[okfn-coord] potential paid web development for historical law project

Fri Jul 7 12:56:01 UTC 2006

NB: I am sending this to coord because nothing definite has been decided 
about the project and Professor Bently told me some of the information 
in confidence.

Professor Bently of the Cambirdge law faculty is running an AHRC funded 
project to digitize a set of historical materials relate to IP law. They 
are planning to digitize a total of around 250 documents from 5 
jurisdictions along with translations/transcriptions and commentary. 
Once the material is collected and digitized they wish to make it 
available online. They have various interesting ideas for the interface 
including a timeline of documents, side by side document and 
transcription etc. They also hope that this database of documents will 
continue grow beyond the basic document set they will put in.

They initially negotiated with the University of Bristol to build this 
websiste but that has now fallen through. I spoke with Professor Bently 
earlier this week about he asked whether I knew anyone who would be 
interested in working on this. There project will provide everything in 
an open form and the web side of things appears to have a lot of 
connections with other open knowledge work we're interested in. Last but 
not least the project seems to have a reasonable amount of money 
available -- somewhere between 10k and 20k.

Thus I'd think it would be good for the OKF to take this on. I've also 
spoken with Francis Irving and John Bywater about collaborating on this 
(John runs the Appropriate Software Foundation and is doing ongoing 
development work for the OKF).

If we did go ahead Tom Mustill is happy to work with me in drawing up 
the proposal/doing negotiations etc. According to Bently they'd like to 
have things resolved by the end of July, need to have the final site 
done by Sept 2007 but want a prototype by this october.

Regards,

Rufus