Research on making an open world: a world of open information.

The purpose of our research is to obtain key facts and figures about the state of the information economy and, especially, the opportunity for employing alternative compensation systems (ACS) for paying for information -- "alternative" in being different to monopoly rights like patents and copyright.

Themes

• Size and form of the information economy: how much money is spent on buying or producing information each year? How much on music, how much on software etc?
• Sources of funding for information: how much funding is supplied by: public, government sources; philanthropic sources; private "open" businesses or individuals; private "closed" businesses. The logic here being that the first three are all "open-compatible" today.
• Detailed planning of ACS like remuneration rights. For example, assessing how much we would each pay for "open music", how we could assess usage (and value) and allocate monies

Some of this research is statistical and data oriented. Some of it is classic "desk research" to find papers, or to summarize reports.

Structure of this repository

This is a Git repository. Its authoritative online location is:

https://gitlab.com/rufuspollock/open-world

NOTES.md          Quick dump for notes, questions and ideas.

datapackage.json  Use datapackage.json to track datasets and general metadata
data/             Data we have prepared
archive/          Use for storing "blob" files and source documents
scripts/          Code and scripts

# we may create project subdirectories if we have specific sub-projects
# project directory structure will mirror base structure
# projects MUST have a README.md
{project-name}/
  README.md
  datapackage.json
  data/
  ...

Generally use issue tracker for ideas and questions that we want to follow up, especially if we need to plan. NOTES.md can be used offline and is more discursive.

Sometimes we move particular research projects to separate repositories. In this case we will then list them here so we have single entry point for discovery.

Bibliography

We will manage bibliography information in the separate library repo:

https://gitlab.com/rufuspollock/library