Contents

1. SELF goes India: Mukta is not Mufta!
   
2. Gnowledge.org Launch
3. Copyleft in Culture
4. Government Interoperability Frameworks Project
5. Agenda
6. About

1. SELF goes India: Mukta is not Mufta!

In the chaos of Mumbai, India, the seven SELF Consortium partners gathered at the end of January to discuss the progress of the SELF project. During the week-long meeting the programme was filled with different aspects of the project, the launch of Creative Commons India, discussions about the technical aspects of the platform and interface design, presentations of strategic planning, finances, the SELF Support Programme and of course in-depth analyses of the legal structure, learning materials and open standards. The get-together concluded with the second international conference on the broader aspects of Science, Education and Learning in Freedom, held at the Homi Bhabha Auditorium, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. The main purpose of this conference was to bridge the gap between the overflow of media attention on various aspects of ICT revolution and how little awareness is found about the copyleft movement. Therefore the conference informed the participants about the copyleft movement in general, and its relation to science and education in particular.

Fortunately, it became clear that India is not unknowing. For example, Kerala, a state on the Western Coast of south-western India, recently released a draft IT policy largely concentrating on Free Software. Kerala will collaborate with organisations and industry for research and development in ICT and knowledge sharing, with a clear focus on e-governance, Free Software and development of technologies. The policy includes proposals of an International Centre for Free Software and Computing for Development, ITES Training Centre and extension of Internet to all educational institutions and villages by 2010. It emphasizes that Free Software and Open Standards will be used in e-governance projects to avoid total dependence on select vendors.

The Ekalavya Project shows another ambitious programme meant for anyone wishing to enhance his or her competences by learning from others. The project consists of a portal where users can seek advice in the Free Software community, find lists of projects they can participate in and get information on programming standards and guidelines. Cybermedia Online India quoted Javed Tapia, president of Red Hat Indian Subcontinent: "The National Knowledge Commission, constituted by the Prime Minister that advises on how India can promote excellence in the education system, has recently recommended that India must use open source software in education to meet the knowledge challenges of the 21st century. Open source will play a huge part in building India's IT infrastructure, and we have to ensure that the next generation is ready for this."

Furthermore, Creative Commons India was successfully launched on January 26th at IIT Bombay, Mumbai. By joining the iCommons, also known as Creative Commons (CC), India will become part of a significant international effort in helping to make knowledge more accessible. The initiative already has over 25 different national chapters. Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. IIT Bombay has taken the initiative in creating the iCommons chapter in India, which will be led by Prof. Shishir K. Jha, Lawrence Liang, Alternative Law Forum (Bangalore) and Prayas Abhinav. The launch was welcomed by Joichi Ito, the chairman of Creative Commons, and many other prominent speakers.

Surely these are only a few examples the SELf team came across while in India. Though sometimes merely invisible, it does seem that a lot is happening in this field. Many individuals, organisations and policy makers already understand that the 'free' in Free Software refers to 'freedom', and never to price: Mukta is not Mufta!

More information:
News on Kerala IT Policy
Ekalavya Project
Cybermedia Online India
Creative Commons India
Creative Commons

2. Gnowledge.org Launch

A community portal for collecting, organising, networking and distributing free knowledge, developed by the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR, Mumbai, India, was launched during the second international SELF conference. The portal named Gnowledge enables all the willing members of the community to share a common repository of knowledge and is built for weaving gnowledge. By `gnowledge' we mean the knowledge accessible freely for the community in general, and to the users of the WWW in particular.

Richard M Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project, who were to address the conference from Spain, could not join but sent a pre-recorded speech. The launch was performed by Federico Heinz, Fundacion Via Libre, Argentina. Jonas Oberg, Free Software Foundation Europe, spoke about the significance of collaborative organisation of the vast data so as to transform it into information, and in turn into gnowledge. All the participants were given a snapshot version of the portal containing seven million articles from Wikipedia in a DVD called 'GNOWARE'.

Gnowledge.org

3. Copyleft in Culture

Mumbai as metaphor, as city of creation, interpretation, adaptation, imagination, production, reproduction, construction, deconstruction... During the SELF Conference Dr. Mathias Klang (Free Software Foundation Europe) formulated how life is, and always has been, organised around technology, and how disruption takes place when this technology effects the social arrangements around which we build our lives.

Science
Without the ability to decipher is 'dead' dogma

Software
Without the ability to decipher is stagnation

Culture
Without the ability to decipher is unintelligible

Copyleft
is about maintaining the right to decipher

A panel discussion following Mathias Klang's keynote intensified the notion that the copyleft movement is currently transforming many fields of human creativity - science, poetry, music, cinema and other symbolic forms. V. Sasi Kumar expressed the urgent need of freely accessible scientific publications while Shaina Anand (Chitrakarkhana.net) spoke about the influence of copyleft in critical art and media practice. Creative evolution: Federico Heinz (Foundacion Via Libre, Argentina) concluded with the concept of quality as emergent behaviour.

Presentation Mathias Klang

4. Government Interoperability Frameworks Project.

The Government Interoperability Frameworks (GIFs) Project is a joint initiative of UNDP-APDIP, IBM, Oracle and the International Open Source Network. It aims to help Asia-Pacific countries share and create strategies, blueprints and policies for adopting the right blend of open standards and technology services. The goal will be for more countries to develop universally compatible applications and networks to make internal and external government services and transactions more automatic, affordable, efficient and service-oriented.

According to Dr. Emmanuel C. Lallana, Project Adviser: "The GIF Project meets a growing global interest in interoperability using open standards, recently demonstrated by the submission by 20 government's National Bodies to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) expressing concerns on a standard".

More information

Contribution by Dessi Pefeva, ISOC.bg

5. Agenda

Open Educational Resources for lifelong learning

16-17 April, 2007, Salzburg, Austria
3rd EduMedia Conference of Salzburg Research

• 17 April, 2007, 15:00 - 15:30 SELF Project, presented by Wouter Tebbens, ISOC.nl
  

NIOC Congress

17-18 April, 2007, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
NIOC is a forum for ICT in Education. The theme of the NIOC Congres
2007 is 'Learning in all stages' with subthemes
- ICT as independent speciality
- ICT in other disciplines
- Continuous learning curves
- Formats of ICT education

• During the congress Hinde ten Berge, ISOC.nl, will give a workshop on the SELF Project.

8. About

SELF News is a monthly newsletter about the SELF Project and related issues. SELF aims to be the central platform with high quality educational and training materials about Free Software and Open Standards. It is based on world-class Free Software technologies that permit both reading and publishing free materials, and is driven by a worldwide community.

Information about SELF:
http://selfproject.eu/

Consortium Partners:

• Internet Society Netherlands
• Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
• Free Software Foundation Europe
• Gothenburg University
• Internet Society Bulgaria
• Fundación Vía Libre
• Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education

Newsletter editor:
Hinde ten Berge

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