ox4 - Final Version

Free Software and Beyond
The World of Peer Production

Philippe Aigrain

Philippe Aigrain is the CEO of Sopinspace, Society for Public Information Spaces. Sopinspace develops free software and provides commercial services for the organisation of public debates and collaborative work over the Internet. He is active at international level for the recognition of information and knowledge commons and for the promotion of new schemes for creating a synergy between the economy and non-market activities

Philippe Aigrain was trained as a mathematician and computer scientists. He holds a doctorate and the Habilitation a Diriger les Recherches from University Paris 7. Until 1996, his career was as a researcher and research manager in both porivate and public labs. He was particularly active as a software scientist and in the field of IT applied to media (photography, moving image, music). In 1996, he joined the European Commission R&D programmes where he was hed of sector for software technology from 1998 to 2003. He initiated and coordinated the policy in support to free/open source software innovation and usage and acted at the interface between the information society policy and regulatory policy (copyright, patents, privacy). He became a proponent of positive intellectual rights (rights thet are connected to capabilities to achieve some results) in contrast to restrictive rights.

After a brief scientific expertise for IRCAM in Paris, Dr. Aigrain founded Sopinspace, Society for Public Information Spaces in January 2004. The company develops innovative free-software Web services, such as Glinkr(R) and co-ment(R), and provides commercial services for public debate, participatory democracy and collaboratiove projects other the Internet.

Dr. Aigrain is a member of the Board of Directors of the Software Freedom Law Center in New-York and of the Board of Trustees of the NEXA Center for Internet and Society in Torino, Italy. He is the author of 2 books : "Common Cause: Information Between Commons and Property" (published in French, Italian and Arabic) and "Internet & Creation: how to recognize Internet exchanges while funding creation" (in French, English version to appear in 2009) and of many papers in English and French, accessible on his blog at http://paigrain.publicdebate.net/?page_id=11

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