Friends,

The communal project of Jewish spirituality can only be improved through cooperation and collaboration. The creative work used in our traditional liturgies is the common cultural heritage of the Jewish people. Most of this work resides in the public domain. The Open Siddur is your Siddur. Join the Open Siddur Project today and begin crafting and sharing the siddur you’ve always wanted.

This development status update chronicles progress on the Open Siddur made since our last update 11/11/2009. If you’d like to get news of Open Siddur Project development as it occurs, make sure to follow @opensiddur at Twitter, or join the opensiddur-announce email list.

Contributions (Aharon, Anonymous, Gabriel, Efraim, Eve, Daniel, John)

Software Development (Efraim, Ze’ev, Ilan, Raphael)

Documentation (Efraim, Aharon, Ze’ev)

Organizational Structure (Aharon, Efraim)

Communications and Promotion (Aharon)

Press (Aharon, Efraim)

Team Member Updates (Azriel, Aharon)

Wishing you a happy and warm Adar,
Aharon Varady
Founder & Co-director
The Open Siddur Project
http://opensiddur.net/join-us/

• How might the Jewish community increase Jewish literacy as more religious and educational resources become digitized in e-formats, and thus become more easily disseminated and accessed?
• Will prayer become more individualized as siddurs (prayer books) become available to everyone and can be carried without adding any extra bulk to a briefcase or book bag?
• Will learning of Jewish texts attract new students as Torah and Talmud become available in new formats?
• Will Jewish life become less expensive by saving on the purchase of books at religious schools and day schools?
• How might synagogues and JCCs build relationships beyond their walls as sermons, newsletters and blog entries are sent to the palm of constituents’ hands?
• Will all Jews need a handheld device, like new students at some universities, in order to fully participate in all the community has to offer?

How else might the Jewish world change as it enters the digital realm? What’s your organization or community doing to interact in the digital world?

Here at the Open Siddur Project, we see the platform we’re developing as, yes, a means for improved dissemination and access — especially for illuminating the historical diversity of Judaism’s spiritual traditions enshrined in Jewish liturgy. But this is not our raison d’etre. There are already many who are sharing texts of the siddur online. What is novel for us is the opportunity for individuals and groups to collaborate with one another: creating, remixing, and sharing art and text, each a seed-like contribution grown in the fecund mulch of our common cultural and spiritual heritage. Speaking for myself, the question of whether Jews will be davvening (praying) from e-books in the future is thus something of a distraction from what is much more interesting — how digitization of the ingredients of the siddur and collaborative publishing platforms like the Open Siddur might empower a sense of personal ownership in the craft and creation of useful and beautiful tools for engaging in spiritual relationships.

Need it be argued that print media will ever be made entirely obsolete for the Am haSefer, or People of the Book? We are, after all, a people who have enshrined in our laws the careful reproduction of our seminal texts by a capable scribe using quill and ink on animal skin parchment. I love Star Trek and hate paper goods derived from felled trees, so I’m hopeful that in the future we will at least be davvening from siddurim made from 100% recycled bamboo and hemp based sustainable paper goods. iPhone possessing Jews, serious about the fulfillment of their thrice daily t’fillah obligations, are already davvening from siddur apps. Yet, I caution against any premise that assumes digital media supplanting print media, in a sort of self-justifying march of technological progress.  Considering that conventions for sabbath observance are well fixed in the Jewish tradition, one could hardly expect print formats to disappear so long as there are Jews observing traditional sabbath laws. Saying this, I am certain that digitization will improve print resources used by Jews at any point during the week, let alone Internet or cloud-based resources — with one important caveat. We need to think seriously about how this material is licensed.

Efraim provided an insight into this issue with his economic argument for free primary data. I’d like to add to what Efraim and I began to advocate publicly on the Jewish Tech list, here in a criticism of Bar Ilan’s Responsa Project’s licensing of newly digitized historic works that are otherwise free and in the Public Domain.

The question of what formats improve access and dissemination is pressing. As cultural workers we should be interested in making access as inexpensive as possible to the source texts of Jewish culture. If we’re serious about this we will be mindful to use open standards and free culture licensing that allows others to build on top of and improve our work.

