Today, I’m honored to be a keynote speaker at the Technology Affinity Group conference in Monterey, CA. I’ll be talking about my career and my experiences in the open space, and sharing three suggestions for the foundation community:

Technology deserves a bigger place at the table. Technology is what drives the big innovations in the philanthropic world, but all too often, the technology people don’t have enough of a voice in a foundation’s leadership. That’s a problem that I think foundations need to address before they can work at full potential.

Share by default. When foundations share their data, it’s often the exception rather than the rule. What if foundations made sharing the default? Yesterday, we blogged about a group of foundations making a commitment to share their grant data regularly, openly, and in a usable format. I’ll be applauding the Reporting Commitment and urging other foundations to get onboard.

Bake open into philanthropy. Every foundation wants to get the most good for its money. There’s a strong argument that grant dollars go further if they go toward openly-licensed work and resources.

Do you have any questions or thoughts from the session? Share them in the comments.

In the past few weeks, the Foundation Center and the philanthropic world have taken two big steps forward in transparency. First, 15 of the nation’s largest foundations joined the “Reporting Commitment,” agreeing to release grant information regularly through Foundation Center’s Glasspockets repository. Then last week, the Foundation Center relaunched IssueLab, an extensive repository of third-sector research. IssueLab’s mission is to “gather, index, and share the collective intelligence of the social sector” more effectively.

All of the IssueLab metadata is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA and all of the content is accessible (for reading, if not necessarily for other uses) for free. Everything released to Glasspockets under the Reporting Commitment is licensed under BY NC.

Taken together, these initiatives present some interesting possibilities for the future of open data in the foundation space. Foundation Center president Bradford K. Smith discussed the implications of both initiatives in a blog post:

If you think foundations are only ATM machines and nonprofits just service providers, think again. With the launch of IssueLab, there is one place you can go to find more than eleven thousand knowledge products published, funded, produced, and/or generated by foundations and nonprofits in the U.S. and around the globe.

Last month, the Foundation Center announced the Reporting Commitment, an effort by fifteen of America’s largest philanthropic foundations to make their grants data — who they give money to, how much, where, and for what purpose — available in an open, machine-readable format. Starting today, through IssueLab, the social sector can also access what it knows as a result of that funding. A service of the Foundation Center, IssueLab gathers, indexes, and shares the sector’s collective intelligence on a free, open, and searchable platform, and encourages users to share, copy, distribute, and even adapt the work. It’s a big step for philanthropy and “open knowledge.”

Smith went on to explain why it’s important that these resources aren’t just freely available; they’re openly licensed too:

Free is good, but IssueLab promotes openness in a number of other ways. First, the metadata — the abstracts and “tags” developed for all reports in the collection — is available under a Creative Commons license and can be grabbed and/or remixed by anyone as long as they use it for non-commercial purposes. Second, only work that is available for free is included in the IssueLab collection. These are public “assets,” in that the organizations which produced them already have tax-exempt status and/or have received government funding, and they should be easy for the public to find. Sorry but Kardashian Konfidential will not be found on IssueLab. Third, IssueLab itself is an open-source platform whose underlying codebase/framework is continually being improved by a community of developers. And fourth, our own developers embrace the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), which develops and promotes interoperability standards to facilitate the efficient dissemination of online content.

Here at Creative Commons, we’re big proponents of foundations and other institutions sharing their data — and the works they produce or fund — under an open license. It makes sense for foundations to reciprocate the public’s trust by showing how philanthropic dollars have been spent, and the foundations that join in the Reporting Commitment make that information available much sooner and much more easily than it is under the federally-required information returns. By use of Glasspockets, the public can see and compare the activities of the participating foundations. Private foundations are tax-exempt because they are dedicated to the public benefit; those that share their data and research in ways that invite the reuse and contributions of others add a valuable new dimension to their public service.

Here’s an exciting opportunity for the open education community. Susan D’Antoni, a long-time leader in Open Educational Resources (OER), is coordinating an important effort to map the global OER space.

You can join the list by sending an email to: oer-community-request@athabascau.ca and typing “subscribe” in the subject line. I have signed up to contribute. I hope you will too.

Read the complete announcement below for more information.

