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It's one of those almost invisible infrastructures that we start to notice only once they go extinct. A place where all people can get access to all knowledge that can be collected seemed for a long time a dream beyond reach - dependent on the limited resources of rich patrons or unstable budgets of (welfare) states.

OpenGeoportal.org is a new site that brings together geospatial professionals, developers, metadata specialists, and librarians to coordinate the Open Geoportal (OGP) project. The Open Geoportal is a collaboratively developed, open source, federated web application to rapidly discover, preview, and retrieve geospatial data from multiple repositories.

A number of universities are partnering on developing geospatial metadata and a tool that can scrape datasets from various sources to display (and overlay!) on a single, federated interface.

The story of Aaron Swartz, incredible programmer and activist for internet rights, open access and open knowledge. Good documentary to learn a little more about the open access movement, see some important figures (Tim Berners-Lee, Lawrence Lessig, etc.) and the fight against the SOPA bill. A big part of the movie is about his personal life and legal battle over copyright infringement. Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

This was a great video! I enjoyed it very much and it was very touching. thank you for posting. @smoens - awesome blog too. thank you for the link.

For the Copyright section I recommend to watch this documentary: The Internet's Own Boy depicts the life of American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. It features interviews with his family and friends as well as the internet luminaries who worked with him.

This is a neat idea. You start a sketch on your tablet and send it out into the world. Someone else sees your sketch and is inspired to do something else to it. Through successive iterations you have a new sketch that many people have collaborated on. It turns into something unexpected and new.

There is a project called Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/), which is a software that allows children and teenagers to learn to program graphically, can share their programs and work collaboratively. Thank you for sharing. -------- Existe un proyecto llamado Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/), el cual es un software que permite a niños y adolescentes a aprender a programar de manera gráfica, pueden compartir sus programas y trabajar colaborativamente. Gracias por compartir.

There's a lot to digest here, particularly if you want to read the whole report as well as the edited summary. I particularly liked the responses from JP Rangaswami: "The quality of real-time information that becomes available will take the guesswork out of much of capacity planning and decision-making......The net effect will be to reduce waste everywhere: in physical flows and logistics, in the movement of people and goods; in logical flows and logistics, in the movement of ideas and information; decisions will be made faster and better, based on more accurate information; prior errors in assumption and planning will be winkled out more effectively." And from Howard Rheingold: "We will live in a world where many things won't work, and nobody will know how to fix them." On a personal note, I can see there might be benefits with the IoT, particularly the use of sensors and actuators for monitoring and improving health, but will it put the final nail in 'privacy' and enable marketers to push their products and control my thoughts 24 x 7 through the pervasive use of wearable devices and biological interfaces with technology? Reading time: 60 mins

This site brings the concept of participatory culture to teacher professional development. I see it as an aspect of citizen activism because it is essentially taking the old idea of "professional development" (US teachers are probably all too familiar with sitting in a room while someone from a publisher makes them go page by page through a binder of photocopiable worksheets) and turns it on its head. #2minpd is teachers creating the professional development and sharing it in a format that does not demean participants.

To watch the actual videos, go to YouTube and search for the project name (#2minpd).

"The Open Source Malaria project is trying a different approach to curing malaria. Guided by open source principles, everything is open and anyone can contribute."

Open Source Malaria is an effort to find medicine for malaria faster by opening up the data and the process. There are even some non-science tasks in a to-do list!  https://github.com/OpenSourceMalaria/OSM_To_Do_List/labels/Non-Science 

Shule.Info is a project that puts data about Tanzanian schools online, providing information for the overall country, regions, and individual schools. The website is also in both English and Swahili, the language of the majority of Tanzanians. This is a great attempt at making this open data accessible and understandable to the people to who need it. "We all know that education in Tanzania is in a state of crisis. Massive failure rates. Not enough teachers. Not enough books. Poor teaching. And many more problems. So what do you do if you are a parent, brother or sister and want to find a good school? What if you are a council or national government leader and want to track progress? Right now it is very difficult to do so, because data is not easily available. And when you can access data, it is very difficult to understand and use. Open data is in fact relevant to all of us in making beter decisions. It is not just a concept for technical experts. If we knew which medicines were available in our nearest health centres we would save ourselves wasted trips. If we had live traffic updates we could better plan our travel. And if we had data on school performance we would have the chance to make better decisions about our children's education and potentially shape the course of their future differently."

Medievalists are often considered, like their subject matter, a stodgy old-fashioned bunch who are the vanguard of old academia. But there are a few exceptions, like the Digital Medievalist site. Open to scholars and enthusiasts of varying skills and experience, it runs a long-standing open-access journal, a small wiki dealing mostly with aspects of the digital humanities, and a list of important news and upcoming conferences for professional scholars. Overall it's a great place for those interested in what's going on in the medieval academy. It's not perfect, though: the journal only publishes a handful of papers each year, and most of the rest of the content isn't very expansive. It feels like, and probably is, a side-project that a few scholars work on in their free time rather than the comprehensive resource it could be; and that makes it a cautionary tale. If we freely offer only the barest bones of what constitutes a journal (or any other scholarly resource), we run the risk of presenting open access as an inferior model that can only take readers so far. It's important to remember that open access takes real sustained effort to make it a viable alternative to traditional models of scholarly publishing.

I think that as more information we have about the deep web, much more knowledge we will have to really know that is really going on in the cyber space. Deep Web (also called the Deepnet, Invisible Web, or Hidden Web) is World Wide Web content that is not part of the Surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines.

Muchos dicen que en la "red profunda" existen sitios con contenido desagradable, se debería tener cuidado, aunque existen proyectos como https://www.torproject.org/ que nos permiten navegar en la red profunda sin tener que sufrir riesgos (http://www.cnnexpansion.com/economia/2014/06/27/como-opera-la-deep-web-en-mexico), más vale prevenir. ---- Many say that the "deep web" sites with objectionable content exist, care should be taken, although there are projects like https://www.torproject.org/ that allow us to navigate the deep network without having to suffer risks (http: //www.cnnexpansion.com/economia/2014/06/27/como-opera-the-deep-web-en-mexico), better safe.

An exciting blog on and about citizen science - projects, resources, opinions of a scientist with a passion for public involvement in science.

Research often involves teams of scientists collaborating across continents. Now, using the power of the Internet, non-specialists are participating, too. Citizen Science falls into many categories. A pioneering project was SETI@Home, which has harnessed the idle computing time of millions of participants in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Our projects live within the 'Zooniverse', the home of Citizen Science on the web. Each is inspired by a science team who provide the initial ideas, the reassurance that what we're doing can make a real contribution and an audience who are willing to use the end result.