OTASKI is a nonprofit and non-governemental international organization promoting open, or free, access to scientific results and technology information.
The main idea is that scientific or technology research belongs to the human kind and should be available as a global knowledge. Research is expensive, and doing it again because it's not open is a pure waste of time, souls and money. As a species, human beings should work together to evolve towards a world full of free solutions for its survival and exploration through the ages, not against each other. A typical example is that if research makes a technology more efficient, it should be available for everyone; even slightly improving the efficiency of a system at the planet's scale can be a major advance in human race integration with its environnment. To this end, the OTASKI helps projects for which freedom of information matters.
OTASKI is funded by donations and volunteering. Donations can be money, hardware, advertisement, and many other things. Volunteers are always welcome, for example 1) to help spread the word so that the organization gets sufficiently known and projects make hosting requests by themselves, 2) to search projects that could be proposed for attachment, or even 3) to help with legal issues like licences, terms of use or infringement.
Projects hosted by OTASKI are helped in several ways. If the organization has enough money or is given hardware, it is distributed to projects so that they can make more open research. Projects benefit from the display on this website, that could help them to be known and find people willing to help a particular project. A list of calls for contributions may be held up-to-date on the OTASKI website for all projects. Hosted projects all follow the main idea of OTASKI, but generally implement a specific goal for one or sometimes several domains of research:
- Reproduce some private research and make results open,
- Propose and evaluate innovative solutions,
- Compare solutions for a very specific or poorly addressed issue,
- Gather information from around the globe to provide simple access to complicated information,
- Freely implement public research results and significant technology solutions that are not well known.
Free for us doesn't only mean costless, but also freedom of use, modify and redistribute, as in free software. This means that all information produced or delivred by hosted projects is free. No mention of the source is mandatory, but strongy encouraged. Any use of hosted projects' results for commercial purposes is against the main idea of OTASKI, but may not be prevented. Commercial uses of OTASKI's hosted projects results requires mention of OTASKI in the development credits and also requires a monetary compensation as a ratio of the generated income, the ratio having to be determined case-by-case depending on the importance of the results used in the commercial product.
