I’ve been on the road to Creative Commons certification for a few months now, so I’ve decided to share my logbook with you, as I complete each training unit. Here is the project I submitted for final validation. Don’t hesitate to send me your comments: as always, I’ll be delighted to share more widely what I’ve learned and the resources I’ve put at my disposal.

Essay ◆ Towards a public cultural service in common goods

Before addressing our subject, I should point out that I work in a communications department, with responsibility for digital media and contributing a number of innovation projects for sustainable digital development. My daily commitment to the values and methodologies of openness1, as well as to open-source projects, aims to develop a cultural public service based on common goods, the main principles of which I’d like to outline for you.

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✏ 1 Open Definition ↗

1 — Mille-feuille

In the field of digital media, the search for levers of openness means dealing with the complexity of the layers mobilized by information: from server to screen, from database to user. This “mille-feuille” of layers offers a wealth of opportunities for all kinds of expertise: for GLAMs, designers, communicators, developers, project managers, mediators, administrative managers, people creating specifications for public procurement contracts, etc. The development of open digital services must therefore take up the challenge of synthesis in order to engage in a truly holistic & operative approach, both in terms of hardware (Open Hardware, destructuring, modularity, re-use,…) and content (free & open source software, open licenses & legal tools such as those proposed by Creative Commons2, lifecycle, compression, remix…).

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✏ 2 'Share your work', Creative Commons ↗

2 — Transitions

To “work through environmental despair” (Joanna Macy3) and cope with climate change transitions and adaptation, cooperation is becoming a major organizational tool. While the creation of active, caring coalitions is at the heart of this approach, it is the tools of openness (across all strata of information) that facilitate the empowerment of stakeholders, densify the network of relationships and free up the circulation of knowledge. It is the values of openness that enable the creation of effective commons, in the service of sustainable achievements for living organisms and abiotic resources, and with due regard for cultural diversity. Open Access, Open Knowledge and Open Content practices reinforce the reproduction of resources, methodologies and actionable content.

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✏ 3 “Working Through Environmental Despair”, In “Ecopsychology : Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind”, edited by Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes & Allen D. Kanner, Sierra Club Books, 1995 / Mentionned in “Reclaim : collection of ecofeminist texts selected and introduced by Emilie Hache”, Cambourakis editions, 2016

3 — Radicality

Renunciation is also central to cultural openness. Like the wastelands of permacultural4 gardens, it’s a question of “reconsidering disorder”5. While the image of ruin6 and collapse is evoked in the background, it is above all the issue of radicality that is at stake. The legal opening up of works through free licenses implies a renunciation of all or part of copyright, which must be negotiated. The transfer of rights by public institutions does not represent a degradation, but rather an increase in its capacity to return the fruits of its missions to the commons. The power of copyleft makes it possible to secure the reproduction of its work according to the conditions it has defined for the general interest. In this way, the opening up of copyleft marks a change of social model, based on a return (since we’re talking about a step backwards) to community systems7.

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✏ 4 Guillaume Désanges, A short treatise on institutional permaculture: for a living, productive site for contemporary creation ↗ , Palais de Tokyo (Paris), 2023 | 5 Éric Lenoir, The Great Punk Garden Treaty (Practical manual of non-gardening), Terre vivante editions, october 2021 | 6 “Negative commons as ruins”, In. Alexandre Monnin, Politicizing the renunciation, Divergences editions, april 2023 | 7 Principle #8 of the Mozilla Manifesto ↗ : “Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust.”

4 — Re-enchantment

French Philosopher Bernard Stiegler8 sees in free and open source softwares - and by extension the processes of openness through licensing - “a new economic matrix for the organization of work, which creates a new kind of value, extremely efficient, which produces a process of deproletarization. […] Individuals develop knowledge, share it, and use machines to increase their knowledge, which is truly the bearer of a process of transformation.” Openness is not a condition for survival, but rather for the re-enchantment9 of public cultural services as common goods. The values of cooperation and solidarity are embodied in open dynamics such as the criteria of a Digital for General Interest10. This re-enchantment is the humus for the changeover from a capitalistic & toxic model for both resources and biodiversity.

