In one of her last actions as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton presented the Open Book Project, "an initiative to expand access to free, high-quality educational materials in Arabic, with a particular focus on science and technology. These resources will be released under open licenses that allow their free use, sharing, and adaptation to local context."

In other bookish news, "Boundless, the company that builds on existing open educational resources to provide free alternatives to traditionally costly college textbooks, has released 18 open textbooks under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), the same license used by Wikipedia. Schools, students, and the general public are free to share and remix these textbooks under this license. The 18 textbooks cover timeless college subjects, such as accounting, biology, chemistry, sociology, and economics. Boundless reports that students at more than half of US colleges have used its resources, and that they expect its number of users to grow."

From TheNextWeb,"Online meeting company YouDazzle has launched its latest service designed to allow anyone to meet online. Called Meet.fm, its goal is to allow anyone to create and run their own personalized and information-rich meeting on any computer or mobile device. In addition, it provides users with the ability to drag and drop file presentations into meetings from various cloud file services like Box and Dropbox."

Also of note from TheNextWeb: "… Just.me‘s iPhone app … finally launched this week, but in private beta, so you’ll have to exercise a bit more patience before you can give it a whirl. … Just.me, backed by the likes of Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures, SV Angel and betaworks, is trying to build a ‘new type of post-PC social network’ that lives on your smartphone and in the cloud and can be accessed from your desktop browser, rather than the other way around."

Because sharing is the new black, more and more events on various aspects of the shareable life are cropping up around the world. To keep things organized, Shareable has launched a prototype version of its new events calendar. It's a growing list of everything sharing related: coworking and Jellies, gift circles and seed swaps, maker events and swap meets. Find an event, submit an event, and share your feedback. Finding, attending, and hosting events was the most popular request from the reader focus groups that Shareable held last summer, and this prototype is the first version of what will grow and evolve into a full-fledged events network.

Specific events of note:

SOCAP:Soul is a full-day event slated for Saturday, March 9 in Boston at MIT's whimsical and sustainably innovative Stata Center. Join social entrepreneurs and investors, faith leaders and activists, cultural creatives, and thought leaders who are all seeking to align what they care about with their jobs, and with the way they spend and invest their money. Buy tickets here — each $95 ticket includes full day of content, meals, evening party, and access to online networking.

Building a Democratic City: The 2nd International Conference on Participatory Budgeting in the US & Canada will take place in Chicago, May 3-5. Join the weekend of exciting and engaging panels, presentations, and workshops, from participants and organizers of PB initiatives from across North America and the world. Together with conference co-organizers the Great Cities Institute, The Participatory Budgeting Project is currently accepting proposals for conference sessions. Please see the Call for Proposals and conference website for more information. The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2013.