AnnodexFoundation:About

From AnnodexFoundation

Jump to: navigation, search

The Annodex Foundation is a public-good, non-profit incorporated Australian association that is focused on furthering the open Annodex technology. The Annodex technology is a set of open specifications and software that allow the creation of Webs of audio and video. Just like HTML, HTTP and URLs enabled text documents to be turned into hypertext for the World Wide Web, Annodex allows to turn audio and video into hypermedia for the Web (see http://www.annodex.net/).

Contents

History of the Foundation

Before the creation of the Foundation, Annodex had been developed mostly within the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), Australia's largest government science research organisation. There had also been substantial developments from individual open source developers, to mention in particular debian packages by Jamie Wilkinson, python bindings by Ben Leslie, and perl bindings by Angus Lees. A strong commercialisation drive by CSIRO and the focus to research into automated annodexing approaches had prompted a better visible separation of the open Annodex technology from the closed-source research and products built on top of it. This separation requirement had led to a decision to create the Annodex Foundation as a public-good, non-profit association to further the technology in the spirit of the open source community and independently of the interest of commercial bodies.CSIRO has to be given credit for contributing the initial technology specification and open source reference implementation as well as the Annodex Trademark and the internet domains to the Annodex Foundation.

Goals of the Foundation

The Annodex Foundation draws together individuals that are interested in furthering the technology and application of Annodex. There are in particular two parts to the Annodex technology that the Annodex Foundation is concerned with: the open specifications and the open source software. Particular goals of the foundation are therefore:

1. To further develop the open Annodex specifications as open standards and ascertain interoperability with other Web technologies.

2. To facilitate interaction with other open source associations and open standards bodies.

3. To maintain the open source Annodex reference software as implementations of the Annodex specifications.

4. To plan and coordiante further development of software applications of Annodex, maintaining a regular release cycle.

5. To supports the creation of new Annodex-related software projects from the community of open source developers.

6. To ascertain that the Annodex technology stays open technology for the advantage of the general public.

7. To support Annodex content developers in the use of the technology.

8. To ascertain a legal framework for the use of the Trademarks and technology owned by the foundation.

9. To facilitate interaction with commercial entities.


Foundation Organisation

Constitution

The constitution of the Annodex Foundation Inc. is published openly to the public. The structure is currently being designed. Some of the key elements that are planned are explained here.

Committee

The Committee manages the association, sets future directions, appoints the Chief Community Manager, and supervises the disposition and solicitation of non-profit donations. The Committee consists of a Chair, a Vice Chair, a Treasurer, a Secretary, and three Ordinary Committee representatives. According to Australian Law, the Committee ultimately represents the Annodex Foundation and the Secretary is the Public Officer that is the primary legal contact in the organisation. Only the Committee has the authority to set membership dues, discipline and suspend members, and to amend the constitution.

Advisory Panel

The Advisory Panel is a panel of experts that are industry representatives and take an interest in influencing the future direction of the Annodex Foundation. Companies pay a fee to have one or more representative on the Adivisory Panel. The panel meets twice yearly with the Committee to discuss achievements, plans and other business.

Income

As of September 2005, the Annodex Foundation is funded in most part through the generous donation of benefactors providing time, hardware, and hosting. Income also stems from companies that pay to have experts sit on the Advisory Panel.The Annodex Foundation membership is free to encourage anyone to participate.Donations by members and non-members are encouraged.The Committee will regularly explore other sources of income such as grants, a paypal donation system, registration for tax-deductible donations, and bounties.

Liabilities

One of the main expenses for the Foundation is hardware and networking cost.

Domain registration is another part of the foundation's liabilities.

As of September 2005, the following servers are used by the foundation:


The hosting and bandwidth are provided by the CeNTIE project of CSIRO, a project within the CSIRO ICT Centre.The foundation does not intend to spend money on salaries or similar type of expenses. The foundation may in future reimburse costs of members where it was incurred in fulfilling foundation business, such as travel costs, shipping costs, and phone bills.

It is up to the Committee to decide upon the distribution of funds.

Retrieved from "http://www.annodex.org/wiki/AnnodexFoundation:About"
Personal tools