Open content opens doors to opportunity

Plenty of groups met at the Internet summit in Tunis, Tunisia, last week to talk about changing the fortunes of people from developing countries still locked out of the information society. A few, however, preferred to use the event to announce action.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Development Gateway Foundation are members of a group that dropped the words for deeds last week when they announced a new open-content initiative together with Utah State University and the African Virtual University. The group launched a new portal that provides access to a wide range of open-content educational courses and other materials offered for free by institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and the Chinese Open Resources for Education.

The portal will be managed by the African Virtual University, a network of African universities working together to support distance learning and open-education initiatives.

The Development Gateway, a public foundation based in Washington, D.C., and launched by the World Bank in 2001, will coordinate and host the portal on its Web site, http://www.developmentgateway.org. The site is used by an extensive global network of partners to exchange information and collaborate on development issues, according to Global Gateway spokeswoman Karen Lynch.

“We provide technology, such as our content-management system and online collaborative tools,” Lynch said. “And we also provide access to a very large global audience focused on development issues.”

Since 2001, the Hewlett Foundation has been making grants to support institutions and organizations that develop and provide online access to open-education content. The foundation invests to help create synergies between providers of content and network services, said Catherine Casserly, a program officer with the Hewlett Foundation.

To date, the foundation has contributed more than $40 million to open-education initiatives such as MIT OpenCourseWare, which publishes materials from virtually all MIT courses, and Creative Commons, which offers copyright systems support for accessing creative work and scholarly materials online.

In Tunis, the Development Gateway also unveiled plans for a new Arabic language Web portal on development, in collaboration with Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The portal aims to address the existing shortage of development information for the Arab world.

In addition, the Development Gateway announced a new e-government project that will establish a common communications platform to connect 15 national public administrations in Mozambique.