Proposed detailed description for the working group (submitted for approval by the group)

Scope:
--------
The public sphere is meant to designate all forms of public expressions in all
media by individuals or civil society groups, as well as the interaction
between this public space and democratic processes. The public sphere is a
major source of public domain and voluntarily shared material. If one
measures public domain contents by the time people allocate to its production
and usage, blogs and collaborative media represent a huge share of the
voluntary public domain.

Public sphere activities and materials raise special issues: they are strongly
decentralized, are coordinated mostly through technology and services rather
than through institutions. Many originators of public sphere expressions are
not aware of licensing though their intent to share is not at doubt. Some
contents in the public sphere are not subject to copyright in some
jurisdictions. Searching the public sphere is difficult and archiving /
preserving it is even more difficult. The public sphere (in particular
collaborative media) is a major source of innovation in governance processes
and inspiring practices, but these innovations are not easy to transport to
other domains.

Participatory processes (interfacing the public with democratic decision
making or policy implementation) are also very important. However, it is
proposed to include them in the working group scope only when issues of
creating, licensing, indexing, searching or preserving public domain
information are concerned. There are many other arena for the discussion of
participatory democracy at large. Govervance processes for the information
commons may be a key issue for the working group (as illustrated for instance
by the discussions in the open access panel in Louvain). The revision process for the
GPL license has provided one of many examples of global governance processes
involving asymetric actors : Intel chief counsel's view and that of an
individual Croatian developer need to treated on the same footing in such
processes, while of course each speaks in its own competence.

Activities:
-------------

As pointed by Sévérine Dussollier in the General Assembly, working group tasks
are subject to (human) resource constraints. It will thus be for the working
group members to decide on which activities they want to truly progress. Here
is an incomplete list of possible candidates :
- Outlining, cartographying and measuring the public sphere
- Technology and governance processes for and from the public sphere
- Public domain information needs for the public sphere
- How can the public sphere influence norm setting at National and international level?
- Interfacing COMMUNIA with the public sphere, including at the occasion of
COMMUNIA events
- ...

Organisation:
-----------------

The working group will be open for participation by non COMMUNIA members,
based on proposals by WG members.

The working group is intended to use extensively on-line collaborative tools
and services (those of the COMMUNIA site and other tools and servces
contributed by the WG members). It will hold its face-to-face meetings
mostly at the occasion of the COMMUNIA events.