At Creative Commons, sharing and gratitude go hand in hand. We empower the sharing of knowledge and creativity, as well as celebrate the collaborative creativity and gratitude that sharing engenders.

As Chair of the Creative Commons Board of Directors, I am ending 2019 with a special sense of gratitude for the CC community. This has been a year full of challenges and opportunities for CC. Our staff has risen to the occasion with remarkable energy, collegiality, and grace. Interim CEO Cable Green deserves special recognition for taking on new responsibilities with his typical insight, steadiness, and dedication. He is backed by an outstanding team that includes the rest of the CC staff, our Board of Directors, and the Advisory Council. The CC community also includes the CC Global Network and the millions of educators, librarians, technologists, creators, and activists who use our tools to help grow the global commons. And of course, it includes the generous donors—including visionary foundations and individual CC community members—who make our work possible. (Not a donor yet? Please contribute here!)

At our most recent Board meeting, we recognized two extraordinary members of the CC team. 

Johnathan Nightingale and Tom Rubin have completed their terms of service as members of the CC Board of Directors and will now join our Advisory Council. 

Johnathan Nightingale has served on the CC Board of Directors since 2015, including as Chair of the Development Council. Among the many highlights of his service, Johnathan provided key technical and management expertise as we built the team and the technology behind CC Search, and served as a trusted mentor to our technical and project staff.

Tom Rubin has served on the Board of Directors since 2013, including as Vice-Chair. Tom contributed critical legal expertise and strategic guidance in support of CC’s mission and vision, always holding the organization to the highest standards of performance and professionalism.  

We extend our deepest appreciation and gratitude to Johnathan and Tom for their outstanding contributions, dedicated service, and steadfast devotion to CC’s mission and vision. We look forward to continuing to rely on them as they take their new roles as members of our Advisory Council. 

If you are reading this, then you too are a member of the Creative Commons community. Thank you for sharing our commitment to open knowledge and creativity, and for supporting our work. 

We end this year with gratitude and excitement for continuing our work in 2020!

Molly Van Houweling | Creative Commons Board Chair

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Since its launch, CC Search has become more than just a search tool for CC-licensed content; it has come to exemplify the virtuous cycle of knowledge creation—where we create, collaborate, and learn from one another. 

Our recent collaboration with a group of students from UC Berkeley was a true exercise in this cycle of creation and collaboration.

In the fall of 2019, instructors of the UC Berkeley graduate course, Product Design Studio, approached us to act as “clients” to a group of students learning how to solve complex design challenges. Of course, we said yes! And thanks to prior user research on CC Search, we already knew what design challenges we faced but were struggling with how to fix them—that’s where the students’ insights were critical.

Like a well-trained team of consultants, they immediately asked thoughtful questions about the proposed design challenges, reframed them in terms of the user journey, and identified what they would be tackling. Early on, they were able to identify that the key challenge we face with CC Search is how to convey complex CC license and attribution information in a way that is succinct, actionable, and engaging.

Fast forward to the end of our four-week collaboration and the students left us with an immensely impressive outcome: a user research report of nearly 40 pages, a presentation highlighting and explaining their final design choices, and several interactive, high-fidelity prototypes.

In aggregate, the UC Berkeley students dedicated dozens of hours to this project while we provided guidance, feedback, and insights along the way. 

After completing the project, student Janine Rosenbaum told us, “Working on CC Search gave me hands-on experience…I really enjoyed the great teamwork and learned a lot of new things, especially regarding user testing.”

Student Victor Grajski echoed Janine’s sentiment, “It was a pleasure working with the team at Creative Commons. I greatly appreciated how much they know and understand their users, and it was inspiring to see how enthusiastic the team and their users are about creating a global commons! Working in a group to make a well-run, established team like theirs happy with a 4-week timeframe was an ideal learning experience for me as a designer.”

What are the next steps for the CC Search product team? 

The results of this collaboration have jump-started an overhaul of the CC Search user interface, serving as a launchpad for upcoming iterative design improvements. 

The outcome of this project truly spoke to the power of the cycle of knowledge creation. Each prototype was better than the last thanks to the many talented minds who, in the spirit of collaboration, brought their best ideas to the table with informed enthusiasm.

To stay up-to-date on the technical updates that we’ll be making to CC Search throughout 2020, be sure to follow Creative Commons Open Source on Twitter @cc_opensource, join #cc-usability in the Creative Commons Slack, or keep an eye on the Active Sprint and Backlog in GitHub! 

