A voluntary community of individuals and organisations that work together to promote and implement open content resources using Free, Libre
Organization
OSS-Watch
OSS Watch is a service for the UK Higher Education community. It provides unbiased advice and guidance on the use, development, and licensing of free and open source software. Their site includes excellent information on the legal, social, technical and economic issues that arise when educational institutions engage with free and open software. Although this is largely focused on universities, many of the resources are relevant to ICT in schools.
The Open Source Initiative
“Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.”
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open-source community.
The Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation is an American donor supported charity founded in 1985 and based in Boston, MA, USA. The FSF has a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all free software users. The http://www.fsfeurope.org/ Free Software Foundation Europe was launched in 2001 and supports all European aspects of Free Software; especially the GNU Project.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons offer a range of licenses for the publication of works (anything – not just software, so particularly relevant to learning resources, for example). Similar to the idea of copyright, Creative Commons offers creative control away from the extremes. At one pole is total control, such as “all rights reserved”. At the other pole it is permissible to do anything with content.
SchoolForge
SchoolForge is an American organisation with similar objectives to the UK Schoolforge.org.uk. It aims to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for education. Their site includes some interesting case studies (mostly from US schools) and a large directory of Open Source Software which their community has found useful in education:
Wikiversity
Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources and learning projects for all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning.
