OurProject.org (OP) is a web-based collaborative free content repository. It acts as a central location for the construction and maintenance of social/cultural/artistic projects, providing web space and tools, and focusing in

free knowledge Open knowledge (or free knowledge) is knowledge that is free to use, reuse, and redistribute without legal, social, or technological restriction. Open knowledge organizations and activists have proposed principles and methodologies related to the ...

. It claims to extend the ideas and methodology of

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

to social areas and

free culture The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or Free content, open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's origin ...

in general. Since September 2009, Ourproject is under the Comunes Association umbrella, and gave birth to the Kune collaborative social network for groups.

Philosophy

Ourproject was founded in 2002 with the aims of hosting and boosting the cooperative work done in multiple domains (cultural, artistic, educational), with one specific condition: the results of the projects should remain freely accessible under a free license. This is understood in a broad way, as not all the available licenses are cataloged as free/libre (such as several Creative Commons licenses). Its non-profit perspective is partially imposed on its online community of projects, as no advertising is allowed in the hosted webpages. Thus, OurProject projects have mainly been carried out by social movements, university-supported groups, some free software related projects, cooperatives, artist collectives, activist groups, informal groups and non-profits.

Current situation/Condition

As of December 2016, OurProject.org was hosting 1,733 projects and had 5,969 users, with a constant linear growth rate. and had a PageRank of 6 and the 14th position on public

Gforge GForge is a commercial service originally based on the Alexandria software behind SourceForge, a web-based project management and collaboration system which was licensed under the GPL. Open source versions of the GForge code were released from 2 ...

sites, being the first of them not restricted to just free software projects. In fact, the

GNU Project The GNU Project () is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collaborat ...

highlights it as "Free knowledge & free culture" project. It claims to be the most successful wiki farm with full free version and without ads (

comparison Comparison or comparing is the act of evaluating two or more things by determining the relevant, comparable characteristics of each thing, and then determining which characteristics of each are similar to the other, which are different, and t ...

). It has presence especially in Spain, Latin America and China. Relevant projects that are using Ourproject infrastructure include: * the

Critical Mass In nuclear engineering, a critical mass is the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction. The critical mass of a fissionable material depends upon its nuclear properties (specifically, its nuclear fi ...

movement pages reference for the Hispanic movement * The Spanish cooperative for

Organic farming Organic farming, also known as ecological farming or biological farming,Labelling, article 30 o''Regulation (EU) 2018/848 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2018 on organic production and labelling of organic products and re ...

"Bajo el Asfalto está la Huerta", reference in the food sovereignty movement * the Kune project, a federated collaborative social network * the main Free Software association of

Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...

* The community website of the Ubuntu Spanish community * the internal work group of the P2P Foundation. During 2011, it has attracted interest by the new wave of protesting social movements in several areas: * It has hosted several projects related to the

Arab Spring The Arab Spring ( ar, الربيع العربي) was a series of anti-government protests, uprisings and armed rebellions that spread across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s. It began in Tunisia in response to corruption and econo ...

movements from

Lebanon Lebanon ( , ar, لُبْنَان, translit=lubnān, ), officially the Republic of Lebanon () or the Lebanese Republic, is a country in Western Asia. It is located between Syria to Lebanon–Syria border, the north and east and Israel to Blue ...

, Palestine and Syria. * The social movement of

2011 Spanish protests The anti-austerity movement in Spain, also referred to as the 15-M Movement (Spanish: ''Movimiento 15-M''), and the Indignados Movement, was a series of protests, demonstrations, and occupations against austerity policies in Spain that began aro ...

repeatedly used its services. * The American

Occupy movement The Occupy movement was an international populist socio-political movement that expressed opposition to social and economic inequality and to the perceived lack of "real democracy" around the world. It aimed primarily to advance social and econo ...

is recommending its use in its

howto The Linux Documentation Project (LDP) is a dormant an all-volunteer project that maintains a large collection of GNU and Linux-related documentation and publishes the collection online. It began as a way for hackers to share their documentation wi ...

and it recently began being used.