Digitization and networks provide the foundation for easy dissemination of cultural works. So much of the legacy of our cultural inheritance is already in the Public Domain, and thus, free, but bottled up in print media. The tragedy is that in the conversion from print to digital media, cultural workers are using closed standards and terms-of-use agreements which limit access to other cultural innovators. It is a real travesty when amazing and ambitious projects assume ownership of our common cultural heritage through onerous terms-of-use agreements. (See for example, Bar-Ilan’s Responsa Project or Davka Corp’s license for using public domain texts they’ve digitized).

Cultures, including our own, breathe creativity and exhale innovation. We rely on the creative works bequeathed to us by earlier generations to remain rooted in our cultural identity. Synagogue members and kids in day schools, summer camps, youth orgs, and creative Jews working on their own can all benefit from our educational, cultural, and spiritual institutions cooperating with one another in sharing the bounty of our cultural heritage. As Jews, are we not all collaborating on a grand project of Torah learning, spiritual improvement, and tikkun olam? It’s time our cultural licensing choices reflect these profound intentions.

When considering bringing old content online, both of these aspects are important. A first level of digitization involves simply making data available. Google Books and Hebrewbooks.org work at this level, providing PDFs and/or OCR-ed transcriptions of the material. A second level of digitization involves semantic linkage of the data, both internal to the site and external to the site. The Open Siddur Project, Tagged Tanakh and Open Scriptures digitize at the semantic level. This second-level digitization is required to do all of the cool things we expect to be able to do with online texts: click on a word and find its definition or grammatical form, find the source of a passage in one text in another text, find how the text has evolved historically, etc. Even the simplest form of a link: a reference from another site, requires some kind of internal division.

Digitization that takes advantage of the web therefore requires a number of steps: (1) getting the basic text online, (2) getting it in an addressable form (to make it more like typed text, instead of a picture of a page), (3) assuring the text’s accuracy, and (4) marking it up for semantic linkage. Some of these steps, or parts of them can be done automatically, but, overall, they require some degree of intelligent input. Even step 1, which is primarily mechanical in nature, requires design of the procedures.

I hope that this outline of the required steps to getting a text online suggests that the most expensive part of making content available is human labor — it takes time to do it, and it takes even more time to do it right.

And now for the rhetorical questions:

• How many times has the Tanach been digitized?
• … the siddur?
• … the Talmud?
• … major commentaries on the siddur, Torah, Talmud (Rashi, Tosefot)?
• … full codes of Jewish law (Mishneh Torah, Tur, Shulchan Aruch, Aruch Hashulchan)?
• … uncommon piyyutim (liturgical poems)?

In some cases, the answer is: it’s been done many times. In other cases, the answer is: it’s never been done. And, both answers lead the all-important question: why? Why are there so many digitizations of the Tanach and no full digitizations of Shulchan Aruch online? Why isn’t the siddur already hyperlinked to its Talmudic sources?

I would propose that we have been wasteful with our resources. Earlier, I pointed out that the primary resources that go into these advanced digitizations are time and human labor. In some cases, these resources equate directly to money, in others, the linkage is more indirect.

The core material of all of the above-mentioned works comes from the public domain. It is ownerless, and free for anyone to copy for any purpose. Every time we encounter a basic text that we have to digitize again because of “new copyright” claims or EULA-style contractual constraints, that is an indication of a failure somewhere in the system. This is particularly true if the claims are being made by non-profits, “social” businesses, or academic institutions. In the Jewish world, even for-profit published books are sometimes donation-supported. Each common text that has to be digitized a second, third, or hundreth time equates to another less common text that is not being digitized. Redoing basic OCR work and transcription takes resources away from establishing semantic linkages.

Some people and organizations get it. As of now, we only need one digitization of the Leningrad Codex (Masoretic Bible). That’s because Christopher Kimball and the J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research digitized it, transcribed it, and released it as free data. The Westminster Leningrad Codex is now perhaps the most built-off version of the Hebrew Bible online. The base texts (which may be used “without restriction”) are present in both commercial and non-commercial products. The Open Siddur Project is using it both for its technology demonstrations and as the basis of all biblical texts in the siddur.

