Data in relation to open knowledge
* Platforms, methods and tools for creating, sharing and curating open
knowledge
* Light-weight, adaptive interaction models
* Open, decentralized social network applications
* Open geospatial data
### Law, Society and Democracy
* Open Licensing, Legal Tools and the Public Domain
* Open government data and content (public sector information)
* Open knowledge and international development
* Opening up access to the law
### Culture and Education
* Open educational tools and resources
* Business models for open content
* Incentive and rewards open-knowledge contributors
* Open textbooks
* Public domain digitisation initiatives
### Science and Research
* Opening up scientific data
* Supporting scientific workflows with open knowledge models
* Open models for scientific innovation, funding and publication
('open-access')
* Tools for analysing and visualizing open data
* Open knowledge in the humanities
## Submission Details
* Submission deadline: January 31st 2010
* Notification of acceptance: March 1st
* Camera-ready papers due: March 31st
We are accepting three types of submissions:
1. Full papers of 5-10 pages describing novel strategies, tools,
services or best-practices related to open knowledge.
2. Extended talk abstracts of 2-4 pages focusing on novel ideas,
ongoing work and upcoming research challenges.
3. Proposals for short talks and demonstrations
OKCon will implement an open submission and reviewing process. To make a
submission visit:
* http://www.okfn.org/okcon/submit/
Depending on the assessment of the submissions by the programme
committee and external reviewers, submissions will be accepted either as
full, short or lightning/poster presentations.
Proceedings of OKCON will be published at http://ceur-ws.org. If you
want your submission to be included in the conference proceedings you
have to prepare a manuscript of your submission according to the LNCS
Style.
### Programme Committee
* Sören Auer, AKSW/Universität Leipzig
* Christopher Corbin, UK Advisory Board on Public Sector Information
* Adnan Hadzi and Andrea Rota, Goldsmiths College, University of London
* Claudia Müller-Birn, Carnegie Mellon University
* Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge
* Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation and Emmanuel College,
University of Cambridge
* Joseph Seddon, Wikimedia UK
* John Wilbanks, Science Commons
--
Jonathan Gray
Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org
Twitter/Identica: jwyg
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Hello,
As the simple English Wikibooks project is slated to be closed[1], the
textbooks should probably be imported to the English Wikibooks. There's
a request for this to be done server-side[2]. When this happens, there
will be a mess to clean up. When the bug is handled, we should all try
to pitch in to make the transition as smooth as possible for our friends
from the simple English Wikibooks. There are a few hundred texts - not
an insignificant amount of work, so I wouldn't want them to be the only
people working on this.
Thanks,
- -Mike
[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22103
[2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22106
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If there are any K-12 teachers using Wikibooks in their classroom who
might be interested in participating in a short phone interview for an
article with an ed tech magazine, please email me at karen(a)k12opened.com.
Thanks,
Karen Fasimpaur
--
K12 Open Ed
www.k12opened.com
* Help build the future of open education at http://dictionary.k12opened.com