[Reader-list] UNESCAP EGP: OSS + KM

Mon Oct 11 22:36:02 IST 2004

Dear Friends,

This is our presentation at the UNESCAP Expert Group Meeting: Open
Source Software for Knowledge Management (KM), 11-13 October 2004,
Bangkok. 

Thanks,

Sunil

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Free/Open Source Software and the International Open Source Network
Presented at the Expert Group Meeting on Open Source Software for
Knowledge Management
UN-ESCAP, Bangkok
11-13 October, 2005
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction to IOSN 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The International Open Source Network1 is a Centre of Excellence for
Free / Open Source Software (FOSS) in the Asia-Pacific Region. IOSN is
an initiative of the UNDP’s Asia-Pacific Information Development
Programme2, which supports effective use of Information and
Communications Technology (ICT) for poverty alleviation and sustainable
human development. Via a small secretariat, the IOSN is tasked
specifically to accelerate the adoption of FOSS by facilitating and
networking advocates, developers, and users in the region; developing
FOSS tools; building capacities; and supporting FOSS R&D.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Community Management
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
IOSN runs a portal which has over 1000 registered members and has had
over 100,000 unique visitors in the last two months. This global
community has created over 2,500 content objects in a voluntary
capacity.  The content organisation is based on region, country and
theme and interested members have been granted additional permission to
manage and publish content these public sections. Other users publish
content only in their personal folders.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Publications
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
IOSN publishes a FOSS primer series. The current and upcoming titles
include general introduction to FOSS; FOSS government policy; FOSS in
education, localisation; licensing; open content; open standards;
network security and infrastructure. The authors come from the
Asia-Pacific region. The primers undergo peer and public review before
being published electronically and in hard copy. These primers are aimed
at policy-makers and decision-makers from the government, multilateral,
donor, and development agencies. 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Events
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
IOSN organises conferences such as Free Open Source Software –
Asia-Pacific (FOSSAP). Last year, more than 50 senior policy-makers and
FOSS practitioners from 20 countries attended this regional consultation
in Kuala Lumpur (www.iosn.net/fossap). IOSN has promoted and supported
events such as Software Freedom Day, which is an annual event in
celebration of FOSS on August 28th. IOSN is also organising a talk
series in partnership with government, academia and the local FOSS
community. The first speaker will be Richard Stallman, Founder of the
Free Software Movement, who will speak in Malaysia and Singapore. 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Training
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
IOSN is producing end-user training material in print and interactive
multimedia format. It covers the use of the GNU/Linux desktop for users
that may have no prior knowledge of Linux or PC usage. IOSN is also
producing a live CD for users of proprietary software who wish to learn
more about FOSS. Both these projects are in partnership with private
sector and academia from Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia. 
A pilot Linux training of trainers and proctors in partnership with the
Ministry of Science and Technology of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City
government and the Linux Professional Institute, Canada, will be held in
November in Vietnam. 20 Linux trainees from North, Central and South
regions of Vietnam will be trained and certified as qualified Linux
system administrators. The proctors come from six South-East Asian
countries and will be able to administer affordable paper tests for
Linux skills certification. Internationally recognized certification in
conjunction with open content training materials and certified personnel
for certification will FOSS adoption in developing countries. There are
plans to translate the open content Linux system administration training
materials to other languages.
IOSN also supports the development of a localisation toolkit in
collaboration with Centre for Advanced Computing [CDAC], India. This
practical toolkit will enable developers and translators build GNU/Linux
distributions and FOSS applications in the language of their choice. 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Grant Scheme
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
IOSN manages a micro-grant programme in collaboration with the
University of South Pacific. USD 1000 will be provided to 40 FOSS
practitioners over the next two years to work on projects relevant to
the development sector. Applications for the first round of grants have
been received; the selection committee will announce the grantees
shortly. 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOSS and Knowledge Management
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Management implies that resources are finite. Finite resources like
human resources and financial resources diminish when consumed or
shared. Knowledge however multiplies when shared. New knowledge builds
on existing knowledge.  In 1675, Isaac Newton wrote "If I have seen
further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Therefore, we are
talking about knowledge production not knowledge management. In other
words, the FOSS philosophy, the mechanism of copy-left and open
licenses, enables accelerated knowledge production. In addition, FOSS
provides a framework to protect and grow the creative commons. A vibrant
creative commons and public domain is critical for innovation and
enterprise in the public and private sector. A researcher developing a
cure for HIV/AIDS or a FOSS practitioner developing a micro-credit
software should not be forced to find their way through a minefield of
patent and copyright litigation.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOSS and Development Practise
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
It goes against the development ethos, if consultants produce knowledge
under proprietary licenses – wherein its use is controlled by either the
contracting body or the consultant. As this knowledge, whose production
costs have already been paid for, will be resold to poor people from
other countries and projects. Whilst this might be good for development
consultants, this makes no sense for the developing world. If, on the
other hand, this knowledge were freely licensed to the public, then the
global community would benefit from using, studying, modifying, and
sharing it. IOSN believes that this small systemic change in the
licensing of knowledge produced by the development sector will have a
far-reaching impact. It will stretch the development dollar and will
improve the efficacy of the sector as a whole. It would also spark
