From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 1 Jun 2013 10:11:00 +0100

Twenty years ago the European Organisation for Nuclear Research —
better known as CERN — published a statement that made the technology
that underpins the Web available on a royalty-free basis. By making
the software required to run a web server, along with a basic browser
and a library of code, free for all CERN paved the way for a
revolution in innovation and creativity.

As a result, the Web has impacted the world in many varied ways — not
least by generating a stream of new products and services, and by
allowing the creation of a multitude of novel new ways for sharing
information and knowledge, and on a global basis.

It has also seen the emergence of an accompanying flood of free and
open movements committed to promoting greater sharing of ideas and
content, and for increased transparency and civic participation in
organisations, in communities, and in government. We have seen, for
instance, the emergence of the open access, free and open-source
software, open data, open science, open politics, and open government
movements.

And to facilitate the free flow of information and creativity enabled
by the Web, Creative Commons was founded, and tasked with developing
new-style licences to make sharing as frictionless as possible.

Initially these movements were bottom-up, citizen-led developments.
More recently, governments have become interested in greater openness
and sharing too, and begun to encourage and even require it,
particularly where resources are created from public funds. Thus we
have seen the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) introduce its
Public Access Policy, the EU introduce its OA Policy, and we have seen
the proposed FASTR Act and the recently announced US Open Data Policy.

To date, these top-down initiatives have tended to be piecemeal, and
invariably focused on one type of public resource — e.g. publicly
funded research or government data.

At the end of last year, however, a new bill was proposed in Poland
that would aim to adopt a more joined-up approach to the openness of
public resources. If enacted, the Open Public Resources Act would
provide “a unified rule for as large a part of Poland’s public
resources as possible”, says Alek Tarkowski an activist for greater
openness in Poland.

Given its radical approach, the proposed bill has attracted a good
deal of criticism, and it remains unclear how — or even whether — it
will become law. If it does pass, says Tarkowski, it will doubtless be
watered down in the process.

Whatever its fate, the proposed bill raises some interesting and
complex issues. As such, it is worth reviewing its aspirations and
objectives, and the nature of the criticism it attracted. In order to
do this I conducted an email interview with Tarkowski recently.

Tarkowski was a member of the Board of Strategic Advisors to the Prime
Minister of Poland that drafted the initial concept of the proposed
bill. He is also the director of Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt: Polska and
co-founder and Public Lead of Creative Commons Poland.

The interview can be read here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/developing-unified-rule-for-openness.html