Talk:Mission Statement

The term ecosystem as applied to software projects strikes me as not only jargon, but jargon that open source folk like Ben Hill seem to have borrowed from Microsoft talking about it's Operating System and the constellation of non-free products that live off it, barnacle like. I kind of like the original wording there a bit better.

10. the fulfillment of Jacob Freedman's vision embodied in his unfinished Polychrome Historical Jewish Prayer Book. (EDF: this is a specific design goal, not a project value) (AV: I've removed it as it is implied by #4: historical awareness.)

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online: The ability to take it offline (even if that means having a local copy of a database) is equally essential.

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run-on sentence -- with parentheticals -- that goes on forever. Split?

PREVIOUS STATEMENTS
The following mission statements and descriptions of the Open Siddur exhibit the many times that we have tried articulating our work to prospective partners and collaborators. They were compiled here from emails, interviews, from work on the Open Siddur at the PresenTense Institute, and from material Aharon wrote describing the project on our developer blog, opensiddur.net. From this mass of content, we hope to refine a pithy paragraph simply describing the mission of the Open Siddur.

The Jewish Liturgy Project (JLP) is the backend for the Open Sidur Project's front end. The Open Siddur and Jewish Liturgy Projects share the same mission but slightly different goals. The only essential goal difference is that all of JLP is free while OSP has a social networking component which includes supporting non-free (i.e., non-shared, private) content. In the statements below, use of the term Open Siddur also includes the work of the JLP.

FROM JEWISHLITURGY.ORG
"This project aims to produce a free software toolkit for making high-quality custom Jewish liturgical books, such as haggadot, siddurim, and bentchers, that can be displayed on screen or printed to paper. The project's goals are to include a reliable source text, and to enable the user to customize the text for local rites and customs, and to selectively include multilingual translations, transliterations, instructions, notes and commentaries" (appears here, and here)

"The ultimate goal of the project is to create a software framework for generating custom Jewish liturgical texts, such as siddurim. For an end-user, the process may involve downloading our software or visiting a website that is running the software as a service. The user would then be given some basic options, such as the times the siddur should be valid (eg, weekdays only, Shabbat, High holidays), which rite (nusaḥ) it should conform to, whether it should include commentaries, translations and/or transliterations. A user will also be allowed to tweak the default options to his/her own customs and needs by setting features based on sets of documented options. The software would then generate a custom book in the user's chosen format." (see here).

FROM OPEN SIDDUR's EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Project Mission: The Open Siddur Project is developing an interactive community workspace for Jews crafting personally customized Jewish Prayerbooks – siddurim that can be adapted to the intimate intention (kavanah) of an individual’s practice of t’fillah (prayer), and which are imbued with the authenticity of Judaism’s diverse communal prayer traditions (nusḥaot).

The Open Siddur Project’s workshop is a free-culture and open source software project (FOSS), taking the form of a social network, digital archive, and web application allowing crafters to select from historic and contemporary arrangements of prayers and poetry familiar and obscure, as well as translations and transliterations, commentaries, exercises and instructions, art and layout templates—all of which can be edited, adapted, added to and shared with others individually or through collaborative groups. Customized siddurim produced through this workshop can then be accessed with an e-book reader, shared online as an educational tool, or printed in a handsome edition though an on-demand printer. The Open Siddur development team is committed to keeping this resource completely free and the intellectual property created or granted to the site accessible to the Creative Commons through a selection of permissive copyright licenses available to participating contributors.

FROM OPENSIDDUR.NET
The Open Siddur is an online tool for individuals and groups to craft the siddur they’ve always wanted. The Open Siddur provides content (translations, transliterations, art, tfillot, piyutim, and other source texts) from an archive of current and historic nusḥaot (both well-known and obscure) and allows users to (re)mix, edit, contribute new content, and share the siddurim they’ve generated. Partnerships with on-demand printers enable users to print beautiful copies of their personally customized siddurim and machzorim. The Open Siddur benefits independent minyanim and trans-denominational communities, pluralistic institutions, teachers of Jewish liturgy, and Jews of all ages evolving their personal use of t’fillah in their own daily practice, both alone and within groups.

The Open Siddur is a free and open source software project developing a collaborative publishing platform for anyone to craft the siddur (Jewish prayerbook) they’ve always wanted. Imagine a siddur that is completely customizable, allowing one to not only see unfamiliar and obscure nusḥaot (regional traditions) but also to remix the siddur with piyyutim (liturgical poetry), with personally chosen translations, commentary, transliterations, template layouts, and art.

