Open Source Mission - Translating Gospel Materials

There is a new ministry initiative launching publicly this week called Open Source Mission (OSM). OSM is a non-profit initiative to enable translation of contemporary evangelical materials from English to various languages through the power of mass collaboration. Some of us who frequent this blog have been working on this in various ways over the past few months so we're excited that it's now unveiled and launched.

OSM is founded on the belief that accessibility to biblically sound content is of strategic importance to the vitality of the growing churches worldwide. In particular, we see an opportunity to bring translated Christian materials to the non-English speaking world by taking advantage of technology innovation and an “open source”, participatory model of translation. Our vision is to create a new, revolutionary, framework for translation by combining the following components:

• Global social network of volunteer translators
• Proven “open source” methodology
• Web 2.0 collaboration platform

In essence, what we hope to see are several ongoing translation projects fueled by the passion and skills of volunteer translators, resulting in an online reference portal of translated books and articles in a multitude of languages – all available for free.

The distinctive focus of OSM is simple -

Mass Collaboration - We want to enable translation through the mass collaboration of volunteer translators. We believe the Web 2.0 world has opened unique opportunities for collaboration through a community participatory model. Such models have been proven successful in other arenas. By applying methodologies similar to those used in an open source software projects like Linux or Web 2.0 projects like Wikipedia, we hope to effectively tackle the translation challenge.

Contemporary Gospel Centric Writings - We want to focus on contemporary, evangelical, gospel centric materials. We’re not interested in doing Bible translations – that’s best left to professionals. Nor are we planning to tackle historical writings (i.e. Puritans, Reformers, early Church Fathers) - there are sufficient hurdles in bridging the translation and cultural gap without undertaking the challenge of a historical gap as well. We're initially focused on contemporary translations from our partner organizations.

Leveraging Technology - We want to leverage technology to make these materials accessible. We believe that the trajectory of technology adoption in the developing nations means that the most effective and inexpensive way to get materials to our fellow Christians in these nations is to provide this material on the web, searchable, cross referenceable and free.

OSM, together with partners like Sovereign Grace Ministries, Desiring God, 9 Marks and other like-minded organizations, will work on the Gospel Translation Project. The Gospel Translation Project involves building a "wikipedia type" portal of translated content at www.gospeltranslations.org. (Disclaimer: the portal is currently in beta and content is still being loaded onto the site.)

Initially, our focus will be to work on translating materials from the aforementioned partners who have generously contributed to our translation permissions library.

If you find this intriguing, interesting, or possibly even inspiring, here’s how to get involved:

1. Check out the OSM website , learn more about what we do , offer feedback and please pray for the ministry.

2. If you are bilingual, please consider using your language skills in one of our projects. You can sign up on the OSM website or email our Ministry Coordinator, Andrew Mahr - andrew@opensourcemission.com. By participating in one of our projects, your contribution will impact your fellow Christians for years to come.

3. Please help spread the word. If you're a blogger, please consider blogging about OSM and the Gospel Translation Project. This is a grassroots movement and thrives on individual volunteer initiative. If you should blog on this, please let others know of the need for translation and issue a gracious call for bilingual Christians to consider participating in this.

4. Link to Open Source Mission on your sidebar and let us know. We need help to make this work and we'd love to have you get involved in some way...even if you can't translate.

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We have a number of willing translators in Malaysia and Indonesia but we would be glad to get more help. There are translation projects starting up in a number of languages including Bahasa, Chinese, Korean and Spanish. If you can speak any of these languages, please consider lending your help.

Citizendium – the Next Wikipedia

Larry Sanger, the cofounder of Wikipedia.org has decided to attempt to fix some of the plagues that Wikipedia faces like errors, juvenile vandalism and the sometimes incomprehensibly arcane contribution. Sanger who has a doctorate in philosophy is beginning a new user contributed encyclopedia online much like Wikipedia called Citizendium.org, but with this difference, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names and experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy.

Now this goes against the primary mantra of Wikipedia that "anyone can edit" and the egalitarianism that has made it into the colossal giant that it is. MIT reports that in just six years, Wikipedia has mushroomed into one of the Web's most astonishing successes, with 1.7 million articles in English alone.

But one of the strengths of Wikipedia has also been one of its weaknesses. Stephen Ewen, an adult-education instructor in Jupiter, Fla., who gave up on contributing to Wikipedia and plans to work on Citizendium, believes the quality of Wikipedia entries often degrades over time because someone inevitably comes along to express a counterproductive viewpoint. This kind of Hegelian synthesis works well on some issues, but not on others.

Some popular issues, have such volume of interest that the nuances and extremes slowly work itself out, much like the free market. Others however, have less interest, and are more susceptible to being hijacked by extremist and special interest groups. Thus, an editor, though not perfect, may be that force of correction, again similar those measures and tweaks we apply to market failures. But the editors themselves have to be in the dialogue, and themselves subject to editing and correction to avoid the single viewpoint paradigm that caused the other encyclopedias to loose out to Wikipedia.

I suspect in time, both of these projects will be successful, both offering a slightly different approach that will be useful under different circumstances.