Grants/Central and Eastern European Free Culture Policy Workshop
Describe the project you are proposing as clearly as possible in just five sentences.
We want to organize in Warsaw (or in its vicinity), in the first half of 2011, a two-day regional meeting of free culture activists (and in particular Creative Commons leads) from Central and Eastern Europe. It's a first of its kind opportunity to meet at regional level, recognize the region's specificity with respect to free culture growth – but also due to common economic and developmental conditions, and discuss strategies suited for our local contexts. The focus of the meeting will be free culture as a policy matter - in the context of both the recently adopted Digital Agenda for Europe; and the upcoming EU Presidencies led by Hungary (January – June 2011) and Poland (July-December 2011), which has declared intellectual capital as one of its priority area. The workshop will start with a collective analysis of national and international contexts and experiences, and then move on to formulate two sets of policy documents: an external one, to be presented to the Polish presidency, and an internal one, to be used by free culture activists. The workshop will focus upon two key areas: culture and heritage, and public / government information and data.
Detail the tangible project output (e.g., paper, blog post, written materials, video/film, etc.; this would be in addition to the final written report that successful grant recipients will be expected to deliver to CC at the conclusion of the project).
Key output: Policy document "Free culture as a key component of Europe's intellectual capital", to be presented to the Polish EU Presidency. Internal policy document „Paths towards free culture growth in Central and Eastern Europe”. Additional output: Recorded and edited audio / video relation from parts of the workshop. Blog posts and other incidental communication.
Describe the community you are targeting. How would the project benefit the community?
We are directly targeting the community of free culture activists active in Central and Eastern Europe. We believe that there is strength in greater regional collaboration, taking into account similarities between countries and relative lack of geographic distance. The workshop will support it through exchange of knowledge and collective policy work. Indirectly, we are targeting the broad free culture community – which we will provide with policy guidelines.br />
Creative Commons Poland, started in 2005, is among the first ten CC jurisdictions worldwide and one of the first ones in the region. Our leads are active in international free culture networking and have experience in organizing and programming a broad range of events (conferences, workshops) related to free culture.
How will you measure and evaluate your project’s impact - on your main participants? Other contributors? On the larger community?
The project will be evaluated directly with workshop participants. The impact of the project will afterwards be measured by observing the reaction to workshop's output documents.
How many participants do you expect to be involved in your project? How will you seek and sustain their involvement?
We expect to fund the participation of 16 selected experts from abroad (assuming 1-3 persons per country) and 4 persons from Poland, with a mixed set of competences and backgrounds corresponding to both the two key areas and other areas of interest (for example, science, education, innovation, etc.). These persons will be invited through CC affiliates in the region (jurisdiction affiliates or people and institutions considering such status). Through them we will invite both persons involved in Creative Commons, other free culture activists, and potentially also other key experts dealing with these issues from different perspectives. In order to insure involvement, we are moving beyond a simple "talk" model and want to focus the workshop on a specific policy document. Part of the collective work on document drafting will have to be done after the Forum - this effort will be led by our Polish staff; we hope that its activity will encourage peer contributions from other participants.
Describe how your project will benefit Creative Commons' mission to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in "the commons".
The external policy document will help raise awareness of issues related to free culture and hopefully affect national-level or European policy. Secondly, an internal policy document will sum up experiences of regional activists and describe effective ways for promoting and spreading free culture in Central and Eastern Europe. Finally, the workshop process itself will strengthen Creative Commons' presence in the region, by allowing for exchange of knowledge, networking, and common strategic goals.
Describe what technologies and tools your project will use. What kinds of technical skills and expertise do you bring to the project? What are your technical needs?
Our technical needs are minimal. We will use simple, freely available tools to coordinate the project, collectively gather knowledge and produce content.
What challenges do you expect to face, and how do you plan to overcome them?
We do not recognize any significant challenges related to organizing the workshop, other than the potential difficulty of having our policy statement recognized. To overcome this potential problem, we hope to use our contacts in the Polish public administration. We believe that the regional CC affiliates and their partners have sufficient, broad expertise to run collectively a successful policy workshop.
How do you plan to sustain your project after the Creative Commons funding has ended? Detail specific plans. How do you plan to raise revenue to continue your efforts in the future?
The workshop is a one-time event with a clear output and end date. We hope to make this a regular event - but will evaluate the need to do so after the first workshop. By networking activists in the region we plan to create a possibility for starting future projects together.
How can this project be scalable, or have a scalable impact?
By aligning the workshop with the Hungarian and then Polish EU Presidency, we expect to gain substantial visibility and achieve a policy effect at both European and regional level.
What resources and support do you expect Creative Commons to provide to your project to ensure its success (if any)?
The workshop will be organized with the use of Creative Commons Poland's own organizational capacity. We are ensuring support of other jurisdictional chapters from the region by involving them in the project.
Describe how your organization currently communicates with its community members and network partners. (100 words)
CC Poland runs its own mailing list (300+ members) and a blog. We are also involved in the Coalition for Open Education, which is an important communication channel for us (with its own mailing list and webpage).
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