Today, SELF magazine released a collection of new CC-licensed photos created to increase awareness about vaccines and promote accurate information about immunizations. The project, developed in partnership with the American Academy of Pediatrics, includes several dozen high-quality images made by photographer Heather Hazzan. These photos are available to the public as a free alternative to traditional stock photography and were designed to be used for illustrating stories about vaccines.
Photo credit: Heather Hazzan, SELF (CC BY)
After consulting with us here at Creative Commons, SELF and the AAP chose to release these images under our Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, so that they can be freely used by anyone—including media outlets, hospitals, public health departments, and other organizations creating content about vaccines—as long as credit is given to the photographer.
In addition to the photo project, SELF magazine today released “Vaccines Save Lives,” a special digital issue dedicated to exploring vaccines and highlighting the inaccuracy and dangers of anti-vaccine misinformation.
We’re pleased that SELF and the AAP chose CC licensing to share freely and openly with the world. Read more about the photo project on SELF’s site, and dig into the photo collection itself over at Flickr.
Today Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley is announcing the conclusion of his five years of leadership of the organization. As he describes in his personal message, he is stepping down as CEO to start a new position at Wikimedia. We are thankful to Ryan for his five years of leadership at CC and excited for him and the Commons that he will continue as a leader in the open knowledge community. We are all very proud of Creative Commons’ accomplishments during the past five years—including redesign of our global network, launch and development of the CC Certificate program, and our new search engine—which provides a welcoming front door to the commons.
In other leadership news, I am delighted to announce today the appointment of four new members of the Creative Commons Board of Directors. Carolina Botero, Bilal Randeree, Alek Tarkowski, and Alexander Macgillivray are all longtime members of the CC community. Each of them brings incredible expertise and insight to this new role with the organization, as the bios below illustrate. Carolina, Bilal, and Alek have begun their CC board service, while Alex will begin his term in January 2020. All of us at Creative Commons are thrilled to start working with these outstanding CC community members in this new capacity.
Two of the touchstones of the organizational strategy that has driven our recent work have been gratitude and collaboration. On behalf of the Creative Commons Board of Directors, I want to express my sincere gratitude for Ryan’s service to our organization and mission. Looking to the future, we are excited about the opportunities for collaboration we will have with Ryan in his new role. I am also grateful to our new board members for their willingness to serve, and I’m excited to collaborate with them and with the global Creative Commons community on the process of searching for a new leader for CC as we enter our third decade. We will soon be announcing details about that search process and inviting community input. In the meantime, my board colleagues and I are working closely with CC’s dedicated management team to ensure continuity and momentum for our important work.
The Commons is ever-changing and resilient. It is my great honor to cultivate it along with Creative Commons staff, our global network, and supporters.
Share alike, friends!
Molly Van Houweling
Creative Commons Board Chair
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Carolina Botero (Photo by Diego Mora, CC BY)
Carolina Botero is the Executive Director of the Colombian civil society digital rights organization Karisma Foundation. She is a researcher, lawyer, lecturer, writer, and consultant on topics related to law and technology. Carolina works in the defense of human rights in technology environments, following debates on freedom of expression, privacy, access to knowledge and culture, social innovation and ICT in technology. She has been a leader in the CC community in Colombia and around the world since 2003. Carolina holds a master’s degree in international law and cooperation (VUB – Belgium), and a master’s degree in Business and Contracting Law (2006, UAB – Spain). She frequently writes op-eds for El Espectador and La Silla Vacía.
Bilal Randeree (Photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg, CC BY)
Bilal Randeree is a digital media practitioner, investor and strategist. He currently serves as the Director for Africa/MENA at the Media Development Investment Fund, a mission-driven investment fund providing debt and equity financing to independent news and information companies. Bilal has 15 years’ experience in business, tech and media—by way of a unique career path. As a qualified Chartered Accountant, he spent a few years in Transaction Services before going back to school and studying journalism. That culminated with him serving as Social Media Manager and Online Editor at Al Jazeera in Qatar, which he eventually left to lead a tech startup. He has participated and led Creative Commons activities in the Arab World for the last 10 years, and now back home in South Africa.
