Content projects

There are a number of core problems that must be addressed before we can build and maintain a multilingual body of freely accessible knowledge, content for learning, and collaborative projects. A few are listed below, along with some ideas of how to start tackling them in the short term.

Formats and free licenses

• Compatibility, definitions, and cross-identification. The free culture movement in contrast with specific definitions and subclasses.

• A clear definition of openness and content freedom that maximizes the

reusability and compatibility of content collections. There is no substitute for being able to pull together educational materials from dozens of compatibly-licensed collections to produce something new.

Localization

A hydra in more ways than one.

Internationalization

Many content creators and providers are oblivious to best practices and even the need for i18n in developing tools and content.

Translation

Distributed translators. A model that allows multilingual people to devote small amounts of time to parts of large projects

Announcing and finding free materials

World digital library; OER organization; open source software organization; coordination of searches by license, topic, and format; Wikimedia searching; media storing on Archive.org / Ourmedia / Wikimedia / Flickr / Youtube / Myspace...

Creator networks

• Global projects
• university- and community-sponsored mentoring networks.
• Local hubs of creation, networked with but not dependent on one another; with implied problems of localization, communication, & synchronization.
• Microgrants for grassroots creators; there are a few places to get these now, including Global Voices for local cultural news and bridge blogging; various OS Foundations and their projects

Academia

Defined in terms of the freedom of the work it produces; still often closed in practice.

Youth

Some of the most active sharers and creators on the planet; often use non-free licenses and projects for lack of interest or awareness that there is a difference. Rarely collaborate on educational materials unless specifically involved in projects that teach them they have something to teach.

Tools

• A framework of creative, publishing, and editing tools that are needed to allow large-scale collaboration. As a small instance, we still lack an open-source program for collaborative drawing, or an open toolchain for the spectrum of localization.