Open Access Button Update: March 10

• 2 min read

Rex Crossley Awards

The Open Access Button is now award winning! On March 8, the Open Access Button was awarded the Rex Crossley Award — Best Project. The Rex Crossley Awards recognise the work and achievements of the best projects of the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations (IFMSA).

Recruiting Team Button

Student Team
As we noted in the last Button update, we’re expanding the Button team. Currently the Button team is composed of 8 student volunteers and we’re recruiting 14 more volunteers to join our hardworking but fun team. Applications for the student team are due today, March 10. Check out our Get Involved page to view the available opportunities and apply here.

Steering Committee
Many professionals showed interest in supporting the work of the Open Access Button, and we were pleased to announce a call for our Steering Committee on February 27. The Steering Committee will provide guidance to the team and ensure we’re as effective as possible.

We are looking for nominations from the community of who to appoint to the committee. Our current steering committee has experience with project management, student leadership and Open Access advocacy but we are interested in adding expertise in the following areas:

  • Fundraising
  • Governance
  • Programming
  • Law — specifically copyright
  • Communications including media and press
  • Technology in the Global South

If you would like to nominate someone for the committee (you may self nominate) then please email us at openaccessbutton@medsin.org with their (or your) name and email address. Nominee’s will be requested to confirm an interest in joining the project and to send a CV. Nominations are due March 20.

The Future of the Open Access Button

Development
One of our fantastic developers, Victor Ng, is a software developer for Mozilla. Mozilla is a free software community that best known for the Firefox web browser. Mozilla being a supporter of open source technology have kindly separated out time from Victor’s other Mozilla duties in order for him to continue working on Button development over the coming weeks.

Mozilla exists to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet. These are goals that are shared with the Open Access Button. The donation of Victor’s time will be an immense help in catalyzing the development of Button 2.0.

Wikimania 2014
Wikimania is a 4000-person conference, unconference, festival, meetup, workshop, hackathon, and party, spread over five days in August 2014. It’s the official annual event of the Wikimedia movement, and we’ve submitted a presentation proposal on The Future of the Open Access Button! Please check out our proposal and add your name to the list of interested attendees if you’re going to be attending Wikimania 2014 in London.

Get your personalised Open Access Button at openaccessbutton.org
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