The siddur has long served as the single common spiritual and educational tool for Jews of all backgrounds. The variations in the siddur reflect the incredible diversity of the Jewish people over the span of tradition and the common text of all siddurim is itself an aggregate of thousands of years of creativity. The Open Siddur makes accessible all the creativity preserved in traditions historically separated by geography and by the limitations of non-digital publishing.

The Open Siddur Project is a free and open source software project founded around a community of folk passionate about the siddur. We are developing an online collaborative publishing platform for crafting custom siddurim, for preserving the diversity of Jewish prayer traditions, and for sharing translations, commentary, t'fillot, meditations, and art in the siddur.

FROM EMAILS
The Open Siddur Project is an online repository of the Siddur (Jewish prayer book) and all the local, regional, and traditional variations of the Siddur available in the public domain and in copyleft. We are creating a tool for people interested in the siddur to custom build there own personal siddur, to share these personal siddur "recipes," and to contribute their own content (commentary, translations, prayers, art, layout templates, etc.)

The Open Siddur Project is a repository of siddur nushaot in encoded XML with a tool for users to create nusaḥ mashups, as well as to contribute commentary, translations, instructions and art. Bascially we are providing siddur ingredients for siddur recipes that users can share and edit, similar to epicurious.com.

The Open Siddur Project is a noncommercial free and open source software and text project, digitizing the text of the siddur and encoding it in a standard XML format. We want to make accessible the content of the siddur for people to more easily develop their own siddurim, to contribute and share translations, piyyutim, commentary, art, and instructional text. We also have an automated transliteration tool for those who need transliteration. We are eager to develop a repository for even the most obscure nusḥaot.

The Open Siddur Project is an online siddur building tool that uses as its source texts all the nusḥaot both current and historic (common and obscure). We're doing this as a way of preserving traditions and as an expression of my belief in the value of diversity in our tradition.

The Open Siddur is a FOSS project that provides the ingredients and recipes for folks to create their own personally relevant and evolving siddurim. The growing development team aims to provide XML encoded text of all the traditional nusḥaot (familiar and rare, historic and contemporary) -- variations and innovations of earlier siddurim, as well as instructional text, translations, commentary, etc., all pulled from public domain siddurim, and provide an interface where folks can contribute and share their own translations, commentary, instructional media, art, layouts. I want the siddur to be both a reflection of current and historical Jewish diversity, an intellectually rigorous archive of tradition, and a space for folks to own and take control of that legacy in inventive, creative, and personally relevant ways. You can imagine how powerful just thinking of the siddur as an individual tool can be for imagining Judaism as a set of exercises for creative, intellectual, and spiritual growth where before it was a static one-size-fits all top down program for boxing denominational Jewish identity and experience.

The Open Siddur is a free culture and open source software project for preserving nusaḥ traditions and for creating new ones -- helping folk build the siddur they've always wanted. Besides serving as a repository for nusḥaot historic and familiar, traditional and obscure, Open Siddur users will be able to add and edit commentary, translations, prayers, instructions, and art, collaborate and share their work, and then share with the public personally customizede siddurim that they can affordably print through on-demand printing.

Content isn't limited to text. We can share context specific audio of rare piyyutim, instructional videos showing Jewish yoga, layout templates, fonts, images, and other art.

We are building this resource from the ground up using open source software and open standards so that other free culture projects can build on our projects and not have to struggle with the same challenges we did.

One of these challenges is simply getting the text of a siddur available for distribution through a copyright permissive license. Although the texts of the siddur were inspired and authored hundreds or thousands of years before copyrights, the digital version of the texts is held by publishers as valuable intellectual property. Our project is trying to free this text so that it can be the foundation for individuals, communities, and other Jewish free culture projects that need to manipulate and redistribute these texts without asking for permission from publishers whose hashkafah might be radically different from their own.

I am hoping you might take an interest in the project generally, and if so, help us find the digital text of a siddur we can use and redistribute under a copyright permissive license. In lieu of available text, we are busy transcribing it manually from the Siddur Avodat Yisrael (1901) prepared by Seligmann Baer. After encoding this text, we hope to add additional variations of nusaḥ Ashkenaz, Sfard, Sfardi, Roman, etc. revealing the evolution of the siddur text from Rav Amram and Rav Saadya Gaon's siddurs to the present day.

If this project sounds familiar, it is. It was partly inspired by Jacob Freedman's uncompleted Polychrome Historic Jewish Prayer Book (1969). Freedman wanted a siddur that revealed it as an aggregate of thousands of years of inspired authorship. We want to create this siddur and inspire this and future generations to build on this work as an essential and intimate tool for creative engagement with tradition and with the practice of t'fillah.

