Grants/Open Font Library
Describe the project you are proposing as clearly as possible in just five sentences.
A large number of fonts now exist in the commons and are useful for all computer users. However, most people are unaware of this and have no way to easily browse and use these fonts. The Open Font Library aims to correct this by collecting and visually showcasing them on the web. The applicants are two web developers who have volunteered substantial amounts of time to the site this year, and are backed by a growing community of developers. We would like to focus on the project full time this summer in order to make it shine.
Detail the tangible project output (e.g., paper, blog post, written materials, video/film, etc.; this would be in addition to the final written report that successful grant recipients will be expected to deliver to CC at the conclusion of the project).
This project has two tangible outputs: The Open Font Library website will have all major features working well, and the site will be well documented.
For the website to work well, the existing PHP code must be improved and new code must be written. The major features are to be:
- A visual directory of all fonts uploaded
- Font family specimen pages that preview the fonts well, providing simple ways to use the font family on web pages with @font-face and providing analysis of language coverage to motivate community improvement, and showing parent-child relationships of derivative works
- A simple upload process that ensures font files have free culture license metadata attached, and font family metadata is well formed.
This would all be achieved by improving and extending the existing site, which runs with the Creative Commons initiated "ccHost" Content Management System.
Better documentation is essential for font users, font creators and the project's developer volunteers. Font users ought to know what they can do with fonts in the commons, including the new way of using fonts in their webpages. Font creators ought to know how to attach a free culture license to a font and how to upload fonts to the site. Finally, software developers ought to know how they can easily contribute to the site's ongoing development.
The documentation for font users and creators will be in video form, while documentation for site developers will be in text form on the website's wiki.
Describe the community you are targeting. How would the project benefit the community?
The Open Font Library's audience is made up of computer users, especially those involved in visual creativity, who are looking for fonts they can use freely.
The Open Font Library's target community is people who create new fonts and would like to place them in the commons, and people who improve the fonts they use. For example, many users in Africa and Asia live in cultures with Latin-based writing systems, but most Latin fonts do not include the glyphs they need to communicate. With freely licensed fonts, the opportunity exists for people who need glyphs to make them and share them.
Unfortunately, the site is not currently configured to highlight this opportunity. The proposed project aims to make the Open Font Library significantly more effective at unlocking this potential.br />
The Open Font Library was started in 2004 and today is the top Google hit for "open fonts."
Dave Crossland became involved in the site developer community in 2006 and in 2008 took on a leadership role, raising US$10,000 to develop the site from Mozilla, YesLogic, River Valley and TUG. The funds were used to hire two graphic designers and two software developers who, throughout 2008 and 2009, produced a graphic identity for the site, customisations to ccHost, and libre font previewing and analysis software. However, the success of this activity was limited as it did not bring the site to life.
Dave was committed to a Masters degree programme in Typeface Design at this time, so was unable to dedicate time to invigorate development and things slowed down. But he is now focusing his energy more fully on the site.
In the run up to the www.libregraphicsmeeting.org conference in Brussels at the end of May, he worked full time for 2 weeks with Pierre Marchand on bringing the work done in 2009 alive.
Pierre has been a subscriber to the site's mailing list since 2007, and volunteered full time for 2 weeks in May to work with Dave on the site. He is excited to see the site reach its potential.
Since the applicants have worked together on the site successfully, we believe we are the best individuals to lead this project.
For the avoidance of doubt, the Open Font Library is no longer funded by other means.
How will you measure and evaluate your project’s impact - on your main participants? Other contributors? On the larger community?
The project's impact can be measured quantitatively by how many fonts are downloaded from the site each month, and how many new fonts are uploaded each month, after the project concludes, compared to how many fonts have been downloaded and shared to date.
The project's qualitative impact on the site will also be evaluated, and on bringing more software developers into the site's on-going improvement efforts.
How many participants do you expect to be involved in your project? How will you seek and sustain their involvement?
Two participants will be involved in the project, Dave Crossland and Pierre Marchand. We are ready and willing to spend up 1 to 3 months full time on this project, depending on the funding opportunities available to us.
Describe how your project will benefit Creative Commons' mission to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in "the commons".
Fonts are integral to all visual content and are used by all computer users.
Many free cultural works are encumbered by their use of proprietary fonts. The Open Font Library increases the amount of creativity fully in the commons by providing free-culture fonts to creators so their works are no longer encumbered. It does this by helping font creators to place their works in the commons easily, and providing a visual directory of libre fonts for the public.
When a font has a restrictive copyright license, users cannot fix the problems with it; one important problem is poor language support, where only some of the glyphs needed for a language exist.
Our font language coverage analysis feature can highlight how close a font is to supporting a particular language. For example, if a font only needs 5 more glyphs to support Vietnamese, this will be highlighted on the font specimen page, to motivate the Vietnamese graphic design community to contribute these glyphs to the commons.
Describe what technologies and tools your project will use. What kinds of technical skills and expertise do you bring to the project? What are your technical needs?
The site uses ccHost, a PHP-MYSQL based Content Management System. Dave Crossland is a systems administrator, graphic designer, and holds a Masters degree in Typeface Design. Pierre Marchand is a freelance software developer, known for his free software project "FontMatrix," a Qt font management application. We have no technical needs beyond the laptops and internet connections we already own except time to learn how to use them for this project.
What challenges do you expect to face, and how do you plan to overcome them?
ccHost is a complex tool, and customising it is hard work. This can be overcome by spending time learning its intricacies and fixing bugs as they are discovered.
How do you plan to sustain your project after the Creative Commons funding has ended? Detail specific plans. How do you plan to raise revenue to continue your efforts in the future?
The site has a long history of slow volunteer development, and the key driver of the slowness is that how to become a contributor has not been well documented. Part of this project is to create that documentation. The overall aim of the project is to significantly increase the site's traffic, and some of that traffic will convert into new volunteers for development if the documentation is in place.
Future revenue will be raised by applying to similar grant programmes as this, and by a direct call for donations on the website.
How can this project be scalable, or have a scalable impact?
Since the project is most simply stated as hiring 2 developers to improve the site, the project can scale from 1 month at a cost of $3,000, to 3 months at a cost of $9,000. It could even scale down to hiring 1 developer for 1 month at $1,500.
The site is hosted with technical support and unlimited bandwidth at no charge by the Oregon State University's Open Source Lab, so I believe its load scalability is perfect; the OSUOSL provides a cached webserver infrastrucutre, and the ccHost system is proven to handle high traffic sites such as ccmixter.org
All the site's code is published in our Subversion repository as free software, so if another project wished to operate a font sharing site, they would be able to do so.
The project's core aim is to improve the administrative scalability of the site.
The site's base technology is PHP and MYSQL, which are incredibly popular web development technologies. The ccHost system is however complex and quite obscure, so this project's functional scalability is limited. However, one of the project's aims is to mitigate this.
What resources and support do you expect Creative Commons to provide to your project to ensure its success (if any)?
In 2009 Creative Commons sold the ccHost codebase to a free culture record label, and its primary developer now works for that company. The OSUOSL provides excellent supported web hosting free of charge. Therefore I do not expect Creative Commons to provide support to the project beyond funding it; however, if Creative Commons can connect us with web developers interested in the project, that would be excellent.
Describe how your organization currently communicates with its community members and network partners. (100 words)
The Open Font Library has a discussion mailing list with 163 subscribers, and communicates with the wider graphic design community through its website.
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