Two researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) are launching the Open Patent Office, aiming to aggregate innovative ideas to defend them from being blocked by patents. Patents no longer contribute to innovation or knowledge, the two claim, and often create a loss instead of a profit. Conversely, there is a growing need for defensive … Read more
Building on the experience from last year’s successful pre-FOSDEM meeting, the Free Software Foundation Europe and OpenForum Europe recently continued the tradition of bringing together active Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) groups a day before the FOSDEM event, in order to discuss public policy related actions at both the EU and the national levels. This year, … Read more
WikiCite 2017 is a 3-day conference, summit and hack day to be hosted in Vienna, Austria, on May 23-25, 2017. It expands on efforts started last year at WikiCite 2016 to design a central bibliographic repository, as well as tools and strategies to improve information quality and verifiability in Wikimedia projects. Our goal is to … Read more
Yesterday COMMUNIA sent a joint letter to MEPs working on the copyright reform dossier. It is supported by 34 organisations and 17 individuals, all advocates of quality education. In the letter we note our concerns on the phrasing of a new education exception to copyright, as included in the proposal for a directive on copyright … Read more
In order to provide quick and user-friendly public services to citizens and businesses, public administrations are trying to adopt customer-centric approaches and readjust their ways of working. One way to achieve efficiency and increase user-friendliness is through the ‘once-only principle’. Instead of asking the citizen for information that they have already provided, public administrations will … Read more
COMMUNIA, together with other advocates of quality education in Europe, has developed a letter to members of the European Parliament. In the letter we express our concerns that the proposed directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market will make things worse for education. We make recommendations that would help copyright transform into copyright fit … Read more
The UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) will renew its focus on the creation of reusable, open source software projects, says Anna Shipman, GDS’ Open Source Lead. It is a subtle shift from making source code publicly available – the default of the past five years, to creating real open source projects – getting a community … Read more
The ‘OSS Directory‘ aims to make it easier for public administrations and companies to find open source IT solutions as well as providers of open source IT services. “In the database those interested in open source IT solutions can see that for instance Linux or Postgresql is used by many others. That does not mean … Read more
Psychologist Michal Kosinski developed a method to analyze people in minute detail based on their Facebook activity. Did a similar tool help propel Donald Trump to victory? Two reporters from Zurich-based Das Magazin went data-gathering. On November 9 at around 8.30 AM., Michal Kosinski woke up in the Hotel Sunnehus in Zurich. The 34-year-old … Read more
What is SecureDrop? SecureDrop is an open-source whistleblower submission system that media organizations can install to accept documents from anonymous sources. It was originally coded by the late Aaron Swartz, with assistance from Wired editor Kevin Poulsen and James Dolan. The project was previously called DeadDrop. Freedom of the Press Foundation took over management of … Read more
