On Wednesday, 11th of December, Tracey P. Lauriault, a post doctoral researcher on the Programmable City Project led a webinar with the Canadian Federal Government GeoConnections program on the topic of legal issues with traditional knowledge and cybercartography in the Canada’s North.

The webinar discussed the results of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Funded Partnership Development Grant entitled Mapping the Legal and Policy Boundaries of Digital Cartography led by Dr. R. Fraser Taylor of the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC), Carleton University, and Dr. Teresa Scassa of the Faculty of Law, Centre of Law, Technology and Culture (CLTS) at the University of Ottawa, including the Canadian Internet Public Policy Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) and GeoConnections.

The issues presented were:

· Traditional Knowledge (TK) and cybercartography;
· The complexities of Intellectual Property rights and TK;
· Challenges and possible solutions with regard to Western law and TK;
· The role of collaborative relationships in cybercartography in the North.

While this work was not part of the Programmable City Project, it does demonstrate the nuanced issues related to the production of data, in this case the uneasy relationship between the protection of traditional knowledge and western concepts of law, especially intellectual property law which protects creative works produced by individuals while traditional knowledge grounded in communities that are collectively owned cannot benefit from these protections.

A French version of the Webinar will be presented by Lauriault on Friday, Dec. 13.