Knowledge commons for human development

Logo of “why open educations matters”- by US Gov, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License., source: http://whyopenedmatters.org/

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan explains in a three minutes video, why he believes that Open Educational Resources will help communities students and workers to get access to high quality education and to shape their own educational material. Check it on http://whyopenedmatters.org/

Link: whyopenedmatters.org

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Note: This text was first published on the blog of Balthas Seibold at the Alumniportal Germany (www.alumniportal-deutschland.org/en/). Check the blog ( register or login first). All blog entries represent the personal views and ideas of Balthas Seibold.

It looks like the ideas around open education are reaching the mainstream media. I just found this piece on “Massive Open Online Courses — known as MOOCs” in the New York Times. the article takes up some of the ideas which we have been experimenting in the past years, e.g. collective building of open educational resources, which we did at ict@innovation, see http://www.ict-innovation.fossfa.net/blog/%5Buser-raw%5D/africa-and-europe-join-forces-training-free-technology. The trend towards “Open Online Courses” is certainly an interesting one, particularly for our field of developing capacities through global & open knowledge cooperation. Cheers, Balthas

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/education/moocs-large-courses-open-to-all-topple-campus-walls.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26&pagewanted=print

Logo of FTA, copyleft 2007: FTA, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution share alike license, source: http://freeknowledge.eu/FTA

Just got news about this years courses by the Free Technology Academy, which is a partner of http://www.ict-innovation.fossfa.net. See the following announcement: The Free Technology Academy expects to run two course modules for users and systems administrators who want to get started with GNU/Linux systems. Skills in this area are increasingly demanded and hard to find for employers [1], making these topics very interesting for any IT professional.

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Interesting article on “Mobilizing Global Volunteers for Grassroots Innovations” in the online journal digital development debates. Also check my comment and related article on the “knowledge commons” and the “freedom to innovate“.

Link: http://www.digital-development-debates.org/06-innovation/science-technology/mobilizing-global-volunteers-for-grassroots-innovations.html

Only one month to go before the “5th African Conference on FOSS and the Digital Commons” will start in Abuja, Nigeria. Idlelo is a conference organized by GIZ partner FOSSFA every two years to bring together the Open Source Community in Africa to share experiences and to network.

Link: http://www.ict-innovation.fossfa.net/event/idlelo-5-5th-african-conference-open-source-and-digital-commons

This is an interesting call by the “Open African Innovation Research and Training” inititative, which is part of the GIZ commons@ip programme, which I run:

“The Open A.I.R. initiative on the role of intellectual property (IP) in open development invites applications for a three- or six-month Research Fellowship to work in Cape Town, South Africa, on the project’s research, outreach and training activities. Primary responsibilities will include conducting research on a case study within one or more of the project’s thematic areas, contributing to the development of outreach strategies and training initiatives, and helping to solidify and grow Open A.I.R.’s pan-African network.

Link: http://www.openair.org.za/content/2012-fellowship-opportunity

FYI – Interesting upcoming event on the knowledge commons: “1ST THEMATIC CONFERENCE ON THE KNOWLEDGE COMMONS” -governing Pooled Knowledge Resources: Building Institutions for Sustainable Scientific, Cultural and Genetic Resource Commons. The call for papers is still open until 31. January 2012 … CONFERENCE TRACKS
. Track 1 on “Scientific Research and Innovation Commons” . Track 2 on “Digital Information Commons” . Track 3 on “Historical experience of the knowledge commons” . Track 4 on “Genetic Resource Commons” . Track 5 on “Cultural Commons” . Cross-cutting conference track 6 on climate change

Link: biogov.uclouvain.be

UNCTAD just released their Information Economy Report 2011 focusing on the link between ICTs and private sector development. It also mentions our programm ict@innovation with FOSSFA (see section on “developing human resources” page 59).

Check the: Information Economy Report 2011 – ICTs as an Enabler for Private Sector Development

More Info on the site here:

Just released: an IT sector promotion manual and toolbox with many examples and tools pertaining to OpenIT@giz – Open Innovation for Development such as capacity building, open innovation methods, training-of-trainer networks in IT, Open Source etc. Check it out! BTW: It is drawing on the ict@innovation programme and other programmes described here). And for archival reasons, please find below the reprint of the news item published on the German ICT4D Blog.

The Sector Project ICT4D on behalf of BMZ and with the support of GIZ’s ict@innovation team has just released it’s IT Sector Promotion Toolbox. The Toolbox, together with its explanatory Manual, introduces a methodology and a set of practical tools to promote the IT industry in developing and emerging countries. Relying on German Development Cooperation’s instruments and project experience, the Manual and the Toolbox provide a strategic “roadmap” for IT sector promotion which can be flexibly adapted to accommodate future changes in resources, global markets and technologies. They have primarily been designed for the staff of ministries and agencies involved in economic development, for managers and staff members of IT clusters, associations, networks, communities of practice and chambers of commerce. They should serve as orientation for staff of donor organisations involved in private sector development, economic development, and employment promotion as well as in information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D)/development informatics.