global collaboration around this body of shared knowledge. 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Case Study: Knowledge Management at IOSN Portal
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
IOSN has opted to use Plone3 as its content-cum-community management
system. With a community of more than 1000 members, this becomes a
knowledge production and management system. Plone has support for
localisation and has been translated into 36 languages. It is highly
standards compliant and renders well across several different browsers
and devices. It adheres to international standards for access by the
disabled. It also has powerful content types, interactive modules and
work-flows that can be modified to suit different modes of knowledge
production. 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Enabling Copyright Framework
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
IOSN uses four types of licenses to enable a knowledge producing
community. For software projects, IOSN recommends GNU GPL or BSD style
licenses. “Creative Commons Attribution” or “Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike” licenses are recommended for documentation
projects. This choice of licenses allows the authors and developers to
decide whether the users can create derivative works under non-free
licenses. This is in line with the inclusive moniker FOSS (that is Free
and Open Source Software), which represents the interests of both camps.
When the IOSN end-user training manual was released under the Creative
Commons Attribution license, there was a great deal of positive feedback
from the FOSS community worldwide. Volunteer translators have offered to
work on the German, Dutch, Filipino, French, Italian, Portuguese,
Spanish, and Tamil versions of the manual. 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Open Standards and Formats
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The IOSN portal is Dublin Core Compliant. The Dublin Core is a set of
standards for the use of the Resource Description Framework (RDF)
dialect of XML, to describe library meta-data or any web page. This
standard consists of 16 optional meta-data elements, any of which may be
repeated or omitted4. By complying with this standard, the IOSN portal
easily inter-operates with many other products and services. It is
important that we build knowledge management systems that comply with
Open Standards and Formats. It is not sufficient to comply with
previously closed standards and formats that are even now being made
available by single proprietary vendors as a means to capture market
share. One must adopt open standards and formats that have been designed
by consortia having adequate representation from industry, academia, and
the user community. Only then will there be an abundance of FOSS tools
that could be used to produce or consume data in these formats
accurately. In the absence of these tools, the public is coerced into
purchasing or pirating proprietary software to interact with the
knowledge management system. This is especially tragic if this knowledge
has been created using public funds. Therefore, public bodies,
especially government and development agencies, must be wary of ending
up as marketing agents for proprietary software vendors. 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Collaborative Authoring 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The lone inventor or innovator is a myth. Especially in the
Asia-Pacific, intellectual and creative pursuits are group activities.
Often these groups are not democratic, but merit based hierarchies. We
have a similar system of managers and members maintaining and updating
Blogs and Wikis on the IOSN portal. These are perfect tools for
collaborative authoring and are perfect for capturing of tacit
knowledge. Blogs allow for log or diary style entries, threaded
discussions around each entry, and rating of comments. The Wiki allows
for tracking document history, allowing for comparison of different
versions and also for undoing a particular user's changes. One of the
popular blog sites Livejournal has more than 4 million registered users
and Wikipedia has more than 300000 articles that has had more than 60
million page views. FOSS technologies and licenses are used to power
both these projects. 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Collaborative Publishing
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The IOSN portal automatically updates the section pages using RSS feeds
from relevant external news sites and also blogs of Linux User Groups.
For example, if one goes to the Education sub-section, one will notice
that we feature a feed from School Forge. Similarly, our feed is
featured on Planet MYOSS, the community site of the Malaysian Open
Source Community. This could be understood as peer-to-peer publishing or
collaborative publishing. Collaborative publishing is both highly
scalable and cost effective at the same time. For example, in September
2004, the IOSN portal was slash-dotted twice in one week. Once the
community noticed the large traffic on the portal, they started
volunteering to mirror our end-user training material. Soon we had six
mirrors in Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Italy, Mexico, and United
States. Other volunteers uploaded the files on E-Donkey - a peer-to-peer
network.  
Collaborative publishing ensures the independence of knowledge. Often
States and corporations undermine free speech and fearless knowledge by
capturing and controlling public media spaces. However, FOSS projects
like Free Net, allow for digitally signed anonymous collaborative
publishing. It would be impossible to build an equivalent proprietary
tool as the community is afraid that a single vendor would be able to
expose their anonymity. Technical reasons aside, there is a fundamental
philosophical reason why the Free Net project opposes copyright and is
thus an indirect endorsement of FOSS. The FAQ on the Free Net project
site states that “the core problem with copyright is that enforcement
requires monitoring of communications, and you cannot be guaranteed free
speech if someone is monitoring everything you say. You cannot guarantee
freedom of speech and enforce copyright law”.  In other words, you could
say that FOSS ensures freedom of speech, information sharing, and
knowledge production on the Internet.

Sunil Abraham, <sunil at apdip.net> and Khairil Yusof <khairil at apdip.net>
International Open Source Network (IOSN) <www.iosn.net>
UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP)
<www.apdip.net>

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.unescap.org/icstd/events/EGM_KM.asp
http://www.unescap.org/icstd/documents/SC_ICST/Prov_Agenda.pdf
http://www.unescap.org/icstd/applications/OSS/Participants.pdf

Thanks,

ಸುನೀಲ್
-- 
Sunil Abraham, sunil at mahiti.org http://www.mahiti.org
314/1, 7th Cross, Domlur Bangalore - 560 071 Karnataka, INDIA
Ph/Fax: +91 80 51150580. Mobile:  +91 80 36701931

Currently on sabbatical with APDIP/UNDP
Manager - International Open Source Network
Wisma UN, Block C Komplex Pejabat Damansara. 
Jalan Dungun, Damansara Heights. 50490 Kuala Lumpur. 
P. O. Box 12544, 50782, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Tel: (60) 3-2091-5167, Fax: (60) 3-2095-2087
sunil at apdip.net http://www.iosn.net http://www.apdip.net