At the Open Source World Conference in Málaga, Spain, Karsten Gerloff discussed the FLOSSInclude project in a session on EU-sponsored FLOSS research projects. The presentation met with lively interest from the audience, drawing questions in particular from Latin American participants.

The session was chaired by Jesus Villasante, head of unit for the Software Technologies unit in the EU Directorate General Information Society and Media (DG Infso)

UNU-MERIT’s Collaborative Creativity Group has organised a panel on “Technologies for Access” at Yale Law Schools Third Access to Knowledge Global Conference (A2K3). The conference will take place in Geneva, Switzerland, on September 8-10. UNU-MERIT researchers Rishab Ghosh and Karsten Gerloff will be attending the event.

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At a seminar organised by the South Centre in Geneva on June 30, UNU-MERIT researcher Rishab Ghosh participated in an expert panel on intellectual monopoly powers and standards.

IP-Watch reports:

Standards can be of two kinds: de facto standards created by market forces, and de jure standards created by standards-setting organisations. In both cases, the standards can include intellectual property rights.

In the de facto scenario, “the value is in the standard, not in the technology itself,” said Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, senior researcher at the United Nations University (UNU-Merit) in the Netherlands. The value comes from the fact that everybody is going to use the same technology, he said.

After Stiglitz and Sulston last week, now the Wall Street Journal has an article about the problem that the patent system has become. It’s US-focused, but it pretty neatly outlines how the debate on a mild patent reform there sets the pharmaceutical industry against technology companies:

Yet the fault line over patent reform signals the deeper problems. Many pharmaceutical companies lobbied against the proposals, fearful of reduced value in their key intellectual property. In contrast, most technology firms supported the reforms, worried more about uncertainty in the law than about the value of their patents.

Both sides may be right. New empirical research by Boston University law professors James Bessen and Michael Meurer, reported in their book, “Patent Failure,” found that the value of pharmaceutical patents outweighed the costs of pharmaceutical-patent litigation. But for all other industries combined, they estimate that since the mid-1990s, the cost of U.S. patent litigation to alleged infringers ($12 billion in legal and business costs in 1999) is greater than the global profits that companies earn from patents (less than $4 billion in 1999). Since the 1980s, patent litigation has tripled and the probability that a particular patent is litigated within four years has more than doubled. Small inventors feel the brunt of the uncertainty costs, since bigger companies only pay for rights they think the system will protect.

Link

Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz (Economics, 2001) and John Sulston (Physiology/Medicine, 2002) argue that the patent regime, along with other forms of intellectual monopoly powers, locks down access to knowledge rather than allowing its dissemination.

Both were speaking at the launch of Manchester University’s new Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation:

Patent monopolies are believed to drive innovation but they actually impede the pace of science and innovation, Stiglitz said. The current “patent thicket,” in which anyone who writes a successful software programme is sued for alleged patent infringement, highlights the current IP system’s failure to encourage innovation, he said.

Sulston made the privatisation of science his topic:

Reversing the trend toward privatisation of science is critical, Sulston said. The world should concentrate on the survival and thriving of humanity, and exploration of the universe, he said. The outcome, he added, depends to a great extent on “who owns science.”

via IP-Watch

This is a joint initiative by some of the UNU institutes. For the UNU MERIT courses on innovation and development we linked lecture recordings with slides via slideshare, and also posted some papers written by PhD students who were taking the course last year.

United Nations University
Public Announcement
4 February 2008
MR/E03/08

United Nations University Launches Online OpenCourseWare Portal

New initiative offers free online access to training courses

Today, 4 February, United Nations University launches the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal, accessible at http://ocw.unu.edu. Initially, the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal offers open access to about a dozen courses developed by three of UNU’s Research and Training Centres and Programmes (RTC/Ps) and the Tokyo-based UNU Media Studio.

