rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

UPDATE and NOTE: This is a year old post, so its not up-to-date…oops…clearing the queue…The original post is here.

I’ve been trying to come up with unconventional ways to raise money for the small non-profit. Yesterday, someone decided to auction off their old web domain and give 90% of the money to Creative Commons. So, I started to think about all the code that is sitting on developers’ shelves, old domains, etc. I wonder if other developers would consider auctioning off domain names, old code, etc, and or just outright donating old code, domain names, etc. to Creative Commons. This code would get licensed so that it would be Open Source and I would even take the time to make a place for it that would be visible and accessible.

Does anyone have any code, failed or sleeping dot.com projects, and/or domain names they would like to donate to CC? CC could then decide what to do with these (auction, put online, developer further, etc). From the likes of the domain name auctions on Ebay, this is a great way to raise funds. However, I’m quite surprised that not more people are trying to sell their code on-line on ebay.

Also, I just now started to wonder about how to apply the similar logic of fundraising of naming certain properties after people, for the web. Like, how much of a donation would it take to get certain tools, sections of a website, or campaigns named after donors?

Maybe I should try this for my site. I could name my next open source tool after someone, for a donation of $1000 USD. Hmmm…maybe I should rename an old project if anyone is interested in this Ideally, also, the name would just be a name and the code would all stay as open source.

What other unconventional tactics can other people think of that would help CC or any nonprofit in the world, raise money to stay in operation? What new possibilities are there? So much time and money is spent on adapting and revolutionizing business, but what about simple nonprofit operations like fundraising?

So, I just read Harold Welte’s blog post about the delays on OpenMoko and how it is basically a cultural issue. Their team has basically 4-5 Open Source hackers and a team of about 50-60 (I’m guessing slightly). Thus, most of these workers I’m assuming are in Taiwan and China and have rarely touched Open Source, nor have come into contact with the culture of Open Source development. Harold notes:

In the end (up to now) I have been doing tons of more things. I’ve been doing hardware related debugging, hot-fixing and consulting, providing lots of support for our internal development team, doing all the system administration, configuration and maintenance of our four physical and about 15 virtual machines (wiki, lists, gforge, svn, build server, etc.). Today I even spent a lot of time on web related issues [hey, I haven’t done much web stuff since HTML4 and CSS1 came out], since we have committed to go public with our web sites public at some point.

We’ve had to teach people how to use request tracker, bugzilla, subversion, mailing lists, IRC. Those basic means of communication, natural for everyone ever involved in a FOSS project are all things that we had to bootstrap here.

Many of the things that are a complete given for me (and even us, the rest of the core team consisting of Sean, Werner, Mickey and myself) are not at all known, valued and/or respected [yet] by the various people and entities we had to relate in this project.

This problem is so very familiar to when I worked for Gopets in Korea. While my friends and colleagues there are some of my best friends, the economics and culture of Open Source had not struck. Thus, I spent so much of my time just helping people get up to speed on what is Subversion (how you need to check-in often), bugtracker (which no one used), and other forms of communication. It took much energy, but I slowly helped to convert a few people.

So, when I read Harold’s post about these issues, I immediately started to think about how to get more people into Open Source in Asia, particularly Mainland China and Taiwan.

First of all, nothing can stand-in for pure experience. But, for crash course cultural learning for developers and others, I think it should be mandatory learning to read Karl Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software book. Oh, and guess what, the book is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 1.0 license. So, not only is it available, all the sources are available. Thus, anyone could help translate this book.

So, my question out into the ethos is, do translations of this book exist? And, if not, would anyone out there in Taiwan and China be interested in helping to translate this book? I’m really serious, this endeavour would be of huge benefit to the world of Chinese and Taiwanese companies breaking into Open Source and for companies that have some form of outsourcing. Please comment on this post if you know of a translation and/or would like help translate this book. The sources are online, so we could submit a patch to Karl Fogel.

