The 10th anniversary of open content is quickly approaching! The phrase “open content” was born in the late spring of 1998, and the first open content license was unleashed on the world in July of 1998 (yes, I know this first license was pretty awful – but hey, it was my first attempt!).
In recognition and celebration of all those who caught the open content vision, including Creative Commons, MIT OCW, Wikipedia, Magnatune, and others, OpenContent.org is declaring 2008 “The Year of Open Content!” What should we do to celebrate? Have any ideas? We should start planning now to maximize both the partying and the potential media impact we can have in sharing the idea of open content! Regardless of whether you call your open content “free knowledge” or “opencourseware” or “open educational resources” or “free culture” or some other name, I hope that for one year we can come together to celebrate the incredible progress we’ve seen this last decade.
Please put your ideas for celebrations, events, and other things in the comments below. We’ll bundle them up and work together as a community to make great things happen!!
Congratulations “Open Content”
That first license and your coining of the concept of “Open Content” was instrumental in moving my own thinking forward. Thanks for that. The free knowledge community in general and the open content educators in particular have made sterling progress.
Yeah – I like the idea of a global celebration. The free content community should have something similar to software freedom day where we celebrate our progress annually. Lets pick a date and and start a “Open Content for Educators day” along the lines of software freedom day.
See: http://softwarefreedomday.org/
What I like about SFD is how the community comes together to promote and help folk understand the benefits of free software.
We could dedicate one day in the year where all educators on the planet are encouraged to develop one free lesson, lecture or whatever in achieving a free curriculum by 2015.
I’m on board – and the Commonwealth of Learning is keen to help spread this idea throughout the Commonwealth.
Cheers
Wayne
Well hooray!
It’s “the year of open content” every day here at ccLearn, but I like the idea of collaborating on a consolidated media effort to bring attention to the fact that this movement is 1) not brand new, 2) is growing rapidily, and 3) welcomes newcomers with open arms. I also agree that it would be nice to couple the celebrations with some specific outcomes, like interesting media about the movement generated that day for all to use and share.
Attaching celebrations to existing conferences or other gathering events would be nice. A worldwide event could be something like: distribute a short, customized video or audio ad about open content to as many theaters, music shows, TV channels, etc., as we can manage, all to be displayed or presented briefly prior to each event on the same day. It would take a lot of coordination, and probably some directed media creation, but it would be pretty interesting…
-Ahrash