Jordan Open Source Association Participates in Internet Governance Forum

The Jordan Open Source Association was one of the organizers of the workshop "Open Content and Open licensing in the Arab World" that was held in the last Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

The IGF is a multi-stakeholder meeting organized by the United Nations to discuss issues related to Internet Governance, how the Internet is managed and what are the main actors and controversies. The IGF is considered one outcome of the Tunis Agenda and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

One of the main workshops within the "openness" theme discussed Open Content and Open Licensing in the Arab World and what are the challenges and opportunities facing their use and applicability.

The workshop's web page states that "the debate over the use of open content licenses has increased recently in the Arab world, where enforcement of copyright laws is limited and piracy rates are high. The use of Free Open Source Software (FOSS), Creative Commons and other voluntary mechanisms could provide a meaningful alternative to those problems."

The workshop explored opportunities and challenges (legal, technical, educational linguistic) facing the use of open content licenses focusing on the specific needs of the Arab world.

A special emphasis have been put on how governments and businesses in the Arab world could eventually benefit from such voluntary mechanisms in order to encourage more adaptation and use of such models.

Professor Brian Fitzgerald from Queensland University of technology has chaired the workshop, organized by Ziad Maraqa and Rami Olwan from Creative Commons Jordan, Rafi Dammak from Creative Commons Tunisia, Ahmed Gharbeia and Issa Mahasneh, president of the Jordan Open Source Association.

Issa Mahasneh focused on Free Culture and how it can be encouraged in the Arab World. He said that "we strongly believe that Free Culture implies freedoms, freedom of knowledge, freedom of expression and other civil rights".

Mahasneh added that "Arab World is not innovative, a UNDP report shows that only 1.1% of global scientific publishing is from Arab researchers and the Arab countries are spend only 0.3% of their GDP in scientific research. Another negative point is that we have limits on expression and communication, in addition to the lack of access to knowledge, with more than 30% illiteracy rate in the Arab population and Internet penetration below 11% (global average) in most of the Arabic countries."

"Most of the people in Arab World are not aware of Free Culture as a concept, and unfortunately we do not have enough promotion or national strategies and workplans to enhance the use of Free Culture".

"On the other hand, we have a set of positive points: Most of the Arab citizens are young and digital native. The use of Internet increased 1400% in the last eight years and there is more interest in Intellectual Property and free licenses. We have examples like the Al-Jazeera Repository, Jeeran and our website that are licensed under Creative Commons licenses, in addition to more than 100,000 Wikipedia articles in Arabic", said association's president.

"Another good point is that there is more interest in Arabic content on the web, Arabic language is one of 10 most used languages on the net, and we know that probably the next big thing of the Internet will come from here, the Arab World. We have seen how Yahoo! acquired Maktoob, that is one of the biggest Arabic websites".

Mahasneh suggested a set of points in order to promote open content, for example, public administration can release all their products in public domain or under an open license, cultural activities funded by Ministry of Culture can be licensed under Creative Commons and educational curricula should be open-sourced in order to be editable, enhanced and freely available.