What does it mean to become a Country Champion?

The idea behind the championship is to build a network of people and institutions who will support the project especially by helping to collect OER data and stories from their country and ensuring its quality by editorial control. This posts describes the characteristics as well as the responsibilities of an OER World Map country champion.

Since the launch of our landing page during open education week this year we are looking for persons and institutions, which would like to participate in the OER World Map project as country (or even continental) champions. We have since then received quite some responses (a list of the existing country champions will be published soon) but we are still far away from having one champion for every country of the world!

What does it need to be a champion?

As an OER World Map Country Champion you should be

• clearly dedicated to openness as defined by The Open Definition or the 5R framework. This is dedication is absolutely mandatory and should be proven by prior activity in the field of OER or the related fields of Open Access, Open Education, Open Source etc. 
• well connected to your local OER community.
• ideally representing an institution since we believe that institutions do provide a certain sustainability. But this is not compulsory. Especially for small countries, which have not been in the center of the OER movement yet, we are more than happy to cooperate with engaged individuals. Examples for institutions would be private or public education institutions, research institutes or NGO`s like Creative Commons, Wikimedia or the Open Knowledge Foundation. Even commercial cooperations could apply, but only if truly dedicated to openness.
• speaking English.
• have fun engaging for OER!

What will a champion have to do?

As an OER World Map Champion you will be responsible for

• rising  awareness of the OER World Map Project in your country e.g. by resending/retweeting our messages.
• translating calls for participation into her/his mother tongue.
• acting as a point of contact for people from your country interested in participating in the project.
• helping to build an editorial board, which keeps care of collecting data (and stories) in her/his country and assures the quality of this data.
• organizing the “OER World Map-Edit-A-Ton” a global community event, which will aim at collecting all OER related data (planned for fall  2015).
• telling us, what the OER community in you country expects from the OER World Map.

Country championship will not be exclusive. This means that there can be several OER World Map Champions for one country. We hope that in this case volunteers will cooperate to develop a joint editorial board. Especially in lager countries this will help to make the efforts related with Country Championship maintainable. After all it`s all about cooperation!

What to do next?

If you want to participate in the OER World Map project please write us a mail to info@oerworldmap.org – we are looking forward to hear from you!

 (photo: pixabay)