Imagine a Vilhelm Hammershøi painting printed out and hung over your fireplace, a 3D printed sculpture in your garden, or maybe a party that mixes Spotify playlists with an opera singer performing romantic songs in front of the newly acquired Friedrich’s painting. Sounds like something John Lennon dreamed up in the song “Imagine?” These are actual examples of a museum keeping up to date and using technology to its advantage.

Engaging with users: a closer look at the strategies of GLAM institutions

After almost 30 years of “the modern internet” and ten years of “Internet 2.0,” we already know that technology won’t open all the doors. As GLAM (Galleries Libraries Archives and Museums) practitioners our objective is clear: how can we make sure people stay connected to knowledge and heritage, and become inspired by it? How can technology be our ally?

Heritage institutions improve accessibility and access to knowledge, art, and culture. . In addition to access, they also provide the inspiration and building blocks for further innovation and creativity. How can the (digitised) commons serve as the means to both heritage institutions’ and their audiences’ ends? What are the different institutional strategies and user behaviours related to them? What works and what doesn’t in delivering access, use and reuse? To what extent are CC licenses already promoting this? And, last but not least: why?

We are going to address these questions during our Creative Commons Summit 2017 session. The idea behind the session is to shift the conversation from the abstract ideas and values to the actual institutional strategies and user behaviours. Our implicit hypothesis is that the only way for the commons to stay relevant over time is for increased usage. The context of who and how they can be used is, on the other hand, ever-changing. There are no absolute responses. The research that has already been done in a field will serve as a point of reference and a context for studying particular examples. We propose to explore the examples of how GLAM institutions successfully engaged the users basing on their (different) behaviours, rather than assumptions or declarations. And we welcome participants’ own reflections on both the present, and future, of heritage institutions’ use of open licenses to deliver creativity and innovation.

Our session will kick off with presentations and later take up a form of an open discussion. Let’s talk commons, and let’s talk GLAM. You are invited. See you in Toronto!

The post How Can The Commons Stay Relevant? Let’s Talk GLAM. appeared first on Creative Commons.

Nearly a quarter of the participants coming to the Creative Commons Global Summit in Toronto, CA from April 28–30 are scholarship recipients. They are representatives from a variety of communities and issues, including free and open culture, copyright reform, GLAM, open education, and global information systems. They represent every CC world region, with the majority coming from Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.

Of the 95 scholarship recipients, 23% are from Africa, 18% are from Latin America, 29% are from Europe, 18% are from Asia-Pacific and 6% are from the Arab World. In addition, we’ve nearly doubled our scholarship numbers this year both in terms of community participation and organizational funding. This is a big investment for CC, and we’re proud to support our community members to help them join the conversation.

Through our scholarship program, we are creating a healthy community by recognizing and engaging with gender, cultural, and geographical diversity in order to fulfill our organizational mission of a vibrant commons and community. As you’ll see, the diversity of the scholarship recipients extends beyond geography in order to provide opportunities to summit first timers as well as CC veterans and moves the community conversations beyond licenses toward advocacy, art, law, education, usability, and growth of the commons.

Creative Commons believes that providing pathways to participation is crucial to our goal of lighting up the commons and we’re proud to support so many participants from our Global Community. Below, read about some of the ways our community is looking forward to engaging during the summit and beyond.

Lia Hernandez, CC Panama Legal City Leader

I am almost ready to attend the CC Global Summit in cold Toronto. I am so excited because its my first global summit and I am looking forward to meeting all of you in real life.

Christian Villum, CC Denmark

As always, I look forward to the summit in order to reconnect with the global community and have important discussions that help drive forward the expansion of the global knowledge commons. Specifically I am excited to be part of a few of the sessions around new open business models because I believe this to be a cornerstone in building the future that we want.

Cherubim Mawuli Amenyedor, CC Ghana

I’m excited about the summit because I will get to meet, share and learn from equally passionate and knowledgeable community members working tirelessly to explore the future of the Commons and sharing for users, creators and activists.I’m grateful to CC for providing the needed platform to free-up the results of creative work for re-use, sharing and collaboration. I believe this will help me unlock Africa’s creative potential in the digital economy.

Leslie Chan, University of Toronto Scarborough

Usually I have to travel to attend conferences of this scale, and it is a nice change to welcome the world to Toronto instead. I am committed to ensuring that the Web will continue to be inclusive and open to diverse knowledge making and sharing, and I am looking forward to meeting so many like minded folks and to share experience. I will be speaking on Lessons from Failures in Open Advocacy and how I would do things differently on Sunday morning April 30.

Dimitar Dimitrov, Wikimedia Brussels

I have always believed that instead of several parallel movements we are one big free and open movement. I am particularly excited to meet the great girls and guys who are actively working on freeing up creativity and knowledge in Africa.