The Open Siddur Project is an open source software platform for people to build their own customized siddurim online, and it is a socially networked site allowing folks to contribute material for the siddur and join collaboration groups, but ultimately, to create beautiful pdfs that they can then bring to either a book artists/graphic designer or just go ahead an print via an on-demand printer.

In order to make this a truly useful community resource we're working on creating a fully XML encoded text archive of all the variations of the siddur in every nusaḥ going back to Rav Amram and Rav Saadya Gaon's siddurim (and earlier if possible) in order to show the siddur as an aggregate text of thousands of years of inspired creativity -- hopefully to inspire folks to think of the siddur as an Open siddur that they can contribute to as well in their own personally customized siddurim.

The Open Siddur Project is a web application for users to build highly customized and personalized siddurim. Our team wants to help small communities preserve their siddur traditions from homogenization, help Jews access the diverse traditions seen in other communities nusḥaot, as well as share their own innovative t'fillot, translations, commentary, and instructions in text, audio, video, and graphical content.

I'm writing representing the Open Siddur Project, a free culture and open source software project developing a digital-archive based web application that will help individuals and groups craft highly customized siddurim, preserve siddur traditions, and aid in teaching Jewish liturgy.

I want to introduce to you my team's project, the Open Siddur, and it's potential to preserve traditions of communities whose cultures are threatened by homogenization.

We're creating a digital archive of all of the ingredients of the siddur (source text, translations, commentary, instructions, kavanot/meditations, and art) in all the various nusḥaot and their historic variations over the centuries from the many geographically dispersed communities currently in Israel and the Diaspora. Ultimately, we're creating a web application for individuals to craft their own highly customized siddurim based on content they've chosen from this archive of material, which they can then print and have bound with an on-demand printer, or else bring to a book artist to create a very beautiful volume.

We are inviting translators from all these communities to join the Open Siddur project and to help create and share new translations of the siddur in the many languages Jews speak. For example, the Open Siddur is already working with an initiative of a Norwegian Jew to translate the siddur into Norwegian.

Our project already uses a transliteration engine that can automatically transliterate text into any phonetic script: English, Russian, Amharic, Arabic. You name it.

The Open Siddur project is a free culture and open source software project. We are simply really passionate about the values pluralism and multiculturalism, especially within our Jewish communities.

The Open Siddur is a free and open source software project of translators, transcribers, scholars, and artists, creating an archive of all the diverse nusḥaot of the many geographically dispersed Jewish communities and making all of their ingredients and arrangements available as free XML encoded texts. With the website we’re developing, one should be able to combine and share translations, commentary, and source text together to generate a pdf they can then bind and publish with an on-demand printer.

The Open Siddur Project is a free culture and open source software project that myself and some others are working on called the Open Siddur, a collaborative publishing platform for empower individuals to craft printed siddurim relevant to their spiritual practice (see opensiddur.net).

We are creating an archive of source texts that comprise the siddur in all of its diverse historic and regional variations (familiar and obscure) to show that the siddur is an aggregate of thousands of years of creatively inspired work. By giving users the ability to compare traditions, edit, adapt and upload content (mental exercises, meditations, liturgical poetry, translations, commentary, etc.), as well as collaborate (if they wish) on the design and content of siddurim, we hope to provide the basis for which the siddur could be used as a tool for relevant and useful practice (rather than simply as a source text emphasizing community cohesion as part of a conforming communal practice). We hope that by empowering individuals creatively in this way we will also help revive the tradition of art crafted siddurim for those who want to do more than print their siddurim with on-demand printers. But beyond this, we want to create a diverse platform where siddur content can be shared and localized in as many languages as Jewish tradition is being and has been innovated.

The Open Siddur Project is a project for folk to share their siddur innovations with other individuals and communities, online, through a free culture project called the Open Siddur.

When I was launching the Open Siddur in Jerusalem this summer, I met with a good number of emerging spiritual communities there who are interested in creating new siddurim and are looking for content. The Open Siddur isn't only digitizing historically important siddurim representing nusḥaot in the public domain. We are also asking anyone who has created a siddur to share their content with others by contributing it to the Open Siddur under a permissive copyright of a Creative commons license (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA). We hope in this way that individuals, emerging spiritual communities, and small communities threatened with cultural homogenization, will be able to craft new siddurim relevant to their practice using our free and open source web application.

The site is not yet active but the Open Siddur will be a collaborative publishing platform where folk can upload new t'fillot, modify or adapt existing ones, remix content from between traditions, edit and share translations, contribute commentaries/meditations/instructions, and collaborate if they wish. Ultimately the result of all these efforts are digital files that can then be easily printed as handsome siddurim via on-demand printing (e.g., lulu.com, or lupa.co.il).

