Published July 24th, 2007
in OLP sites and partners.
I mentioned in my last post that the OLP is now being run through The African Commons Project. TACP is also the local facilitator of the iCommons presence in South Africa and I have created a node on the iCommons site dedicated to the OLP. The node will facilitate discussion about the scope and operation of the OLP so if you would like to be involved in the OLP and give input, feel free to register on the iCommons site and participate in the node. I don’t believe this is only open to members of the legal community. The OLP is intended to serve members of the public as a whole so if you feel you have some input then I’d like to hear it.
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I had a meeting with Heather Ford this morning about the OLP. Heather is the executive director of iCommons and a a big part of the African Commons Project, the parent entity/facilitator of iCommons in South Africa and Creative Commons South Africa.
The outcome of the meeting is that the OLP will be run as an initiative of the African Commons Project going forward. This means the OLP has the support of a major player in the open culture space in South Africa. I think it is a great fit and I am really excited about what we can do together. A big benefit of this development is that the OLP will hopefully be seen as a more credible initiative to facilitate public and free access to good quality legal information.
Going forward one of our challenges is to secure seed funding to get the OLP on to its feet. The funding is intended to develop an initial body of content to get the wiki going and develop it to the point where it tips and the community takes over the content creation. We also need some funding to cover our costs going forward. If you are in a position to help out or know someone who is interested, please give us a shout. My email address is to the right in the sidebar.
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Published July 8th, 2007
in Open law sites and OLP news.
I received a link to a wiki called Jurispedia which seems to be a global version of the Open Law Project. The wiki runs on MediaWiki software (the same software that powers Wikipedia and the OLP wiki). What is interesting about Jurispedia (besides its global approach) is the fact that is is based on an implementation at academic institutions. In other words, a university will join the initiative and make contributions to the project (at least, this is the case if I understand it correctly). According to Jurispedia:
The project is open for cooperation with other partners. Any other teams of researchers or Faculties of Law in the whole world can freely join us. Participation in JurisPedia requires only human implication on the shared law.
What is also interesting is that the content on the site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.0 license (the current version of this license can be found here). The OLP wiki is currently licensed under a GPL FDL Free Doc license because it is published on Wikia. As I understand this license, it is the equivalent of a Creative Commons Attribution license which is fine with me. Ideally the content published through the OLP must be as close to the public domain as it can get, if not in the public domain. Crediting authors of parts of the overall work is a good idea because there is acknowledgement of their valuable contributions.
There is some merit to a NonCommercial license because I do envisage the OLP charging a nominal license fee for commercial application of the content as a way to keep the OLP self-sustaining but this is a discussion point at the moment.
I am working on developing the OLP under the auspices of a like-minded NGO and will hopefully have something to report pretty soon. This has been a bit slow going but I think the OLP is moving in the right direction. I hope to see the OLP begin to develop a considerable amount of South African legal content before the end of 2007 and take its place alongside the likes of Jurispedia as one of the larger initiatives to bring the law to the people who are subject to it, at least in South Africa.
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