Paula Eskett, CC New Zealand

I’m most excited about the amazing speaker lineup and connecting and learning from the other Summit participants, but can’t deny the obvious excitement of traveling to the other side of the world too!

Last year I was so lucky to be part of IOL2 — a life changing learning experience, and I’ve recently joined the CC Aotearoa New Zealand Advisory Panel as an education representative.

As a professional librarian I see CC and Open as integral to the sustainability and future focused thinking of all libraries regardless of sector, and strongly believe in libraries providing equitable access to information and spaces to create and share new knowledge.

I’ll be delivering a session Friday 4pm : Preloading not backfilling : Preparing our children for a life of Open.

Mohamed Rahmo, CC Morocco

I’m excited about the summit because I will meet my open counterparts from all over the world. I’m from Morocco and I have an idea for all the people of the CC community in the world — I would like to launch a global content creation day, and I will advocate about the copyright policy back home so I want to learn from the other people. Back home we will also start a series of workshops to educate people about CC.

John Weitzmann, CC Germany

I’m excited about the CC Global Summit because it is most important and inspiring to meet many of the fantastic people in the network in person. My connection with the CC idea is based on the fact that such legal tools are simply necessary as long as the defaults of the law continue to hinder exchange and sharing.

Bastian Greshake, Germany

I’m super excited to finally meet all of the commoners again, as we’re not getting the chance to meet in person that often. I’m involved as I’m running a website that uses Creative Commons to enable research by putting genomes into the public domain. While I’m a strong believer in all things open*, my professional background makes me especially interested in the Academic Commons, that’s why I’ll be facilitating a session on “Towards the Scholarly Commons” on Saturday from 2:30–3:30PM.

Kayode Yussuf, CC Nigeria Tech Lead

I am a member of the CC Africa . School of Open team, I was a member of the CCSummit program committee and I plan and execute CC Nigeria’s projects.

I am excited to attend the Global Summit because I’d get the opportunity to meet with community members in real life. I am also looking forward to seeing the CCSummit program play out. The committee did a lot of work, making calls, sharing documents across several times zones to put the program together. As one of the committee members put it — this will be the best summit ever.

Carlos Guerrero, Hiperderecho, Peru

I’m really excited about the summit because it’s a big opportunity to share experiences and to enhance the ecosystem of CC. I’m especially enthusiastic about the work on my region; Latin America. Nos vemos ahí!

Clint Lalonde, CC Canada

I have been involved with the CC community for a number of years through my work with Open Educational Resources, and believe that the work of CC is vitally important in empowering people to fully maximize the affordances of new and emerging digital technologies. This will be my first CC Global Summit and, while I am looking forward to connecting with others working in the OER space, I am very excited at the opportunity to connect and learn more about the burgeoning Platform Co-operative movement and am happy to see the connections being made between the CC community and this exciting new movement.

Yi-hsuan Lin, CC Taiwan

I am mainly in charge of the license translation/localization issues. I’m excited to participate in the summit and I’m looking forward to networking with others who have reconciled 4.0 license issues.

Thanks for CC HQ for providing me this great opportunity to participate 2017 CC global summit!

Aristarik Maro, Public Lead CC Tanzania

I’m so excited about the 2017 summit because I’ll get to meet community members from different parties of the world, some of who I have been communicating with online in real life!! & some of which are new to me but hoping to hook up and network. I am thankful to CC for the support especially the establishment of the countries’ affiliate teams where we network. I’ll participate in most interesting sessions and use CC communication tools to support the Global Movement in my country.

Maxwell, economics student and open textbook advocate at University of Victoria

I got truly involved with CC while working with a professor to develop an open textbook for microeconomics. I’m excited about the summit because I’ll get a chance to immerse myself in the CC environment and learn about the many aspects it has beyond just open education! I’m involved with CC because I see the potential it has to make education more innovative and more accessible.

Marcela Basch, Buenos Aires

I can’t wait to get to Toronto and meet the amazing global CC community. I run El plan C, a digital magazine on collaborative economy, free culture and commons, with special focus on Latin America. The future of the commons and collaboration is one of my main areas of interest, so I’m eager to participate on that track and be able to discuss with people who’s been thinking about that from other points of view, geographically and culturally speaking. Almost at the end of the meeting I’ll be hosting a session on this topics, “What is exactly a commons oriented initiative and how could it be sustainable?”, on Sunday 4pm. Spoiler: I don’t really have answers yet, but I hope we could think it through together.

Shahadu Sadik, Wikipedia Ghana

I am an editor on Wikpedia, a blogger and a technology enthusiast. I love open education.

I am super excited to be a part of this year’s Creative Commons Global Summit in Toronto Canada. I just can’t wait to meet people from across the globe to share and discuss issues relating to Creative Commons and its sister projects.