 

Dear Colleagues,

The following invitation is extended to any of you who might be interested in a discussion of how the OER community at large might design, create and sustain an OER world map of institutional initiatives – to help us connect and communicate.

The objective of this conversation is to consider together whether the global OER community could design and build a world map of OER institutional initiatives.

Over the past decade, there have been more and more initiatives in more and more countries. It has become difficult to have a sense of the global OER landscape. As we seek to communicate with stakeholders, as we seek to connect with potential partners and as we seek to learn from the experience of others, we might find useful a picture of the OER world – a global map of institutional and perhaps national initiatives as a starting point. Over time, an “OER World Map” could be enhanced as the community wished and found feasible.

Maps can be effective in communicating a message visually. There are already several global maps that have been created for specific OER groups, such as, the Open CourseWare Consortium and the Open University OLnet project in the United Kingdom.

As many of you will remember, the former IIEP OER community showed enormous energy in its interaction. And importantly, the community showed a capacity to self-organize. A number of groups came together to translate the report of the group’s consensus on priorities to advance the OER movement. If mapping the OER world were seen to be useful, perhaps the worldwide OER community could self-organize to build and maintain an OER world map together.

Our conversation is scheduled to take place online over a three-week period from 12 – 30 November. At the conclusion of the discussion a draft report will be sent to everyone for review and comment.

In addition to this international discussion in English, some groups have already decided to hold similar interactions in their own languages for their own communities or networks. Their input will be shared with the international group, and incorporated into the final report of our collective deliberation and conclusions. We hope others may also wish to organize separate discussions.

I will be back in contact with further details before we begin. I am very much looking forward to being back together again.

My best,

Susan

——————

Outline of the international discussion

Week 1: What could an OER world map look like? (12- 16 November)

• Why map the OER landscape?
• Essential information and visual presentation

Week 2: Could a world map be built collaboratively? (19-23 November)

• Organizational approach for collaboration
• Ensuring the quality of the information

Week 3: Reflection and next steps (26-30 November)

• Design of an “OER World Map”
• Organization
• Resources available/needed
• Next steps

Please:

• Send an email to oer-community-request@athabascau.ca and type “subscribe” in the subject line.
• Share this announcement with your colleagues and networks.
• Plan a parallel or follow up discussion in your own language and network and give your feedback for the final report of all the discussions.

If you follow Creative Commons’ various social media outlets, you’ve probably heard us talking about GNU MediaGoblin’s crowdfunding campaign. Today is the last day to support the campaign, so we wanted to give it one last shout-out.

CC alumnus Chris Webber is MediaGoblin’s lead developer. It’s an open-source media-hosting platform. It’s already CC-enabled, but Chris and his team have some exciting plans for its future, so they’re running a funding campaign with the help of our friends at the Free Software Foundation. Watch the video to see what’s on the horizon:

If you’d like to help spread the word, then click Retweet below:

Today’s the last day to donate to @mediagoblin‘s crowdfunding campaign. bit.ly/T5pTrISupport open media platforms!

— creativecommons (@creativecommons) November 9, 2012

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You can also spread the word on identi.ca and Facebook.

P2PU is giving a webinar next week to help new and seasoned community members kickstart their courses, especially those just beginning to flesh out their ideas for a School of Open course! P2PU Learning Lead, Vanessa Gennarelli, will give an overview of the P2PU course design, and then dive into the step-by-step process of creating a course on the P2PU platform. I will also go over some tips and guidelines specific to creating a course as part of the School of Open, a community initiative that will offer courses on the meaning and application of “open” on the web and offline environments.

What: Course Creation 101 with P2PU (a webinar)
When: Wednesday, November 14 at 11am US pacific / 2pm US eastern
Where: Collaborate room, no registration or log-in required; simply click the following link: https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.201F591479750E670246FFFB9315F5&sid=2008170. We recommend joining 5-10 minutes early to make sure you have the necessary system requirements.

If you can’t make this webinar, don’t worry; it will be recorded for posterity and linked from the P2PU website. You can also learn how to Make a P2PU course in 1/2 hour on your own while referencing these School of Open guidelines. P2PU has a help desk for platform issues you might encounter, and School of Open has a discussion list for iterative feedback.