Information Governance: Civic society voices

The transformation of society towards knowledge based wealth has resulted in the increase of importance of modes of information and knowledge use, exploitation, production and dissemination; which also resulted in the emerging of a conflict around different views of information governance. Importantly, a core tension between a corporate logic versus a commons logic of information governance. Recenly, several events, campaigns and international networks led to the emergence of a free culture movement (FCM), which agglutinate the civic society actors in favor of a common logic vision. The Free Culture Movement refers a network of individuals and organizations, linked by more or less dense networks, solidarity ties and moments of confluence, sharing a loose collective identity and a common set of values and principles (most importantly accessibility and the flow of information and knowledge, creativity, participative formats, network settings and communal ownership), that have recently mobilized on the policy issues linked to Intellectual property and information and knowledge accessibility. The paper will address the FCM identity formation, composition and its pattern of dialogue and interaction with the institutions dealing with information governance. The empirical analysis will be based on an in-deep case study of the Free culture forum (fcforum). The Free culture forum is an annual meeting of FCM expressions taking place in Barcelona since 2009. The methodology will be based on content analysis of 10 interviews to fcforum participants, and of the two declarations of the Fcforum, and 20 semi-structured online questionnaires administered to fcforum members.