Efraim Feinstein, Ph.D., is a day school graduate, a biophysicist by training, and has had a long term interest in technology, free software, and the intersection of copyright and culture. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and is co-director and lead developer of the Open Siddur Project. Devorah Preiss, Ed.D, is the founder of PrayerLive, a collaborative computer supported program for the creative exploration and meaning-making in prayer. She is on the faculty of David Yellin College and Michelelet Efrata in Jerusalem, where she lectures on educational technology. Devorah directs and produces multimedia and, prior to making aliyah, spent many years as an instructional technologist at SAR Academy.

In this article, the authors introduce the concept of sharing in a free culture context as a model for the future of online Jewish educational resources, presenting a new resource-sharing/creating project that they hope will revolutionize the study of the siddur.

The Open Siddur: A next generation communal Jewish educational resource

Efraim Feinstein and Devorah Preiss

In the past, paper books were the primary source of Jewish texts, and teaching was a one-to-many activity. However, today’s students find information independently on Google and Wikipedia. Searching for knowledge is second nature and requires no intermediary. The popularity of tools like Facebook and Twitter among school age children, highlights that the web is no longer a read-only resource; it is now a social medium that facilitates many-to-many communication. If we are to keep pace with this culture and engage learners with our ritual texts, the next generation of Jewish educational resources, for both students and teachers, must be available online.

The social web does not just promise unprecedented access to material; this environment also provides opportunities for large-scale collaboration between students and for creative engagement with text. The use of technology and collaborative Judaic learning has already been demonstrated to be an effective medium for adolescents (Preiss, 2009), in which a group of students extended their connection to traditional prayer by creatively interacting with it on the computer. On the Internet, such collaboration can be expanded to a global scale. Just as the popularization of movable type in the 15th century shifted the balance of literacy from a few persons to the masses, the Internet – or Information Age – has the potential to effect an equally profound change in scholarship.

This article will introduce the Open Siddur Project (http://www.opensiddur.org), which aims to be the first of a new breed of Jewish communal resources that use social web technologies to allow the sharing and collaborative development of online Jewish liturgical resources. All content will be fully reusable and redistributable under liberal terms compatible with a “free culture” philosophy. The article will first define “free culture” resources, and explain why such a philosophy works to the advantage of their users. It will then discuss the envisioned product, followed by a brief discussion of its current state of development. Finally, it will contrast the project with existing resources.

Free culture

By default, all works of culture, including educational works, are proprietary. Copyright law restricts the distribution and modification of all creative works whether or not copyright has been filed or claimed. The copyright system is intended to protect authors’ and publishers’ economic interests in their creative work by introducing a legal barrier to unlimited dissemination of a work. A negative consequence of this system is that it blocks the types of positive reuse of work that are required for creative engagement. As educational material developed by teachers and students leaves the private confines of a classroom and enters the public sphere of the Internet, website operators and educators increasingly face the restrictions imposed by all-rights-reserved copyright terms.

The free culture movement developed as a response to the locking up of culturally relevant materials in copyright terms that last multiple generations (Lessig, 2004). Free culture resources allow users the freedoms to study, modify, and redistribute the content they offer in original or modified form. These freedoms are assured by contributing authors’ granting rights that would otherwise be reserved by them to anyone who receives the material by way of copyright licenses. A set of popular and well-understood free culture copyright licenses is maintained by the Creative Commons organization (http://www.creativecommons.org).

If a website is to support creative engagement with both traditional material and newly developed original material, all contributors to the project must agree that the rights to do so are secured for all the projects’ users. Adhering to a free culture framework is a necessary prerequisite to building a website built on collaborative development of material by its users that does not take unfair advantage of its users’ contributions. Under such a framework, authors retain ownership of their contributed material; all other users and the site itself reuse and redistribute it under the same permissive license grant. By facilitating collaborative development, free culture encourages educators to form communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1998) that center around our common heritage.

Siddur toolkit

Although the siddur is a resource shared by a people, the individual editions are bound by copyright law and thus inaccessible for legal reuse. The Open Siddur’s goal is to provide liturgical material that is free from copyright restrictions that disable its positive reuse. The Open Siddur, a multipurpose educational resource, will allow students of all ages to be exposed to extant and historical Jewish liturgies in one accessible location. As a collaborative environment, it will enable learners to develop and share their own expressions and experiments in liturgy and to comment on each others’ work.

The core of the toolkit will be a database of liturgical resources, including digitized copies of historically important siddurim and base texts for common traditional rites. These will be linked to scans of their sources, allowing verification of their accuracy and error correction. The database will also include user-contributed materials, which may include new ritual texts, new translations, commentary and halakhic or instructional information. All of the materials will be shared under free culture terms, presenting no legal or moral impediment to their sharing and modification.

A web-based interface will be built over the database backend. This interface will allow users to browse existing liturgical material, enabling, for example, online study of the liturgy’s history. Beyond browsing, it will allow users to mix together material that is already in the database to create a new siddur, add new material to the database, add new variant texts and comments, and share what they have created with other users of the project. In addition to primary material, the toolkit will support a library of user-contributed secondary material that could then be built upon by other users.

