[okfn-discuss] Our vision: Why, How and What for the Open Knowledge Foundation

[Rufus Pollock]

2009/7/14 Luis Villa <luis.villa at gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 9:08 AM, Rufus Pollock<rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
[...]

> OKF has, as I see it, three issues:
>
> 1) what is OKF's motivation and philosophy? In other words, why are we
> promoting open? Is it just a fuzzy sense that open is good, or can we
> get more specific? The 'about' page defines open, but doesn't say why
> open is a good thing. I think having some clear sense of that would
> help clarify a lot around what it is, where it is going, etc. (This
> may be written down somewhere, and if so, I apologize, but it seems
> worth putting front and center either way.)

Excellent point Luis. What about something like this (taken from an
essay on the value of the public domain)

With the IT revolution of the last half-century it is now possible to
distribute knowledge at costs that approach zero. At the same time
these technological changes have greatly reduced the barriers to
active participation in the creation and reuse of knowledge goods. Key
to realizing the full social, cultural and commercial benefits of
these changes are open approaches to the use, reuse and distribution
of knowledge.

The value of open knowledge both actually and potentially is high.
This is not to disregard the role of monopoly rights such as copyright
and patents in incentivizing and coordinating a significant amount of
cultural and industrial creativity. However it does suggest that
promoting and expanding openness in several key areas would yield
large benefits for society in the form of increased access, greater
development of complementary goods and services, and the ability to
decentralize and widen the innovation process. It must be remembered
that where feasible and reasonably efficient methods of up-front or
indirect funding exist, an open approach to knowledge production will
always be superior to one based on monopoly rights.

> 2) there are a variety of organizations similar to OKF out there now-
> CC is the highest profile, but we can all probably list a few others
> that have more or less overlap with what CC does, like resource.org,
> openlibrary.org, etc. How is OKF distinguishing itself? Is it merely
> better at executing on what it does, or is there some organizational
> or philosophical differences that make us stand out? If so, focusing
> on those differences may make good strategic sense.

On the one hand we obviously share many common ideas and ambitions
with much of the other participants in this space. That said here are
some thoughts about what might be considered different:

* Not US-centred/based -- as Mike has just mentioned in his response
(I know CC have lots of regional offices but it is primarily a
US-based ORG). I definitely wouldn't want to say we are UK specific
(EU might be closer) but obviously many of OKF people are UK based.

* We strive to be more like Apache than FSF (I hope i'm not offending
anyone with this analogy!): i.e. a community built around a network of
projects (and working groups) joined by shared understanding of
openness (and its value) -- as opposed to something centrally driven
and organized (and very strongly committed to a particular
philosophy).

* A clear espousal of openness with explicit application across a
variety of domains (so not just content, not just data -- genes to
geodata, sonnets to statistics ...). Many other groups/orgs are
focused on one particular thing (e.g. openlibrary)

> 3) How is OKF preparing for the day when open 'wins'? The Open Source
> Initiative, ten years in, is now horribly floundering because, in some
> sense, they've won- open source is not dominant, but it is broadly
> accepted as part of the tool kit of software developers. Much of what
> used to be important/controversial for them (license approval,
> primarily) is now routine and uninteresting, and they have no other
> sense of what they should be doing. It would be good if OKF starting
> thinking now about 'what happens when open knowledge is routine',
> because I think we're already edging in that direction- we're seeing
> it in the slow proliferation of licenses, slow proliferation of groups
> in the space, etc. Does OKF then just fade away? Become a data
> repository? Become a source of licenses? a source of license
> proliferation? a government lobbying group, pushing for more open data
> 'at the margins'?

Again a great question. As you suggest, the main danger from "open
knowledge being routine" would be if our prime activity were promoting
"openness". However, though we obviously do quite a bit of that, a lot
of what we do (probably the majority) is providing services, tools,
events related to open knowledge and the demand for these will only
increase if open knowledge becomes more mainstream.

Regards,

Rufus