The Use of Creative Commons Licenses in the Ministry of Justice of the Government of Catalonia

Nowadays the Internet is about sharing, co-producing, transforming and personalizing to create new products and services. To create, it is necessary to be able to make use of knowledge that already exists, without limits, and to share it afterwards. This is the philosophy of innovation that is now all-pervasive thanks to the democratization of technology.
Creative Commons (CC) licenses are legal texts that allow authors to hand over some rights of their work for the uses they deem appropriate. So, these licences are an alternative for managing the author's copyright in a more flexible way.
As a public Administration, the Ministry of Justice has decided to use CC licenses with the idea of turning over the knowledge created by the organization to the public so that it can be re-used. In this regard, CC licenses have been essential for this opening-up of knowledge.
Thus, for each item of material or work, the most suitable license is chosen and applied to both digital and paper formats. The Ministry of Justice played a leading role by publishing in June 2007 the Administration’s first general-content work to be subject to a CC license.
From the beginning, the Ministry has ensured that external authors of a work sign a cession of rights contract in favour of the Ministry of Justice in order to allow the Ministry to manage the author's copyright of the work appropriately through CC licenses.
On the other hand, an in-house training programme for the staff has been implemented in order to make sure that people who produce content to be published on the web site or on the platform of collaborative work e-Catalunya are respectful of the authors’ copyright. To be able to licence material under CC one has to own all rights and sometimes people do not know that the images and other material they use for their work are subject to image and intellectual property rights. For this reason, workshops have been organized to explain how to find free-use material on the Internet and how to cite it appropriately.
In parallel with the dissemination of works through institutional channels, the Ministry of Justice has taken a step forward in the socialization of its knowledge by opening new communication channels using the Internet open repositories, where it posts its own content. It has two open channels in YouTube and Sclipo to publish videos; it publishes presentations in Slideshare, images in Flickr and events in Google calendar. Moreover, it has the blog Gestió del coneixement that gathers the most innovative experiences in knowledge management and the methodology used by the Ministry through the Compartim programme.
With these initiatives the Ministry of Justice promotes a more open and collaborative Administration, internally as well as externally, to favour the creation of new knowledge from the content that it shares. Several terms have been used for this concept: Open administration, wikiAdministration, etc. It is, in short, a matter of not losing the opportunity to collaborate, through flexible social networking, with the public, companies and social organizations.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.