<< previous article | table of contents
In Brief
News and Items of Interest for September
Open Source and Proprietary Software
Bridges.org is currently conducting a two-year-long comparison study of open source and proprietary software. Investigating the practical issues facing existing computer laboratories in South Africa and Namibia, the project hopes to bring unbiased information to a polarized debate that often relies on opinions rather than substantiated claims.
Find out more about the study and its progress at www.bridges.org >>
The Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI) was begun in June 2001 to bridge the perceived gap between the nonprofit and open source communities. Among other projects, NOSI supports the Cyber Café, a traveling booth that appears at a few national nonprofit technology and management conferences each year, equipped with networked laptops connected to the Internet and loaded with open source software. The Café provides a free place for decision makers in the nonprofit community to explore Linux and other open source software. NOSI is also behind a total cost of ownership (TCO) study of open source on the back end for nonprofits. The study’s goal is to demonstrate what's involved in switching to Linux and determine whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
Find out more, or get involved in the TCO study at www.nosi.net >>
Tim Bray, a guru of Web architecture, information retrieval, and software optimization, maintains ongoing, a blog that wants to be a “coherent, catalogued essay about the world.” In “The Web’s the Place,” Bray draws an analogy between software development on proprietary platforms and sharecropping.
More at www.tbray.org >>
Since the founding of the Free Software Foundation in 1985, a number of new nonprofit foundations have formed to serve the interests of programmers. Harvard Business School professor Siobhan O'Mahony discusses her research on foundations formed around three projects: Debian, a complete non-commercial distribution of Linux; the GNU Object Model Environment (GNOME), which is a graphical user interface for Linux-based operating systems; and Apache, a public domain open source Web server.
Read the interview at news.com >>
Metadata
As mentioned in “A Meditation on Metadata,” librarians meeting in Dublin, Ohio in 1995, began to develop a metadata standard for library resources called the Dublin Core. Today the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is an organization dedicated to promoting the widespread adoption of interoperable metadata standards and developing specialized metadata vocabularies for describing resources that enable more intelligent information discovery systems.
Read up on one of the dominant metadata standards at dublincore.org >>
Also mentioned in “A Meditation in Metadata,” the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Learning Technology Standards Committee Learning Object Metadata, or IEEE LTSC LOM, represents work done by the educational community to develop standards.
Find about more about the LOM at ltsc.ieee.org >>
Metadata application profiles, touched on in “A Meditation in Metadata,” are developed by organizations to make sure resources are described consistently and with the appropriate vocabulary. There are some metadata application profiles in common use. In Canada, many universities use CanCore (http://www.cancore.ca/) to describe the learning resources they are putting into shared learning object repositories, such as CAREO or CLOE. In the United States, MERLOT is a related project.
To see metadata application profiles in action, see CAREO, CLOE, and MERLOT >>
Nonprofit Taxonomies
The National Center for Charitable Statistics, in collaboration with others, developed the Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) in the 1980s to make it possible to obtain meaningful information about the diverse community of nonprofit organizations that exist in the United States. The NTEE facilitates the collection, tabulation, presentation, and analysis of data by the types of organizations and their activities; promotes uniformity and comparability in the presentation of statistical and other data collected by various public and private agencies; and provides better quality information as the basis for public policy debate and decision-making for the nonprofit sector and for society at large.
Read more about the taxonomy at nccs.urban.org >>
N-TEN is developing a capacity map, a searchable, online directory of individuals who and organizations that provide technology services to the nonprofit sector. The system will help nonprofits identify the provider best equipped to meet their needs. As a first step, N-TEN focused on developing the nonprofit technology taxonomy that will underlie the entire project by establishing the nomenclature that describes the ecosystem within which nonprofits receive technology-related assistance.
More on the capacity map is available at www.nten.org >>
<< previous article | table of contents
© 2003 Isoph | sophist@isoph.com | subscribe to The Sophist