Communia @ Barcelona

The 6th Communia workshop convened in the historic Universitat de Barcelona to sink its teeth into memory institutions and the public domain. Communia is a thematic network of over 50 members (universities, libraries, NGOs, and even companies), fueled by the generous public funding of the EU, to develop policy recommendations on the public domain and open licensing. The policy recommendations will be online in Sept. 2010, but currently they are being debated and digested internally within the network. It targets European legislation, soft law, and tools for the public domain in fields such as education, scientific research, libraries, businesses, and technology. It sounds ambitious, and it is.

Scoreboard of “openness” in universities

To break down these topics, we’re divided into six working groups. I joined WG 1 & 5, a joint endeavor to produce a “scoreboard” to evaluate universities against the various criteria set in the Wheeler declaration. The scoreboard arose from the Università Aperta online debate, organized by NEXA with Sopinspace during the Biennale Democrazia. A questionnaire will be completed in the next few days and circulated to universities. I’ll post the link once it’s available, so you can share it with colleagues or complete it for your own institution.

Public Domain Manifesto

You can find more proceedings and working group outputs on the Communia website. One project to keep an eye on is the Public Domain Manifesto, an effort to map and define the public domain, what it is, and should be, in theory and in practice.

Image: Communia Break by Wrote. CC BY-SA

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