[SMW-devel] Announcement: Open Semantic Data Association (OSDA)

[Markus K. <ma...@se...>]

Dear all,

we are very happy to announce the creation of a new non-profit 
organization that supports the goals of SMW and related tools and 
applications: the Open Semantic Data Association (OSDA). This is the 
result of a long effort in establishing an SMW-related charity that has 
been supported by a number of people from the community (many thanks!).

We hope that the creation of OSDA will help us to better support the 
great activities around this community. For example, we needed some kind 
of organizational structure to support the organization of the SMWCon 
meetings. Another example is when an Open Source project wants to apply 
for a grant or award that requires a representative organization (like 
Google Summer of Code this year).

OSDA is able to provide such support as long as it relates to its 
general charitable not-for-profit goals (chiefly: supporting education, 
free access to semantic data, and related open source tools). 
Officially, is a charitable registered association under German law 
(gemeinnütziger eingetragener Verein, VR 3603, Amtsgericht Karlsruhe) 
seated in Karlsruhe, Germany. It is legally required to operate as a 
not-for-profit organization that only pursues the charitable goals set 
forth in its statutes.

It should be noted that OSDA does not generally represent Semantic 
MediaWiki or any of its related projects or organizations, even though 
some members of OSDA may be closely affiliated with these. (In other 
words: OSDA is not the "Mozilla Foundation of SMW".)

OSDA is a volunteer organization that does not currently have any 
employees. A small Management Board is in charge of the practical 
operations. A Steering Committee of OSDA members discusses important 
matters and takes decisions on the activities of the OSDA. The OSDA 
Management Board is currently comprised of:

     * President: Markus Krötzsch, University of Oxford
     * Vice president: Yaron Koren, WikiWorks
     * Treasurer: Frank Dengler, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

The current OSDA Steering Committee includes the members of the 
Management Board and the following members:

     * Michael Cariaso, SNPedia.com
     * Jeroen De Dauw, independent
     * Daniel Hansch, ontoprise GmbH
     * Joel Natividad, TCG Software Inc.
     * Lydia Pintscher, KDE
     * Don Undeen, Metropolitan Museum of Art
     * Denny Vrandecic, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
     * Jesse Wang, Vulcan Inc.

As you can see, OSDA is a community-based organization, and of course we 
will maintain this in the future (the committee members will naturally 
change over time).

To contact OSDA, please write to os...@se....

Cheers,

Markus