One month back GoK published an advt with the photo of
singer K J Yesudas.
The photo was taken from wikipedia which was contributed by wikipedia
Rakesh Konni. PRD contacted Rakesh and gave the advt with proper credits.
On 29 March 2011 00:19, Shiju Alex <shijualexonline(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Would you like to share some information about your latest effort?
Naveen, Thanks for sharing this news in India list.
As Naveen mentioned below, the license of
http://www.ldfkeralam.org/ is
changed to a free license that is compatible with the wikipedia license.
LDF is the current ruling coalition of Kerala. Now it is election season in
Kerala and the above site is setup as part of election campaign.
The IT sub-committee of LDF in principle has decided to use free licenses
and free software in various places. Many of the people behind
http://www.ldfkeralam.org/ have awareness about free software. In fact the
site admin is a veteran Malayalam wikipedian. When LDF had decided to start
the site, the license of the site was decided as CC-BY-SA 2.5 IN. But
unfortunately when the site is released to public, license was pointing to a
NC-ND license. I pointed this and they immediately corrected it. It was
possible only because the people behind the site have awareness about the
importance of free software licenses.
Later when other district committees of LDF started website they also
followed it since the mother site is using free license. There were cases of
some district commitees using NC/ND license. But they corrcted it as soon as
we pointed the issue in using non-free licenses. Now there are many LDF
sites using free license.
Wiki community could use photos (and the content also) of some of the
notable LDF candidates. Since the content and images are free, people could
freely use it across web for their blog, buzz, and so on.
Few days back I have shared this story with few Indian language
wikimedians. I requested some of them to see whether it is possible to
replicate this in other Indian states.
For instance, how easy or difficult was it to
convince government
officials? Did it involve going into a lot of details with them?
Awareness about free software and free licenses among government officials
is very important. If the officials sitting at the other end doesn't have
awareness about these things then nothing is possible. In the past,
Malayalam wiki community and other Malayalam free software organizations
(for example, SMC) have initiated various programs to create that awareness.
We are happy to see that slowly that efforts are yielding.
In Kerala, this is not the first time State Government or political
parties or non government organizations are changing the license of their
website to a license that is compatible with Wikipedia license. As
mentioned in this mail thread, way back in 2008, Kerala Government had
officially announced that it is changing the license of govt. encyclopedic
project in Malayalam (sarvavijanakosam) to Free documentation license so
that Malayalam wiki community could reuse its content to develop Malayalam
wikipedia. This was done in 2008 December while Jimmy and Sue were in
Thiruvananthapuram to attend the free software conference.
We expect more happy news in the near future.
Shiju
On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Anirudh Bhati <anirudhsbh(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
This is amazing! Congratulations, Shiju.
Would you like to share some information about your latest effort? For
instance, how easy or difficult was it to convince government officials?
Did it involve going into a lot of details with them?
Yours sincerely,
Anirudh Bhati
00 91 9328712208
Skype: anirudhsbh
On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 7:23 AM, Naveen Francis <naveenpf(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi all,
It is election season in Kerala.
I have one good news to share with you all.
Shiju Alex has convinced LDF election web team to change there site
license to creative commons license.
http://www.ldfkeralam.org/
And now we are having images of candidates in commons and process is in
progress.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_the_ldfkeralam.org_w…
Before this we didn't had images for many ministers in Kerala
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_S_Achuthanandan_Ministry
He has also convinced
http://www.ldfkannur.org/ web team to change there
license. Now they are also creative commons.
Thanks a lot Shiju !!! ... Need more site creative commons
I think it is change in happening though it is slow.
--
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