Helen Turvey

As well as the continuing business of running the Foundation, this year we have welcomed 5 new fellows to the programme, created a sleeker look and feel our brand/website and created a new ‘Flash grant’.

Flash Grants:

The rationale behind these grants is that there appears to be some voices that are not heard, ideas not seen and Fellows that are not yet ready to be Fellows, bubbling around the periphery of our funding model.  We wanted to pay attention to that, and see if we can find a way to tap into some of the people/ideas and extend our networks.

Grants of $5,000 are nominated by each Fellow (including Fellows emeritus) to someone who they thinks are an impressive change agent and could be a potential Fellow (i.e. work in the field of open/education/tech).  We have given awarded to the 1st recipients and I will report back on how they faired in 6 months time!

Brand/Website:

Using the website crowd sourcing service from 99 Designs, we have updated our brand.  The process was surprisingly fun, cost effective, quick and far more challenging than I imagined it would be.  The winning design  is, imo,  far better than we would have achieved if we had briefed worked with an agency.

We also bought the Information Architects WordPress theme for $49.95  and have customised it somewhat to reflect us.  It is clean and simple to navigate – plus seriously easy to keep up to date!  Highly recommended.

Fellows 6 months highlights and reports:

Mark Horner

Full report back and summary:

• Department of Basic Education printing and distributing the Siyavula Maths and Physical Science for every learner in Grade 10 – 1.8million books
• Life Sciences book started and making good progress

Rufus Pollock

Full report back and summary:

• Estimated 30-50 *public* operational deployments of CKAN, of which RP runs about 20
• Finalised separation of software and site: CKAN = data hub software, theDataHub.org = community data hub site
• Community has grown significantly with now almost 50 OpenSpending datasets on theDataHub.org and growing group of core “data wranglers”
• Spending Stories was a winner of the Knight News Challenge. Spending Stories will build on and extend OpenSpending.

Philipp Schmidt

Full report back and summary:

• More disruptive in methodology – challenge based learning
• More ”schools” with expert entities (school of citizen cyber science, school of openness with creative commons etc…)
• P2PU were on track to be a product the big change is that it is a lab and a methodology working with rather than for organisations.

Kabir Bavikatte

Summary:

• Since BCP’s were recognised by WIPO in 2010, SA, Namibia, India, Malaysia and Bhutan have adopted (or are in the process of being ratified) them in national law.
• 13 BCP’s have been completed and implemented and a further 14 are in progress
• Idea has now gone viral, there are a lot of communities developing BCPs but calling them by other names
• Move to India – has the opportunity to directly influence their indigenous knowledge policy and implementation

Gavin Weale
Full report back and summary:

• 50,000 copies of a magazine produced and distributed 100% by young people
• Covered 80% of costs in 1st issue through advertising and design
• Y2 will expand from just advert dependent to internships, work placement, and opening up the minds of SA commerce to things like letting the kids play around with their brand

Kathi Fletcher

Full report back and summary:

• Created Open API (OERPub) based on SWORD for OER’s.
• Implemented in Connexions.
• Massive content enabler, an importer that takes documents (Word, Open Office/ Libre Office, Google Docs, and some HTML and blog entries and transforms them into a remixable XML format – then lets authors upload and publish to OER repositories (currently Connexions).

Arthur Attwell

Full report back and summary:

• Prototype of site
• Rights agreements drawn up
• In negotiation with copy shops and large copy chains
• In principle commitment from publishers (i.e. Bloomsbury, UNISA, News Corp International, etc…)  to use service

Paul Gardner-Stephen

Full report back and summary:

• MeshMS (Mesh SMS service), interactive mapping,  Rhizome file distribution or store-and-forward SMS working
• Recognised as the leaders internationally in this space: finals of the World Embedded Software Competition for University students (South Korea), strong engagement by and with the IEEE 802.11 standards process (USA and international), presenting at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas and TEDx Adelaide (Australia), and also reaching the finals of the Ashoka Foundation World Changer’s Citizen Media competition (international) from a field of more than 400 entrants.
• Next steps: add in the missing pieces, primarily the security and authenticity, appropriate trails with 3rd parties