As part of the capacity building component of the Abbara program, an online session on Intellectual Property Rights and Creative Commons was held on Monday, 20 March 2023, for the participant organizations in the two rounds of Abbara 06 and Abbara 07

The session, which was also attended by participants of the Culture 3.0 program and members of the Culture Resource team, was presented by Majd Shihabi (Palestine/Syria), a technologist urban planner and a PhD student at the Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto. Majd presented a detailed explanation of the concept and evolution of intellectual property rights and an overview of the commons and creative commons, which he illustrated with examples such as Palestine Open Maps and Palestine Oral History Archive

The capacity building component of the Abbara program is divided into six main trajectories: 1) cultural systems, 2) cultural organizations management, 3) solidarity, partnerships and networking, 4) sustainability and resource management models, 5) communications, 6) current themes related to cultural work in the Arab region. This session comes under the sixth trajectory, which aims to better enable the participant organizations to address crucial current issues related to cultural work and the consequent need to reorder work priorities in light of political and social  changes in the region and in the countries in which the organizations operate, in particular.

The Abbara team is in the process of organizing the second training workshop for Abbara 07 which will take place in Tunisia in May 2023, and will cover financial planning, financial management, and communications.