By Alice

The Warumungu Aboriginal community in the town of Tenant Creek in Central Australia wanted a system to archive and organize their digital cultural materials in line with their cultural protocols. The Mukurtu system was the result.

The developers of Mukurtu created traditional knowledge licenses, recognising that indigenous communities have different use and access expectations in regards to their knowledge and materials. The licenses require special permissions and appropriate acknowledgement from the source community. These traditional licenses work alongside creative commons licenses or copyright licenses to specify access and usage rights.

Mukurtu is a free and open source community content management system which uses tools that are international standards-based but also adaptable to the local cultural protocols and intellectual property systems of indigenous communities, libraries, archives, and museums.