Call for proposal EOLE 2019 : Legal challenges of digital commons

The CFP is extended until September 15th (included)

Necessity for some, alternative for others, digital commons are becoming the new collective goal in a society someway too technological and not enough human oriented. This increasing phenomenon is transforming the way of working of traditional actors from several sectors: health, mobility, spatial, Legal, etc.

The notion of digital commons refers to the creation of a digital resources managed and maintained by a community. From a legal perspective, it combines several tools from soft law to contractual framework and sometimes specific regulations. All of these tools have two main goals: organizing the collaboration between a heterogeneous community and ensuring the inclusion of external players through a standardized IP rights management.

The digital nature of these commons has come with new answers to former issues faced by non-digital commons, but it has also brought some strengths to address new issues related to digital (platform, API, etc.). From both values and practices point of view, they share a lot of similarities with the Open Source, Open Data and Free Software culture. Some free projects (as the Linux kernel, the LibreOffice.org application, the Wikipedia encyclopedia or the OpenStreetMap Database) are produced and maintained as de facto digital commons. Even if they have different purposes, digital commons and Open Models show a strong similarity regarding their community and inclusive-approaches. For this reason, it is not a surprise if their respective communities are getting closer. Digital commons and Open Source dynamics are strengthening each other, they are both looking for a better model of shared value, new ways of funding projects and organizing contributions, as well as building innovative public-private collaboration frameworks, etc.

For this 12th edition, EOLE will be hosted by the event Numérique en Commun[s] for a one day event mixing conferences and workshops, with people from both digital commons and Open Source projects in order to share thoughts, experiences and ideas on topics such as:

• Legal Challenges faced and/or addressed by commons
• Combining Open Source & digital commons in projects
• Sharing value in- and outside the community
• Combining Ethic & Sustainability vs. building an efficient development model
• Building projects between private and public actors
• Funding commons
• Supporting maintainers of OS projects
• Open Source Definition and new licenses

Conferences and workshops will be presented in english or in french the day of the event.