[cc-education] A Voice in The Void.

Heather Ford hford at csli.stanford.edu
Wed Dec 3 17:34:42 EST 2003


Thanks Stephen and David for your great comments on this.
> >
> > It is worthwhile to think of setting up an open system whereby Open Office
> > users are able to tap directly into (CC and equivalent licensed) RSS feeds
> > distributing free content. For example, a direct connection between
> > OpenOffice and Wikipedia would be most useful.

This sounds really interesting, Stephen - would love you to explain more 
about how you think this could work/look. I've been thinking a lot about 
how to make this connection more direct than just having a list of open 
content on the cc website. I'd love to find a way of extending the 
user-friendliness that CC is becoming well-known for, in developing this 
side more - but I'm still trying to work out how it would look.

> >
> > It is going to be important for those who promote open access to think of
> > the content infrastructure as an interconnected network extending from the
> > author directly through to the user's desktop applications. Anything less,
> > and it will be controlled and monopolized.

Couldn't agree with you more - but I think that this is becoming a problem 
as a lot of software and content is being developed as 'open source' etc. 
with no openness in the actual *process*. I don't know if this is relevant 
anywhere else, but in the development/humanitarian aid sector, it is really 
critical for the *process* rather than just the product to be open to 
comment, alteration, suggestion, support etc.


>I am very much involved with the Debian community, and therefore
>familiar with OpenOffice.org.
>With the kind of content involved in these two posts I took the liberty
>of onforwarding a copy to their developers' mailing list.
>It should reach a cast of thousands within hours.
>Working example.

Great :) Look forward to hearing what they have to say.


>You have some nice ideas, Heather.
>I have recently assisted Christiane Aschenfeldt with setting up the New
>Zealand aspect of the CC internationalization programme.
>I think that the cultural potential there with the Maori, Tongan,
>Samoan, and other tribal mentality groups has real potential with
>respect to open source and CC.

I would *love* to hear more about this - it would be great to present some 
of the ideas behind the New Zealand project in terms of the 'cultural 
potential' that you talk about. Is there somewhere that I can find info?

>I know that they have taught me a lot.
>You may well have the same potential in South Africa.

I do hope so.

best,

Heather.




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