International audienceThis paper addresses the current trends and issues with regards to opening up data held by public entities in various sectors, including public sector information, geographic data, cultural heritage, scientific publications and data. In the paper, opening up public data is defined as making it available for any purpose of use. While several initiatives have been taken within Europe to make public data available, many issues still remain unsolved. Based on the state of play in various sectors, this paper gives an overview of common issues that need to be addressed in order to move to more and better accessibility and reusability of public data. It will argue that even if sectors are currently regulated by different laws and policies governing data of a different nature, a common techno-legal framework can be defined to address legal, cultural and institutional challenges in a cross-sectorial manner
Current open data systems lag behind in their promised value creation and sustainability. The objective of the current study is twofold: 1) to investigate whether existing open data systems meet the requirements of open data ecosystems, and 2) to develop a research agenda that discusses the gaps between current open data systems on the one hand and participatory, value-creating, sustainable open data ecosystems on the other hand. The literature reveals that the main characteristics of value-creating, sustainable open data ecosystems are user-drivenness, inclusiveness, circularity, and skill-based. Our comparative case study of five open data systems in various application domains and countries highlighted that none of these systems are real open data ecosystems: they often do not balance open data supply and demand, exclude specific user groups and domains, are linear, and lack skill-training. We elaborate on a research agenda that discusses how research should address the challenge of making open data ecosystems more value-generating and sustainable.
Commons are holistic social institutions to govern the (re)production of resources, articulated through interrelated legal, socio-cultural, economic and institutional dimensions. They represent a comprehensive and radical approach to organise collective action, placing it "beyond market and state" (Bollier & Helfrich, 2012). They form a third way of organising society and the economy that differs from both market-based approaches, with their orientation toward prices, and from bureaucratic forms of organisation, with their orientation toward hierarchies and commands. This governance model has been applied to tangible and intangible resources, to local initiatives (garden, educational material), and to resources governed by global politics (climate, internet infrastructure). Digital commons are a subset of the commons, where the resources are data, information, culture and knowledge which are created and/or maintained online. The notion of the digital commons is an important concept for countering legal enclosure and fostering equitable access to these resources. This article presents the history of the movement of the digital commons, from free software, free culture, and public domain works, to open data and open access to science. It then analyses its foundational dimensions (licensing, authorship, peer production, governance) and finally studies newer forms of the digital commons, urban democratic participation and data commons. Issue 4This article belongs to Concepts of the digital society, a special section of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by Christian Katzenbach and Thomas Christian Bächle.
Online peer-production platforms facilitate the coordination of creative work and services. Generally considered as empowering participatory tools and a source of common good, they can also be, however, alienating instruments of digital labour. This paper proposes a typology of peerproduction platforms, based on the centralisation/decentralisation levels of several of their design features. Between commons-based peer-production and crowdsourced, user-generated content "enclosed" by corporations, a wide range of models combine different social, political, technical and economic arrangements. This combined analysis of the level of (de)centralisation of platform features provides information on emancipation capabilities in a more granular way than a market-based qualification of platforms, based on the nature of ownership or business models only. The five selected features of the proposed typology are: ownership of means of production, technical architecture/design, social organization/governance of work patterns, ownership of the peer-produced resource, and value of the output.
For over twenty years, alternative forms of organising and networking – fuelled by the Internet but sometimes pre-dating it – have been discussed as possible responses to the dynamics of concentration, centralisation and capture exemplified in the current pervasively digital world by Internet giants such as Google and Facebook. This article takes stock of the lessons learned by the authors in over a decade of research on decentralised/P2P network architectures and on information commons, to suggest some ‘ways forward’ for these alternatives for the Internet.
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