Report of the Friday Talk held at Department of Library and Information Science, University of Mysore, Manasagangotri, Mysore. Topic: Information for an open society Speaker: S. Sheshishkar, Informedia, Mysore Date: September 2, 2005 Time: 4 to 5 PM Venue: Department of Library and Information Science, University of Mysore, Mysore Organiser: MULISSA Summary of the lecture: Information is a vital resource. Libraries have a natural link with information. Librarians from Kallimachos to Ranganathan have always worked for organization of information. Society at large has no or very little role in the creation and distribution of information However, the balance seems turning towards the society. Any body can create and distribute the information directly. Thanks to the development of technologies like WWW, email, VoIP, IRC etc. The speaker introduced some of those technologies which can be used by any one in an open society. Here the concept open society designates �a society that allows its members considerable freedom in creation and use of information�. We are moving towards Open Society where every one has equal opportunity to participate in creation, distribution, sharing and use of knowledge. There are plenty of opportunities for any to document his/her thoughts. Wikipedia is a huge success story. Any body can contribute to Wikipedia in any language of the world. More than one thousand articles have been placed in Kannada language. (http://kn.wikipedia.org). One can contribute, modify others article and/or record their criticism. Its growth rate is enviable even to the likes of Encyclopedia Britannica. Another technology that encourages every one to contribute is the Web log or Blogs in short. Web logs or blogs are a type of Web content typically created by independent writers (although some reporters for media companies create blogs on newspaper or magazine sites). Some are personal journals; others resemble newsletters or columns. Often, they contain links to other sources of content. Planet Sun is an example and an aggregation of public weblogs written by employees of Sun Microsystems (http://planetsun.org). Bookmarks save the addresses of your favorite sites, so you can return to them quickly without having to retype the address. In some browsers, bookmarks are called favorites. What makes social bookmarks different from bookmarks is its ability to see the bookmarks collected by others. del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others. Open societies does not disrespect the copyrights and intellectual property rights. The contents created could be registered for their flexible copyrights. For example the Creative Commons website (www.opencontent.org) enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information. The speaker also provided information about many success stories of open society creation like Project Gutenberg, Wikibooks etc. He said open society might contribute to the already existing information deluge on the Internet. For example by participating in the Open Directory Project � DMOZ, we can provide an organized approach to the resources on Internet. Mr. C.S. Surendra welcomed the gathering and Ms. Chaitra M extended the vote of thanks. The above summary is prepared by Mr. Raghu and Mr. Harish, the first and the third semester students of MLISc respectively under the guidance of Dr. N.S. Harinarayana. -- N.S.Harinarayana Ph.D Department of Library and Information Science University of Mysore Manasagangotri, Mysore 570 006 Ph: 2419393