The Creative Commons Catalog Application Programming Interface (CC Catalog API) gives developers the ability to create custom applications that utilize CC Search, a rich collection of 330 million and counting openly licensed images. We have spent the last two years gathering this data from a diverse set of 28 sources, ranging from curated collections assembled by the Met Museum to user-generated content on Flickr. 

Integrating the API into your application will give your users access to the largest collection of openly licensed images ever released on the internet.

While the API has been publicly available for some time now, the release of CC Catalog API, Version 1.0 marks a new milestone in the stability and reliability of the tool and a guarantee that we will not change the existing interface without ample warning and a long sunset period. It’s also important to note that the API is open source and the code is available under the MIT license on GitHub. 

Applications of the CC Catalog API

One of the best ways to understand what capabilities can be enabled by the API is to look at already existing applications. For example, every time you visit CC Search and type something into the search box, your browser is talking directly to the API to fulfill your request!

An exciting milestone for us was seeing Google Summer of Code participant Mayank Nader implement his excellent CC Search Browser Extension, which uses the API to put CC Search at your fingertips via your browser. Other community-built applications include the CC Search WordPress plugin by the Greek School Network and Curationist by the MHz Foundation.

We think there are ample opportunities to integrate the API into your own applications. For example, CC Search could be particularly useful for content management systems to help users find images they can use royalty-free. Another possible application is in image editing programs, which would give users easy access to images where derivative works are allowed.

How to use the CC Catalog API

The API is free to use and open to the public. Anybody can visit the API homepage and start making HTTP queries. Still, we strongly encourage you to follow the instructions for signing up for an API key, which will impose fewer restrictions on your use of the API and give us a way to increase your rate limit if needed. We may impose stricter rate limits on anonymous consumers in the future, but registered users will always have preferential access.

We’d love to hear any feedback you have about the API and about the applications you are building using it. Please email us at cccatalog-api@creativecommons.org.

Deprecation of the pre-release version of the API

If you have already started building on the API, that’s great! However, if you are making any calls without “v1” in the URL, you need to update your application to use the new version. Starting in July 2020, we will be sunsetting the pre-release version of the search API. The Version 1 release is largely compatible with the original pre-release version; see the release notes for a full list of breaking changes.

To stay up-to-date on the latest tech developments and resources, including new versions of the CC Catalog API, follow @cc_opensource on Twitter and visit the CC Open Source website!

As the nonprofit organization behind CC Search and the CC Catalog API, please consider donating to Creative Commons so that we can continue building the open access tools and platforms the world uses to share. Thank you! 

The post Announcing the CC Catalog API, Version 1.0 appeared first on Creative Commons.

Over the last few days, a growing number of organizations have shut down their offices and told employees to work from home in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Here at Creative Commons (CC), we’ve also taken necessary precautions such as postponing all work-related travel and canceling the in-person component of the annual CC Global Summit in May. 

Fortunately, however, our daily operations haven’t been disrupted to the same extent as other organizations because CC has been a global, fully remote nonprofit since 2015. Our staff is spread across Europe, North America, and South America; and although this working environment presents incredible benefits, like flexibility and rich cultural exchanges, it also presents unique challenges. For example, staff on the west coast of North America are often just waking up as staff in Europe are signing off! 

In the spirit of open access and promoting good health, we’d like to share some tips for both organizations and individuals on the subject of remote work. 

---

For organizations

• Create clear policies and guidelines that are accessible to all staff. Make sure to anticipate questions and/or concerns that your staff may have, and include answers in a FAQ.

• Craft an internal communications strategy that maintains clear, reliable, and regular communication across the organization and within teams. In fact, don’t be afraid of  “overcommunication.” 

• Schedule video conferencing—encourage leadership and/or management to schedule informal video conferencing with their team members to maintain team morale and cohesiveness.

• Don’t assume all staff has access to the latest technology—in particular, don’t assume all staff members have access to high-speed internet. If they don’t, work with them to figure out alternatives or to set expectations.

• Ensure contact information is up-to-date—for emergency purposes, ensure that all staff’s contact information is correct.

• Assess and adjust expectations and deadlines on projects that may be impacted by the lack of in-person engagement or by a disruption in schedules due to schools closing, individuals becoming ill, etc.

• Provide mental health resources—it’s important to provide staff with appropriate resources in case they begin to feel isolated and/or depressed while working remotely.

• Showcase flexibility, patience, and empathy—leadership and/or management should showcase these qualities in order to reduce employee anxiety and stress under challenging circumstances.

• Give regular updates, either via email or through video check-ins, on the status of COVID-19.

• Don’t micromanage your staff’s activities—instead, set realistic goals and trust they’ll get their work done.

---

For individuals 

• Keep your normal workday morning routine—this includes brushing your teeth, changing your clothes, eating breakfast, etc.

