AvoinGLAM/Cultural Commons
Work in progress
Cultural Commons[edit]
At AvoinGLAM, we advocate for a Cultural Commons. It can have many different emphasis and the idea lives in time, but the following, living text is meant to outline our perspective and contributions.
The digital cultural commons is the sum of the shared resources of individuals and collectives, companies and public institutions, that has been placed for shared use. We acknowledge that the cultural commons is not limited to the digital sphere, but we skip repeating the word "digital" to make it more simple.
Why are Wikimedia projects great for preserving heritage?[edit]
Wikimedia projects are formed with communities of care around them. The communities agree on shared principles. These principles include for example the notorious notability criterium that shuts some of the content out by default. It is both good and bad. Wikimedia makes a statement to care for materials that benefit the public rather than provide an open channel for any kind of content. This is the choice of scope that the projects make. It is also a stop-gap in the international environment for differing legal regulations around the same issues. It sets standards for not crossing the line in sharing personal information, for example.
Wikimedia's robust infrastructure has guaranteed the preservation of the materials accepted there until perpetuity. During the 20+ years of existence, many digital projects have fallen because of their failing funding models or revenue logic. Wikimedia funding has largely been based on the kindness of people, the necessity that they see that these projects respond to. Will it last forever?
Wikimedia projects excel in languages. For a long time, that capability was not supposed to be used for language preservation, but fortunately now Wikimedia is wholeheartedly supporting linguistic diversity. The infrastructure support over 700 languages while there are Wikipedias in more than 300 languages. That is an enormous advantage for providing useful tools for communities around the world to safeguard their culture and heritage on Wikimedia projects.
Why might they fail in doing that?[edit]
There are several reasons to protect materials from exploitation while facilitating their digital preservation and conditional open sharing.
Data sovereignty is a concept that must be secured for indigenous cultural heritage. It is the right of the indigenous communities to manage sharing their assets themselves, including cultural heritage collections. At the same time, we must find ways in which the sharing environments could take into account the different conditions for sharing in order not to shut them out of the Cultural Commons. They might include for example restrictions of use for specific purposes.
The ways in which digital media is used narrows down the culture that can be digitized, transformed into the formats it allows. Languages are usually not served outside the largest global languages, that have often been imposed on colonized nations and cultures rendering their linguistic heritage useless. The screen and typewriter -combo has forced to focus on text and images, with the extension of audio and video and anything that can be reduced to these formats. The sociotechnical online environments have been crafted by engineers from a monoculture. The indigenous worldviews and practices rooted in lived experience do not translate into this environment, especially if the environments are as hostile as they are.