This week, we’ll be featuring stories from this year’s State of the Commons report, which highlights the impact of our global community by exploring the wide array of creativity and knowledge that is freely available to the world under under CC licenses. Read more about why this report marks our biggest year yet.

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GeoNet adopted a CC BY license in order to provide crucial, open information and quick response to earthquakes, volcanic activity, and tsunamis. Its real-time CC BY-licensed and open format data is now reused every day for emergency management, research, industry use, and by the public. GeoNet has become a core tool for global positioning systems, measuring instruments, geotechnical consultancies, local and central government, as well as for national and international universities and research organizations. In 2016, It recorded over 32,000 earthquakes and has changed the way that the public learns about and understands earthquakes through its open format.

On 14 November 2016, the day of the Kaikoura 7.8 magnitude earthquake, there were 250 million hits to the site by third party apps – people around the world wanted to know the strength of the earthquake and what that meant for them. Geonet sent out 206 million advisories that day through its app, website, and social media sites.

Due to the reach of Geonet, there is increasing information on a variety of safety protocols like where one must move to avoid tsunamis and advice about what size after-shock to expect. Worldwide, new knowledge and research has been developed through legal reuse of this licensed data.

The post State of the Commons Feature: Geonet appeared first on Creative Commons.

This week, we’ll be featuring stories from this year’s State of the Commons report, which highlights the impact of our global community by exploring the wide array of creativity and knowledge that is freely available to the world under under CC licenses. Read more about why this report marks our biggest year yet.

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The African Storybook initiative works with organizations and individuals to facilitate access to storybooks and create website tools for users to create, translate, and adapt them. So far, the initiative has created storybooks in 94 African languages with the support of 30 partner organizations across Africa.

Multiple projects in multiple countries use the website and/or storybooks with the intervention of the African Storybook project team: schools or community libraries serve as pilot sites; governments use the content on their platforms to print and distribute; and partners add to and use content in their literacy development programmes. In addition, the project serves educators who integrate the website tools and storybooks into their pre-service training programs, as well as lecturers in higher education institutions stimulating their postgraduate students to experiment with and research use of the African Storybook. The remixable content also inspired the Global African Storybook Project, which translates the stories into other languages with few resources for childhood learning.

As of September 2016 the initiative contained 730 storybooks and 2,754 translations/adaptations. In only two years, 636,803 storybooks were downloaded with an average of 4800 visitors per month, of which 2,800 are new visitors. Further, the Global African Storybook Project has produced 460 translations in 26 languages. Between 30 and 400 African Storybook titles have been republished on a variety of academic and commercial sites.

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Everything is political

With these welcoming words, Creative Common’s CEO Ryan Merkley confirmed I was in the right place. It was my first time at the global Creative Commons summit, and though I knew a bit about Creative Commons, this was my first adventure into meeting and learning from the community.

The open data community that I’m part of has a lot of overlap with the Creative Commons space. Not just because we both talk about licenses for data or content, but moreso due to our community’s enthusiasm to use tech and data and information to further our shared values – chief amongst them, a belief that open is better.

In Canada we’ve got great momentum going in terms of applying this belief to how our government works. Code for Canada has recently launched, we’ve got a new chief digital officer in Ontario, and adoption of the Open Data Charter at the federal and provincial governments. Cities across Canada are showing renewed focus on their open data plans. So how to build on this momentum of openness?

By increasing our political action. Many of us have a handle on how tech and systems work, how they can be open, how they can be applied – and yes, we’ve got lots of opinions on it all too. As a community, we need to show up more to support our governments in their work to do tech right.

When I needed a jolt of inspiration in doing this work a few years back, I watched the Internet’s Own Boy, a documentary about Aaron Swartz, in Lawrence Lessig’s words, “one of the early architects of Creative Commons”. To help share this inspiration and keep the discussion moving along, we’ll be hosting a joint movie night, put on by the Toronto Public Library, Creative Commons Canada, and the Open Data Institute of Toronto – details will be shared as we have them.