AT PRESENTENSE
Aharon Varady always wanted a Siddur to call his own. Twenty years ago this involved photocopies, scissors, rubber glue, and a large binder overflowing with prayers, commentaries, and translations ancient, contemporary, and personal. After working at an open source technology firm in early 2000, Varady laid out an idea to build a database to store all the prayers and their textual variations, to create a tool for generating a custom Siddur from the content of the database, and to create a useful tool by which participants could share their custom siddur "recipes" and add additional "ingredients" to the database. Varady hopes that the Open Siddur will preserve nusḥaot (regional traditions), encourage creativity and sharing in communal and personal prayer, and give those who pray or study prayer a Siddur to call their own.

One-Liner: The Open Siddur Project is a digital archive based web application that will preserve nusḥaot (regional traditions), encourage creativity and sharing in communal and personal prayer, and give those who pray or study prayer a Siddur to call their own.

VALUE PROPOSITION: The Open Siddur is an online tool and database of Jewish liturgy that empowers individual and independent minyanim that are passionate about t'fillah with the capability and resources to build the authentic and relevant Siddur they've always wanted. Unlike current siddurim that come ready made, the Open Siddur provides access to all the traditional and historic nusḥaot (both well-known and obscure) allowing its users to mashup content from across traditions, contribute new translations, commentary, instructions, art, and prayers, and, if they want, to share their personally customized siddurim with others.

An aggregate of thousands of years of Jewish creative inspiration, the siddur has been used as both a tool for individual and communal spiritual expression as well as a common educational textbook for geographically dispersed Jewish communities for at least a thousand years. A single variation of the siddur (nusaḥ) may preserve piyyutim, blessings, and other spiritual expressions of our tradition not found in others. By providing an Open Siddur user with these traditional siddur variations, and by allowing them to modify them and add content relevant to their own spiritual experience and yearning, the Open Siddur engages them in the rich trove of authentic Jewish spiritual expression while empowering them with a relevant tool for developing their spiritual and creative capabilities. Because it is a social tool, a user-contributor can add value for the whole community of Open Siddur users by sharing their personally customized siddur. Lastly, the entire archive and the source code backend of the project is available as open source and copyright permissive license allowing other projects to further develop and extend the code, encoding standards, and text libraries our team has developed.

THE 15 SECOND PITCH: Once upon a time Jews prayed from the heart. When was the last time your siddur allowed you to truly express yourself? The Open Siddur is a web application for helping you craft a customized siddur relevant to your spiritual practice.

The siddur was handed to you as a static, unchanging entity. It wasn't always that way, and it doesn't have to be anymore. The Open Siddur Project is a free software collaborative platform to help make the siddur your own.

PRAYER A LA CARTE by Raphael Ahren in Haaretz
Aharon Varady always dreamed of putting together his own prayer book. Realizing that many people – including himself – often see prayer as a dull and robotic exercise in the fulfillment of a religious duty, he thought for years about ways to enable people to create their own prayer book, or siddur, in order to make the most of their experience. A fellow at this year’s PresenTense Institute, Varady earlier this month finally embarked on a daring project, creating a tool for “individuals and groups to build the siddur they’ve always wanted,” as his Web site explains.

Varady’s Open Siddur project aspires to funnel all different regional traditions, translations, commentaries and instructional notes that Jews from the four corners of the world have produced through the ages into one Web application. The site will provide the core liturgy and enable users to freely add content, comparable to cooking Web sites where food aficionados exchange and comment on each other’s recipes.

Similarly, at OpenSiddur.net users can download different prayers, add creative translations, commentaries and other “siddur recipes,” as the 34-year-old Philadelphia resident put it. Looking for an oriental version of the morning services or a rare medieval religious poem? Chances are that sooner or later someone will upload it to the site, Varady assures.

“We believe the text of the siddur is an aggregate of thousands of years of inspired authors,” Varady told Anglo File this week. “This culture, which right now is locked in text we can [only] read on paper, is not yet available easily to manipulation and remixing, adopting and tweaking for people who want to use the siddur as a spiritual tool.”

While the new site facilitates the study of Jewish liturgy, he says, its main purpose is helping those who are dissatisfied with the way conventional siddurs dictate prayer. “People don’t feel they can be engaged with their prayer,” Varady says. “It’s programmed for them.”

Ariel Beery, the New York-born co-founder and director of the PresenTense Group, believes that Varady’s project might “spark a paradigm shift in how we approach individual spirituality and group coordination in an age of radical interdependence,” as he told Anglo File this week. “If we’ve learned anything from Facebook it’s that even though every person has their own page and profile, it is the interaction [that] provides the value people seek.”