• Do work in another room, not in your bedroom—if you live in a small apartment, try to create a space that you can designate as your “office.”

• Take breaks throughout the day—make some coffee, go for a walk, read a book, or stretch.

• Keep in touch with coworkers outside of formal meetings—this can help prevent social isolation, anxiety, or depression. CC staff, for example, schedule “lunches” over video or take “walks” together while talking over the phone. 

• Create boundaries between your life and your work—stick to your regular work hours and set expectations about email response times. This is often one of the biggest challenges of working from home!

• Find other remote workers in your town—schedule coworking days with them or meet up for lunch (if it’s safe)!

• Don’t buy (only) unhealthy snacks—you will eat them! Make sure you buy healthy snacks that will keep you energized throughout the day.

• Be wary of your tone—especially when communicating through messaging applications (e.g. Slack) because these forms of communication can feel impersonal and cold.

• Log off distracting websites—social media sites are especially distracting, so either log off of them or use a browser plugin to help you stay focused.

• Be proud of working from home—just because you don’t go to an office doesn’t mean your work is less important or you’re less productive.

Here’s the gist: On an individual level, try to create a routine that makes you feel productive, included, and motivated. On an organizational level, actively listen to and check in with staff to ensure everyone feels supported and included. Most importantly, as the World Health Organization (WHO) says, “Be safe. Be smart. Be kind.”

For more insights on remote working that our staff has found helpful, check out this article from Deekit, this guide from Trello, this guide from GitLab, and this podcast from Remoter!

The post We’re a Fully Remote Nonprofit; Here’s Some Advice on Working From Home appeared first on Creative Commons.

Storytelling is a powerful tool because it can change perceptions and inspire action—and images are an essential component. As Depression-era American photojournalist and documentarian Dorothea Lange said, “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” 

Unfortunately, finding high-quality and diverse openly licensed images, particularly those of women, is a difficult task for activists and nonprofit organizations. Either they don’t exist or they’re behind expensive paywalls. Thankfully, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation—one of Creative Commons’ institutional supporters—is making that task easier with Images of Empowerment, a CC-licensed stock photography collection that shares women’s stories from across the world.

Opening access to women’s stories through Images of Empowerment

In 2015, the Hewlett Foundation approached Getty Images to “tell the important story of women’s lives in sub-Saharan Africa through powerful, positive images.” According to Sarah Jane Staats, communications manager for the Hewlett Foundation’s Global Development and Population Program, the Foundation recognized that “…too often the images most available to us in commercial stock photography collections or in the media focus on disaster, poverty, or reinforce outdated gender stereotypes.”

“Nonprofits around the world can access powerful, positive images to help tell the story of their work and why it matters.”  

The Foundation decided to publish the images under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license so that “nonprofits around the world can access powerful, positive images to help tell the story of their work and why it matters.” This decision was in line with the Foundation’s open licensing policy, and its support of CC’s open licensing and open education work for over a decade.

By 2017, the Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) added photographs from Colombia, Ghana, India, Peru, South Africa, and Thailand showcasing women’s “informal work” (e.g. cleaning homes, collecting recyclables, etc.). In 2018, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation became a collaborator as well, adding photographs from Bihar, India and from Louisiana and Mississippi in the United States.

According to Emily Bosworth, communications manager at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, these images could have a profound impact on gender inequality and bias. “The photos we use to tell stories matter. Images quickly connect to our emotions and leave a lasting impression,” Bosworth explained, “Affordable, easy access to high-quality images that accurately portray women and girls as they are—in decision-making roles, as active participants in their communities—has tremendous power in challenging gender stereotypes and reinforcing asset-based narratives.”

“The photos we use to tell stories matter. Images quickly connect to our emotions and leave a lasting impression.”

Today, the Images of Empowerment collection includes over 2,000 images licensed CC BY-NC 4.0 from across Colombia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Peru, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Thailand, Uganda, and the United States. The images in the collection show women as “active participants in their communities, accessing and providing quality reproductive health information and services, and advocating for better working conditions.”

Now you can search these images more easily through the Images of Empowerment website

Just in time for International Women’s Day (IWD) on March 8, the Hewlett Foundation launched a dedicated stock photography website for the Images of Empowerment collection.

Users can now easily search and download these images for use in their nonprofit work, as well as learn more about each photo thanks to the detailed captions that identify the individuals in the pictures and provide additional context. Incredibly, they’ve also included accompanying videos for each collection that share the experiences of the photographers involved.

Images from the collection have been used by nonprofits across the world for conference materials, research and policy briefs, social media content, and more. Media organizations have also utilized the images, including The New York Times, Vox, Time, and the Guardian to explain the impact of certain policy issues (e.g. reproductive health).

