Drumroll, please…. after two successful years in Toronto, Canada, the 2019 Global Summit will be held in Lisbon, Portugal May 9-11 2019. Please save the date!

Since 2015, the CC Summit has nearly doubled in size. We’ve lined up two great venues to host this international event. Workshops, talks, planning sessions, and small group sessions will be held in Museu do Oriente, a vibrant new museum in a refurbished industrial building on the Alcântara Waterfront. Our keynotes and our Friday night party will be held at Cineteatro Capitólio, a major Art Deco cultural landmark that recently reopened its doors. The event will be co-hosted by CC and CC Portugal, and we owe tremendous gratitude to the CC Portugal team for their insight and assistance. We also want to congratulate and thank Teresa Nobre and Timothy Vollmer, our Program Committee Chairs, for stepping up to lead our community planning.

We’ve grown the CC Global Summit every year as hundreds of leading activists, advocates, librarians, educators, lawyers, technologists, and more have joined us for discussion and debate, workshops and planning, talks and community building. It’s a can’t-miss event for anyone interested in the global movement for the commons.

Last year’s stream and keynotes from leading global activists:

Information on programming and how you can get involved coming soon. For updates, subscribe to our Summit mailing list or join us on Slack.

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Please join CC in extending a warm welcome to three new members of the CC team! On our Product team, Alden Page and Steven Bellamy have joined us as Front End Engineer and Back End Engineer, respectively. On the fundraising and development team, we’re welcoming Jami Vass as Director of Development.

Alden Page is a backend software developer on CC’s Product team and strives to build the infrastructure that will power a rich ecosystem of applications on top of the digital commons, beginning with CC Search.

Prior to joining Creative Commons, Alden developed and operated a real-time market risk management system used by equity derivatives traders at Deutsche Bank. He also has experience contributing to free software, and worked in the ad-tech industry. Alden currently lives in New York City and enjoys cycling in his free time.

Steven Bellamy has over 15 years experience with developing interfaces for the web and architecting JavaScript solutions.

Previously, he worked on enterprise level applications for various startups, the Department of Defense, and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB). Steven currently lives in Alexandria VA, where he spends much of his time listening to jazz.

 

 

Jami Vass is excited to join the Creative Commons team as Director of Development, where she will lead global fundraising efforts to support CC’s mission. Jami brings over 17 years of diverse fundraising experience to CC.

Formerly, she led development efforts in the Southeast US at the ASPCA. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology and a Masters Certificate in Nonprofit Management. When Jami is not fundraising, she plays the piano or spends time with her horses.

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Creative Commons is pleased to announce an award of new funding in the amount of $800,000 over two years from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, in support of CC Search, a Creative Commons technology project designed to maximize discovery and use of openly licensed content in the Commons. Arcadia supports charities and scholarly institutions to preserve cultural heritage, protect the environment, and promote open access. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded more than $500 million in grants to projects around the world.

The digital commons — made up of over 1.4 billion CC licensed, public domain, and other openly licensed works — is massive, distributed, and growing. The Commons extends well beyond photos and video to include a myriad of content types — from open educational resources (OER) and scientific research to 3D models; from video games to VR landscapes. There is no larger compendium of shared human knowledge and creativity, available to everyone to reuse under simple, permissive terms. Despite the tremendous growth of the Commons and the widespread use of CC licenses, there is no simple user-friendly way to maximize discovery, use, and engagement with all of that content.

CC Search — together with the Commons Metadata Library and the Commons API — will form the Commons Collaborative Archive and Library, a suite of tools for discovery and collaboration. CC aims through the development of this suite of tools to make the global commons of openly licensed content more searchable, usable, and resilient, and to provide essential infrastructure for collaborative online communities. The project elements will feature an index of every openly licensed and public domain work on the web (the Library); an API allowing developers to query the metadata library and to develop services and integrations for content in the Commons; and CC Search, a search engine that harnesses the power of open repositories and allows users to search across a variety of open content through a single interface.

Creative Commons is deeply appreciative of Arcadia’s generous support of this work. Arcadia has previously supported Creative Commons with an award for development of an academic suite of legal tools that work in combination with CC licenses to enable and accelerate Open Access publication and expansion of the commons. We are pleased to build on that work to expand and enhance the discoverability of open resources.

For more information, contact Eric Steuer, Director of Content and Community, at eric@creativecommons.org.

Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, supports charities and scholarly institutions to preserve cultural heritage, protect the environment, and promote open access. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded more than $500 million in grants to projects around the world.

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I’m excited to share an update on the implementation of the CC Global Network Strategy, and to move forward on an important next step that will, for the first time, put the Network in the hands of the Network: the first meeting of Chapter representatives to the Global Network Council.

We started this process together in 2015, at the Global Summit hosted by CC Korea, in Seoul, South Korea. Many leaders in our community wanted to revitalize our network and help it grow, and it was soon after I had joined CC with a mandate from the Board of Directors to put community back at the center of our work.

