The second COMMUNIA workshop, Ethical Public Domain: Debate of Questionable Practices, will take place on Monday, March 31 in the geographic center of Europe: Vilnius, Lithuania.

The workshop will host ten rounds of debates on issues concerning to the public domain and related policies and practices, followed by a press conference inviting the media and public to join the discussion.

The workshop in Lithuania is organized by Minciu Sodas, an online laboratory experimenting with humanitarian efforts such as Pyramid of Peace, an innovative project helping Kenyans during political unrest by enabling the donation of mobile phone airtime, which can be shared or traded in the Kenyan mobile phone network for food and medicine.

Also, the First COMMUNIA International Conference will be held in Leuven-La-Neuve (Belgium) from June 30 – July 1, 2008. There is currently a Call for papers for the conference. The deadline for submissions is March 30th, and abstracts addressing one of the following topics are very welcome: Libraries and archives, Public sector Information, Creative works, Scientific research, Publishing intermediaries or Emerging Issues.

COMMUNIA is a project funded by the European Commission and coordinated by Politecnico di Torino. It consists of over 35 members from 21 countries dedicated to developing “the single European point of reference for high-level policy discussion and strategic action on all issues related to the public domain in the digital environment” and related topics, including Creative Commons licensing.

In January the first COMMUNIA workshop was held in Turin, Italy, whose highlights included, among many, a discussion of the latest developments in CC metadata.