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I've saved this because it identifies a facet of open knowledge that is becoming increasingly important - the concept of "open manufacturing". Additive manufacturing - or 3D printing as it is more commonly known - is being used in more industry sectors than ever before. New materials and use cases have led to 3D manufacturing in Health, Entertainment, Automobiles, Fashion, Construction etc. I particularly liked this quote from David Rowan at Wired: "The democratisation of manufacturing will empower anyone with a compelling idea to prototype, make and launch a physical product ay speed and low cost".

A great example of how to introduce open knowledge to the wider populace. This initiative provides facilities for the people of Exeter (a town in Devon, England) to experience and use open fabrication technology, using a variety of equipment, including 3D printers. Fablab also provide various workshops and Taster Courses to help people learn and understand how to use these new technologies. A great example of bringing new ideas to communities.

"To help students start new software projects without breaking the bank, GitHub, Bitnami, Crowdflower, DigitalOcean, DNSimple, HackHands, Namecheap, Orchestrate, Screenhero, SendGrid, Stripe, Travis CI and Epic Game's Unreal Engine are launching the GitHub Student Developer Pack, a new program to give students free access to their tools." A great example of Open Access to developer tools and software.

"SAGE Open is a peer-reviewed, "Gold" open access journal from SAGE that publishes original research and review articles in an interactive, open access format. Articles may span the full spectrum of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities."

The aim of the initiative is to bring the digital revolution to education with a range of actions in three areas: open learning environments, open educational resources, and connectivity and innovation.

The Declaration shows the importance of Open Educational Resources and gives recommendations to governments and institutions around the globe. In this document, we will briefly give an introduction to OER and reflect on the main recommendations as well as propose implementation actions for governments as well as institutions.

Open educational resources (OER) have been defined by the Hewlett Foundation as teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources. By ―open‖ it is generally meant that the resource is available at no cost to others for adaptation and reuse in different contexts. However ―open‖ is not a simple dichotomy; rather, there is a continuum of openness. We discuss four separate aspects of reuse and demonstrate how these describe different levels of openness. We discuss how the licensing and technical aspects of open educational resources affect the relative openness of an OER.

Open e-learning course about open access, new science comunication models  for everybody

I was lucky to be in Berlin with some colleagues earlier this month for the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival and associated fringe events. There's really too much to distill into a short post-from Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, making the case for " Embracing the open opportunity," to Patrick Alley's breathtaking accounts of how Global Witness uses information, to expose crime and corruption in countries around the world.

A useful summary of some of the key take-aways from the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival, courtesy of Tariq Khokhar From the article: 1. There are some great open data initiatives around the world and two common themes are the need for a strong community of technologically literate data re-users, and the sustained effort needed within governments to change how they create, manage and publish data in the long term. 2. Spreadsheets are code and we can adopt some software engineering practices to make much better use of them. There are a number of powerful tools and approaches to data handing being pioneered by the scientific community and those working in other fields can adopt and emulate many of them. 3. Open data fundamentally needs open source software. App reuse often doesn't happen because contexts are too different. Reusable software components can reduce the development overhead for creating locally customized civic software applications and a pool of high quality civic software components is a valuable public good worth contributing to. Reading time: 15mins

I see that Google are the sponsors of the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival but despite having little knowledge about Google's role and interest in the Open Knowledge , I also feel they are the culprit when it comes to data manipulative for their own profit motives.

Well-written article on open sources and open learning. It discusses what the future holds and how the next step must be to converge technology, ideas/content and resources even further.

Where to publish is too important of a decision to put off until the end of the research process.