Last May, a diverse group of nearly 50 experts from every continent took part in Creative Commons’ Open Culture Strategic Workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, to advance our TAROCH initiative — Towards a Recommendation on Open Cultural Heritage. Over the course of two days, participants collaborated to co-create a strategic roadmap for future action, charting a course towards the elaboration by UNESCO Member States of an international legal instrument that would promote open solutions to enable equitable access to cultural heritage worldwide, in line with UNESCO’s broader mission on openness and heritage-related policy goals.

Today, we’re excited to share the workshop’s report, capturing the event’s highlights. Here are two of the main outcomes:

• A narrower focus from “open culture” to “open cultural heritage in the public domain” — moving from TAROC to TAROCH.
• Flexibility regarding the nature of the legal instrument: recommendation, declaration, or other type of UNESCO instrument.

The report also outlines anticipated developments, highlighting key milestones on the horizon. It concludes with a set of recommended actions to build on the momentum gained in Lisbon.

We are now in the process of building an architecture to organize future work and establish ladders of engagement. Watch this space!

Read the full report 

If you’d like to learn more, please reach out to us at info@creativecommons.org.