On the Open Knowledge Foundation blog I noticed a call for projects related to One Laptop Per Child (which we saw at scifoo). I’m wondering what we could do in chemistry – there is so much around and so much that would be fun to do…
Tomorrow is the first day of the Northern Summer of Content 2007. The Summer of Content is an initiative of WikiEducator and the One Laptop Per Child project. Inspired by Google’s Summer of Code, the programme aims to match creators with mentors and stipends to “develop open content and run free culture events throughout the world”. The Northern pilot will run until the end of September and a Southern version will run from December 2007 to February 2008.The organisers place an emphasis on community in content production, and aim to create what they call “a self-supporting networked ecosystem of projects”. They aim to educate participants about open licensing, meta-data and accessibility, as well as providing support for technical aspects of creating content. A list of proposed projects can be found here.
PMR: Here are the current ideas:
Articles in category “Summer of Content proposals”
There are 33 articles in this category.
PMR: I haven’t read these but what could we do in chemistry to create content? Wikipedia has fantastically good chemistry (even though most “academic” chemists aren’t interested and don’t contribute). It would be easy to do it on a one-compound-per-laptop – each volunteer gets one compound to find out as much as they can. Or, perhaps, one product. Many products have a list of ingredients – I have a mineral water bottle that has Calcium, Magnesium, Potassium, Sodium, Bicarbonate, chloride, fluoride, nitrate, sulphate (sic). Since most kids can’t do real experiments in the classroom any more, here’s a list of real chemicals doing real things. And there are lots of Wikis and blogs in the chemical blogosphere that might be interested.
But I am sure that others have more exciting ideas than this.