There are precious few examples of free data in the Jewish community, even on the Internet. There are copious examples of donation-funded organizations presenting primarily public domain data with new copyright claims.

Free data prevents the necessity of duplication of effort, which, in turn, prevents the community as a whole from unnecessarily wasteful spending. Particularly for organizations with a social mission, its use is a win for everyone.

• opensiddur-announce: A read only list for project announcement postings
• opensiddur-talk: General discussion list (replaces jewishliturgy-discuss)
• opensiddur-tech: Technical discussion list
• opensiddur-dev: Commit messages and issue reports (replaces jewishliturgy-devel)

The jewishliturgy-discuss and jewishliturgy-devel lists are no longer functional. All old messages are archived on the new lists. Members of jewishliturgy-discuss are now members of opensiddur-talk. All committers should become members of opensiddur-tech. Please update your bookmarks, mail filters, etc.

The following chart shows the flow of data within the project between end users, collaboration groups, Jewish source texts, other free culture projects, and the goal of a more vibrant Jewish culture.

The data flow starts in the upper right hand corner, with traditional Jewish source texts available in print and which are in the Public Domain due to their age. Some of these texts are already digitized and free. Compatible free culture and open source licensing enables these digitized texts to be  used in other open source projects, as well as included within the Open Siddur Project’s free digital library.

For texts that are not yet digitized, the Open Siddur Project is engaged in a process of transcription, proofreading, and encoding. Through this process, the material in our digital library will be interlinked with each other and organized as a public database. Our use of a well documented open standard for encoding this material permits it to be efficiently served to our users and other open source projects over the Internet.

Open Siddur Users with common interests can join collaboration groups to advance the development of specific texts. Users engaged in transcribing, proofreading, and encoding texts comprise an important collaboration group within the Open Siddur Project, as they are contributing core material to this public database. Any user of the Open Siddur can join this group which operates consistent with our Mission Statement. We envision other collaboration groups coalescing around translating, authoring, and/or transcribing texts that will be shared with free culture licensing.

Free culture licensing provides the legal framework for this type of sharing to flourish. Material in our library (texts, graphics, audio, and video) is open for editing and remixing by our users. Modifications, adaptations, and newly authored works can be shared with other users or groups. An act of sharing requires acceptance of one of the free culture licenses our project relies on (CC0, CC-BY, and CC-BY-SA).

We recognize that davvening (Jewish prayer) is as much a private experience as it is often enough (although not necessarily) framed within a communal setting. For that reason, the Open Siddur platform will support a user-private database, offering users (and private collaboration groups) opportunities to limit the sharing of their work in the public library. Privacy is what distinguishes the Open Siddur Project from a wiki devoted to collective work on the Siddur.

Once texts from the database are edited, ordered and remixed, our rendering technology will compile them into digital or custom printed formats suitable for reading, printing with on-demand printers, or further offline crafting.

Crafting a siddur is not only a matter of selecting, arranging, and modifying text. A siddur also reflects the aesthetic of its maker. Besides offering a selection of open source fonts and a rudimentary layout editor, we welcome the opportunity for book artists, book binders, and other consultants to get involved in the production process of siddurim. Our selection of licenses was considered carefully so that individuals producing or helping to produce siddurim using the Open Siddur can derive revenue through their efforts.

The project of Jewish spirituality is a matter of common interest and private engagement. When Jewish individuals and collectives engage and share in the legacy of their common cultural heritage what results is a more vibrant and vital Jewish culture.

The colors and shapes on the flowchart below are not self-explanatory, so here’s a key:

• Rectangles are Processes.
• Rhomboids represent Data.
• Curve-cut rectangles are Documents.
• Concave/convex-ended rectangles are Databases.
• Orange identifies work deriving from the Public Domain.
• Yellow identifies work licensed with permissive copyright (free culture) licensing.
• Blue identifies public resources maintained by the Open Siddur Project team. (Light blue identifies user/private resources within Open Siddur.)
• Green represents external processes. (Dark green is other projects using our public resources; light green are external resources for users; bright green represents a more vibrant Jewish culture.)

The Open Siddur is a volunteer driven project to create a free resource for folks crafting their own siddur (Jewish prayer book). We intend to collaboratively build an archive of material that makes up the siddur — texts, translations, instructional material, commentaries, essays, and other associated media. Along with the archive, we are building the software that can be used to put together the building blocks to customize and personalize the siddur. Ultimately, siddurim prepared from this content may be printed on your home printer, by on-demand print shop, or in cooperation with a book artist.

For more about our mission, click here. To see some early technology demos, click here. To learn move about how you can get involved in helping to build the Open Siddur, read on.

By “open,” we mean that our code and our texts are free to take under permissive copyright licenses. We are creating a community of folks passionate about the siddur and who express their passion by contributing material that can be used by others in the preparation of their own siddurim. This material could be historic or new, familiar or obscure. We seek to design a tool that will provide a resource to help those who take Jewish spirituality seriously engage in their own spiritual practice.

If you’d like to help us, take a look at the following opportunities to contribute (below), fill out our survey, or just contact us. (Donations, if you like, can be made to this project via our fiscal sponsor the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity. )

For more details on our development and to get status updates, please fill out our survey. If you’d like to follow our developments closely and participate, then please join our discussion list, friend us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and check out our development wiki (our current storehouse for documentation and texts).

Make the God-name big.

Big and holy.

Do it in this world,

This creation sprung from consciousness,

And bring some order to this.

Do it fast, soon, in our lives, in the days ahead, in the life of the
people we call home.

Everybody join with me: May the name be blessed forever and ever!

Yes, blessed.

Blessed, whispered, sung out, shouted, honored, this holy name.

The name is beyond any song, poem, or comforting words we could ever speak.

Eveybody say: That’s the truth!

May a big peace descend from the heavens, a life-giving peace for all
of us, for our beloved people,

Let everybody say: May it be true!

Make that peace in the heavens, great peacemaker, great One who brings
wholeness to our people.

Stop.

Everybody pray:

May it be true.

Rabbi Daniel Brenner, executive director of Birthright Israel Next, contributed a Kaddish to the Open Siddur Project. It is now part of the cultural commons of the Jewish people by virtue of this text being contributed with a CC-BY-SA license. Thank you, Rabbi Brenner!

Rabbi Brenner submitted this with the CC-BY-SA license by including the following text.

I am the original author of the attached Kaddish and I am licensing the following attachments under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Attribution may be given as ‘Contributors to the Jewish Liturgy Project/Open Siddur’, with the author’s name(s) Rabbi Daniel Brenner included in the contributors list.

Take it, use, add to it, and remix it. Just make certain to abide by the requirements of CC-BY-SA.

If you would like to contribute a translation, commentary, transcription, meditation, or any other content to the Open Siddur, please see our helpful guide to doing this. (Once we have the Open Siddur web application fully built, submitting and sharing content should be even easier.)

The Open Siddur is a volunteer driven project to create a free resource for folks crafting their own siddur (Jewish prayer book). We intend to collaboratively build an archive of material that makes up the siddur — texts, translations, instructional material, commentaries, essays, and other associated media.  Along with the archive, we are building the software that can be used to put together the building blocks to customize and personalize the siddur. Ultimately, siddurim prepared from this content will be printed with either an on-demand printer or else in cooperation with a book artist.

By “open,” we mean that our code and our texts are free to take under permissive copyright licenses. We are creating a community of folks passionate about the siddur and who express their passion by contributing material that can be used by others in the preparation of their own siddurim. This material could be historic or new, familiar or obscure. We seek to design a tool that will provide a resource to help those who take Jewish spirituality seriously engage in their own spiritual practice.

If you’d like to help us, take a look at the following opportunities to contribute (below), fill out our questionnaire, or just straight out contact us. (Donations, if you like, can be made to this project via our fiscal sponsor the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity. )

For more details on our development and to get status updates, fill out our questionnaire and you’ll be added to our mailing list. If you’d like to follow our developments closely and participate, then please join our discussion list, friend us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and check out our development wiki (our current storehouse for documentation and texts).

Update 12/3/09: Broken links in the table have been corrected.

If you’re in the Jewish content world, it’s quite possible that some day, you will develop content that is relevant not only to you and your users directly, but to the wider Jewish community.  Because the siddur is so wide ranging in scope, it may even be relevant to the Open Siddur Project in particular.  Conversely, I hope that some of the essays contributed to the Open Siddur Project would be relevant to your site(s).  By “content compatibility,” I mean the ability to post content generated for one site onto the other and then further develop it.  It is possible for content to be one-way compatible or bidirectionally compatible.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

Issues of content compatibility arise out of copyright law.  All literary or creative works fixed in a tangible form (including electronic texts on the web) are covered under copyright law.  Copyright law reserves certain rights to authors or owners of works.  These rights include the rights to copy a document, to share it with others, to make changes to it, and to distribute the changed document.  For a work written by an individual in the US today, these rights are exclusive to the copyright owner until 70 years after the author’s death.  Permission must be obtained from the copyright owner in order to do any of the activities covered under copyright law with his or her work.  There are certain exceptions to copyright, including “fair use,” which allows reprinting short excerpts of works under copyright for purposes such as academic discussion.  Fair use will likely cover most of your everyday uses of copyrighted works.  There are many useful online and offline resources that go into more detail.

Content compatibility becomes a major issue when a text is developed collaboratively.  If all contributing authors do not agree to a framework for sharing their contributions, the site relies on an “implied license” from the contributors to the site owner.  The implied license covers normal operation of the site, and little else.  It most likely does not include copying from one site and placing the content in another.

Aside from relying on an implied license, some websites attempt to use “parasitic” licenses hidden in their terms of use.  These licenses attempt to claim maximum rights from the contributor, while giving a bare minimum back to the community.  Sometimes, this is intentional.  Sometimes, it’s accidental.  Some sites’ operators blindly copy fill-in-the-blanks terms of use templates that assume that the content is to be kept proprietary.  One example from a popular site that provides source sheets and other learning material is presented here:

Limited Right to Use.
The viewing, printing or downloading of any content, graphic, form or document from the Site grants you only a limited, nonexclusive license for use solely by you for your own personal use and not for republication, distribution, assignment, sublicense, sale, preparation of derivative works or other use. No part of any content, form or document may be reproduced in any form or incorporated into any information retrieval system, electronic or mechanical, other than for your personal use (but not for resale or redistribution).

Editing, Deleting and Modification.
We reserve the right in our sole discretion to edit or delete any documents, information or other content appearing on the Site.

and the rather dangerous (and dubious, emphasis added):

Use of Information.
We reserve the right, and you authorize us, to the use and assignment of all information regarding Site uses by you and all information provided by you in any manner consistent with our Privacy Policy. All remarks, suggestions, ideas, graphics, or other information communicated by you to us through the Site (collectively, the “Submission”) will forever be the property of SITE NAME. SITE NAME will not be required to treat any Submission as confidential, and will not be liable for any ideas for its business (including without limitation, product, service or advertising ideas) and will not incur any liability as a result of any similarities that may appear in future SITE NAME products, services or operations. Without limitation, SITE NAME will have exclusive ownership of all present and future existing rights to the Submission of every kind and nature everywhere. SITE NAME will be entitled to use the Submission for any commercial or other purpose whatsoever, without compensation to you or any other person sending the Submission. You acknowledge that you are responsible for whatever material you submit, and you, not SITE NAME, have full responsibility for the message, including its legality, reliability, appropriateness, originality, and copyright.

These broad claims of ownership(!) rights over submitted content work entirely to the benefit of the contract author, and against the benefit of the remainder of the community.  One also may question whether a site which serves source sheets and audio recordings of prayer texts is compromising its own potential by limiting reproduction of its materials to personal use.  A copyright-conscious contributor (such as myself) would refuse to submit to such a site, fearing that his or her own future use of his or her own material would be threatened by the (legally questionable) claim of transfer of ownership.