The intent of the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal is to make the course materials used by UNU RTC/Ps available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. The initiative is not meant to replace degree-granting higher education or for-credit courses, but rather to provide content that can be used by educators for curriculum development, by students to augment their current learning resources, and by individuals for independent self-study.

The long-term goal of the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal is to promote the development, use and distribution of training materials under Creative Commons licenses. The initiative is part of the Global OpenCourseWare Consortium (http://ocwconsortium.org), a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world with a common mission of advancing education and empowering people worldwide through OpenCourseWare.

Expressing his support for this initiative, UNU Rector Konrad Osterwalder said, “This signifies our commitment to broadening access to high-quality educational materials and will contribute to the United Nations University’s core mission, which seeks to further the generation and sharing of knowledge in order to strengthen individual and institutional capacities to resolve pressing global problems.”

Resources available in the initial phase of the UNU OpenCourseWware Portal include six courses on electronic governance, developed by the UNU International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST, Macao); five Ph.D. training courses on the economics of technical change, innovation and development, developed by the UNU Maastricht Economic and Social Research and Training Centre on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT, the Netherlands); and two courses on mangrove biodiversity and integrated water resources management developed by the UNU International Network on Water and Health (UNU-INWEH, Canada). Several more UNU system units are currently preparing course materials for inclusion in the portal later this year.

Project coordinator Brendan Barrett notes that UNU is committed to sharing the expertise developed through this initiative by offering support and guidance to universities in the developing world that are seeking to open up their courses.

Philipp Schmidt, who is responsible for the project at UNU-MERIT and who recently participated in drafting the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, said, “So far, the OpenCourseWare movement has focused on distributing content from the developed to developing countries. Through our partnership with institutions like the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, we are trying to reverse this trend and make locally created content more accessible.”

In the Asia–Pacific, UNU is collaborating with several Japanese universities, including Keio University, Waseda University, the University of the Ryukyus and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, to jointly run open courses on such important topics as climate change, sustainable energy and disaster management. Many of these universities are members of the Japan Opencoursware Consortium (http://www.jocw.jp). UNU is very pleased to take this opportunity to announce its intention to officially join JOCW in March 2008.

For more information, visit the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal (http://ocw.unu.edu) or contact:

Brendan Barrett
UNU Media Studio
United Nations University Centre
53-70, Jingumae 5-chome, Shibuya-ku
Tokyo 150-8925, Japan
Tel: +81-3-5647-1318
Email: barrett@hq.unu.edu
Web: http://www.unu.edu; http://www.mediastudio.unu.edu

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration is launched - “Teachers, Students, Web Gurus, and Foundations Launch Campaign to Transform Education, Call for Free, Adaptable Learning Materials Online”

Champagne and Appletizer all around! We soft-launched a few weeks ago and there have been a number of interesting and useful responses and comments, some critical, many positive and supportive.

What did the critics say?

North America bias: I’ll start with this one, because it comes from Stephen Downes whose voice and opinion deservedly carry a lot of weight in this space, and also because I find it relatively easy to respond to. Stephen said:

“… written by a group of mostly American academics and advocates invited by a foundation to a private meeting in South Africa …”

Regardless of how I categorize the participants in the original group of drafters (country of origin, country of residence, country of work), I can’t find such a North America bias.

Call it libre/free/open/all of the above: This is a discussion that has moved from the open source community into the open education world, with little progress in finding more common ground. Ahrash spells it out (emphasis mine) although many will disagree again:

“The whole debate about “libre” versus “open” lends itself to an empirical question: are we better off using the broader (but potentially more confounding) “open” term, or using the narrower (but potentially obtuse and confusing) “libre” term if one of the primary intents of the Declaration is to raise awareness and expand the activity levels in open education? I don’t know the answer, nor does anyone else.“

Top-down vs. community education: Further, some people felt the declaration still focused on the top-down delivery model of education, and was too concerned with copyright:

Leigh Blackall writes: “There is too much standard thinking about the ‘delivery’ of education, and the near neurotic obsessing over copyright seemingly at the expense of more important issues to do with learning.”

