The Longest Now

This week I returned to the hack that Jutta Treviranus and I and a few others put together at the OER Hackday for an annual awards ceremony celebrating the world’s best educational materials — where ‘best’ includes openness, accessibility, and flexibility. Right now it seems the focus will be on materials that are:

Open and accessible

• open and gratis: available for anyone to use, online or offline, at no charge
• educational: useful for both K-12 students and autodidacts of all ages
• repurposable:  licensed to allow use and reuse as widely as possible
• accessible: available in many formats and languages, usable by all sorts of learners

Modular and editable

• modular: available as collections / libraries, with sections and components marked for easy remixing
• annotated: with tags and categories, structured data and metadata.
• clustered: with links to similar works and information on how it has been used or modified
• editable: published and maintained in a way that makes it easy for users to share revisions and variants.

These are still draft ideas; your thoughts are welcome.  This will be the first year of the effort; we will likely allow submissions that do not meet all of these guidelines. Each focus describes a spectrum, at any rate.  For example:
Ease of reuse may range from highest marks for “public domain” to lowest for “single copy for personal educational use”.
Accessibility may range from “in major free archives, designed for many extremes of ability” to “on a public website, no DRM”.

Submissions: The awards will allow for direct nomination of great materials by curators in each category, but this year aims mainly to bring greater attention to existing contests in narrow fields, and to recognize the curatorial work they do.  So many entries will be the finalists and winners from those existing contests.   Some of the free knowledge awards and events we mean to ask to participate:

• Open Game Art’s Liberated Pixel Cup — recognizing the best free + open “game art”, and the best games made with such art.
• Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year
• Wikimedia Deutschland’s Zedler Preis für Freies Wissen

Categories: There are a variety of formats and a variety of topical fields to consider. We will have a limited set of categories for the contest, and map the intersections of formats & fields onto them.  This year we may not distinguisn text and physical media from software and digital media in the categories.  We are aiming for enough cross-discipline competition to be valuable without making judging impossible.

Location: We are still discussing where and how to hold a ceremony honoring the winners, or perhaps a number of small events recognizing the year’s most excellent work at other major gatherings honoring developments in education, knowledge, and collaboration.  Assuming we do this in person and not virtually, relevant events include:

July 12-15: Wikimania, DC.
August ??: Stockholm Challenge.
Oct 16-18: Open Ed, Vancouver.
Oct 22+?: oXcars, Barcelona

Stay tuned for updates on this front.  And send in your favorite places to find amazing data, books, art, media, and other free knowledge.