Software used

OurProject.org uses a multi-language multiple-topic adapted version of

FusionForge GForge is a commercial service originally based on the Alexandria software behind SourceForge, a web-based project management and collaboration system which was licensed under the GPL. Open source versions of the GForge code were released from 20 ...

. Its aim is to widen the spectrum of

ideals, focusing on free social and cultural projects more than on free software. Thus, its software was originally a kind of social and multiple-topic forge following the

free-culture movement The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, ...

. Nowadays, the Ourproject community has been involved in the development of the collaborative environment Kune and eventually this would cover all current Ourproject functionalities.

Licenses allowed

The main condition for hosting projects at OP is that the content created during the project must be released under one of these licenses: * Creative Commons, Attribution * Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike * Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike * GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) *

Open Publication License The Open Publication License (OPL) was published by the Open Content Project in 1999 as a public copyright license for documents. It superseded the Open Content License, which was published by the Open Content Project in 1998. Starting around 2 ...

* Libre Designs General Public License (LDGPL) * Design Science License *

Free Art License The Free Art License (FAL), (french: Licence Art Libre (LAL)) is a copyleft license that grants the right to freely copy, distribute, and transform creative works. History The license was written in July 2000 with contributions from the mailin ...

Artistic License Artistic license (alongside more contextually-specific derivative terms such as poetic license, historical license, dramatic license, and narrative license) refers to deviation from fact or form for artistic purposes. It can include the alterat ...

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

(GPL) *

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

(LGPL) *

Affero General Public License The Affero General Public License (Affero GPL and informally Affero License) is a free software license. The first version of the Affero General Public License (AGPLv1), was published by Affero, Inc. in March 2002, and based on the GNU General P ...

(AGPL) *

BSD License BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lice ...

Mozilla Public License The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns ...

Public Domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...

* No license

Services

OP provides several free Internet services to free/libre projects collaborators: * Web hosting with subdomain (projectname).ourproject.org or

Virtual Hosting Virtual hosting is a method for hosting multiple domain names (with separate handling of each name) on a single server (or pool of servers). This allows one server to share its resources, such as memory and processor cycles, without requiring al ...

* Mailing list * Web Forums *

SSH The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH applications are based on ...

account for full customization *

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

database * permanent file archival (

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

) * Wiki * Web-administration * E-mail Alias @users.ourproject.org * Periodical full backups * For software projects: SCM ( CVS, SVN) Other secondary services: * Task management * News service * Documentation management * Surveys * Registering * File publication system * Stats

Partners

Ourproject developed partnership with several organizations: * GRASIA (Group of Software Agents, Engineering & Applications): Research group of

Universidad Complutense de Madrid The Complutense University of Madrid ( es, Universidad Complutense de Madrid; UCM, links=no, ''Universidad de Madrid'', ''Universidad Central de Madrid''; la, Universitas Complutensis Matritensis, links=no) is a public research university lo ...

, it is offering joint grants to students and providing hardware resources. *

American University of Science and Technology The American University of Science and Technology (AUST) (french: link=no, Université américaine de sciences et technologie; ar, link=no, الجامعة الأميركية للعلوم والتكنولوجيا) is a private, non-sectarian, an ...

(Beirut): offering students the chance of collaborating with Ourproject receiving trainings in administration, or framing their senior project and Master theses in this environment. * IEPALA Foundation: It has joined Ourproject, together with other

initiatives, to build a common Data Center. * Xsto.info:

Free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

cooperative A cooperative (also known as co-operative, co-op, or coop) is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically-contro ...

that has been providing technical infrastructure to Ourproject without charge, and recently joined the mentioned collective Data Center.

References

External links

* {{Official website Project hosting websites Creative Commons-licensed websites Collaborative projects Internet properties established in 2002 Social networks for social change Wiki farms Multilingual websites Web service providers Creative Commons Knowledge markets