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✏ 8 Interview given by Bernard Stiegler to Radio Debout, 2016 | 9 Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the world. Feminism and the Politics of the Commons., PM Press, 2019 | 10 Arnaud Levy, Towards a Digital for General Interest ↗ , In “Communication & Démocratie”, july 2023

5 — Innovation

Major contemporary innovations, such as generative “Artificial Intelligence” analytical algorithms (also known as “artificial stupidities”11), imply a deep change in the copyright business model. Do these technologies represent an opportunity for “better sharing [i.e. sharing that is inclusive, equitable, reciprocal and sustainable12] while respecting the work of human creators”13? Until then, the role of metadata seems crucial, as does frugality & sobriety of use. Among the major levers available to structure a more sustainable web, “privacy, equity, trust, security and transparency”14 are essential values. The search for the right ends and the “reconciliation of opposites”15 relies in particular on a strict assessment of needs, as well as financial support for sobriety models and communities that create free cultural works16. The development of an open economy also supports the transformation of the circularity model17 and territorial coalitions.

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✏ 11 Will Knight, “Will machines eliminate us? ↗ ” : an interview with Yoshua Bengio (professor of computer science at the University of Montreal & 2019 Turing Award winner), MIT Tech Review, January 2016 | 12 Brigitte Vezina, Catherine Stihler, “Generative AI and Creativity: New Considerations Emerge at CC Convenings ↗ ”, Creative Commons, september 2023 | 13 Catherine Stihler, Better sharing for generative AI ↗ , Creative Commons, february 2023 | 14 Mozilla AI ↗ : “Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence” | 15 “La sobriété peut-elle être désirable ? ↗ ”, podcast du Festival “Et maintenant ?” with political scientist Nathanaël Wallenhorst & philosopher Frédéric Worms, France Culture, october 2022 | 16 Definition of Free Cultural Works ↗ , Creative Commons | 17 Fab City ↗ : “Our mission is the achievement of a globally connected production. Materials stay within accepted distances in cities and regions, information travels on how things are made. This recipe is called ‘Products In Trash Out’ (PITO) to ‘Data In Data Out’ (DIDO).”

6 — Challenges

Among the major challenges ahead, the fork in the road towards the widespread adoption and application of open cultures is certainly paramount. Particularly in public service practices. Awareness of the efforts that need to be made, and the need to ensure that the rhetoric behind these efforts is matched by a willingness to accept responsibility for the actual renunciations, is also fundamental. In addition, the question of interoperability and the meshing of the commons is also an issue, why not (as far as digital technology is concerned) underpinned by Fediverse18 technologies. The negotiation between the reproductive dynamics generated by openness and the accumulation of resources (heritage and matrimonial resources in particular, but also other forms of production) is legitimately posed in view of the fact that six out of nine planetary limits have been reached19. The triptych consolidated around the values of solidarity, cooperative support and universal openness seems to be a good avenue to explore.

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✏ 18 Per Axbom, “The many branches of the Fediverse ↗ ”, january 2023, CC BY-SA | 19 Où en sommes-nous des limites planétaires ? ↗ , Commissariat général au développement durable (France), october 2023

Case Study ◆ Developing universal Open Content within a hybrid public cultural organization

Vladan Joler : affinity to infinity - New extractivism Image cropped from 'New extractivism', 2020 | Vladan Joler CC BY-NC-SA

✏ Vladan Joler, extractivism.online ↗

1 — Context

The development of a universal Open Content is part of a collective experimental dynamic whose work is still in progress. Its commitment is long-term, and was initiated in 2019 when I joined the Champs Libres team. The aim is for the institution’s overall strategy to natively integrate the subject of Open Content into all content managed, produced and co-produced by the institution, at the highest possible level of openness, and across all layers of digital media.

By way of background, Les Champs Libres1 is a cultural institution managed by the metropolitan public authority of Rennes (France) and created in 2006. As a public space, it includes a library, a museum, a science center, an auditorium, exhibition halls and meeting areas. Some 250 people work here in a wide variety of fields, including events programming, mediation, administration, communications, public relations, conservation, security or building services. The institution welcomes almost 1.2 million visitors every year, making it probably the leading cultural institution in western France.

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✏ 1 leschampslibres.fr ↗

2 — Challenges & opportunities

At the outset of this ambition, the school’s digital strategy had not yet been written. Numerous questions were already naturally mobilizing the teams, but no structuring document had been created. In the process of industrializing information, digital technology was essentially envisaged as a production tool, as a variation of print, generally serving programming and rather centralized in a single department. Skills and expertise related to digital cultures were scattered throughout the teams, in extremely varied and non-centralized areas of intervention.