Aaron had a fierce political belief in the power of opening up information. It’s on us as a bigger and broader open community to think strategically about what we can do politically to make sure this happens. I’m excited for our communities to continue to converge and collaborate and I’m grateful for the summit experience that confirmed another global community of people keen to do this work.

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In the United States, there are two bills making their way through Congress that would require all government data to be made available in open and machine readable formats by default. The OPEN Government Data Act has been introduced in both the House of Representatives (H.R. 1770) and the Senate (S. 760). The bill would ensure that federal government data is “open, available, discoverable, and usable to the general public, businesses, journalists, [and] academics.” The legislation would codify the Obama administration’s 2013 Executive Order.

Along with the Data Coalition, Creative Commons and a group of over 80 organisations wrote to the House and Senate asking for their continued support:

First and foremost, this legislation would institutionalize the federal government’s commitment to open data and allow the United States to remain a world leader on open data. Second, adopting a policy of open by default for government data would ensure that the value of this public resource would continue to grow as the government unlocks and creates new data sets. Third, a firm commitment to providing open data as a public resource would encourage businesses, non-profits, and others to invest in innovative tools that make use of government data. And, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s review of the 2016 unanimously passed Senate bill, taking these steps would not have a significant impact on agency spending.

Another bill—the Preserving Data in Government Act of 2017 (S. 960)—has been introduced in the Senate. Similar to the OPEN Government Data Act, this bill acknowledges the importance of publishing data in open and machine readable formats. It focuses on ensuring that federal government data sets be adequately preserved for long term access and use.

The introduction of the bills are a breath of fresh air within a political environment that has jeopardized access to government data on topics such as climate change. The bipartisan support for this legislation demonstrates that sharing publicly-funded data under open licenses and in machine readable formats can be an important tool to improve access and reuse of data for both the public and private sectors.

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As a Copyright and Digital Scholarship librarian, I spend a lot of time talking to people about the rights they have to the things they create, and as an active member of the open community, I often find myself encouraging others to apply Creative Commons licenses to their work. For these reasons, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to attend and speak at the Creative Commons Global Summit in Toronto. I was looking forward to meeting a community of individuals committed to openness connected through a tool that facilitates openness in scholarship and art,but I also was new to the idea of the commons, and I was drawn to the summit partially through a deep curiosity. What – or who – made up the commons? How did they work? And how could I make my way into the heart of the open movement?

But I was also wary of this environment – a microcosm of open superheroes that could easily turn into a Batman vs. Superman situation. When you have devoted your career to advocating for a cause, it can be inspiring to see how others achieve similar goals. But it can also be difficult to be open to ways others achieve those goals, especially when they conflict with your own modus operandi. On the other hand, these events can create a self-congratulatory echo-chamber, where people are unable to engage in a meaningful and critical discourse that helps to generate meaningful, future-oriented action. At events that gather smart, hard-working, and dedicated advocates, striking this balance can be tenuous.

The Creative Commons Global Summit has set a gold standard for this balance. From the moment a smiling volunteer handed me a name-tag, I felt warm, welcome, and safe in this space. Even before the opening remarks, I met and connected with brilliant people both within the Western library world that I was familiar with, but also people from outside of libraries and academia, and people from all over the globe. So rarely can an organization succeed at creating an aura of effortless inclusivity. From the Women of the Commons colouring book under every chair, to the unveiling of New Palmyra, every action taken by the organizers was brushed with these undertones. It was unspoken but evident in each action.

This commitment to inclusivity made Ashe Dryden’s keynote all the more powerful. She began with primer on time travel –light and accessible – then she dug a little deeper. As she spoke about the importance of bringing in new voices to open, about giving people an opportunity to express themselves and to shape this space, she not only empowered every person in attendance who did not feel they had a voice in the community to speak, but the also mandated those with a voice to take a breath, step back, and listen. Her talk enabled us all to be individuals, and allowed us to feel like we are the commons. I came to Creative Commons looking for an in, but the door was always open.

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