Virtual communities and licensing

1Mediamaisteri Group 2005©

Virtual communities and licensing

Mediamaisteri Group

PL 82 (Pyynikintie 25)

33101 Tampere

Finland

mediamaisteri.comSELEAC 2003-4715 /001-001 EDU-ELEARN


General overview of virtual communities

• A virtual community may support some organization that wants to make its existing traditional operation more effective

• Some web communities operate only relating to a certain topic or objective

• Many web-based virtual communities are becoming more and more professional

• When developers and users see that they will get more from the virtual community than they give, the community starts to expand rapidly

• The role of the main developer or developer team is vital

SELEAC 2003-4715 /001-001 EDU-ELEARN



• It is very difficult to get virtual community developing only by thinking resources and financial aspects of the work

• Virtual community grows from the genuine need to work for the community

Has to fit to the individual objectives!

• In time members of the community will find resources that they can use to the benefit of the virtual community and also benefit from that

Win-to-win situation




• Input to the virtual community can be described as an investment to the future

• Product selling and services linked to the community work

• substantial benefits f.ex. by saving money in yearly license fees

• getting learning content for the organizational use

• Virtual community is challenging to start but the impact can be global in content or software production areas



Technical perspectives

• Virtual Community can use different technology models

• Protocols can be http, https etc.

Usually normal web standards (client/server)

• Content creation standard usually in learning html, xhtml, xml SCORM

• Learning object is based on idea of how virtual community shares content

• Video, sound, animation, excesise standards (IMS QTI, GIFT etc.)



Content perspectives

• Requirement for the community to live and

prosper = Enough valuable content motivating the participation

• Community members and supporters should encouraged to submit content into the portal

• There may be a barrier to submitting content that has been expensive to produce to the community

• Institutes and organizations work with very different business models government funding vs. comercial training



Content perspectives

• Those who submit content into the database must accept the following terms:• The name of the author is recorded in the database,

but also other users have right to use and modify the object

• Modified content can be imported into the system with reference to the original document as the basis of their content

• A new version of the content can be uploaded into the system by the original author, successor or validators and chief editors

• Users can translate existing learning objects to their own language and import the translations into the system



Licensing models in general

• Open Source Software products are licensed, not sold• Traditionally software companies have developed

software in-house and used end user license agreements Limited rights to use the software for specific purposes

• Usually, source code is not shared and distribution is restricted

• In academic circles software has been for a long time developed with the principles of open source code and free distribution

• Licensing models can be divided to a) Technical licensing modelsb) Content licensing models



Technical licensing models

1) Commercial licensing

2) Double licensing

3) OS -licensing



Content licensing models

1) Commercial licensing

2) Separately agreed use

3) OS -licensing Creative commons

• Offer some of your rights to any taker, and only on certain conditions

• Possible to match conditions from the different options

• Attribution

• Noncommercial

• No Derivative Works

• Share Alike(www.creativecommons.org)



Creative commons (Open content)

• Open community operates by utilizing open principles

• Virtual communities develop certain content or software involves co-operation and is based on idea of releasing all work to be utilized by anyone interested

• Only rule is that you have to share you work also back to the virtual community

• Every community has a responsible developer group that decides which completed contents or software are released in community

• The actual release occurs under a license (GPL/GNU), which enables free use and further development of products



Creative commons (Open content)

• One example of the software released under GNU/GPL is Linux operating system

• In scope of eLearning similar open communities are for example Moodle (http://moodle.org) and FLE (http://fle3.uiah.fi/)

• Worldwide there are tens of similar virtual communities in eLearning

• Also the communities specialized in open content are starting to work under comparable licenses

(http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL)



Discussion

• Why is licensing important for the virtual communities?

• What kind of experiences do you have of using different licensing models?



Sources

• Bäck, A. & Väliharju, T. Creating an e-Learning Content Community for Graphic and Media Communication Technologies. 2004.

• Lee, Fion S.L.; Vodel, Douglas; Limayem, Moez; Virtual Community Informatics: A Review and Research Agenda. Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application (JITTA), 2003, 5, 1, pp. 47-61.

• Välimäki, M. & Oksanen, V. Evaluation of Open Source Licencing models for a Company Developing Mass Market Software. 2002.


Documents

Virtual communities and licensing