But the soft-spoken Varady, a technology consultant and city planner by profession, takes a more modest approach. “If there’s anything radical about my project,” he says, “it’s that an individual can start creating an archive of personal prayers and keep it private or share it with others.”

He notes that his innovative project was inspired by Jacob Freedman’s “polychrome” siddur, which color coded parts of the text to indicate during which time periods various prayers were added. Freedman started his project in the late 1960s but never completed it. Now, Varady says, the time has come to once again try to create a prayer book for people “who take their prayer very seriously, or for independent congregations that are struggling to create a relevant siddur for their community.”

Varady realizes that some people – especially those who are proud to pray with their grandfather’s siddur – will not be attracted to a Web site offering prayer a la carte, picking and choosing texts from various geographic areas, time epochs and religious streams.

Yet he thinks his project has the potential to make praying interesting to those who otherwise wouldn’t bother. “We can teach children that prayer is important,” he says, “but we can’t take for granted that this will be relevant for them when they are adults, when they have a choice. What we can do is provide the deepest resources for them to engage in this essential creative process.”

ON FACEBOOK
The Open Siddur Project is collecting the ingredients and arrangements (nusḥaot) of Jewish prayer (historic and contemporary, familiar and obscure) and making them accessible in a web application for users to build personally customized Jewish prayerbooks. We need help collecting these ingredients (t'fillot, piyyutim, yiḥudim, kavanot, translations, commentary, and instructions) through outright donations of digital text, font art, audio, video, and graphics granted to the creative commons through a copyright permissive license or through the digital transcription of siddurim that are already in the public domain.

There are a variety of reasons the Open Siddur to come into being, but foremost among them is my feeling that even though spirituality is such an intimately personal experience it is one of the first to be ceded to others in its expression. So I want to provide a tool for anyone to design their own Siddur, based on their evolving sense of what is a useful and relevant practice. In this way, thousands of new Siddurim could be published, and the diversity of Judaism could be refreshed in this multiplicity of expression.

Speaking for myself now, I want a siddur that is not just a book for expressing shared values while developing a sense of community cohesion. I want a guide that I can use daily in a practice to help me grow creatively, reminding me to be compassionate, and encouraging greater awareness. The siddur I would design is a siddur that is not for everyone, and being individually oriented might not work for communal prayer either. I thought the best way to craft the siddur I wanted would be to develop a tool for anyone who, like me, wanted to make their own siddur.

There are other reasons as well. I strongly believe that Judaism expresses multicultural values especially in the acceptance of the diversity of communal customs (minhagim) and prayer traditions (nusḥaot), and I want to do what I can to promote and emphasize these values at a time when small Jewish communities cultures are under threat by homogenization -- from being lost in the midst of other cultures. This is happening right now with the thousand year old prayer traditions of Ethiopian Jewry. We need an archive, a repository of prayer traditions, that could then be translated in any language and freely adapted for local contexts. This is why most of our materials to date are derived from materials in the Public Domain. Contemporary works we can only accept if they are first contributed to the Creative Commons under a permissive copyright license (CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) that allows for derivative works and requires only attribution.

FORMAL LETTER SOLICITING TEXTUAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF SIDDUR CONTENT
The Open Siddur Project is producing an online application to help Jews develop a personal practice of tefillah centered 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. We are intending to address the problem that, while the Internet has eased interpersonal communication and sharing, these contemporary innovations have not yet been applied to the siddur. Compounding the problem are lengthy copyright terms that prevent new works from entering the public domain and being shared freely. Many publishers claim new copyrights over the digital texts of works authored hundreds of years ago, preventing the formation of an intellectual commons.

The Open Siddur Project is thus soliciting contributions of digitized content for a siddur that can be freely used, copied, modified, and redistributed by its users, without restriction of the medium or the users' endeavor. With deep respect for authors' and publishers' rights, we only copy and redistribute material for which we have legal and ethical rights to do so. To that end, the free culture community has developed a set of common and widely understood copyright licenses that allow authors and other rights holders to state their intent to contribute their material to the cultural commons. The Creative Commons organization (http://www.creativecommons.org) maintains these licenses, which allow rights holders to select from a spectrum of rights. In order to be compatible with our aims for users' freedoms, we allow material released under the following licenses to be admitted to our archives:

Creative Commons Zero [CC0] (No rights reserved); An international public domain declaration. http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported [CC-BY]; A license that allows unlimited reproduction of the work, as long as the author attribution is maintained. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported [CC-BY-SA]; A license that allows unlimited reproduction of the work under the conditions that the author attribution is maintained and that all derivative works are distributed under the same terms. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/