On OpenDepth.com

OpenDepth.com has been generating some interest from some people, and questions are being asked. While I am pretty busy working on things for OpenDepth.com - from the Drupal automatic translations to actually getting content up, it's pretty busy and I don't have as much time as I would like to respond to people properly - instead just telling them, 'Just wait until January 1st'. That's a little more than a week away. But, before I start getting back to work on it and as I finish my first pot of coffee, I can find nothing better to write about here on KnowProSE.com. If anything, it's something I can tighten up and reuse in different ways.

What's OpenDepth.com?

OpenDepth.com is an experiment based on a vision I've been developing over the last 3 years. As it says on the welcome page;

...knowledge is 4 dimensional - the original text (1), and the context of the text which includes the author (2), the period (3), and the references(4)...

That thought traces back to the first time I read about Hypertext - what is commonly called HTML. It was in a BYTE magazine¹ in the 1980s, and I can still see the pages clearly in my mind. It was an article about what Apple Computer had intended to do with it - how it could be used to add accessibility to depth in knowledge. It was one of the more exciting articles I read as a teenager², and something which captured my imagination even as I studied for my General Certificate of Education (GCE) Ordinary Levels. Perhaps especially so, because I wished a lot of the time that all these textbooks didn't have me flipping pages back and forth and referencing other texts...

25 years later, and people are still doing pretty much the same thing. HTML hyperlinks rarely connect with references in the same way that was first written in that magazine, and I know that I spend a lot of time going back and forth researching topics. But technology has made things more viable. The Wikipedia is around now; a dynamic first stop reference. Drupal, my content management system (CMS) of choice has passed through puberty and become more mature and versatile. The Gutenberg.org project continuously moves on, as it has since 1971. Mozilla and Firefox allow tabbed browsing, which means you can 'flip pages' or open references in a new tab, or 'page'.

Technically speaking, the tools are in place.

Then there's the issue of works in the public domain, as well as open content. But a lot of these things are disconnected. In travelling and becoming more aware of Culture, Language and ICT issues, I recognized that translation of public domain works didn't seem to be done fast enough for the growing internet presence of many people.

When I talked about what could be done, a lot of people didn't seem to understand - so I decided to show them. When I write, I like to point people to references of which I write - ideas that aren't necessarily mine, but can be tracked back to a lot of things which are accessible, though not as accessible as I would like.

Thus OpenDepth.com. I'm hoping to have 1,000 pages of content up by January 1st, though I'm behind schedule because of matters in the real world, but it can still be done and I fully expect to open the 'doors' on January 1st. People will be able to access, join, comment and discuss subjects of interest as they wish - and that part will be hard as well, because that is a matter of morphing things into what is accessible.

While I admire initiatives that request funding, I am working on making OpenDepth.com self-funding, which of course is a difficult thing. In time, maybe it will be sponsored by some group... but for now, it has to start on it's own two feet, pay for it's hosting and modifications, and my time. Eventually, I would like it to provide for the time of other people as well, to do more.

I suppose the bottom line is that OpenDepth.com is my idea of adding some value to the world... and of allowing an experiment for a range of ideas which are not all originally mine, but which I think can integrate well and grow into something that will be larger than the sum of the ideas that it came from.

It also keeps me busy and out of trouble. ;-)

¹ See this FAQ on why BYTE magazine is dead. I miss that magazine; the Do It Yourself articles were a wonderful thing.
² Other magazines had exciting pictures. We're talking about content, OK? :-)