Bosworth noted that the images from Bihar, India (photographed by Paula Bronstein) have made a noticeable impact. “By capturing the strength and resilience of women and girls in Bihar,” she wrote, “the images challenge false stereotypes about the role of women and deliver a more accurate message about the remarkable individuals that call this region home.” 

Explore the Images of Empowerment collection!

We believe this collection demonstrates how open access can help create a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world through sharing. Please consider donating to Creative Commons so that we can continue stewarding the CC licenses and building the open access tools and platforms individuals and organizations, like the Hewlett Foundation, use to share.

The post The Hewlett Foundation Shares Women’s Stories Through Openly Licensed Images appeared first on Creative Commons.

Since the early days of the Creative Commons movement, the annual CC Global Summit has been one of the most important vehicles for bringing people in our community together to share their work, ideas, and vision for the future of Open.

Unfortunately, given the current concerns around the global spread of COVID-19 (and in the wake of scores of major conferences being canceled around the world), we have made the difficult decision to cancel this year’s in-person Summit.

This is obviously an unfortunate and disappointing outcome, but we feel strongly that it is the right call. The health and safety of our global community are of paramount importance.

If you registered for the Summit, you will of course be reimbursed any fees you paid. We will be in touch with you shortly with details.

We are considering ways to keep the energy and collaboration of the Global Summit alive in 2020. We’re excited to engage with the CC community on thinking through what this might look like.

In the meantime, thank you for all the hard work and enthusiasm you bring to this community. We look forward to seeing you in-person once again at Creative Commons Global Summit 2021.

The post Important CC Global Summit Update appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Smithsonian—the world’s largest museum and research institution—announced yesterday  Smithsonian Open Access, an initiative that removes copyright restrictions from 2.8 million digital collection 2D and 3D images and nearly two centuries of data.

This major initiative uses CC0—Creative Commons’ public domain dedication tool—to make millions of images and data freely available to the public.

“Our goal for Smithsonian Open Access is to make the nation’s collection available to people around the world for any purpose…,” explained Effie Kapsalis, the senior digital program officer at the Smithsonian who led the strategy and implementation of Smithsonian Open Access for over a decade. “Over 100 staff members met every two weeks over the past year to create the specs and platforms,” wrote Kapsalis, “and I am extremely proud of the Smithsonian Open Access Values Statement that reflects our responsibilities as stewards of the nation’s collections, and that will be a guiding star as we move to future phases.”

Included in the collection are high-resolution images from all of the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, and archives (including from the National Zoo); from portraits of historic American figures to 3D scans of dinosaur skeletons. Research datasets and collections metadata are also included, which users can download and access through the Application Programming Interface (API) and GitHub data repository.

CC0 is once again being used to remove barriers to artistic and cultural artifacts.

We’re excited to see this initiative come to fruition as members of the Creative Commons team, including our Interim CEO / Director of Open Education Cable Green, General Counsel Diane Peters, and CC GLAM platform lead Evelin Heidel have worked with the Smithsonian for the past few years on its open access policy. Thanks also to all of the CC alum (Jane Park, Ryan Merkley and more) who worked with the Smithsonian in prior years.

“Today’s announcement matters because the Smithsonian is dedicating its works to the public domain using CC0, communicating to the world’s museums that digitizing and using the right legal tools can and should be done,” remarked Green at the Smithsonian Open Access launch event, “The Smithsonian is a leader in this space, and it is leading.”

Watch video from the Smithsonian Open Access launch event here.

In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be working to share all of the Smithsonian’s millions of newly released works through CC Search, our tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone. Additionally, we are pleased to be working with the 3D content platform Sketchfab to make all of the Smithsonian’s 3D scans and models available for download and reuse through CC Search. This coincides with Sketchfab’s announcement that the platform has added formal support for CC0 so that any cultural institutions can now easily dedicate their 3D scans and models to the public domain.

This is an extraordinary time for open access and the public domain, as the Smithsonian joins a growing list of other major cultural institutions that recognize the importance of removing barriers and increasing accessibility to artistic and cultural artifacts.

Let us know how you reuse, remix, and reshare these resources from Smithsonian Open Access by tagging us on Twitter @creativecommons and using the hashtag #SmithsonianOpenAccess!

---

We hope to encourage more cultural institutions to embrace open access initiatives by offering support, training, and education activities. This is a core aspect of our partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation in the OpenGLAM space. We’re currently preparing a Declaration on Open Access for Cultural Heritage that we expect will help cultural institutions understand how open access to cultural heritage is key to achieving knowledge equity.

If you are affiliated with a GLAM institution and would like guidance on using CC0, or any of our CC licenses, please email us at info@creativecommons.org We’re here to help!

The post Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million Images + Data into the Public Domain Using CC0 appeared first on Creative Commons.