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IMPACT

We reinforce our open knowledge advocacy through partnerships with organisations like the Wikimedia Foundation and Creative Commons, and local cultural institutions (also called GLAMs - Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums). In collaboration with our partners we organise edit-a-thons to improve on a specific topic and workshops to introduce skills in editing on open knowledge platforms.

 

HIGHLIGHTED ACTIVITIES

Our recent activities include:

 

 

Reducing the gender knowledge gap

Since 2018, and on an annual basis, JOSA along with a myriad of entities takes part in the organisation of WikiGap. WikiGap is an edit-a-thon whereby the goal is to close the gender gap on Wikipedia, particularly through contributing content pertaining to Arabic women of prominence.

 

 

Expanding the online visibility of Jordanian heritage

Through our Open Jordanian Heritage initiative in partnership with the American Centre of Oriental Research (ACOR), we have organised a series of edit-a-thons to increase content about Jordan’s heritage on open source projects such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata. Thus far, our volunteers have contributed ~40k words to Wikipedia on various topics related to Jordanian heritage. Prominent Jordanian photographer Bashar Tabbah also donated 250+ high quality images of Jordan’s archeological landscapes under CC-BY-SA license.

 

 

Stronger community for Arabic open knowledge

In 2018 we hosted Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director, Katherine Maher, in a meetup for open knowledge advocates and became the first organisation to join the Creative Commons Global Network. In 2019, we also hosted the first “Introduction to Wikidata” workshop.

Highlighted Activities

April 2021

MaDiH Hackathon

MaDiH is a collaborative project that aims to contribute to the long-term sustainable development of Jordan’s digital cultural heritage.  The word MaDiH is a wordplay that stands for “Mapping Digital Heritage in Jordan” in English and means “praise” in Arabic. The project was funded by AHRC and Newton Khalidi and handled by several entities such as the Jordan Open Source Association, Hashemite University, King's Digital Lab, the Council for British Research in the Levant, Endangered Archeology in the Middle East and North Africa and the Department of Antiquities of Jordan.

Jordan Open Source Association led a MaDiH hackathon to ensure that the analysis and lessons learned from the project are aligned to educational and commercial opportunities. The goal was to get IT students and professionals to use MaDiH available resources in innovative ways to expand the reach and visibility of Jordanian heritage via digital methods.

The winning team (Adel Qaddoumi and Mohsen Albawab) developed an augmented reality mobile application which uses the 3D model data available in the MaDiH CKAN and displays archaeological artefacts and monuments —such as The Treasury in Petra— in the user’s real world environment. The app also allows the user to learn more about the displayed objects via digital information cards.

What does open knowledge mean?

Open knowledge is knowledge that people are free to read, copy, redistribute without legal, social, or technological restriction. The preceding definition, for example, was adapted from the Wikipedia article on “Open Knowledge”. This is possible because most content hosted on Wikipedia is under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license allowing anyone to copy and “remix” the content on condition of ascribing credit to Wikipedia itself.