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Open Information Pledge

The Open Information Pledge is meant as a target for digital rights campaigners, and as a certification scheme for charities, non-profits, companies and other kinds of organisation who deal with digital media. The central idea is to get these organisations to adopt policies that mean they will always use open formats where possible, and that where loss of content and/or form is inevitable they will offer open formats as an alternative.

In terms of benefits for signees, it will educate them about issues surrounding the use of digital media, and to avoid proprietary lock-in. It may also become a useful certificate to have.

In terms of benefits for activists, it provides a simple way of effecting changes in attitudes and use of digital media in any organisation, from a small 'grassroots' business to a major international NGO. It adds a positive solution to our portfolio, so that rather than merely pointing out problems with schemes like the EUCD and Trusted Computing, we can then insert solutions into the gaps we create.

I made a presentation on this project at the AFFSAC 2004. The slides can be found here: http://www.affs.org.uk/papers/affsac2004/TC_oip.pdf.

Lots of work needs to be done to make this happen...

Organisations contacted and to involve:
UK Campaign for Digital Rights (contacted; limited response)
Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (contacted; no response, no followup yet)
Association For Free Software (contacted; good response, now an AFFS workshop in development)
Association of Free Software Professionals (contacted; good response)
Open Data Format Initiative (contacted; no response, no followup yet)
Electronic Frontier Foundation (contacted; no response, no followup yet)

Things done: