Philippine Commons

Bayanihan Books has signified their intent to be one of the active proponents towards Open Content.

Interestingly, Greg Moreno of Bayanihan Books wrote the article, “How to solve our textbook problems and give every Filipino a better education”, a concern shared by the CC-PH deputy project lead in “An opportunity arising from the new Philippine DepEd policy on public school textbooks”. These articles were written independently, and the two authors were only introduced to each other, over email, by Jun Asis of the Philippine e-Learning Society and MagandangBalita.com, a week before the CC-PH license launching.

Bayanihan Books is a project that aims to solve the textbooks problems in public education using community-based collaboration and a copyright license that promotes sharing and reuse (i.e. Creative Commons) of educational content. Its goals are to (1) Produce textbook materials for every subject in every grade level and make it available on the Internet; and (2) Convince the government to adopt these materials, and print and distribute them to public schools. Currently, Bayanihan Books have the initial text for two books. It has the outline for all subjects but it still needs authors to lead the writing. The links to these books are available at its website, www.BayanihanBooks.org.

Necessarily thus, Bayanihan Books aims to write textbooks in the open where contents are made available on the Internet from initial outline to final manuscript. This would allow every teacher, parent, student, professional, DepEd official, virtually anyone, to review the textbooks even before they get published. It aims to release the textbooks under a license that would permit everyone to use and publish the textbooks without paying royalty to anyone. Thus, saving the government of content development costs and allowing more publishers to fulfill the demands of public (and even private) schools. [ Read more ]

The launch of Creative Commons Philippine jurisdictional licenses have been amply covered by Philippine media.

Interviews with Atty. Soriano by GMA-7 and RPN-9 were aired. Articles on broadsheets, such as in the Manila Bulletin (page E3) and the Daily Mirror (page A3), both 17 January 2008 issues, were published. The Manila Bulletin article was written by Mindy of WikiPilipinas.org.

Atty. Soriano is scheduled for an interview, on Creative Commons, in another TV network after he returns to Manila after the ACIA conference.