A bit more than 2 months remain before deadline I need to pass a final work in Essex University. I developed the main idea about the topic recent year, but thoughts need to be ordered and expressed in an easy for readers way.

Why openness and inclusiveness?

These two months I will write here or in other public places how the process develops. Why? Firstly, it helps me to structurize ideas, thoughts and other part of text which will be created. Secondly, I can warm up my (academic) writing skills, that is not very simply for me. Thirdly, I can discuss with everyone who will have questions and alternative ideas and is keen in the same area. And last but not least, I want to make the final work under free licence, and i guess openness and inclusiveness in the very beginning of the process helps me to be more consistent in openness of the final result.

About what will the research be?

I will dig an access to educational sources in developing countries. I’m interested to foster with arguments my belief that education is one of the monopolized sphere in global market. The monopolist is the global North, as known as western rich countries. Moreover, the monopoly is fostered by a worldwide intellectual property (further, IP) legal regime creating significant obstacles for knowledge proliferation in poor countries (Yes, Belarus can be considered in the set of countries as well). So, the expected results of the dissertation are

1. to reveal existing legal and policy barriers established by IP (especially copyright) and its lobbyists,
2. to consider several countries where copyright provide explicit examples of hindering enlightenment.
3. to describe international legal framework which can be used for defending right people to education not just elementary education.
4. to outline legal and social tools which already are used for promoting and safeguard open access to knowledge.

To sum up this part, I will discuss about clash of two rights: right to education and copyright. About challenges in the research I will talk in the next blog posts.   

What tools for organization of my work will I use?

Now I think about number of tools which in my view provide sustainable and well-documented framework and make the research data organization easier.

• For organization of my daily thoughts I will use this blog, some time I will post reviews of different books, news, articles and ideas. The way help me to classify what I really need what not as well as to formulate the first vision about some new source and points.
• For organization of my sources and creating little notes I will use Zotero. They provide free accounts with 300 MB for storage PDFs, links etc. I think the volume will be enough for my case. Furthermore, Zotero synchronizes all what you have online with your desktop storage. That is more sustainable.
• The third tool will be Trello. Why trello? For this postgraduate research university usually takes around 100 hours. I realize that it takes me more time. In terms of lack of time up to deadline it is necessary to organize my time-budget the best way. And this online tool help me to do this with more convenient approach.
• The last point is a place for landing final paper and a draft of the dissertation or specific part of it. I’m at least in two minds. Before I used Google documents. It gives a good engine for processing text and export formats needed. Several weeks ago one wikimedian offered me use Wikiversity for the work. The main argument in favour of the latter is openness, verificability and, for example, suitable reference making. I don’t know do i really need this tool for placing the final version, but in some of next post i will consider different sides of wikiversity and other text processors.

Wishes

Ideally i want to post as often is possible. Maybe two post a week is a real level for me now. Yes, I will be glad if someone will comment all my post and participate in the activities.

All content (texts, diagrams, databases) produced in the research will be published under free open licence CC BY-SA 4.0 International. Any specific cases will be described precisely.

So, yes, here I will support my ideas. Even if the work started as an academic paper I will be subjective. Every opinion and belief of mine I will provide with arguments and examples. I hope in the journey everyone will get benefits: readers, writer and participators. Let’s get started!