Bridging the Knowledge Divide Role of Open Content, Open Software and Open Standards

Prof. C. N. Krishnan
Program Director AU-KBC Research Centre Anna University Chennai (cnkrish@au-kbc.org) &

Dr. Savithri Singh

Principal Acharya Narendra Dev College Delhi University Delhi (principalandc@gmail.com) Abstract This paper argues that bridging the Knowledge Divide in the digital era can be greatly helped by moving to an 'open knowledge paradigm' characterized by the Content, the Software and the Standards being made open. What this means is defined and explained for all these three categories, with appropriate examples taken from the fields of E-Governance, E-Health and EEducation in the Indian context. 1. Introduction While it is true that the information and knowledge available to humanity today is significantly more than at any time before, their distribution is highly uneven and skewed across the nations of the west and the rest of the world, as well as with in the countries of the non-western world. There This paper was submitted for eWORLDFORUM 2011 conference Page 1

is clearly a 'Knowledge Divide' that exists, which takes the form of 'Digital Divide' in the Internet era. We focus here on the issue of Digital Divide , partly because the all knowledge is increasingly becoming digital, and partly because , rather paradoxically, approaches and solutions already exist today to significantly bring down the digital divide. Open Content, Open Software and Open Standards are the approaches and solutions that can help bring down the digital divide, and are the subject matters of this paper. We first define these terms here. By Content is meant the information or knowledge that one wants to exchange with the Net and the Web which could be textual, numerical, graphical, pictorial, audio, video, etc. For example, in the context of e-governance, this could represent all information of use and relevance to the citizens in the context of his/her interface with public institutions and government. By Open Content is meant content released under a license whose terms permit free access and use of the same by every one. Software is the medium or language in which all computer and internet applications, packages, tools etc are written, used and exchanged. Free/Open Source Software (FOSS), loosely referred to in our context as 'Open Software', stands for software applications, tools, packages etc that are released to the public under a license that allows its use, modifications and distribution free of cost and with out any restrictions other than possibly on its use for commercial purposes. Finally, 'standards' are specifications and stipulations that have to be complied with while building any applications, packages, tools, etc. or while creating content in any form primarily to ensure interoperability across systems, platforms, applications etc. Open Standards are those that are released to the public in a completely open and fully understandable form, either free of cost, or at a nominal cost, so that any one can create tools, applications and resources using them that ensure total interoperability. These are explained and expanded in the remainder of this paper, and their role in bridging the digital divide brought out. 2. Open Content With the expansion in creation and use of online resources, their accessibility became an issue with most materials being posted under copyrights and needing a registration, paid or free. The This paper was submitted for eWORLDFORUM 2011 conference Page 2

paradigm of Open Content along the lines of Open Source Software was created to make the online content freely and openly available. The term "Open Educational Resources (OER)" was defined by UNESCO in 2002 as "digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research. OER include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. Distinction needs to be made between open and available online, 'free ' and open etc. what is free need not be open, and vice versa. The extend of openness is decided by the license under which an Open Content is published; licenses like the Creative Commons

(http://creativecommons.org/) explicitly allow free accessing,copying and modifying of its information by anyone, as well as allow reproduction and distribution in whole or in part and in any medium, provided that the terms of the original license are adhered to. The most well known open content project is the Wikipedia an online encyclopedia that is freely accessible, can be edited by anybody, can be downloaded and used freely as such or after adaptation. Contents like the MIT Open Course Ware, the Khan Academy, the Indian NPTEL , Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's OCW project etc. provide free access to content but are not truly open. All truly open content should also be made using only open source software i.e. the format cannot be proprietary. Wikieducator is a wiki for educational content that was first supported by the Commonwealth of Learning, and institutions like . the Acharya Narendra Dev College (ANDC) are helping to create contents in it. The OER Foundation [1] was recently formed as an independent, not-for-profit organization that provides leadership, international networking and support for educators and educational institutions to achieve their objectives through Open Education. Going beyond just education, projects like the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) of the CSIR also contribute to Open Content in the field of drug design. 3. Open Source Software

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As mentioned earlier, FOSS gives the user many freedoms as to what one can do with the software, in addition to its being available free of cost. What one can or can not do with a piece of FOSS software is specified in the particular License under which the same has been released. Popular examples of FOSS licenses include GPL/L-GPL, BSD, Apache, MIT, etc. Popular examples of FOSS are the Linux operating system, Apache web server, Postgres data base, Mozilla Firefox browser, OpenOffice suite, etc., and today FOSS versions would be available for almost all commonly used software packages in most fields of use. In the context of E-Governance, E-Health, E-Education etc, the kind of software needed to provide these services can be broadly divided into two classes:

Software for building the IT infrastructure of the organisation, such as the servers, desktops, networking, communication, data base, security, web applications, etc.

Application Software that run on the IT infrastructure of the organisation, and which are specific to the services that the organisation provides to the citizen, such as banking, ticket booking, hospital services etc.