For an existing forum, if the operator simply removes draconian terms of use and returns the site to an implied license structure or the terms are kept in place, the following scenarios are still possible:

• Material from the project is relevant in its entirety to a free culture project (defined below) such as The Open Siddur Project.  It is not covered by fair use.  We take terms of use at their word.  We can’t use it without asking permission for all required rights from the copyright owner(s).  We either need to answer the legal question as to whether a transfer of ownership can be extracted by a terms of use agreement or track down every contributor.
• Material from another free culture project (such as The Open Siddur Project, Wikipedia, or Wikisource) is relevant in its entirety to the project.  The material cannot be copied wholesale and further developed without playing by the rules of free culture (see below).
• Fifty years from now, everyone who wrote for the project has moved on to other stages in life and other projects.  The site or project as an institution may not exist anymore, and nobody knows who are the heirs of its “intellectual property.”  Some of the material is still circulating, still relevant, and still under copyright.  Even if the original intent of the authors were never to sue anyone for use of the material, the future researcher does not know that because either no policy was written down or the written policy indicates that his or her usage rights are limited.  The material may become unpublishable and lost forever.  This problem is known as the orphan works problem .

The free culture community has developed mechanisms to make sharing and collaborative development easier.  The principles that define works of free culture are:
1. the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
2. the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
3. the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression
4. the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works
Note that these freedoms do not discriminate on the basis of endeavor, and all free culture works allow creation of derivative works and commercial use.

The free culture community is a group of individuals who believe that culturally-relevant works of their creation should have minimal legal impediments to their dissemination and further development.  The mechanism involves use of copyright licenses, which work by having each contributor agree to release his or her work under a given set of terms at the time of submission.  All collaborating authors may then use, share and build on the work using the rights given by the original author.  Users may share, modify, publish, and distribute the work on their own without asking for permission, as long as they comply with the liberal terms of the license.  None of the free culture licenses transfer ownership of the work.  An author may later decide to release his or her own work in another forum under a different set of terms (including “all rights reserved” copyright).

A major organization responsible for maintaining the legal framework of the free culture community is Creative Commons.  Because some authors want to retain different sets of rights over their works, Creative Commons has developed a set of copyright licenses that are widespread, well known, and well understood.  Their licenses are divided by sets of terms (note: this is just a summary of the most important features.  Read the full legal code before making a decision.):

• Creative Commons Zero – “no rights reserved” – essentially, an internationally-applicable public domain declaration, indicating that the author surrenders all rights to the work.
• Creative Commons Attribution – The work may be copied, modified, and distributed, as long as attribution is maintained and reference is made to the license.
• Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike – The work may be copied, modified, and distributed, as long as attribution is maintained and reference is made to the license, and all derivatives of the work are also released under the same terms.

Creative Commons also offers some licenses with *non free culture* terms (in combination with the Attribution and/or ShareAlike terms):

• NonCommercial – No commercial use.  Use of this term will also place severe limits on the work’s use in the future, both by you and your users.
• NoDerivs – The work may not be changed from its original version.  Use of this term will completely curtail communal development to the same degree as “all rights reserved” copyright.

Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, the largest free culture projects, have chosen the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license for their material.

The Open Siddur Project has a somewhat more complex licensing structure, in which works that originally derive from the public domain are released with no rights reserved (Creative Commons Zero); other original works (such as translations and commentaries) may also be released under either Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 or Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, at the discretion of the author.  A combined work retains the licensing properties of the most restrictive of the set of the licensing terms of its included components.

In many cases, the Open Siddur Project’s use of Creative Commons licenses makes one-way compatibility from the Open Siddur Project to most other projects a given.  In most cases, attribution must be maintained; if the essay of interest has a ShareAlike licensing term, the derivative essay would also have to be released under the same terms.

In the other direction, the Open Siddur Project cannot currently copy and distribute works derived from sites with no explicit policy (or an explicit proprietary policy) because of their “all rights reserved” copyrights.

Because securing rights requires the consent of all contributing authors, it is best to approach these issues at the start of a project before accepting contributions from large numbers of authors.

Joining the free culture community involves surrendering some control over submitted works.  In exchange, the entire community benefits from more widespread dissemination of knowledge.  In addition to simple propagation of ideas, free culture also allows works to develop in novel ways that the authors could not have imagined.  I hope that you will consider joining the Free Culture community in building enduring, truly collaborative resources for the Jewish community.

We hope to begin a conversation about content compatibility with the world of online Jewish content providers. If you’re interested in joining it, talk to us.