Wikimedia Commons is a free media repository.

It helps illustrating Wikipedia articles -- but not only.

This repository now contains more than 11 millions pictures, videos and sounds.

In September 2011, the Wiki Loves Monuments contest

encouraged thousands of people in all over Europe

to upload photos and videos of cultural heritage monuments.

In one month, more than 170000 photos have been uploaded

and about 25000 of them are from France.

For the Seine-et-Marne [east of Paris], more than 150 monuments have been the subject of pictures and videos.

The map you see here is produced collaboratively,

and its data are free: this is the OpenStreetMap project.

By combining informations from OpenStreetMap and geolocalized pictures from Wikimedia Commons,

we have a map where you can see pictures from the Wiki Loves Monuments contest.

And here is the flickr account of "Tourisme77" [Seine-et-Marne tourism office], managed by the Seine-et-Marne.

This flickr groupe could reuse photos of monuments in Seine-et-Marne

uploaded during Wiki Loves Monuments, since these pictures are free.

But let's take this further...

... what if inhabitants and tourists could contribute to a "Seine-et-Marne" flickr group

and were encouraged to put these contributions under a free license...

Imagine the map we would obtain...

Moreover, imagine applications for mobile phones that we could invent.

That's the point of free culture:

geting one's hands on local territories and contributing new to spread the local treasures.

What Internet users do for the free culture, the free culture does it for you!