Commoning is a term coined by the Commons movement, describing a social practice of empowering people to create, share and manage resources collectively, saving them from appropriation through a few and from scarcity through commercialisation. Digitalisation offers many opportunities for digital commoners, since it enables sharing on a new scale. Creative Commons are to the knowledge society, what free and decentralised software is to the Internet. In order to remain open to the community, a lot of authors and material providers rely on your fairness. What should be good practice among every citizen is especially relevant for Open Source. Keep the intellectual Commons working!
Open Educational Resources
Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with an intellectual property license that allows for free use, adaptation, and distribution."
Source: UNESCO
The Five Principles of Ethical Commoning
1. Respecting Sources and Identifying Them
Authors often depend on being visible as contributors. Help them so that they might continue their engagement as commoners.
2. Adopting, Not Stealing
Don’t take other content over in a thoughtless way. Otherwise, you might not thoroughly explore the original work and its quality.
3. Giving Back
Give something back to the community and to authors by publishing, using and sharing other good materials or foregrounding good authors.
4. Appreciating Quality
Appreciate what others give you for free. The value of OER is not measured by money or authorities. Try to find the specific quality of each work.
5. Respect Rights
Original ideas and models can be used, but these need to be cited with appropriate information about the sources. Copyrighted material cannot be mutualized without permission.
Creative Commons Licenses
There are different models of licensing your content under a Creative Commons License.
Open Access
Open Access means free and unrestricted online access to scientific and scholarly information. Open Access materials can be copyrighted and limit resharing Info about Open Access.
Nils-Eyk Zimmermann
Editor of Competendo. He writes and works on the topics: active citizenship, civil society, digital transformation, non-formal and lifelong learning, capacity building. Coordinator of European projects, in example DIGIT-AL Digital Transformation in Adult Learning for Active Citizenship, DARE network.
Blogs here: Blog: Civil Resilience.
Email: nils.zimmermann@dare-network.eu
