Content Contribution

July 19, 2009

The Open Siddur Project aharon@opensiddur.net http://opensiddur.net Kehillat Kol HaNeshama Attn: Luli Harris Re: Nusaḥ Kol HaNeshama and the Open Siddur

Dear Kehillat Kol HaNeshama,

The Open Siddur Project is building an online application to help Jews develop a personal practice of the siddur around a siddur that they can personally customize. The project is founded on a database of nusḥaot representing the full diversity of Jewish customs spanning 1200 years of inspired creativity and innovation that continues today. The problem is that innovations today are not easily shared between communities, and adding to the problem is that published content of the siddur, even the digital text of works authored hundreds of years ago, are protected by copyright.

The Open Siddur Project is thus soliciting contributions of digitized siddur content to be redistributed with copyright permissive licenses allowing derivative works to be made that acknowledge the origin and authorship of innovations contemporary and historic. To do this we are requesting copyright holders release their intellectual property to the Creative Commons under one of the following licenses, CC0, CC-BY, or CC-BY-SA. The following are hyperlinks explaining the meaning of each license in detail.

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/index.php?title=CC0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

To release the siddur, the content of the siddur simply needs to be emailed to us with the a text file of the license included. Once Kol HaNeshema releases its siddur with one of the licenses aboce, the siddur would be encoded by the Open Siddur Project and made accessible for free via our online application. Depending on the license chosen, future works derived from the Siddur Kol HaNeshama would need to be re-released under the same license requiring the attribution of the text to be represented. These future works could be the source of siddurim distributed commercially or non-commercially by other publishers, who by virtue of selecting works in the Creative Commons, would be able to enrich their siddurim with content provided by all the author contributors to the siddur, contemporary and historic, whose work is accessible in the Creative Commons.

Kol HaNeshama can only contribute content they have themselves permission to contribute: works it has authored or digitized, for example, translations and commentary by Rav Levi Kelman.

Thank you for considering this request.

Sincerely, Aharon N. Varady The Open Siddur Project