Recently the Agile Knowledge and Semantic Web research group (AKSW) at Universität Leipzig launched Cofundos.org. Confundos aims to help people share, refine, fund and realise new ideas for open software and knowledge projects. It was founded and developed by Sören Auer, who leads the AKSW research group (and is on the OKF’s advisory board).
The Confundos model for project development is very simple. The How does Confundos work? page conveys it in a neat schematic picture, the contents of which are roughly as follows:
Someone proposes an idea for an open software/knowledge project
Others discuss and refine the idea, suggest their own requirements, and bid money
Specialists offer to realize the project and propose a price/timeline
Bidders vote (weighted according to their bid) on which offer to accept
The selected specialist realises the project
Bidders vote whether project was successfully realised
Bidders donate the bid amounts to the specialist
So far there 34 projects and 79 bids (amounting to over €3000). It looks like a funding and development model with a lot of potential. Relatively small bids could add up to be a substantial funding source for community developed projects. It also looks like a model that will work particularly well for open knowledge/software - as any interested party can come along and further customise the relevant code, content and/or data to their own specific requirements, if, for example, the results were not precisely as they had hoped or envisaged.
We’ll certainly furnish the site with some open knowledge projects in due course!
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/26/2007 01:22:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