In 2010, Rennes became the first city in France to open up its data. Open Data has thus historically been part of the DNA of the local authority’s public services. Between 2013 and 2017, Les Champs Libres regularly contributed datasets2 to the local authority’s warehouse, notably with statistical content. The license used is ODbL3 1.0 (Open Data Commons Open Database License), which includes a copyleft lock (reuse under the same conditions).

Despite the fact that between 2010 and 2015 the institution hosted a digital coworking & conference space4 - at the crossroads of start-up and FabLab issues - and still hosts facilitation workshops (based on design thinking and agile methods), the overall acculturation to Open and free cultures (licenses, Open Content, Open Knowledge, Open Source, Open Access, Open Science, etc.) has plenty of room for improvement. Open Content, for example, is exclusively focused on the patrimonial & matrimonial axis. Legal rules & management are integrated in a heterogeneous way, depending on the department: data & metadata, assignment of rights to contributors, in-house or subcontracted production, etc. Finally, web-specific issues are still poorly integrated into overall processes: either they are considered in the context of print communication production (in which case rights are negotiated with illustrators or audio/video producers under CC BY-SA or CC BY-NC-ND licenses), or they are considered from the point of view of curators of classified collections in terms of heritage catalog management.

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✏ 2 data.rennesmetropole.fr ↗ | 3 ODbL License ↗ , created by the Open Knowledge Foundation | 4 wiki-rennes.fr ↗

3 — Copyright

The copyright environment is structured according to the institution’s missions & certain areas of action.

The city library, created in 1803 (heritated from the library of the Parliament of Brittany in 1733), has a regional vocation and offers some 40,000 records of digitized documents distributed under the public domain mark within its heritage collections catalog5. Its contribution to the legal printing deposit since 1943 makes it a national reference. The nature and age of the documents held by the library naturally lend themselves to the challenge of openness. Nevertheless, these collections would benefit from being better promoted and made more visible within other web content.

The museum of Brittany, a museum of society created in 1805, offers over 300,000 digitized object & document records (+90% with images). The collections are disseminated through the catalog6 opened online since 20177, either under public domain or CC0 marks (~45% of records), or under Creative Commons licenses (~25% in BY or BY-SA, ~29% in more restrictive CC) or under strict copyright. The nature of the 3D objects conserved does not lend itself directly to their opening in itself, and requires them to be duplicated digitally (photography & digitization). The substantial work involved in digitizing the collections (financing plans, human resources, etc.), backed up by a team dedicated to rights negotiations, enables the museum to engage in a solidly established community of contributors. In addition, the collections' blog8, with its weekly articles, actively contributes to the museum’s outreach.

Producers, directors, designers, authors (…) associated or partnering with the institution may be called upon to produce objects of widely varying nature: illustrations, posters, visuals, construction plans, texts, series of narrative podcasts, raw sound recordings, photographs commissioned for communication purposes, art photographs, software or algorithmic source codes, etc. Mediation, for example, still rarely integrates free & open licenses into its productions. The level of acculturation & practice of our teams varies greatly from one mission to another, and strategic documents are not formalized. The question of public procurement is also central: how can we structure a holistic openness within the highly constrained framework of public financial procedures? Is public service transparency a vector for greater openness across the board?

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✏ 5 tablettes-rennaises.fr ↗ | 6 collections.musee-bretagne.fr ↗ | 7 Fabienne Martin-Adam and Céline Chanas, “Shared collections at the Musée de Bretagne. When the notion of 'common' enters the museum ↗ ”, La Lettre de l’OCIM (Observatory of Scientific and Technical Heritage and Culture), n°185, september-october 2019 | 8 musee-devoile.blog ↗

4 — Resolutions & lessons learned

On a personal level, my missions enable me to deploy a great deal of energy from the Communication & Digital Department in favor of better qualification of digital models & transitions specific to the web, across all digital media information layers (hardware, servers, content, design, uses, etc.). If we are to take these issues into account, we need to actively involve all our teams. Taking the time to set out the institution’s fundamental ethical values as early as 2019 has led to the drafting of a digital strategy9 in June 2022. Released under a CC BY-SA license, it is available in PDF and editable & accessible OpenDocument versions. It sets out 12 priorities, including: 1- Inclusion 2- Eco-design 3- Usage 4- Building and sharing the commons […] 8- Strengthening the dissemination and promotion of resources. These strategic ambitions have made it possible to set the scene and steer projects & actions more strongly towards a more social (inclusion, accessibility), user-oriented (needs) approach.

