Open Scriptures

Recently, there has been a surge of posts on Open Scriptures. If you haven’t been able to follow them all, here are some of the most exciting threads.

• The Open Scriptures code is moving to GitHub, from Google Code Project Hosting. See our page http://github.com/openscriptures.
• The Open Scriptures website is being redeveloped in Pinax. This is a major change which will allow us to define our projects more clearly as well as become the platform upon which we can build our applications. We are looking to abandon Google Groups. See the Openscriptures.org Redevelopment thread for more information. Special thanks to James Tauber at Eldarion for his generosity in hosting and setting up our new site! We’ll be announcing the beta site soon.
• New group activity kicked off by post, Standardizing on a Web Infrastructure and Web Service API for Scripture, sent to Bible Technologies Group, Crossway, CrossWire, Bible.org, and others. We discussed work on a new edition of OSIS. We are actively talking with Bible.org (NET Bible) and the Crossway (ESV) about ways to promote openness and interoperability.
• We’ve started some excellent dialogue with the Open Siddur project and their lead developer Efraim Feinstein.
• Reminder about preserving the right for a worker to receive his wages.
• The group decided on a common license for our projects, Creative Commons BY-SA. The bulk of the discussion may be found under WLC Lexical Tagging.
• We discussed our channels of communication in the Regular Meetings over IRC or Google Wave thread. The unofficial conclusion is that we do need to have some regular real-time meetings. However, the new Pinax site will also allow for focused collaboration that may alleviate some of the barriers we are experiencing.
• We also decided to use the name “MorphHB” for an open project collecting the morphology of the Hebrew Bible. The thread Decision about how to name the project – Morphology and the WLC has more information.
• We discussed word-level linking between texts.
• We are also now nailing down our the goals for the project, and will be releasing a more refined project description soon.
• We also discussed the naming of our project. The “slug” we used on Google was “open-scriptures” but we are standardizing on “openscriptures”, as on Twitter and GitHub.

There are many more important threads that I will leave for your perusal at our Google Groups site. Over the course of the next few weeks expect to see some more explanations of what we have been discussing. Please feel free to join in the conversations!

The past few weeks on Open Scriptures have seen some steady progress.  Of note is that the Tregelles GNT import script is near completion.  The addition of this manuscript will be much appreciated as it will bring the total number of works in the Manuscript Comparator to six. In addition to New Testament improvements, David Troidl submitted the initial upload of Strong’s Hebrew data (XML).  This first step is the outcome of very hard work and also good collaboration on our Google group. Lastly, we are working on porting all of our code into a Django/Pinax friendly format so that we can switch our site as well as our applications over to this platform.  The progress here is moving along and within a couple weeks we should be on our new server using our new platform graciously donated by James Tauber of MorphGNT and Eldarion.  If anyone has experience with Django/Pinax and would be willing to help out please contact Weston via the Google Group.

There has also been some significant steps forward in the dialog between Weston and the German Bible Society; GBS has a tentative proposal which looks to be quite promising and beneficial for both communities. Look forward to an announcement hopefully next week.