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Of genes, seeds and data:
The boundaries of property,  the Ethics of openness
Wednesday, Sept 22 | 14.45 - 16.00 CEST

A round-table discussion

This panel will explore the extent to which different forms of openness can return value to the communities from which they derive their data, content and code.

Increasingly we are sharing not just data on data centres, but also genome sequences, plant seeds and  even biomaterials. While data remains the core commons element, both the material carrier and the kinds of rights subsisting in our shared “content” changes: if twenty or thirty years ago we were wondering on the ethics of enclosure, now we are debating on the ethical boundaries of sharing.

By using concepts of peer-to-peer communities,  communal spaces and concepts of co-ops we are seeking to develop models for opening up science but also providing attribution to the communities, where different forms of content are derived from. The panel will explore policy options, organizational models and licensing forms that allow the tracing and returning of value to different individuals, groups and communities.

Moderator: Prodromos Tsiavos

Head of digital development and Innovation at Onassis Foundation | OpenAIRE Legal Advisor

Prodromos is a Legal Counsel at OpenAIRE and Athena Research Centre and the Head of Digital and Innovation at the Onassis Group. He serves as the president of the supervisory board of the European Patent Academy of the European Patent Office. He read law and Information Systems in Athens and London and holds a PhD in Law and Information Systems from the London School of Economics.

Panelists

Josie Fraser

Head of Digital Policy - National Lottery Heritage Fund, UK
Josie's work focuses on ethical and inclusive digital transformation, helping sectors get the most out of the effective and creative use of technology.

She is currently Head of Digital Policy for the National Lottery Heritage Fund,  the largest dedicated funder of heritage in the UK. The Fund provides leadership across the sector and work to ensure the UK’s heritage supports positive and lasting change for people and communities. Her role is to help ensure that the National Lottery Heritage Fund makes the most impactful grants it can, leading on digital policy and sector wide digital skills development.

Gloria Origgi

Research Director, Epistemic Norms, CNRS, France
Gloria Origgi’s research draws on social epistemology, philosophy of social science and the study of social cognition and emotions in order to better understand how people create, store and use social information to make sense of themselves and of the social world. She has also worked on situated social cognition, especially on Internet-mediated epistemic practices and on gendered cognition.
She is member of the PeriTia European project on policy and trust in science. She and her Epistemic Norms team are working on the social bases of trust in science and the role of values and emotions in coming to trust experts. She has focused on the role of reputation as a source of epistemic warrant, explaining how reputation can be a motivation for action (to "gain" or modify our social image) and how it can be a "rational" justification to acquire a belief. 
Her research is now focused on the resurgence of passions in contemporary politics and international conflicts, the role of symbolic struggle in the public debate and in social mobilisation. (Origgi, 2019)

Olga Tzortzatou

Ethics & Deontology in Research, Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens, Greece
Olga's field of expertise is Privacy Law, Intellectual Property Law and Bioethics. Since 2007 she holds a position as a lawyer at the Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens, currently the largest independent biomedical research institution of Greece, where her work consists in contractual negotiation for safeguarding intellectual property and ensuring regulatory compliance (i.a. GDPR).
Her academic research focused on the legal and ethical implications related to biomedical research. She has participated and leaded ELSI work in numerous EU funded projects as a legal & ethics scientific advisor (e.g B3Africa, SiENNA, EATRIS, STRATEGY-CKD, miniNO). She is an external ethics expert at the European Commission DG Research & Innovation, a Member of Bioethics Committees (Democritus University and BRFAA), of the European Association of Health Law and an active member of Scientific Boards and ELSI working groups in European Infrastructures/Initiatives (BBMRI-ERIC ELSI and 1& Million Genomes Project).

Alek Tarkowski

Strategy Director of Open Future Foundation
Alek Tarkowski is the Strategy Director of Open Future Foundation, a European think tank for the open movement. He is a sociologist, activist and strategist. Since 2004 he has been active, in Poland and globally, in organizations and social movements building an open internet. His focus has been on copyright, commons-based approaches to resource management and intellectual property. His interests include digital strategies for societies, regulation of emergent technologies, digital skills and openness of public resources.
He is the co-founder of Centrum Cyfrowe, a Polish think-and-do tank supporting open, digital society, where he currently chairs the Oversight Board. He also co-founded Creative Commons Poland, Communia (the European Association on the Digital Public Domain) and the Polish Coalition for Open Education (KOED). He has co-chaired the strategic process for the new Creative Commons Global Network Strategy. He is alumnus of the Leadership Academy of Poland (Class of 2017), in 2016 he was named New Europe 100 Challenger.  Member of the Steering Committee of Internet Governance Forum Poland.  Formerly, member of the Board of Strategic Advisors to the Prime Minister of Poland (2008-2011), member of the Polish Board of Digitisation, an advisory body to the Minister of Digitisation (2011-2016) and Junior Fellow at the McLuhan Program on Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.