Hi,
Otto: many thanks for the memo!
During our meeting with the Finnish country team, the idea below came up. It's about rating devices, web services etc. for their degree of freedom / openness in a crowdsourced way.
We would establish a list of criteria and set up a rating platform. People could then rate a given device or service according to those criteria.
This initiative would provide people with practical orientation about the freedoms (or lack thereof) that devices and services give them. It would be a good way to involve large numbers of people by having them do small tasks. It would also serve to establish FSFE as a knowledge centre, and it would do all these things with a reasonable effort.
IIRC, Henri Bergius already volunteered to build the necessary platform using Midgard.
I think this is a very good idea. FSFE's past attempts at rating anything in a similar way have always suffered from the fact that we didn't have the necessary resources. By letting Fellows (and others) do the rating in a transparent way, we solve that problem.
Best regards, Karsten
----- Forwarded message from Otto Kekäläinen otto@fsfe.org -----
From: Otto Kekäläinen otto@fsfe.org To: finland@fsfeurope.org, Karsten Gerloff gerloff@fsfeurope.org Subject: CertifiedOpen Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:30:03 +0200 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.28.1
Hello,
Here is the memo I wrote about CertifiedOpen. Feel free to continue on it. I am unlikely to do anything about it now, since I have so many other priorities at the moment...
-- Otto Kekäläinen [] otto@fsfe.org Finnish Team Coordinator [][][] GPG/PGP 0xB7F7E4E1 Free Software Foundation Europe || +358 44 566 2204 http://www.fsfe.org/ finland@fsfe.org
Certified Open - the crow sourced way
= Check list =
== User experience ==
- Are you allowed to use the product to any purpose, even things that the vendor didn't intend it for?
- Can you install any software you which on it?
- Can you get root access?
- Does it depend on something external to work (cloud service)?
- Does it continue to function even after the vendor has stopped supporting the product?
- Can you buy services to the device from more than one vendor?
- Are you allowed to sell forward the product if you don't want to use it yourself anymore?
- Are you allowed to copy and redistribute the product?
== Data management ==
- Can you get your data in?
- Can you export your data out?
- Does it relay on and external service that contains the data?
== Development ==
- Are you allowed to study how the product works and poke around in it?
- Is the source code available and usable with an free license?
- Is the code documented and available directly from a repository?
- Are the specifications available? Can you read about the design?
- Can you follow up the development in real time?
- Can you participate in the development?
- Is there a public bug database?
- Are you allowed to distribute improved versions?
----- End forwarded message -----