Share your publications

Sharing is scary. What if somebody steals your publication or makes a heavy criticism on it? However, the only way to create a bidirectional communication with your citizens is to publicly publish your publications. For your public!

Most agencies upload a PDF version in the website. This could be printed and read. However, statistics show that download numbers are quite small. Furthermore, the number of feedback received through this model is insufficient. Sometimes, a public or limited forum has been created but I never saw one of those successfully populated.

I propose something braver. You take your text and publish it in Wikipedia or alike. You allow readers to edit your text, add, update and discuss. You benefit from their knowledge, their ideas and their effort.

You keep the ownership of the text. You provide a Creative Commons (CC) licence. CC is an organization that fights to increase the amount of artistic work available in the Internet, shared and used to build on top.

You have several types of licences, where the copyright owner gives some rights while retains others through open content licenses. CC offers some licenses that owners can freely use to share their work. RDF/XML metadata is added to always maintain the name of the owner, the type of license and other data you can choose.

For example, if you have a report that you will share, you can use a license called "Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)", which allows:

• to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• to Remix — to adapt the work

under the following conditions:

• Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
• Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
• Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

It is as easy as following these instructions and give up fear.

Would have Michelangelo created this Tondo Pitt without sharing and collaboration?