Alek Tarkowski (Photo by Centrum Cyfrowe, CC BY)
Alek Tarkowski is President of Centrum Cyfrowe, a Polish foundation supporting open, digital society. He is a sociologist, activist, and strategist. Since 2004 he has been active in Poland and around the world in organizations and social movements building an open internet. His focus has been on copyright, commons-based approaches to resource management, and intellectual property. His interests include digital strategies for societies, regulation of emergent technologies, digital skills, and openness of public resources. He is the co-founder of Creative Commons Poland, Communia (the European Association on the Digital Public Domain), and Polish Coalition for Open Education (KOED). He co-chaired the strategic process for the new Creative Commons Global Network Strategy, is an alumnus of the Leadership Academy of Poland (Class of 2017), and in 2016 was named a New Europe 100 Challenger.
Alexander Macgillivray (Photo by Doc Searls, CC BY-SA)
Alexander Macgillivray is a lawyer whose interests span ethics, law, policy, government, decision making, the Internet, algorithms, social justice, access to information, coding, and the intersection of all of those. He was United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the final two plus years of the Obama Administration. He was Twitter’s General Counsel, as well as the company’s head of Corporate Development, Public Policy, Communications, and Trust & Safety. Before that he was Deputy General Counsel at Google and created the Product Counsel team. He has served on the board of the Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED) USA, was one of the early Berkman Klein Center folks, was certified as a First Grade Teacher by the State of New Jersey, and studied Reasoning & Decision Making as an undergraduate. he He is currently co-founder and GC of Alloy.us. He is also doing a bunch of coding, writing, and short burst projects with organizations thinking about what they should be doing next. He is also proud to be a board member at Data & Society and advisor to the Mozilla Tech Policy Fellows.
I have some bittersweet professional news to share. I will be stepping down from my position at Creative Commons and joining the Wikimedia Foundation as Chief of Staff. Leading Creative Commons has been the most challenging and rewarding role of my career. It has been a privilege to do this work, and together we’ve had some incredible accomplishments. I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to work with such a dedicated and professional staff, and a caring and driven community — I deeply believe that our collaborative efforts are the reason for every success we’ve had. I’m excited to continue working on issues that I care about in the open community. And I’m excited to continue working collaboratively with the CC team as a community member and partner.
Looking back on five years as CC’s CEO, I believe that the organization is in a stronger position than it has ever been. CC’s focus is clear, building a vibrant, usable commons powered by collaboration and gratitude through community support and training, product development and partnerships, and engagement.
Operationally, CC has an inspired and driven management team, with exceptional staff leading all aspects of our operations and programs. They are some of my favorite humans, and it’s been a joy to work with them. The team is guided by a multi-year strategy and collaboratively developed goals that support accountability and transparency. Financially, the organization has established a meaningful reserve upon which it can draw, secured partnerships with new multi-year funders, and initiated a strategy to secure multi-year relationships that has been embraced by the Board and is being executed upon by CC’s senior management.
Together, we renewed and expanded the CC network, and it is now nearly four times its previous size, with new and long-standing leaders working together to grow CC in communities previously not engaged with CC. I can’t underscore how important that community work has been, how impactful it will be in the future, and how happy I was to see the community hold such a central role in CC’s strategy and programs. Finally, CC has renewed and strengthened partnerships with funders, peer organizations, content partners, institutions, governments, and more. We have established The Big Open, and taken a leading role in inviting others to join us.
That’s a lot. And after five years, it should be. I joined the organization at a challenging time, with a deep belief in the power of sharing to create a more equitable world, to drive innovation, and create access for all to culture and knowledge. My hope was always to leave the organization in a good place, so that its next CEO can join the staff, community, and board in imagining where CC should go next.