 

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In 2017, CC published Made with Creative Commons, a book examining 24 different business models built around CC licenses and CC-licensed content. Financially supported by more than 1600 backers on Kickstarter, the project itself is an example of how openly licensed work can be funded and how CC-licensed content can evolve over time. 

After publishing the book and distributing copies around the world, we have proudly watched as the Made with Creative Commons project continued to germinate thanks to the energy and resourcefulness of the CC community.

Just recently, members of our community across Latin America—including Gunnar Wolf, Luis Enrique Amaya González, Leo “elopio” Arias, Andrés Delgado, and Evelin “scann” Heidel—collaborated to produce a Spanish translation of the book. Marisol Simón from the Economics Research Institute in Mexico edited the translation.

Earlier this year, Hilman Fathoni, Fitri Ayu, and the rest of the CC Indonesia team translated the book into Indonesian. They were also able to hold a public event and print copies of the translated book thanks to funding from the Indonesian Creative Economy Agency.

Finally, Soohyun Pae is currently leading a translation into Korean, and Petter Reinholdtsen is undertaking a translation into Norwegian.

These efforts by you, the CC community, are a testament to the vibrancy, resourcefulness, and ingenuity of the open movement—and your commitment to growing the global commons.

We would like to say thank you to each and every person who has had a hand in carrying this work forward over the last two years, and we look forward to receiving more translations in the future!

If you’re working on a new translation of Made with Creative Commons, let us know by emailing us at info@creativecommons.org or tagging us @creativecommons on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn!

 

The post Thank You for Translating “Made with Creative Commons” appeared first on Creative Commons.

The following is a guest post by Creative Commons community member Sebastiaan ter Burg.

In January 2020 there will be events all over the world to celebrate the fact that new works have entered the public domain. The country where a work is published determines when copyright expires. For example, where I’m from in the Netherlands, copyright vested in a work expires on the first day of January—70 years after the death of the work’s author. Meanwhile, works published in Mexico are copyrighted for a full 100 years after their death of their authors. That’s a long time! 

This is why we celebrate Public Domain Day, which happens on the first day of each year when new works enter the public domain. It’s a day to celebrate the lives of authors who died many years ago and whose works have finally become available to the world to access and use freely. Do you want to know if a Public Domain Day event is happening in your country? Or are you involved in the organization of an event in your country? Then head over to pdday.org to see where events are being held or to add your own event.

pdday.org is also a larger initiative to stimulate the publishing of works in the public domain. In addition to cataloguing events, the site aims to to collect practical tools and best practices for doing things like determining whether a work is in the public domain. The video below is an example of how cultural institutions in The Netherlands get training in determining public domain material in their collections.

I hope you’ll join us in celebrating Public Domain Day wherever you are in the world by attending an event, creating your own, or taking some time to learn about what the public domain is all about and why it’s important.

See also: Save the Date! Public Domain Day 2020 Is Happening in January in Washington, D.C.

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The Creative Commons (CC) Global Network is made up of people like you. People who are attracted to the CC Global Network because of what can be accomplished by building a globally-accessible public commons of knowledge and culture through CC’s tools and products. 

In 2016, CC released an assessment of the community in the Faces of the Commons research. The CC ecosystem has changed since then and many of those changes have been essential for the commons to reach its full potential and to grow the CC Network. In fact, the CC Network has indeed grown to over 500 members across 42 chapters. 

Now that the CC Network is more established, CC wishes to make sure that you, as a member, are feeling fully supported in your work and that you have what you need to help grow the global commons. CC is interested in what it means to you to be part of CC, why you are part of the CC Network, and what you need to continue being an active member of this community.

Whether you’re new to the CC Network or a long-time contributor to Creative Commons, we value your experience and want to hear from you. 

There are two ways for you to share your thoughts on the CC Global Network: 

• Digital survey—This 20-30 minute survey will give us a general understanding of your experience. Take the survey now or bookmark it for later.
• One-on-one interview—You can provide in-depth feedback by signing up for a 60-90 minute online interview. Please volunteer your time, or suggest someone else, through this form and we’ll be in touch!

Both feedback methods are available between December 17 and January 15.

The one-on-one interviews will take place at a time convenient for you outside of the festive season between December 23 and January 2.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences!

Isla Haddow-Flood is an active member of the CC Global Network. We’re grateful to be working with Isla on this project as she provides her expertise in and passion for engaging with open communities.

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