A de-centralised digital library of knowledge
- Pre-Seed
Ourmedian is an interconnected digital library that allows anyone to create a public library to upload, curate, archive, manage and index their digital resources for anyone to discover. Our community of libraries are borderless, requires no library card, can be accessed and shared both online and offline.
Most of the world's knowledge that drives progress are within lengthy documents, however, these documents are mainly stored in hard to locate temporary repositories on the internet, making the discovery of them quite difficult.
On the other hand physical libraries house a collection of limited resources that are only made accessible to local communities. Areas where the populous is of a low socio-economic background, the less likely they will have access to knowledge that would further develop their intellectual curiosity.
Our vision is to allow equal access to digital knowledge, where your gender, ethnicity, location or socio-economic background are not barriers.
Our premise is that knowledge empowers an individual and access to it should not be restricted. As concluded in a report by the Europian Union, archiving knowledge behind paywalls does no benefit to the publisher, research team or community, as it limits who can innovate upon the research. Current platform solutions to publish open knowledge are unidirectional, disengaged from the wider communities/ businesses to help educate and achieve innovation through collaboration.
Ourmedian is utilised for:
- Self-publishing or sharing of referenced free resources
- Intellectual discussions around resources
- Offline access to the resources
By making resources more accessible, we foster an inclusive learning environment and empower disadvantaged youths with the knowledge and potential skills required for technological advancements that are currently under research. We enable bi-directional discussions between businesses, youths, and scientists working in areas of knowledge dissemination.
Track the number of downloads/reads a week - 4500 people downloading or reading material online
Track number of accounts created - 10000 people have created an account on our platform
Track number of comments - 1000 discussion comments
- Lower middle income economies (between $1006 and $3975 GNI)
- Low-income economies (< $1005 GNI)
- Secondary
- Bachelors
- Doctoral
- Europe and Central Asia
- US and Canada
- Digital systems (machine learning, control systems, big data)
Our solution enables anyone to store and share open access, creative commons, and public domain digital resources. Many cloud storage solutions (Dropbox, GoogleDrive) are designed to be private in nature, where we are a public file management system, that stores, manages, indexes and curates public files to be easily discovered.
We are about to implement our own services to scrape open access papers and archive them on our platform. We are also implementing a machine learning tool that can can extract all the relevant information from a paper to assist with the uploading process.
Currently, the publication and dissemination of new research are barricaded by high costs and/or scholastic affiliations, therefore rendering it useless to those who are unable to cross these barriers. Placing these kinds of limitations do not create an even playing field and restricts means to equal opportunity and potential contributions to society. Our platform is at the heart of solving this problem.
Our solution will be accessible via a:
- web interface
- mobile app (online or synced offline library)
Also, all the resources on our platform are in the public domian, open access or creative commons attributed, that can be downloaded and stored offline to any device.
- 9 (Commercial)
- For-Profit
- Australia
We will be developing a sustainable business model, based on subscriptions or pay per papers/books that are not in open access or in the public domain.
Also we will look for partnerships with sponsors (such as journals and government organisations) to lower subscription or pay per costs based on user locations.
Raising money from investors, foundations or Government (as we are technically a community-based library).
For papers that are not accessible, a partnership must be formed with journals to reduce their cost per paper or working out a low subscription model based on the region's accessing their papers.
- 3 years
- We have already developed a pilot.
- 6-12 months
https://angel.co/ourmedian
https://twitter.com/ourmedian
http://www.edugrowth.com.au/meet-members-arun-sri-median/
- 21st Century Skills
- Lifelong Learning
- Literacy
- Online Learning
- Post-secondary Education
We believe SOLVE and its community align to our core values that technology, partnerships, and access to knowledge that will drive innovation that benefits all of humanity and not subclasses. We believe together we can minimize the barriers that disadvantaged youths have right now in accessing an array of digital knowledge both online and offline. The community that Solve harbors can educate our team on how we can approach piloting, scaling our project to have maximum impact.
Project Gutenberg
LibriVox
Partnering with the World Literacy Foundation to build an offline version of our platform for remote communities to utilise as their local library.
Working on a partnership with the Europian Union (2020 open science vision) & Central Queensland University, to store and manage their theses/papers, so they are accessible.
https://www.Scribd.com
