5 Guiding Principles to Living Better in the Digital Age

In the increasingly globalized and constantly changing digital environment, new ways of producing, transmitting, and accessing knowledge are developing, and therefore new timeframes and debates. The UPL Community, together with all its members, has to articulate digital and human development, as well sustainable development, and put in place the foundations for the smart and interconnected society of tomorrow.

The UPL Community brings together Higher Education and research parties (universities), heritage institutions (museum, libraries…), and financial institutions. In their independent missions, they all face the issues and challenges of digital development.

The UPL Community intends to bring a solution to a core problem: how to live better with digital development. This contribution is unique, characterized by its all-encompassing nature and co-construction model, as well as by its critical and creative approach.

The UPL Community prides itself on an approach centred around politics and citizenship, criticism and creation. It intends to make a contribution to the field of sustainable development and more precisely to what we now call its “Fourth pillar”, namely, collective intelligence. The aim is to enable current and future generations to live better with digital technology.

In its capacity to integrate all aspects digital technology in a critical, creative and concerted way, the UPL Community intends to rely on certain of its core strengths:

• The respective and cross-expertise of the UPL Community members: two universities with a strong intellectual, innovative and creative tradition; two LabEx; an IDEFI and leading heritage institutions.
• Recognized potential in the field of “digital humanities” with online teaching among other things
• Its previous research, education programs, and digital creative work
• A tradition of dialogue, transfer of skills, and joint projects with multiple parties facing digital challenges

Based on these strengths, 5 principles will guide the UPL Community’s digital policy:

1. To ensure the quality, accessibility, readability, interoperability and sustainability of data, archives, and existing or future content.
2. To support co-construction and dissemination of knowledge, its mediation, its critical appropriation in a digital environment and its reinvention.
3. To become a significant player in digital creation and innovation
4. To encourage meta- and/or trans-disciplinary reflexion on digital concepts and issues
5. To analyze the evolution of academic fields of knowledge (especially in art and humanities) in a digital environment