Archive:2007-06-29

This is an informal meeting about our open access textbook project.

Minutes
Attendance: Brendan, Nelson, Gavin

Conf call with Dave from the Student PIRGs
We had a conference call earlier today with Dave from the Student PIRGs, who expressed some (lukewarm) support for the project idea. He seemed to believe that gaining support among professors and administrators is more important than gaining support among students for open access textbooks, and therefore prioritized his proposed project to get professors to sign a statement in favor of open access textbooks (over our open access textbooks project). He did think our project was a decent idea though, and was willing to help promote it, but didn't seem to want to help implement it.

Brainstorming / project description

 * Ideally we would want a search tool that can return every item that might possibly be assigned as reading material in a class which is also legal to freely distribute, at least non-commercially. This includes both public domain texts and modern freely licensed texts which are at least NC-ND if not more liberal.  (That's RMS's minimum standard, that's the minimum standard of the CC licenses now that Sampling and Dev Nations have been retired, that's our minimum standard.)
 * To reduce the difficulty of this project to a manageable level, we can begin by only searching Project Gutenberg for public domain texts. We can add further databases in the future.