Acronyme/Acronym: CCCP-Prosodie.

Attention/Beware: each part has its own page. Clic on the title to reach the page and the text developped.

Titre du projet/Proposal title

Caractériser et Classer les Communautés de Pratiques: Participation et Rôles individuels, Organisation interne, Droit et Institutions Externes.

Characterization and Classification of Communities of Practice: Participation and Roles at Individual level, internal Organization, Digital rights and external Institutions.

Programme scientifique et technique/Description du projet. Technical and scientific description of the activities.

Problème posé. Rationale. (1/2 page maximum)

Présentation générale du problème qu’il est proposé de traiter dans le projet et du cadre de travail (recherche fondamentale, industrielle ou développement expérimental).

Software industry represents today a remarkable illustration of the fact that any intellectual property system is a compromise between different actors (the producer(s) of a good, their competitor(s), the users, the state, ….). A good balance between individual incentives to innovate and the maximization of the social utility generated by the diffusion and use of the innovation is very conditional to the technological environment and evolve in course of time. Traditional intellectual protection framework allows producers to finance the initial phase of the innovation process, anticipating returns in the diffusion phase, in which they expect a legal monopoly to produce and commercialize it. Open Source movement shows that, for some knowledge intensive/cumulative innovation, this can be counter-productive, as the diffusion phase allow the producer to finance its initial investment without having a monopoly, but thanks to the feed backs and the joint needs generated by new users and uses.

This example, made possible at a global level by the existence of Internet has precedented occurrences in the history at more local scales. But with the diffusion of the Internet and the fact that research is more and more computer based, sharing knowledge and innovation can be much more efficient than even ten years ago. This could imply the need to stop the present trend of strengthening intellectual property protection regimes. And what happens now in software industry is going to spread to a large scope of other activities and industries.

Thus the question of the possible extension of such a model of production, based on knowledge openness and sharing represents a significant challenge for knowledge based industries in a near future. In this project, we want to analyse communities of practice attractiveness, structure, and institutional background in order to provide tools to analyse, monitor and evaluate their impact on the industry.

Through those analyses, we will investigate what that means in terms of professional skills’ evolution, actors’ goals seek (being the persons, the group of professionals, or the institutions which hire them), in the light of the habits, the goals, the intellectual property framework of the sector they belong to. Our work is threefold: to construct a theoretical and methodological background allowing to explain these phenomena, to test this on the field, and to make proposals to improve the efficiency of such organization. We will focus on two experimental fields we regard as complementary, in terms of the goods produced and of the kind of organization in which they are produced:

1. Communities based on software production, with three base cases: free software, bio-computing and by satelite detection fields. How knowledge or innovations are integrated into a piece of software, how it is published and exchanged, from an organizational point of vue (structure of the community, role of the actors, being individuals of institutions/organizations) and from a juridical point of vue (wich protection, which IPR management).
2. Communities based on encyclopedia production, with three base cases: botanic group (telabotanica), software security data group (managed at Eurecom by Marc Dassier), wikipedia sub-group coordonated by an institution (Medieval history for instance) or astronomer groups. Which knowledge or innovations is exchanged, what are the structure of exchange, monitoring and control, and the roles of the actors ( being individuals of institutions/organizations)

In both cases, basic questions are the same: what do the different actors produce, what do they exchange, how do they construct the programs they use, is there cooperation and how it is organized, what are the links existing between the different organizations participating, does a cooperative production change the goals, the play of some of these organization of persons, does the institutional framework, and especially the juridical one matter?

Justification scientifique des moyens demandés. Requested budget : detailed financial plan.

On présentera ici la justification scientifique et technique des moyens demandés dans le document de soumission A par chaque partenaire et synthétisés à l’échelle du projet dans la fiche «Tableaux récapitulatifs» du document de soumission A Chaque partenaire justifiera les moyens qu’il demande en distinguant les différents postes de dépenses.