Lots of great PR for the launch of the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education today! First off, lots of people carried the Press Release, including the The Sun Herald, Linux Magazine, Street Insider, EarthTimes, Yahoo!, and of course the Soros and Shuttleworth Foundations. Other coverage includes:
- Jimmy and Rich had an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle.
- Scott Jaschik wrote a great article for Inside Higher Ed.
- Peter Suber covered the launch, calling the declaration “a superb document.”
- SEO/SEM Journal has a short piece.
- ZDNET UK’s coverage asks whether or not the problems that have plagued Wikipedia are also in store for open education.
- Bangkok’s The Nation carried part of the op-ed above.
- Computing SA’s piece drew on existing material available above.
- Tectonic has a nice piece with comments from Shuttleworth himself.
- IT Web also covered the launch.
Philip has a good summary of existing commentary on his blog which is worth checking out. Stephen Downes provides plenty of pointers to the folks who find the declaration disappointing. Much of the negative feedback about the declaration has been a feeling that too few people were involved in its creation, and that a wiki format should have been used to involve a larger, more diverse number of voices. Those of us involved in creating Cape Town encouraged people who felt this way to make their own declarations and use this format. Unfortunately, the most active new declaration appears to be the Declaration on Libre Knowledge, with only one contributor so far. I hope that those who wrote so many pages of criticism of what they saw as a closed process with Cape Town will take that same energy and apply it productively to extending Kim’s declaration.