The declaration mirrors the difference in opinion on the first issue. Some in the original group of drafters (including me) are developing educational models in which the institution disappears almost entirely, others are much more interested in slow incremental change of the practices they are used to. I think both is fine and there is enough text in the declaration to let me push strongly towards the learner-centric education model that Stephen and others (and myself) are advocating.

Now, how do we deal with these divergent opinions and statements. Whereto from here?

In my opinion, Brendan Barrett from UNU’s Media Studio set’s the tone for the way forward (on the UNESCO OER mailing list): “Hmmm, instead of a battle about who is right and who is wrong, why not look for a creative way forward. Make your own declaration! Edit the one of wikieducator. Sign the Cape Town one, and make clear your reservations. Write a poem. Celebrate small steps forward.”

And Ken Udas thoughfully adds: “… it is explicitly the hope of the community that grappled with the original drafts of the Declaration for other people and communities to create alternative or companion drafts of documents like this one (see “Can I ‘remix’ the Declaration? here .”

The lively debate and discussion (more links here) that was a result of publishing the draft declaration shows that we(?) are becoming a constructive and critical community of practice that moves towards a broad common goal - even if we often can’t agree on how to describe that goal or how to get there.

Open/libre/free knowledge hooray!

Here is the press release:

Cape Town, January 22nd, 2008—A coalition of educators, foundations, and internet pioneers today urged governments and publishers to make publicly-funded educational materials available freely over the internet.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, launched today, is part of a dynamic effort to make learning and teaching materials available to everyone online, regardless of income or geographic location. It encourages teachers and students around the world to join a growing movement and use the web to share, remix and translate classroom materials to make education more accessible, effective, and flexible.

“Open education allows every person on earth to access and contribute to the vast pool of knowledge on the web,” said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia and one of the authors of the Declaration. “Everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.”

According to the Declaration, teachers, students and communities would benefit if publishers and governments made publicly-funded educational materials freely available online. This will give students unlimited access to high quality, constantly improving course materials, just as Wikipedia has done in the world of reference materials.

Open education makes the link between teaching, learning and the collaborative culture of the Internet. It includes creating and sharing materials used in teaching as well as new approaches to learning where people create and shape knowledge together. These new practices promise to provide students with educational materials that are individually tailored to their learning style. There are already over 100,000 such open educational resources available on the Internet.

The Declaration is the result of a meeting of thirty open education leaders in Cape Town, South Africa, organized late last year by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation. Participants identified key strategies for developing open education. They encourage others to join and sign the Declaration.

“Open sourcing education doesn’t just make learning more accessible, it makes it more collaborative, flexible and locally relevant,” said Linux Entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, who also recorded a video press briefing (http://capetowndeclaration.blip.tv/). “Linux is succeeding exactly because of this sort of adaptability. The same kind of success is possible for open education.”

Open education is of particular relevance in developing and emerging economies, creating the potential for affordable textbooks and learning materials. It opens the door to small scale, local content producers likely to create more diverse offerings than large multinational publishing houses.

“Cultural diversity and local knowledge are a critical part of open education,” said Eve Gray of the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town. “Countries like South Africa need to start producing and sharing educational materials built on their own diverse cultural heritage. Open education promises to make this kind of diverse publishing possible.”

The Declaration has already been translated into over a dozen languages and the growing list of signatories includes: Jimmy Wales; Mark Shuttleworth; Peter Gabriel, musician and founder of Real World Studios; Sir John Daniel, President of Commonwealth of Learning; Thomas Alexander, former Director for Education at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Paul N. Courant, University Librarian and former Provost, University of Michigan; Lawrence Lessig, founder and CEO of Creative Commons; Andrey Kortunov, President of the New Eurasia Foundation; and Yehuda Elkana, Rector of the Central European University. Organizations endorsing the Declaration include: Wikimedia Foundation; Public Library of Science; Commonwealth of Learning; Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition; Canonical Ltd.; Centre for Open and Sustainable Learning; Open Society Institute; and Shuttleworth Foundation.

