July 28, 2011
Share Your Knowledge: cultural institutions adopt open source licences and the next steps
One of lettera27’s most recent initiatives continues its journey, sharing cultural content thanks to a collaboration including the staff of the foundation, tutors, Creative Commons and Wikipedia experts, and the representatives of the 10 institutions involved.

Share Your Knowledge is promoted by lettera27 in collaboration with Nexa Centre for Internet and Society at Politecnico di Torino, managing Creative Commons Italia and SelLili, Fondazione Cariplo, Wikimedia Italia, with the involvement of Africa Centre, Careof, Connecting Cultures, COSV, African, Asian and Latin American Film Festival, Fondazione ISMU, Fondazione Nigrizia onlus, Kunstverein (Milan) and Officina Griot.

Thanks to this collaboration important objectives have been achieved. Firstly, the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike licence has been applied to selected content on the websites of participating institutions. Many documents, articles, images and press releases produced by institutions throughout the years are now available under an open source licence, which has become a useful starting point to enrich Wikipedia. Many new entries have been created from this content. Cinema and public art, biographies of artists and collectives, festivals and events, cross-cultural issues and migrations, institutions and museums, political and economic trends, environment and development, are only some of the themes that can be explored in depth thanks to the materials now available.

The first phase of Share Your Knowledge consisted of 3 events, 20th April on the project, 25th May on copyright and Creative Commons, 14th June on Wikipedia, aimed at a theoretical and  practical understanding of the tools presented in the project, through presentations and workshops.

In the next few months, the content will be analysed by a panel of experts including DensityDesign Reserch Lab/Dipartimento INDACO Politecnico di Milano, Guido Ferilli and Pier Luigi Sacco with Fondazione IULM, Flavia Marzano, Ermanno Pandoli of Deborah De Angelis’s DDA Law Practice, Domenico Sedini of Studium Artis srl, Chiara Somajni, Journalist of the newspaper Sole 24 Ore and President of ActionAid, Dario Taraborelli, Researcher at Wikimedia Foundation and Wikiculture.

The evaluation and guidelines resulting from the project will be presented in a conference in November. This pilot phase of the project, where only 10 institutions were selected, ends in 2011; from 2012 new cultural institutions will be able to take part in Share your Knowledge.


Image: Photo by Valeria Vernizzi