OX is a concept. The OX concept is "an open exchange of ideas among people."
OX is a place where people exchange ideas and information, a place to ask for directions, and a tool to help others in our community.
OX is a open unstructured association of individuals (hobbyists, activists, technical specialists) from the Ottawa-Hull area who are sharing ideas, resources, wit, and wisdom to speed the development of sustainable services for the local public electronic free-space.
OX is a support network for people that wish to communicate and coordinate their efforts to bring citizens and organizations from the Ottawa/Carleton/Hull/Gatineau bio-region online. We intentionally have no organizational structure, preferring to simply facilitate sharing and communication.
A simple method to try to keep the lines of communication open for those in the Ottawa Region who have an interest in using electronic communications tools to aid the people of the region. The job of this organization would not be to accomplish projects, but would instead be a means of communication to create specific project groups.
Where the Internet culture and the Greater Ottawa community culture intersect: creating various commonses [sic] within which you freely give to a larger whole and get back something that is richer and greater than what you could ever create by yourself. Freedom and liberty are sustainable with the feedback, responsibility, and stewardship that all commonses [sic] provide.
Whatever you want it to stand for. People have suggested
There is no official version, and don't let people tell you otherwise.
The first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, aleph, means ox. the symbol was inverted by the Greeks to form the Greek letter alpha.
There is no x in Polish, and no combination of letters to produce the sound of x. The Polish word for ox is wot (with an accent over the o) pronounced voot.
In reference to the logo that looks like a tic tac toe board with an O in the middle and an X in the middle right, Michael Richardson <mcr@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca> writes:
<< If my memory of the "Mathematical Recreations" article in Scientific American on tic-tac-toe is correct (and my scratches on paper are correct), if you start with an O in the middle, and X there, it is not possible to do anything other than tie (assuming neither side makes mistake). If O goes first in a corner, and then X goes in another corner, then O can always win. e.g. the first two moves determine the result, and neither can force the outcome in the first move.
E.g. this diagram shows that people must cooperate, because they can't win except by changing the game. >>
There is no official OX logo. People however, use some of the following ideas:
| |
____|___|____
| O | X
____|___|____
| |
| |
OX doesn't do anything. People who affiliate themselves with the OX concept are involved in lots of interesting projects.
OX domain names names are given out to people who are invloved in OX-related projects. They are not to be primary domain names, but simply a way to collection computers together who are running similar services. For example, if you run an IRC server connected to the OX IRC project, you could get a domain name of "machine".irc.ox.org.
Michael Richardson <mcr@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca> writes:
<< I would suggest that nobody should have foo.ox.org or foo.ox.ottawa.on.ca as their primary domain. I think this destroys the sense that ox doesn't belong to anyone, and that no one is a member of ox.
That is if the Hull-Ottawa Bioregional Online (HOBO, yes I had to play with it) is a human body, then ox is not *organs* but *connective tissue* (does that include veins and arteries? don't overextend the analogy). >>
Michael Richardson <mcr@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca> is the person you need to talk to about getting an OX domain name.
The OX name and concept was started by:
Last update: $Date: 1999/04/22 15:48:19 $