Open Content

There is a unique opportunity to improve people's awareness of their own culture, strengthening their identity and valuation of themselves and their communities in a non-discriminating way. Through equal access to both local and global content and culture in different places and enabling communication and interaction among such experiences, people's identity could be built at the same time as their appreciation and acceptance of other cultures and values, thus promoting a true global culture of tolerance enhanced and enriched by local values and elements.

A friend recently consulted me about streaming media and video-on-demand solutions available to satisfy the requirements of a distant learning initiative to be implemented by one of his customers. While explaining to him the many options available I realized that not many people are aware of how much the streaming media ecosystem has changed in the last few years and that there are several open source platforms and solutions available for streaming audio and video over the Internet, lowering the cost of such endeavors and making the implementation of pilot and fully functional initiatives much more affordable and accessible to all kind of organizations.

TAVOS Media Network is a trail-blazing venture based in Palo Alto, California, that empowers people in underserved communities around the world through local media services. Our vision is to build a global network of local media microfranchises to give voice and promote the life and prosperity of every community.

A few days ago when I blogged on Blogging and War: Can Technology change Social Processes?, I chose not to address the issue of ethics involved in journalism and the unbiased report of happenings from the field.

So it came to pass that on June 6, 2006 (06/06/06), the battle between the ancient beast of Intellectual Property and the armies of Good crossed the Big Pond and a new fight began in the City of Lights.

Access to Computers for Non-Literate People (ACNLP) is an ongoing research project at Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya on how computers can be made beneficial for non-literate or semi-literate people. The research focuses on human computer interaction when users are unable to read or write textual representations of language. In the context of a country like Nepal where the number of non-literates is very high, the project will be very beneficial by developing computing systems that can be readily used by people with limited literacy. It is envisioned that people of any literacy background will be able to create their own information content and share their rich knowledge, heritage and experiences. The research will be one more step in the direction of eliminating the digital divide, and empowering the people with information.

Note: This note is old, I just updated it with some additional information and clearer instructions.

Users can now upload podcasts or audio files to the collaboration framework that visitors can listen to on-line or download for offline listening in their computers, Ipods or mp3 players.

Estee and I have been invited as Fellows to the Symposium on Social Architectures (http://www.corante.com/events/ssa/) at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/) in two weeks.  The event is a partnership between the Berkman Center and Corante (http://www.corante.com/about.php), the world's first blog media company. 

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. Content in the OCA archive will be accessible soon through this website and through Yahoo!

With less than 6 weeks of formal operation, if you search for "Digital Collaboration Framework" in Google, our collaboration framework (fellows.rdvp.org) is the first site listed.
Click here to see it...