The Manual and the Toolbox could be found on this blog as topic 7 of the course section. They were also available at the “IT Sector Promotion Tools” page of the German ICT4D Blog..

“Free your IT Business in WEST Africa!” This was the motto of the first Training-of-Trainers of ict@innovation held in the West African region. Balthas Seibold and his colleagues Petra Hagemann & George Nyambuya officially welcomed more than 26 FOSS experts from Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Cameroon and Senegal, who engaged in 10 intense days of peer-discussions and peer-learning. The training was held in Nigeria’s capital town Abuja and featured senior FOSS experts from all over Africa as facilitators. More on the event is online on ict@innovation, including the presentation held by Balthas Seibold, see the ict@innovation blog entries on West African capacity building action.

Description
English: The new OER logo is designed to create a common identity for the global OER community of practitioners, projects and researchers. The design creates a common visual idea and allows for the name of the term “OER” to be expressed in different languages.This version is intended to be the main English version.
UNESCO website for OER Global logo in other languages
Date 22 February 2012
Source Own work
Author Jonathasmello

In a recent presentation for GIZ e-learning staff, Balthas Seibold gave an introduction to “Open Approaches to educational provision”, stressing the potential of Open Educational Resources and Open Licensing for Capacity Building. The presentation gives an overview of the changing educational landscape, introduces Open Education and Open Educational Services in practice (openSE, openEd 2.0 (UNU-Merit), ict@innovation (GIZ)) and looks at Open Licensing for Human Capacity Building. The presentation heavily draws on work by Dr. Andreas Meiszner – Senior Researcher & Project Manager at UNU-MERIT, CCG and its of course openly licensed :-). Download as pdf and odt at the publications section (presentations) of this website.

January 2011: Balthas Seibold inspecting the new GIZ identity

Balthas Seibold is now with the “Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)” – the successor of a merger of InWEnt – Capacity Building International and the two other bilateral technical cooperation agencies of Germany DED and gtz. The slogan of the merger is “Broad-based expertise for sustainable development – under one roof”. And this is how GIZ describes itself: “Working efficiently, effectively and in a spirit of partnership, we support people and societies in developing, transition and industrialised countries in shaping their own futures and improving living conditions. This is what the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) is all about. Established on 1 January 2011, it brings together under one roof the long-standing expertise of the Deutscher Entwicklungsdienst (DED) gGmbH (German development service), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH (German technical cooperation) and InWEnt – Capacity Building International, Germany. As a federally owned enterprise, we support the German Government in achieving its objectives in the field of international cooperation for sustainable development. We are also engaged in international education work around the globe.” For more official info on the merger outcome, check the following GIZ news. For a brief history of InWEnt, check the wikipedia-entry on InWEnt.

The working group on ‘Promoting Innovation Systems’ of Germany’s development cooperation just published a documentation on “Strengthening Innovation Systems in the Context of Development Cooperation”. An article by Balthas Seibold gives an overview of the potential of open innovation for developing countries. Taking the capacity building programme commons@ip as an example, the paper enumerates important impact indicators, which demonstrate, how a move towards open innovation in developing countries might positively influence innovation systems. Read the article “Unleashing Open Innovation Systems” in the documentation (page 87 to 92) available as a pdf-download at the publications section of this website. For more information on the InWEnt programme commons@ip, please check the InWEnt Train for Trade Portal.

So this is me at InWEnt’s first regional Alumni Conference for Southeast Asia in Hanoi, Vietnam. At the conference, I was acting as a moderator of a Workshop on “open source for healthcare” (Link now to latest version of page on the Internet Archive. Here’s a gist of the workshop as summarized back then: Free and open source software (FOSS) offers tremendous advantages to the health sector of developing countries. The session “FOSS in healthcare” at InWEnt’s 1st Interdisciplinary Alumni Conference Southeast Asia in Hanoi in July 2010 discussed these advantages. The session also offered hands-on opportunities to test drive actual FOSS electronic health records and eHealth applications in Southeast Asia. It drew on experiences by the “International Open Source Network” (IOSN) in ASEAN as a main partner in the InWEnt programme “it@foss – Promoting Free and Open Source Software in Southeast Asia” (2005-2009). Based on this, the session explored opportunities for further network building and capacity building in ASEAN in the area of “FOSS in healthcare” to strenghten open health systems as part of a regional integration framework in Southeast Asia. For the outcomes of the session, see here in section “Outcomes of the Workgroup IX”.

Building that collaboration may be difficult for some people. so the project that will be built will be constrained at…

Dear Wahdan, here ist the source of the Quote from the letter of Jefferson: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html

Dear Winda, of course you can thare the guides - all is under open licenses. See below. Just Name the…

how quotation of the parts of the letter of Jefferson on knowledge and property?

Thank you for this nice guide.This really helped me, keep posting! can i share it?