To read or sign the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, please visit: http://www.capetowndeclaration.org.

The preview Cape Town Open Education Declaration is live. The document is the result of a 2 day workshop in Cape Town that 27 people spent brainstorming, strategising, discussing, agreeing and disagreeing - and then many more weeks of the same by email. It was drafted by members of the community, for the community - as a foundation that hopefully diverse types of initiatives, projects and people can identify with. If this reminds you of the Budapest Open Access declaration, then that is not a coincidence; we are trying to bring together a similar movement around open education.

The current version is a preview that we want to share with a broader community to get initial feedback and comments. Along with the declaration text we have compiles an extensive list of FAQs, which go into much more detail and allow more flexibility than the declaration.

Please, have a look at both, and if you disagree or you feel we are missing an important aspect, send your feedback here. If you really like it, please tell us as well (and keep you pen ready to sign up when it launches in January).

How can society ensure that knowledge goods, which are both costly to create and potentially non-rival in use, can be shared freely?

There is little doubt that the current approach to rewarding the development of new medicines or diagnostic devices has severe deficiencies. Patent enforced monopolies often lead to high
prices. Critics also say that this system often fails to stimulate investment in areas of public interest and priority.

The prize system provides an appealing solution by encouraging new approaches to this thorny issue. If the incentive for innovation can be divorced from the product’s consumer price, then knowledge
goods — including the R&D for a new medicine — can be placed in the public domain immediately, so that competition among suppliersleads to low prices and greater access to new medical inventions.

Prizes can be implemented in many different ways. For donors and governments in particular, prizes might offer an alternative to marketing monopolies as the reward for successful investments in R&D.

Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and UNU-MERIT are calling for papers on the use of monetary prizes as an alternative mechanism to stimulate private investments in R&D.

Participation is open to anyone. Winners will be selected by a jury of high-profile experts. The deadline for contributions is February 15, 2008. Papers should be between four and 20 pages, and must be submitted under a licence allowing unlimited distribution, such as an appropriate Creative Commons licence.

Awards:

• Winning paper: EUR 1500.
• Two runners-up: EUR 500.-
• The three top-ranked papers will be published in the Knowledge Ecology Studies journal.

Successful papers will deal with one or more of the following questions:

1. Relation to exclusive rights of a patent: Should prizes beconsidered as a voluntary or non-voluntary alternative to the exclusive rights now associated with the patent system, or as acomplementary reward?

2. Valuation: How does one determine the size of prizes?

3. Push vs. pull: Where to use research grants (”push”), where to prefer prizes (”pull”) to finance drug development?

4. Sustainable financing: Where should the prize money come from, and will the prospect of prizes be credible?

5. Follow-on innovation: How will prizes deal with the need for incentives for follow-on innovation?

6. Transition: How can the transition from the current monopoly-based system be organized?

For questions and submissions, please send email to Malini Aisola and Karsten Gerloff <prizeprize@merit.unu.edu>. More information will soon be available at ccp.merit.unu.edu/prizeprize.

KEI and UNU-MERIT are looking forward to your contributions.

The Dutch government wants to improve the use of Free Software and open standards in the public sector. It has just published an action plan “Nederlands open en verbinding” (pdf), which is intended to give public bodies more independence from IT suppliers and raise the level of innovation.

According to the document, public entities have to use open standards in their IT, or justify why they’re unable to do so. In procurement, they have to consider Free Software.

The plan takes a number of cues from research done at UNU-MERIT, in particular the 2006 FLOSSImpact study (pdf). The study argues that Free Software offers great economic benefits, both for the public and the private sector. It points out that to fully profit from Free Software and open standards, public procurement needs to change — pretty much in the way that the action plan describes.

Always happy to help