More on the BBC iPlayer - it’s hard to argue with the Open Source viewpoint on this.

‘More than 10,000 people have signed an e-petition on the 10 Downing Street website urging the BBC to make its iPlayer available to non-Windows users.’

Full story from ZDNet

Dell Computers is now offering consumers computers that come preloaded with the open source Linux operating system Ubuntu, the world’s number two computer maker said today. Dell has long offered business Linux-based computers, but this announcement marks the first time that a major computer manufacturer has offered the technology on laptops and desktops designed for consumer use.

The computers will use a version of Linux called Ubuntu and will be available by the end of the May in America with Europe not far behind. With companies like Google offering web-based applications that compete with Microsoft’s most popular programmes, the move by Dell offers consumers an unprecedented opportunity to run a full-featured laptop without using any products from the world’s largest software maker.

“There is growing demand for Linux in the desktop and notebook space, and we believe that there will be positive response to our efforts,” Dell spokesman Jeremy Bolen announced. “In addition, we are seeing the overall ecosystem evolve with enhanced operating systems and applications that make Linux more appealing than ever. “

David, Iain and Ewan attended a half day conference at St. Andrews University run by SHERPA as part of their series of UK roadshows that have also called at such places as the University of Liverpool and the University of Durham.

SHERPA aims to investigate ‘issues in the future of scholarly communication’ and is currently developing open-access institutional repositories in a number of research universities to ‘facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research’.

The day started for the three of us at the Powmill Milk Bar where we ate lunch while listening to David’s funny anecdotes about his numerous adventures.

Half an hour after Powmill we arrived just in time for the beginning of the conference. The first presentation was by Gareth Johnson who spoke generally about Open Access including its current and future use and the various barriers it currently experiences.

The next presentation was carried out by representatives from St. Andrews University. They spoke about their internal experiences of Open Access and the successes and opposition that they had faced and continue to face. The speakers outlined an interesting anecdote which involved one academic saying that open access repositories only existed ‘to give librarians some work to do’.

The final presentation was by Jane H. Smith who spoke about the RoMEO and Juliet services. RoMEO is a useful repository of journal publishers’ listings that is run with support form JISC and the Wellcome Trust. Juliet is a ‘complement to the RoMEO service provided by SHERPA for authors and repository administrators, which lists summaries of publishers’ copyright transfer agreements as they relate to archiving’.

The day was of most interest as it illustrated the view points on Open Access of those from a range of academic areas. The conference also almost acted as a reassurance that the barriers to Open Access are common throughout all institutions.

On 5^th March 2007 the Spoken Word’s Principal Investigator David Donald will travel to Brussels where he will attend a high level workshop based around the agenda of driving forward the establishment of a European e-Infrastructure for e-Science digital repositories along with other ‘professionals’ in the area of digital repositories.

The conference will revolve around various discussions of the following issues:

• What the major issues are behind the interoperability and widening of access to digital repositories across Europe.
• What are the tools that need to be encouraged in order to move infrastructures, techniques for metadata assignment, and storage management technologies forward?
• What are the key technological limitations inhibiting the growth of repositories?
• How can we reduce the domain-specific knowledge required to access and use these repositories in order to open them up to wider research?
• How can a sustainable technical framework be realised, preserved and maintained across Europe that will ensure continuing accessibility to repositories?
• How can European-level policy initiatives encourage growth and the overcoming of technological barriers?

The findings from the workshop discussions will be used in various EU-funded initiatives concerning repositories.

Open Academic looks like it will be worth keeping an eye on.

Here’s the blurb

‘OpenAcademic — supporting learners, teachers, and institutions.

Create an intranet. Blog. Podcast. Manage the school website, and all the club websites. Create a private workspace. Manage a class. Share files. Give students the tools to build portfolios that cross academic years and curricular disciplines. Support teacher professional development. Communicate with parents. Build a safe social networking environment within your school community.’

It uses only Open Source software, namely Moodle, Drupal, Elgg, OpenID and MediaWiki. Still in its early stages but I think the vision is excellent.

Something along the lines of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail thesis, this page confirms Jimmy Wales‘ contention that Wikipedia, far from being reliant on a nebulous and far-flung posting userbase, is actually much more like a conventional organisation than the revolutionary rhetoric associated with some elements within the Wikipedia community would suggest. New content often comes from the anonymous writers or one-time posters, but the majority of edits come from regulars. And it’s even more skewed than you might expect:

How Wikipedia entries get written:

Cory Doctorow: Aaron Swartz, who is running for the WIkipedia executive, has done some data-crunching using a rented supercomputing cluster, against many Wikipedia entries to determine how Wikipedia entries get written. It turns out that while the majority of edits come from a small group of 500 core editors, the majority of new content is inserted by drive-by, unregistered users whose contributions are then massaged into encolopediahood by the core 500.

Link

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

(Via BoingBoing).

Open source and open content are ratified by the Spelling Report from the US Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. More details from Inside Higher Ed. http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/01/commission

Like the European Union, the UK Government and JISC, the US Secretary of Education’s Commission finds strongly in favour of Open Source and Open Content developments ….

‘The commission encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of open-source and open-content projects at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling the open sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Such a portal could stimulate innovation, and serve as the leading resource for teaching and learning. New initiatives such as OpenCourseWare, the Open Learning Initiative, the Sakai Project, and the Google Book project hold out the potential of providing universal access both to general knowledge and to higher education.’

Via Sakai foundation news

In its modern usage, Shibboleth refers to catchwords that distinguish members
of a group from outsiders; it is an appropriate name, therefore, for a
technology that is providing secure access to public sector resources. VUNET has published a very interesting article looking at Shibboleth and its adoption here in UK and Europe.

“Higher education advisory organisation the Joint Information Systems
Committee (Jisc) is using Shibboleth, an open source software development, to
create a federated access management (FAM) system for education users.

Read the full article here.

Useful for us to keep an eye on Plone…

Plone: A user-friendly and powerful open source Content Management System plone.org: “Plone: A user-friendly and powerful open source Content Management System
by Webmaster last modified February 7, 2006 at 01:56

This is the development and community site for Plone, a content management system with strong multilingual support. You’ll find news about Plone and its related products, documentation, links to downloads, and information about the non-profit Plone Foundation.”

(Via .)