Working Group Stories: Public Domain, Open Sustainability, Open Education | Open Knowledge Foundation Blog

Working Groups Stories, a blog series we started back in May, is our way of showcasing the incredible work being done in all different domains across the Open Knowledge Foundation Network. Working groups are domain-specific groups, promoting, defining and producing open knowledge in everything from Archaeology to Shakespeare ... The Public Domain Working Group has been busy over the last few months, working in partnership with OKF France and the French Ministry of Culture to develop a French Public Domain Calculator. Public Domain Calculators are tools to help users determine whether or not a piece of work is in the public domain. In France, this comes at an important time, as we enter the period when most of the works produced by authors who died during the second world war will (theoretically) enter the public domain. However, French copyright law stipulates that authors who died for France during the war have extended terms of protection. This complication could lead to a number of works being incorrectly assumed to be in the public domain ... The Open Sustainability Working Group has been growing fast since its launch less than a year ago, with activity in several countries including Finland and Italy and a new twitter account (@OpenSusty). The group are key in the OKFN global #OpenCO2 campaign to bring more transparency to emissions tracking, so big polluters are held to account ... Open Education, the newest addition to the working group family, has been busy despite its official launch still being a few weeks off! This week, the group organised an Open Education Handbook mini-booksprint in London, inviting open education experts along to share ideas and write down copy relating to various aspects of open education: resources, data and pedagogy ..."