Kickstarter

The Open Utopia is an open-source, open-access, multi-platform, web-based edition of Thomas More’s Utopia.

 “…though no one owns anything, everyone is rich.”  -- Thomas More, Utopia

At the core of More’s famous description of an alternative society is the principle that all property should be held in common. Since Utopia was published in 1516 many English language translations have passed into the public domain, yet there is still not a complete edition easily accessible. The Open Utopia will be the first.

But The Open Utopia is something more: it's an experiment in scholarly communication. For centuries scholars have expressed themselves primarily in print: individual ideas locked on paper pages. The Open Utopia is an effort to explode that model: the text will be readable in a variety of formats, listenable via recordings of staged readings, and viewable as an illustrated “DigiLuxe” flip book. The Open Utopia also opens up the concept of authorship: readers can remix More’s original text, use Commentpress to annotate Utopia, post Utopia-themed videos, and through a Wiki collaboratively write their own Utopia. And this is just the beginning.

I've built a working (albeit incomplete) prototype of the The Open Utopia which I invite you to check out at:  http://theopenutopia.org  but I still need your help with funds:

* To translate from Latin to English the remaining sections of Utopia not already in the public domain.

* For actors to record a staged reading of Utopia.

* For creative and technical help in designing the DigiLuxe flipbook of Utopia.

* For design and programming assistance on The Open Utopia site to move past the prototype stage.  

[The Open Utopia is being created with open source software and the content of the site is under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.]