Appropedia Blog

Appropedia is seeking an intern to work on Intellectual Property. The focus will be on public domain content, and mainly US federal government online resources.

This would be particularly suitable for a law student with an interest in US and/or international IP law. Ability to use a spreadsheet might come in handy, and being more tech-savvy than that would be a bonus.

The main task is to help identify which web resources are and aren't public domain. This information is used as the basis for the Public Domain Search - see the Beta version here (still a significant number of false positives):

This is an unpaid internship (the Appropedia Foundation being a non-profit organization) and you would be working remotely - unless you happen to be near a trusted member of the Appropedia community who can assist in mentoring you. (I'm near Jakarta, and others are in various parts of the US, Canada and the UK.) I've done the work on this so far, but we also have an attorney (Joel Scott) on our board of directors, with an interest in IP issues; and we've discussed this project with the Wikisource community, who may be able to lend a hand. You won't be on your own.

If you are interested, please leave a comment either below or on my Appropedia talk page, and I'll get in touch. (Or email me at my username, above, at appropedia dot org.) For more information about the search engine, see Public Domain Search on our wiki. The position will be open until it is filled, but we'd ideally like to find someone to start in this half of 2011.

Jatropha seeds are a source of oil. (Source)

One of the practical outcome of the MovementCamp, which finished a few hours ago, formed during the post-camp online discussions. Jason Smithson (who works hard on Appropedia tech) and Darren Hill (years of experience with biofuels) agreed to join forces (cue theme music of Battle of the Planets) and work on a Biofuel Content Initiative, the first of our Content Initiatives. Darren's been working for some time on this, but is now bringing his work and his knowledge to Appropedia.

There's a lot of work to be done, but it will result in an extremely useful resource on biofuels - the good news, the bad news, the little known but important facts - and their relevance for tackling climate change and for international development.

If this interests you, check out that Content Initiative page - or leave a note and tell us what area you'd be interested in helping to build.

A very important task that the Appropedia community is taking on is converting valuable documents to wiki format, to make it part of the structured knowledge bank we're building.

An key tool for this is wikEd, which can be used (by those with a Firefox browser) to convert formatted text to wiki markup.  And now there's an even easier way to use it:  Just use the conversion box at Wikedbox. Paste in the formatted text, and press the "wikify" button above, which looks like this:  .  Voila - you now have wiki markup. Mostly it works very well, and saves a heap of time.

For more detail, see Using wikEd to convert formatted text to wiki markup.

Note that this isn't enough to handle PDFs - we're looking for people with access to Adobe Reader Pro who can help us with the first step (simple,  but you need the software) of converting PDF documents to HTML plus images.

I've been thinking about the way we use original content - content produced elsewhere, and copied to Appropedia. Organizations like Practical Action release their excellent content under an open license, and we use it while giving attribution, but how do we present it? We as a community (including me) haven't been really clear in our own minds, and that results in the confusing and not-always-inviting messages on the pages of original material:

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This is a project from Humboldt State University's Campus Center for Appropriate Technology. Please see other CCAT projects here on Appropedia or check out the CCAT homepage.

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and

and:

The original content of this page, Water diversion (original), was taken, with permission for publication under the GNU-FDL, from “Beyond Dams”, authored by Elizabeth Brink of International Rivers Network (IRN) and Serena McClain and Steve Rothert of American Rivers (AR), and published by IRN and AR)

Now, we really want to invite people to edit this material, and Neil Noble from Practical Action tells me they would love to see contributions to their material as well. So how we make things more inviting?

For one thing, these notices need to specify either that the page is not open to editing (and point to an editable page) or they need to clearly invite edits. Putting the note at the bottom rather than the top will also make it less daunting.

But do we keep the original content somewhere in an unchanged state? I was leaning away from this, personally, but I've changed my mind. I'd like to propose the idea of flagged revisions and/or approved pages, e.g. "This page is approved by XYZ" (where XYZ is Practical Action, or Akvo, or an academic body from a particular university...) These original pages might be a good starting point or forerunner of those approved articles.

One thing we would never want to do though, is hide away the open edit pages. I would imagine that the open pages would be the "landing pages" and they might have a link on the top right, say, to an "approved" article. This priority is important, as Appropedia relies on the power of open content.

"The Universal Edit Button is a green pencil icon in the address bar that indicates a web page is editable. It is similar to the orange "broadcast" RSS icon that indicates there is an RSS feed available."

I love this: the idea that you can edit this page should be a regular part of browsing the web, just like subscribing to a podcast or blog. Expect to see this on Appropedia soon.

At the moment you need a Firefox extension to be able to see the button in your url bar, but in time, enlightened browser developers will integrate it in their code.