Can you imagine a comprehensive, illustrated encyclopedia that documented and described every living species known to humankind?

If scientists succeed in a new, boldly conceived project, such a dream might become reality. Meet the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). [Press release]

A steering committee of senior officers from Harvard University, Smithsonian Institution, Field Museum, Marine Biological Laboratory, Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium, Missouri Botanical Garden, and the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations has proposed that “an online reference source and database for every one of the 1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet, as well as all those later discovered and described. Encyclopedia of Life will be used as both a teaching and a learning tool, helping scientists, educators, students, and the community at large gain a better understanding of this planet and all who inhabit it.”

The EOL project has its roots in the writing of biologists Dan Jenzen and E.O. Wilson. Wilson’s 2003 essay on the topic and then a speech 2007 speech (read his wish on TED.com) at the influential TED Conference have brought the concept to wider attention.

Essentially, the EOL hopes to combine collaborative editing using wikis and mashups of a number of other sources of scientific materials. Crucially, entries will edited and approved by scientists to ensure the authenticity and accuracy of the information.

Draft species pages that demonstrate some of the possibilities of a fully implemented system are already available at http://www.eol.org.

The project’s creators hope to have actual, authenticated species pages available by mid 2008. You can learn more by reading the EOL FAQ or watching this video on YouTube.

Mark Frauenfelder over at BoingBoing has also posted about EOL , noting that while the project has received a $50 million dollar funding commitment led by the MacArthur Foundation, the EOL “reminds [him] a lot of Kevin Kelly’s All Species Foundation, which ran out of funding around 2003. It was a TED-borne idea.”

We’ve long since defined Linux.

We’ve gone on to note the various distributions, including lightweight versions in the skinny Linux family like Feather Linux, Austrumi and even Puppy Linux. These operating systems are often run directly from live distros burned onto CDs or from hot-swappable flash memory-based jump drives.

We’ve also podcasted about portable applications, where we learned how open source applications like Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird email client, along with Audacity, OpenOffice and many other apps have been made mobile. Similarly, these applications are run directly from portable storage media or devices. And, like many others, we’re watching how the OLPC’s XO is received and works “in the wild” as it moves from prototype to worldwide distribution.

Now, we’re taking note of the next version of the “portable desktop,” at least as described by Wired’s Monkey Bites blog. Meet “Damn Small Linux,” a distribution of Linux that takes up a mere 50 megabytes of memory. That makes it small enough to fit on most flash drives. Aside from adding even more acronym confusion to the world of computing (given that Damn Small Linux is shortened to “DSL”), DSL is the latest example of how simple experiments using the open source model of development can become robust distributions. In this case, the original concept was to see how many (usable) desktop applications could fit inside of a 50 MB CD, including a functional operating system.

If you’re wondering how many that is, by the way, the current breakdown, according the DSL Web site, includes:

XMMS (MP3, CD Music, and MPEG), FTP client, Dillo Web browser, Netrik Web browser, Firefox, spreadsheet, Sylpheed email, spellcheck (US English), a word processor (Ted), three editors (Beaver, Vim, and Nano [pico clone]), graphics editing and viewing (Xpaint, and xzgv), Xpdf (PDF Viewer), emelFM (file manager), Naim (AIM, ICQ, IRC), VNCviwer, Rdesktop, SSH/SCP server and client, DHCP client, PPP, PPPoE (ADSL), a Web server, calculator, generic and Ghostscript printer support, NFS, Fluxbox and JWM window managers, games, system monitoring apps, a host of command line tools, USB support, PCMCIA support, some wireless support.

Of course, that list could grow over time, but we’re still impressed by the power of community. In fact, it sounds like another example of crowdsourcing to our ears.

Welcome to “pro-am journalism,” “an attempt to bring together professional writers and editors with citizen journalists to collaborate on reporting and writing about the rise of crowdsourcing on the Web. Inspired by the open source movement, the goal of Assignment Zero is to develop a working model of an open newsroom.” [Full Press Release]
AssigmentZero is bankrolled by Wired and led by Executive Director Jay Rosen, founder of NewAssignment.net and NYU journalism professor. If reporting in this proposed “open style” works, according to Rosen, it could “change journalism and expand what’s humanly possible with the instrument of a free press.” You can read Jay’s full essay on the subject here. The project has also partnered with citizen journalism site Newsvine with an eye to engaging that site’s users and involve them in selected assignments. “Essentially, we’re building a software platform for journalism 2.0 — open source and extensible – which we believe will bring new dimensions of creativity to news gathering.” said Evan Hansen, Editor in Chief, Wired News.

Jeff Howe, who we interviewed about crowdsourcing earlier this year, will be drawing from the project for his upcoming book on the subject. Make sure you check out our crowdsourcing podcast if you missed it the first time around.

Dennis, one of our most dependable sources for interesting links, submitted “Videopedia” today. It’s quite interesting — think of it as a sort of Wikipedia, where the content is not just text, hyperlinks and Creative Commons images but instead user-submitted videos.

The vision is quite straightforward: Everyone is an expert in something. Knowledge of that something can be visually explained in less than 5 minutes. Users can easily upload their shorts, using a visual storyboard to annotate videos and add outbound hyperlinks. While the Web site is still relatively new, there’s already some useful content in the tech section including Running ScanDisk in XP and How to do a Google Search.

LibriVox.org is an open source project that provides free audiobooks from the public domain without any advertising. To pull that off, LibriVox enables volunteers to record chapters of books and then upload the audio files as .MP3 and .OGG files back onto LibriVox, where they are then listed within the online catalog. LibriVox’s stated goal is to make all public domain books available as free, downloadable content. We wish them luck! If you would like to help, it’s easy to volunteer. Don’t worry — quite a bit of Tolstoy’s War and Peace remains to be recorded, along with numerous works of Shakepeare, if you’re feeling your thespian oats.