standards which fulfil the following criteria:

• are maintained through a collaborative and transparent decision-making process that is independent of any individual supplier and that is accessible to all interested parties;

• are adopted by a specification or standardisation organisation, or a forum or consortium with a feedback and ratification process to ensure quality;

• are published, thoroughly documented and publicly available at zero or low cost;

• as a whole have been implemented and shared under different development approaches and on a number of platforms from more than one supplier, demonstrating interoperability and platform/vendor independence;

• owners of patents essential to implementation have agreed to licence these on a royalty free and non-discriminatory basis for implementing the standard and using or interfacing with other implementations which have adopted that same standard. Alternatively, patents may be covered by a non-discriminatory promise of non-assertion. Licences, terms and conditions must be compatible with implementation of the standard in both proprietary and open source software. These rights should be irrevocable unless there is a breach of licence conditions.

http://consultation.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/openstandards/chapter-1/

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Goertzel on Artificial General Intelligence, Transhumanism, Open Source http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-dr-ben-goertzel-artificial-intelligence.html
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http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-dr-ben-goertzel-artificial-intelligence_1.html

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This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C https://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/his_could_be_big_decentralized_web_standard_under.php

http://www.w3.org/2011/04/webrtc-charter.html

Cf. http://newtechpost.com/2011/05/05/starfish-a-user-controlled-network

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Why We Need An Open Wireless Movement “[...] What Needs to be Done / EFF will be working with other organizations to launch an Open Wireless Movement in the near future. In the mean time, we’re keen to hear from technologists with wireless expertise who would like to help us work on the protocol engineering tasks that are needed to make network sharing easier from a privacy and bandwidth-sharing perspective. You can write to us at openwireless@eff.org.” https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/open-wireless-movement

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Download a free version of The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind http://www.thepublicdomain.org/download/

Cf. http://www.amazon.com/Public-Domain-Enclosing-Commons-Mind/product-reviews/0300137400

“Why am I allowing you to copy the book for free? And why is Yale University Press letting me? To understand why I am doing it, watch this video by Jesse Dylan.

And if you want to understand why it makes economic sense to my publisher, read this short article. https://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b46f5a58-aa2e-11db-83b0-0000779e2340.html ”

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OS sw designed to minimize synthetic biology risks http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-03/vt-osd032111.php

http://genothreat.sourceforge.net/

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Open data: an international comparison of strategies http://www.epractice.eu/files/European%20Journal%20epractice%20Volume%2012_1.pdf

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Cell phones are ‘Stalin’s dream,’ says free software movement founder / Richard Stallman: iPhones and Androids are ‘Big Brother’ tracking devices: “[...] “It just recently became possible to run some very widely used phones with free software,” Stallman said. “There’s a version of Android called Replicant that can run on the HTC Dream phone without proprietary software, except in the U.S. In the U.S., as of a few weeks ago there was still a problem in some dialing library, although it worked in Europe. By now, maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know.” [...]

Stallman does his computing on a Lemote Yeeloong laptop running gNewSense, a GNU/Linux distribution composed only of free software. [...]

There are four essential software freedoms, Stallman explained. “Freedom Zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish. Freedom 1 is the freedom to study the source code, and change it so the program does your computing as you wish. Freedom 2 is the freedom to help others; that’s the freedom to make and distribute exact copies when you wish. And Freedom 3 is the freedom to contribute to your community, which is the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions when you wish.” [...]

“I don’t admire a person who says freedom is not important,” Stallman says. “Torvalds set a bad example for the community by publicly using a non-free program for the maintenance of Linux (his kernel, which is his main contribution to the GNU/Linux system). I criticized him for this, and so did others. When he stopped, it was not by choice. More recently, he rejected [the] GPL version 3 for Linux because it protects the users’ freedom from tivoization. His rejection of GPLv3 is why most Android phones are jails.” [...]”

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/031411-richard-stallman.html

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ISCB Public Policy Statement on Open Access to Scientific and Technical Research Literature http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002014

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International Aid Transparency Standard Finalised http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/news/2011/02/international-aid-transparency-standard-finalised/

http://www.aidtransparency.net/

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“My Genome is Public Domain” http://manu.sporny.org/2011/public-domain-genome/

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American Physical Society announces Physical Review X : “APS announces Physical Review X (PRX), an online, open access, primary research journal for authors in all fields of physics. [...]

PRX will provide validation through prompt and rigorous peer review, and an open access venue in accord with the strong reputation of the Physical Review family of publications.

Articles in PRX will be published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, leaving copyright with the authors. [...]

The funding required to make PRX freely available will derive from article-processing charges of $1500 per article. These will cover the expenses associated with peer review, composition, hosting, and archiving. “APS strives to be among the most cost-effective publishers in physics and is committed to a sustainable model that makes PRX affordable for authors and their funding agencies, nationally and internationally,” said Joseph W. Serene, APS Treasurer/Publisher.

A Call for Papers will be issued in March and the first article published in Fall 2011.” http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-01/aps-aps011911.php

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Setting standards without kings or votes: “[...] In the intervening 25 years, it turned into a standards organization that creates standards related to the technical operation of the Internet.

However, the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force] is quite a bit different from traditional standards organizations such as ANSI, ISO, or the IEEE Standards Association. Standards organizations typically have high thresholds for membership—in some cases, you can only join the club if you’re a country—and only make their standards available for a (high) fee. Not so with the IETF: “There is no membership in the IETF. Anyone may register for and attend any meeting. The closest thing there is to being an IETF member is being on the IETF or Working Group mailing lists.”

This comes directly from The Tao of IETF, which is the best introduction into this strange and wonderful world—short of attending a meeting in person. If you don’t have that kind of time, two quotes provide a pretty good feel of how the IETF sees itself: “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code” (David Clark). And: “Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept” (Jon Postel). [...]” http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/25-years-of-ietf-setting-standards-without-kings-or-votes.ars

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The Next Net: “The moment the “net neutrality” debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a network – its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation – is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them – that network loses its power to effect change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of the net should be enough to turn us elsewhere. [...]” http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-next-net

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Technology Neutral IT Procurement Decisions: U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy Dan Gordon and U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Cordinator Victoria Espinel issued a statement to Senior Procurement Executives and Chief Information Officers reminding them to select IT based on appropriate criteriawhile analyzing available alternatives including proprietary, open source and mixed source technologies. Click to enlarge.

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