I just emailed Karl to see if he is into these things, as you can see:

Hi Karl, first of all, your book is a classic. I have a book that I’m putting out that deals with the issues you bring out so clearly, with relation to social sciences.

However, the reason I’m emailing you is to both say hi, from Creative Commons, as I see that you book is CC BY-SA licensed. I am the community developer/open souce developer/bizdev guy for them…so so happy to see your book is under cc license.

Also, I’m interested in translations of your book, particularly into Complex and Simplified Chinese? I want to help teach some people in China about Open Source, and your book is a must read.

Do translations exist, and if not, I’m advocating this. If translations get made, would you consider linking to them and or accepting them as patches to your SVN module?

This would be amazing for outsourcing companies, etc.

You are great.

Oh, on Open Source side I’m a core developer on Inkscape and Open Clip Art Library…

Cheers!

Jon

I wanted to add to the blogosphere about the OpenMoko first phone launch for developers on February 11. Looks like the OpenMoko team is sending me a test unit so I can explore development opportunities for this device and open content. That is great.

Check out Stefan Schmidt’s excellent todo list for his development efforts:

• Port OpenMoko framework to the Motorola EZX phones. This includes making the Motorola TS07.10 vendor specifiec stuff ready for the new kernel infrastructure and getting the GUI ready for 240×320 and looking foreward into dialpad only handling. A lot work and a lot fun. I hope we have something nice in Q3 2007.
• Sync with a linux desktop. One of the things I was pissed of by the most cellphones, even the linux ones, is the bad sync possibilities with a linux desktop. Why should we not be allowed to manage our contacs on desktop an cellphone without a hassle? This needs to be fixed.
• GPS navigation under linux. This also itching me for a long time. I like to see two solutions here. First something working based on navit, maemo mapper, gps drive, etc. Using existing map data is fine for the start. Second step should be a always running and *easy* to use openstreetmap data logger. Not only gps tracks, but also something that allows tagging streets and POIs right while walking/driving. The current technics of osm are good, but need to be improved with ’smart autotagging’ and easy clientsoftware.
• Suppourt for more phones. I like to see OpenMoko on as many phones as possible. For EZX phones we have already people promised to get it ready. I heard also about somebody like to start the work for the HTC linux port. What’s about greenphone and all the other linux smartphones? If you’re doing work in this area please add it to the wiki, it will open 2007-02-11. Whenever I’ll get my hands on such a device I’ll even take a look myself.

I will put this question out there. What do people want to see available on mobile phones and OLPC-like devices from the Open Content worlds? It is only natural to have Free and Open Content available on these Open platforms. This includes licensing and access to media collections either directly or through web services.

Anyway, it is so great to see the concerns about mobile phones getting addressed and encourage developers and others to look at OpenMoko. The OpenMoko code and devices are coming out February 11, 2007.

I’m heading to Taipei, Taiwan on Monday for the CC Taiwan sponsored conference “Open & Free: New Enterprise in the Information Age — An International Workshop“. It should be fun to head east. I will also spend some time working with the CC Taiwan team on their own ccHost-based projects. I’m presenting in the collaboration section of the conference about The Open Content Library: Building Large Scale “Open” Communities around Multiple Media. I’m not speaking so much about the larger project Open Content Library, as much as about the concept of open content libraries like the Open Clip Art Library, ccMixter.org, and even good ole wikipedia.

Then, I’m back to China to Hong Kong and Guangzhou for a week off to chill. That actually means eat really good and work on Inkscape release, Open Clip Art Library and other projects. I will also go to my favorite gym and get shouted at in Mandarin in hip-hop, bellydancing, and aerobic dance classes as much as possible. Ah, I will dream about being bi-coastal in the future, as well as wanting to do an American-style road trip in China from Guangzhou to Beijing and (fly) back.

I’ll be in Taiwan from Jan 9-13 and then in Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton) from 13-20 and then back to San Francisco. Let’s connect if you are in those areas and want to do some things As always, the road goes the other way if you are in my neck of the woods (like lil wayne).