Nobody’s perfect, but I do believe I’ve accomplished the goals we set together, and it’s a good time to move on and invite new leadership in the organization. In the intervening period I will work closely with the CC management team and the board to effect a smooth transition.
To the entire CC team, with whom it has been my great pleasure to work so closely for the past five years, I want to share an enormous amount of gratitude. To CC’s many partners, supporters, and communities, I’m sure I’ll see you again in The Big Open. And as CC enters its 20th year, I look forward to celebrating with all of you as colleagues and friends.
The version 4.0 license suite and CC0 are now available in Korean as a result of the collaborative work of CC Korea volunteers. The 4.0 licenses are also now available in Czech, thanks to the work and leadership of CC community members from the Czech Republic.
For the Korean translations, the process was initiated by a group of CC Korea members as a collaborative project in 2017 and was on hold before being resumed in late 2018. The Korean translations were drafted by Soohyun Pae, professional translator and former CC Asia Pacific Regional Coordinator, and then reviewed by Jay Yoon, the former Public Lead of CC Korea who is a practicing lawyer. The final draft for review was submitted to CC HQ on Feb 8, 2019. With the kind support of the Korea Copyright Commission, the public consultation was held from Apr 1 to Apr 30, 2019 through a dedicated webpage and the announcement was made by CODE through its social media and by the Korea Copyright Commission on its website. The public consultation went smoothly and was completed with no major issues found.
Now that the Korean translations of 4.0 and CC0 licenses are available, CC Korea plans to share the news online through various channels and hold offline events to celebrate the work and promote the use of the licenses to the Korean public and local institutions.
For Czech, the process began in 2014 and went on to include input by several legal experts and two public consultations. Finally, after many drafts over the past five years, the translations went live in June 2019. The multi-year process was led by Matěj Myška, Lucie Straková, Anna Drgová, Jiří Marek, and Martin Loučka.
Congratulations and thanks to everyone for their great work and support throughout the long road to publication of these two important translations!
Many friends from the CC and open education communities have noticed my absence from meetings and conferences in the past six months. I’m ready to share why.
I was diagnosed with an auto-immune liver disease in 2005, and with liver cancer in September, 2018. The cancer was caused by the underlying liver disease. Once the cancer was diagnosed, my doctor quickly sent me to the Mayo Clinic. I spent the entire month of December in twice-daily radiation and round-the-clock chemotherapy. Bottom line: I needed a liver transplant to live.
You may have heard about the organ shortage in the United States. There are simply not enough organs available to people who need them. Most countries have similar unfortunate statistics. Want to help? Sign up to be a donor (US link) and talk to your family about your decision.
Because I was not sick enough to receive a cadaver liver, my only option was a living donor transplant. Amazingly, the human liver can regenerate itself if you cut it in two. After learning of my health status, 16 friends and family volunteered to donate part of their liver to me. To say I was overwhelmed by their generosity is an understatement.
It seemed appropriate then, when the Mayo Clinic selected my liver donor, that it would be the person who helped train me in open education – David Wiley (read David’s blog post). I have known David for over a decade. He is a friend and colleague, and he saved my life.
I am pleased to report David and I successfully completed the liver donor transplant on June 28. Without David’s generosity, I would have been dead from cancer in a year. No words can adequately express how thankful I am. His gift will both allow me to live a full, healthy life, and will enable me to work with all of you to create universal, equitable, inclusive and meaningful learning opportunities for everyone.
David is home recovering and growing his liver back to full size. I will be at the Mayo Clinic through the end of July. After the Mayo surgeons skillfully transplanted ⅔ of David’s liver into me, he and I laughed about organ remixes, if he should receive attribution, and wished we’d have asked for a CC tattoo on my new liver.
I also want to thank:
the CC staff, my CEO, and our Board for their complete and ongoing support
TJ Bliss and David’s wife Elaine who cared for David post-surgery
my partner in life, Lesley, who has been by my side throughout
It continues to be my life’s honor to work for this fine organization and with you good people, and I look forward to doing so for many years to come.