The previous affiliate structure was top-down, where each affiliate was selected by CC HQ, and only those with a memorandum of understanding with HQ were permitted to join. The affiliates had only the rights granted by MOU, and their workplans were approved by HQ. While much good work was done, there was a desire from the community to do more, and work more collaboratively. Together, we initiated a community-driven process to evaluate, evolve, and invigorate the network.

A small group of community leaders — both new and longstanding contributors from around the world — formed a strategy committee, chaired by myself and Alek Tarkowski from CC Poland. We designed a global consultation and collaborative design process to create a new network. We commissioned independent research, and a committee of affiliates and community members explored new models and ways of engagement and governance. They reviewed hundreds of comments, and drafted a new strategy, a new charter, and a new code of conduct.

The model, built around a structure of Chapters and a Global Council, was designed by the network, and the members are being approved by the network, for the first time in our history. We decoupled the local teams from institutions to allow leading individuals to join and remain connected no matter where they went. We built clear processes, so that anyone who shared our values and had done work to contribute to the Commons could join. We also added a layer of governance that allows the network to lead the network, with partnership and support from the global organization.

To support these new Chapters, we built a network website to drive engagement and support a connected, active community. CC hired new staff to support local communities and develop a strong global ecosystem. We made our Global Summit an annual event to give us more opportunities to organize and connect. We provided financial support to local projects.

The network decided that each of its members must be endorsed or vouched by two other community members who know them personally and who know their work. It has been quite meaningful to me to be asked to vouch for community members, to share my endorsements of their accomplishments, and to read the statements others write about their colleagues to extoll their virtues and achievements over the years. We have a lot to celebrate, and much more to do.

This is a major shift, and I respect that it comes with some adjustment, especially for longtime affiliates. Change can be difficult and frustrating, and I’m grateful to each of you for working together to make it work.

Today, the new Global Network is growing rapidly, with a dozen formally-established chapters, over 252 individual members and 19 institutional members in 62 countries, and more coming online every day. We are more decentralized, collaborative, and community-led than ever before. I’m proud of the work we’ve done together, and inspired by the energy and passion for the CC community.

What’s Next?

With many Chapters now established, and many more to come, it’s time to hold the first meeting of the Global Network Council. The meeting will take place in late September or early October. We’ll canvass Chapters on the ideal times and provide lots of advance notice.

If you are in a community that hasn’t set up its Chapter yet, now is the time. Our staff are here to help — it’s a simple process of connecting with the members in your country, hosting an online meeting, and selecting a public lead and a representative to the Global Network Council. For some Chapters, there will be more structure needed, and for others it will be less formal. We’ve produced a guide to help you through the process, and there’s a #network-support channel in the CC Slack to get help from your peers.

Thank you again for all your energy and passion for Creative Commons’ community. In particular, I want to thank the network strategy group, the transition team, and the Interim Membership Council, who have all given their time to help establish the new Network. I also want to single out Claudio Ruiz, Simeon Oriko, Rob Myers, Diane Peters, Sarah Pearson, and George Hari Popescu for their work as staff to support this new strategy.

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On July 16, the first four Creative Commons Certificate courses began. Two cohorts of 25 librarians and two cohorts of 25 educators joined us from Bangladesh, Canada, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, and the US. Immediately apparent in this group is the diverse experience, impressive expertise, and personal interest participants bring to the courses. Participants have already begun working on assignments and volunteering openly licensed resources they’ve created. We are compiling a list of the participant-shared Open Educational Resources (OER) which we will share at the end of the courses.

As an instructor, I’m humbled and delighted by the chance to learn from so many new colleagues. I look forward to seeing the number of CC-certified, commons experts increase, and the network of “open” advocates grow. We also recognize that the CC Certificate course is not yet available to many people who would like access to it. We aim to increase course accessibility through a scholarship program, language translations, building instructor capacity, and other improvements. We will be working on all of these efforts over the next year.

In the short term, here are some immediate ways you can get involved.

1. We offer the CC Certificate content to everyone as OER, under the CC BY license, in downloadable, editable file formats on our website. We invite you to reuse and remix the content! Please let us know what content is useful to you and/or how you use it by emailing jennryn@creativecommons.org. Understanding how our shared content is useful to you helps us further advance a culture of sharing and engagement.
2. We are piloting work with Hypothes.is, a non-profit organization that enables anyone to annotate resources online, to make it simple for everyone to publicly add comments to the CC Certificate content. Join CC Certificate participants in this public forum for annotation of Certificate content. CC will monitor these public annotations to learn how we can make improvements to future iterations of the CC Certificate. Your feedback in this global conversation will help strengthen the course. Get involved on the CC Certificate Resources page, or annotate content directly.
3. While the CC Certificate is currently sold out for 2018, we will open 2019 course registration in the fall and look forward to sharing additional updates with you as our 2018 courses progress. For example, we will share compiled lists of CC licensed resources and projects participants generate, and invite you to use them for your own learning and advocacy efforts. Follow #cccert on Twitter, join our newsletter and check out our CC Certificate website for updates.

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