Fifth Communia Workshop

Accessing, Using, Reusing Public Sector Content and Data

The 5th COMMUNIA workshop, co-organised on 26-27 March by the Open Knowledge Foundation and London School of Economics, focused on how we can unlock the huge potential of public sector material. It also examined the current obstacles to doing this -- legal, technological and social -- as well as how they can be overcome. In particular, much of the value of public sector material can only be realized if it is reused and interlinked -- both activities that are currently difficult for a variety of legal and technological reasons.

Across the world there is a growing recognition of the social and commercial value of public sector content and data: be that the text of laws, the holdings of public museums, or the geospatial and environmental information collected by government agencies. Moreover, it is likely that better access to and use of such information is central to improving governance and increasing democratic participation. Therefore, the event focused around the claim that, wherever possible: Public sector content and data should be made available, both legally and technically, for public re-use.

A range of presentations and policy recommendations from researchers, policy-makers, stakeholders and representatives from Europe, the United States and Australia is available from the download section and by clicking on the presentations titles in the agenda below. Policy recommendations and abstracts are also available as two separated downloadable documents and a full report can be accessed here.
[13apr09]

Tom will be talking about government progress in the openness agenda; new developments; and his overall views on the subject.

At 11 am on 11 November 2009, the Imperial War Museum posted its first selection to The Commons on Flickr as part of a collaborative posting by museums and archives around the world to mark the 90th a

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The Internet and Open Content licensing afford many exciting opportunities to make content available for dissemination and reuse.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The Open Library is a web-based library catalogue which is designed to hold the details of every book ever published.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The case for free and open access to taxpayer-funded research seems clear and the case logically extends to effective use and repurposing of data.

Mr Owens' presentation will describe the formulation of copyright policy at WIPO - stakeholders and issues; legal, technology and market concerns.

We will present findings from a research project on the state of open government data in the Netherlands, commissioned by the Ministry for Interior Affairs.

It began as a place to share prototypes of mashups in a collaborative digital environment with the open source development community.