When one speaks of FOSS for E-Gov. etc, it could be at either or both of these levels, and they are quite independent of one another, in the sense that either of them could be FOSS or proprietary in all giving four different possible combinations. While moving the IT Infrastructure to FOSS, fully or in parts, is today rather straight forward, significant cost savings and other strategic long term benefits will accrue only when the Applications themselves have become FOSS such as when all the Electricity Boards in India start using the same FOSS version of the billing and payment software, of course tweaked and customised to each EB' s specific needs and context. For example, the Department of Public Libraries, Govt. of Tamil Nadu, have deployed the FOSS Library Management package Koha across all the 33 major libraries in the state with the support of NRCFOSS [2]. It should be possible to do similar things in other domains as well, such as Health/ Hospital Management using Open EMR (http://www.oemr.org/), Academic Courses Management using Moodle

(http://www.moodle.org/), etc. This paper was submitted for eWORLDFORUM 2011 conference Page 4

At the level of policies, the Central Government has not yet come with a FOSS Policy Statement, though some state governments have done so Kerala being one such state [3]. 4. Open Standards

All forms of digital content, including content on the Net, are created, owned and distributed by a large number of players from all over the world who may be governments, corporations, voluntary bodies, private individuals etc, and these are meant to be accessed and consumed by any one from any part of the globe. As such, these have to abide by certain 'Standards' which in our context, stand for commonly agreed practices and procedures for Accessing , Exchanging and Archiving information of different types such as data, text, forms, graphics, images, audio, video, etc. As defined in the Introduction section of this paper, standards become easily accessible to, and usable by all when they are made Open, and in addition to ensuring interoperable data interchange/ exchange across systems, platforms and applications, open standards also help ensure 'future-proof ' archiving of IT assets by not locking them up with any vendor's proprietary encoding practices. Open Standards are normally created/approved by international not-for-profit agencies such as the International Standards Organisation (ISO - http://www.iso.org), Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C - http://www.w3c.org), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF http://www.ietf.org), etc. Some of the common examples of Open Standards are XML of W3C for data exchange, HTML of W3C and ISO/IEC for Hypertext Web content, ODF of ISO/IEC for Document types, XFORMS of W3C for electronic forms, PNG of W3C and ISO/IEC for Graphics and Image compression, etc. Open Standards specifically allow a level playing ground for all developers, application providers and content creators to participate in government's IT initiatives such as EGovernance, E-Health, E-Education etc. By reducing the entry barrier in investment terms, it fosters competition based on competence and performance, rather than ability to invest funds, so that the range, quality and affordability of the solutions ultimately provided to the end customer goes up significantly. It is for this reason that the Govt.of India has recently announced a set of Open Standards that are to be followed in all aspects pertaining to E-Governance activities [4]. This paper was submitted for eWORLDFORUM 2011 conference Page 5

5.

Concluding Comments As outlined above, a significant part of all E-Gov, E-Health, E-Education etc

programs today can be implemented in the Open Paradigm, using Open Content, Open Software and Open Standards at the IT Infrastructure level of the enterprise, as well as at the level of Applications it offers. It is also the case that this 'opening' need not be all-encompassing to start with; one can progressively move from the present state of nearly 'all-closed' to nearly 'all-open' systems over a period of time. While the government's role in evolving the appropriate policies for moving in this direction is certainly quite important, there are other entities who have to play their equally important part as well such as, the academia , the industry, the community and the media, etc. These players have to come together to build an Open Knowledge Ecosystem that would go a long way in bridging the Digital Divide in the country.

References [1] Open Educational Resource Foundation : http://wikieducator.org/OERF:Home [2] For details of this implementation, please see -http://www.tnpubliclibraries.gov.in/library-automationanetworking http://www.nrcfoss.au-kbc.org.in/full/89/AN/ [3] For details of the Kerala I T Policy, please see http://www.keralaitmission.org/web/main/ITPolicy-2007.pdf [4] The Open Standards Policy adopted by the Government of India is available at-http://www.egovstandards.gov.in/ Author Information This paper was submitted for eWORLDFORUM 2011 conference Page 6

C .N. Krishnan had his education in Electronics Engineering from IIT Madras (B. Tech) and IIT Kanpur (M. Tech and Ph. D.), and has been on the faculty of Anna University Chennai since 1977, specializing in the fields of Communication and Signal Processing. In 1999, he became the founder-director of the AU-KBC Research Centre set up in the University with the support of Dr. K B Chandrasekhar from the Silicon Valley (USA). His interest in multiple/alternate paradigms of knowledge led him in 2005 to initiate the NRCFOSS (National Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software) Project funded by the Dept. of Inf. Tech., Govt. of India, jointly with C-DAC Chennai. Savithri Singh is a M.Sc and Ph.D in Botany from the University of Delhi. She has been teaching undergraduate students in the University for over 35 years and is at present the Principal of an Undergraduate college in the University of Delhi. Her involvement in collaborative writing led her to explore Wikieducator as a medium for collective content development. She is an elected member and Vice Chair of the International Community Council of the Wikieducator. She is committed to popularizing the use of FOSS and of development of Open Educational Resources.

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