The design of holistic openness (hardware, machines, digital functionalities, software, content…) has been reinforced in particular by:

  • the distribution of the magazine “Le Mag”10 (a narrative content space) under CC BY-SA license
  • widespread adoption of the CC BY-SA license for speakers (abandoning the more restrictive CC BY-NC-ND)
  • the use of GNU General Public License and European Union Public License for the source code of services produced, distributed via a dedicated GitLab11 platform and as a contribution to the Software Heritage12 project aimed at preserving source code as heritage
  • the prospect of exploiting the common spaces already available and whose influence is already solid, to support and segment the issue of notoriety from that of visibility & the approach to a more sustainable digital future. This opens the way to portals for heritage & matrimonial collections such as Bretania13 (Regional public institution of Brittany), Open Heritage Platform14 (French Ministry of Culture and Communication), Europeana15 (Europeana Foundation), Wikimedia16, etc.
  • the support of a Wikimedian in residence17, between September 2022 and September 2023, who worked particularly hard to “contribute and participate in the creation & improvement of content linked to the collections in Wikimedia projects, as well as proposing training and awareness actions”.
  • the award of the Free Culture Label18 (at the highest level) by french team of Wikimedia in April 2023 to the entire institution, recognizing the joint efforts of the library and museum teams. It also strengthens the partnership with Wikimedia and commits the teams to a very strong and exciting community dynamic.
  • the integration of the conditions of openness into the development of the establishment’s future website (scheduled for September 2024), both in terms of the visibility of licenses within content, and the reinforcement of related metadata.
  • the prospect of developing a platform based on open-source software and managed locally in a sovereign and sustainable manner, aimed at hosting all our multimedia productions.
  • the perspective of specific support from Creative Commons teams, with the aim of collectively structuring a global legal charter for opening up our content.
  • working in networks to strengthen universal Open Content, with the aim of contributing more actively to the local economy, circularity & transformations. We contribute, for example, to the Augures Lab19, a national laboratory that questions digital & cultural issues, or a Sustainable Digital Communication working group that pushes sustainability issues (in cooperation with the Information Technology Department, the Geographic Information Department and the local authority’s Communication Department) through the prism of communication missions.

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✏ 9 Guillaume Rouan, “Strategy for a sustainable digital future at +2°C ↗ ”, june 2022, CC BY-SA 4.0 | 10 leschampslibres.fr/lemag ↗ | 11 gitlab.com/leschampslibres ↗ | 12 softwareheritage.org ↗ | 13 Bretania ↗ , Brittany’s cultural portal | 14 Open Heritage Platform ('POP' in french) ↗ , the aggregator of digitized cultural heritage (France) | 15 Europeana ↗ , european digital cultural heritage | 16 Brittany Museum’s Hub Page ↗ contribution to GLAM on Wikipedia | 17 “Un wikimédien en résidence au Musée de Bretagne ↗ ”, october 2022 | 18 leschampslibres.fr/opencontent ↗ | 19 The Augures Lab ↗ , the Sustainable Digital Lab for Culture, has been structured as a research-action program bringing together some 20 cultural institutions and territories (National Monuments Center, Ministry of Culture, French National Library, Museum of European & Mediterranean Civilization, Musée d’Orsay, Palais de Tokyo, etc.) around 3 pre-identified themes: conservation/archiving, communication/audiences, new experiences/artistic creation

5 — Prospects

The momentum is there, but there’s still a long way to go. There are two major prospects before us:

  • Transforming shared web-related values through the pollination of open models and free cultures. Focusing more on social & inclusive goals, positioning relationships as a tool for empowering teams and digital service projects, making care a fundamental condition (for both teams and resources), and persevering in the work of creating / contributing / cooperating to the commons.

  • Rely on the methodology of making (specific to FabLab20 makers), through experimentation & the realization of proof-of-concept, acting in small form, on sober, frugal, low-tech & inexpensive models. Create a new brick (POC) or build on an existing one… And always draw inspiration from “do-it-yourself, poaching, foraging”21 methodologies inspired by digital inclusion issues.

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✏ 20 Michel Lallement, The Age of Make: hacking, work, anarchy ↗ , Seuil editions, 2015 | 21 Pascal Plantard, “Digital inclusion : do-it-yourself, poaching, foraging ↗ ”, In “Place publique”, september-october 2013

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