The education, academia and research taskforce charter

**Draught proposal**

The education taskforce sees the need for plural and alternative models for the production and exchange of knowledge and information. To secure and finance the global knowledge commons, it supports multi-stakeholder partnerships and an integrated vision, around the paradigms of open cognition and distributed intelligence networks.

Tenets and principles

Our principles: “education for shared knowledge societies, via open cognition paradigms and open access tools”;

Our plans of action: “scaling up strategies for replicability, modularity and sustainability”

new models for building information and knowledge competence on all levels of education and training, by encouraging the free flow of knowledge, by recognizing the central role and multiple functions of libraries, by convincing content producers to be active participants in the open access paradigm of knowledge and the global public domain;

e-learning extensions and long-distance education transfers, complementary to traditional educational resources and methods, in combination with community media, in a local context of media pluralism and linguistic and cultural diversity ;

new open and self-organized publishing models in science and software production and community-based communications, with in-built maintenance programs and upgrading capacities;

transparent evaluations of global barriers to knowledge, research and education, looking beyond technological obstacles at legal and institutional gridlocks (like Intellectual Property laws and International standards) and promoting a new balance of intellectual properties as a common ground for authors, creators and teachers to protect their works and for civil society to benefit from their contributions;

new designs of degree and diploma accreditations, even when dealing with international or regional educational agencies, granted by local legitimate entities, in keeping with their expectations of content and practices.

Implementing the Charter

a. The taskforce encourages its members (researchers, educators, computer and information science professionals,…) to develop a full awareness of their role and responsibility in the development of the tenets and principles of the Charter, and to contribute to it freely and in the best of their capacity.

b. The taskforce urges its members to mobilize decision-makers worldwide, at all levels (from local to regional and global) to develop clear policies to implement the tenets and principles of the Charter.

c. The taskforce invites its member to push for the recognition of the open cognition paradigm and for the global commons of knowledge, for the capacity-building and the well-being of people and communities worldwide, so as to reach sustainable development.

d. The taskforce encourages all governments to develop worldwide access to Information and Communication services, contents and forms of expression, as they are the best means to bridge the digital divide and to implement all the tools agreed upon in the WSIS process and beyond.

The education taskforce sees the need for plural and alternative models for the production and exchange of knowledge and inform

Meigs

2005-04-04

Education Nationale