Aside from acting as an electronic library, the Open Siddur has other potential uses in an educational environment. For example, in an introductory class on the liturgy, each student may develop his/her own siddur (a low-tech version is described in Brown (2001)) that combines standardized texts with personal comments or insights collected from the database that resonate with him/her and personalized design. The web toolkit will include a collaborative workspace that will allow students to view each others’ work and provide real-time constructive critique, or to work with students located in other classrooms or schools. The Open Siddur could also be used as a resource for educators to share curricular material that is related to teaching or understanding the liturgy.

The database platform will be open to outside programmers developing applications that dovetail on the project itself or are tailored toward the use of repository data by students of specific age groups, or for specific educational purposes. Data from the same core repository could therefore serve elementary school students encountering the siddur for the first time, bar or bat mitzvah students learning the practical aspects of leading prayers, or an advanced high school class in Jewish liturgy.

Current development status

As of this writing, the Open Siddur is at an early stage of development. It is developed entirely on volunteer time, and each stage will be released when it is ready. Even though the software framework described above is not yet available, the Open Siddur Project is accepting contributed material on two tracks: the first involves gathering material from siddurim that are known to be in the public domain and digitizing and making these siddurim available. These public-domain siddurim will form the basis of our texts for traditional prayer rites. We have obtained scanned copies of Seligmann Baer’s Seder Avodat Yisrael (Nusah Ashkenaz) and the Lubavitcher Siddur Torah Or (Nusah Ha-Ari), and contributors have donated transcriptions of substantial amounts of those siddurim. We have also obtained a transcribed copy of the English translation in Simeon Singer’s Standard Prayer Book. We are also working on a free computerized version of the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation of the Hebrew Bible. We are also seeking historical prayer books that we can scan and/or transcribe. Until an integrated transcription interface is developed, these materials are being transcribed and proofread against their original scans on the project’s wiki.

The second track involves sharing newly written original materials. As of now, examples of these materials include a Simhat Bat ceremony and a new translation of a 1927 prayer for the American government. As the software toolkit develops, new, traditional and historical materials will be integrated into the same database. Currently, users may download contributed material in a manner similar to other online library resources.

Comparison to other resources

In general, free culture values have not entered the Jewish educational content community, as evidenced by the terms of use of some of our most popular resources. The Bar Ilan Responsa Project (www.responsa.co.il) is released under a proprietary licensing agreement. Mechon Mamre’s online text repository goes to great length to justify its all-rights-reserved copyright claims on its digitized TaNaKh, Talmud, and Mishneh Torah (www.mechon-mamre.org). New online resources show similar trends. Mechon Hadar’s extensive library of original source sheets and music reserves reproduction and modification rights (www.mechonhadar.org). Both the American Jewish World Service’s On1Foot source sheet builder (www.on1foot.org) and the Jewish Publication Society’s Tagged Tanakh application (http://taggedtanakh.org) require users to agree to grant unlimited rights to their contributed content to the site, but other users and contributors are not granted similar rights to use of the material offsite. All of these websites provide valuable resources to the community, including primary source texts and secondary compilations of materials. If they were to accept the values of sharing, they would have potential for even greater impact.

One project whose values align with Open Siddur’s is Wikisource (http://wikisource.org), which includes a collection of user-contributed source material, including siddurim. Its basis in wiki technology results in limitations that make it less than ideal for the storage of a pluralistic prayer resource. Wiki technology presupposes that only a single copy of each page can exist at a time; therefore, each siddur’s text must be a consensus among all contributors. Because achieving consensus becomes increasingly difficult as the number of contributors increases, Wikisource has multiple independent copies of siddurim, including multiple copies for each major rite. Error correction becomes difficult, because an error in one version must be corrected in all versions separately. Because copies have to be made manually, additions to one copy do not become available to others without manual intervention. In order to achieve consensus, each siddur includes a statement of purpose that limits the types of editing that is considered acceptable. All of the user-contributed siddurim (see, for example Siddur Ha-esh, 2010) currently warn that contributed material may not contradict Orthodox sources.

In contrast, the Open Siddur’s technological backend improves upon wiki technology by recognizing textual variance, obviating the need for project-wide ideological standards or duplicate divergent copies of similar texts. While any siddur produced by an individual or group within the Open Siddur framework may have its own textual or ideological standards, all of the material produced within the global site will be immediately usable in other works. Improvements to one part of the project will be immediately available to all others. The future of the web promises to include increasing opportunities for interactivity. Likewise, the new generation of students will have the proficiency and mind set of owning digital resources and tailoring content. This has already become second nature with the advent of Facebook and YouTube. The Open Siddur is a paradigm that holds great promise in that it may be adapted for other traditional texts.

References

Creative Commons. (2010) Metrics. Retrieved on June 12, 2010 from http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Metrics

Siddur Ha-esh. (2010) Retrieved on Sept 26, 2010 from http://tinyurl.com/35q

Brown, S. (2001) The Looseleaf Siddur. In Clark, S. (Ed.). Noteworthy practices in Jewish day school education. Volume II: Tefilah, 51-53. Boston: Partnership for Excellence in Education.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity: Cambridge University Press.

Lessig, Lawrence (2004). Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Retrieved on June 12, 2010 from http://www.free-culture.cc/

Open Source Initiative. (2004). The Open Source Definition. Retrieved on June 12, 2010 from http://opensource.org/docs/osd.html

Preiss, D. (2009). Meaning-making in prayer: A model for the use of collaborative constructivist technology for spiritual engagement (Ed.D thesis). Retrieved on June 12, 2010 from www.lookstein.org/retrieve.php?ID=-2403008