Dear “Wikipedians”, please allow us to introduce a project we have been working on for about a year now:
Explaining the importance of the open-source movement for a free internet or the importance of Wikipedia (i.e. free content in the form of factual knowledge) here would be like carrying coals to Newcastle. The question, however, is why has *subjective* open content been neglected so far? In the realm of user reviews and ratings we have pretty much forfeited to closed systems like Amazon or Ciao. That's why we created OpenCritics.com. The idea of OpenCritics is to develop an open platform for freely licensed reviews. Published reviews are then not only available for visitors of certain websites, e.g Amazon, Ciao, etc. but can be copied freely. This also helps against the trend towards internet monopolies.(Please find an explanation and more advantages of this on: http://www.opencritics.com/sp-dsp-user_idea ) We started off with movie reviews; book reviews and more will follow. The ratings are published both on all participating websites as well as on OpenCritics.de (in German, other languages will follow). Who we are: --------------------- Our office, the development and my computer are financed by a private limited company. Eventually, I would be pleased if our company could move into the direction of a non-profit organization and funding through donations. However, I do have doubts about that since this is even difficult for Wikipedia. The second best (realistic) alternative is to do what many Linux-distributors, companies like Zend etc do: The content will remain free and open while the project is financed by consulting and support for commercial users. We are still a small team, mainly in our office in Hamburg ,with very different backgound (juristic, webdesign, journalistic and two students). How to help: ------------------- We are especially lacking a prominent team-member known even outside the world of free-internet-geeks who could help us let the little project rise above the attention threshold. Maybe you have an idea who we could contact? In the meantime we are happy about every blogentry (example: http://de.creativecommons.org/freiheit-fur-die-user-ratings/ [in German]) and appreciate critical feedback! Kind regards Georg _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