Megan Beckett, CC South Africa Public Lead

I’m passionate about advancing access to education and life changing learning experiences in my country. CC tools and licenses have been an integral part in enabling the far reaching impact of the work we’ve done at Siyavula Education in OER collaborative development and communities of practice. I’ve also recently joined CC South Africa as the Public Lead. I’m really looking forward to the Summit to be inspired, to learn and to engage with CC and openness more broadly in the international community, whilst finding out what works for others locally.

Elizabeth Oyange, Copyright Associate for Aga Khan University (global), based in Nairobi, Kenya

I look forward to attending the CC Summit for a broader perspective on the various program areas, the keynote speeches and meeting like-minded CC’ers from all corners of the world. This community involvement and networking will allow us to disseminate current views and CC information and hopefully contribute our institutional insight.

Calú (Carlos) Raul Correa Loyola, CC Ecuador

I don’t believe in copyright lottery, obstacles to science and knowledge access, and old-fashioned ways to create. I’m very excited to attend CC Summit because we can push forward all Internet potential, driving a new era of development, growth and productivity. I would like promote this potential in my country, sharing and applying this ideas on widespread arenas with my partners and colleagues.

Guido Gamba, CC Argentina

I’m looking forward to the summit and to meet fellow colleagues from the commons all around the world. I’ve been involved with the network for quite some time already–in fact, this is not my first global summit! Regardless, I’m excited and anxious as if it was my first one. I believe that CC is a vivid example that things can be done otherwise, in a more just and fair way, and it’s always thrilling to meet with so many people people who feel the same way. I’ll be participating in two sessions: “Faces of the Commons: How Can the People of Creative Commons Change the World?” (Friday 13:30h) and “Building a Culture of Appreciation for the New Global Network” (Saturday 16:00h). I hope to see you there!

Hilman Fathoni, Creative Commons Indonesia (CCID), Legal Lead

Aleck Ncube, CC Zimbabwe

Freyja van den Boom, Researcher and Project Manager Future TDM

Hildah Nyakawa, Executive Director at Jamlab, CC Kenya

I’m excited about the summit because I’ll be able to meet and interact with fellow Open Education contributors and enthusiasts.

I have been hosting School of Open sessions here in Kenya and at the summit I’ll be co-hosting a session with P2PU on Learning Circles on Saturday from 11:30 am to 12 noon.

The post Meet CC: Voices from our Global Summit Scholarship Recipients appeared first on Creative Commons.

CC’s community grew up around the licenses, but over the past decade it has evolved into a powerful and diverse movement of interests and areas of work including open policy, open education, access to research and data, and cultural sharing. While those communities grew naturally, CC has never had a model for collaboration, shared goal-setting, and mobilizing action. The new network strategy, for the first time, creates a simple structure to enable global collaboration and action.

The Global Network will identify and collaborate on a series of shared interests and priorities, which we have called Platforms. A Platform is an area of work, a space for individuals and institutions to organize and coordinate themselves across the broad network. It’s open to anyone inside and outside the Creative Commons Global Network to support, share experience and collaborate on its goals and objectives. Through Platforms, we want to initiate strategic collaboration between network members that will have worldwide impact.

We are using the opportunity of this Global Summit to open the conversation about designing Platforms in several ways. On Friday, just after the opening, we will host a session called Programs for the New CC Global Network: How Can We Work Together? (Friday 13:30 – 15:00), where we expect to talk about the future work our community would like to be engaged to work in the future and have a big picture conversation about it. On Sunday (13:30 – 15:30), there will be a session called A Platform for Big Thinking about CC, a follow up session to the first, where we expect to think really big about the Future of the Commons, both in terms of challenges surrounding CC but also the Digital Commons.

Then, we will have specific sessions on Platforms related to the Open Education Platform (Friday 15:00 – 16:50), Copyright Reform (Saturday 15:30 – 18:00) and Open GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) (Sunday 13:30 – 15:30). And, strongly connected with this community-driven effort, we also scheduled a specific session on Building a culture of appreciation for the new Global Network (Saturday, 16:00 – 17:30) where we expect to open a conversation about requirements, needs and tools we would like to see to make our community strengthen and grow healthy and diverse.

While participating in the Summit, and especially leading sessions, please keep in mind the possibility of establishing a platform around a shared issue of interest. We have prepared guidelines for people interested in proposing a platform.

The CC Summit is an exciting opportunity for global collaboration and action. Summit participants will begin to share their goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics and lead a global conversation towards a stronger commons and community through an open invitation that starts at Summit, but will continue through the year, and beyond.

The Summit is the beginning of this conversation as well as the beginning of a big experiment in working together. By proposing a platform early on, you can join this early phase of testing how platforms will function. If you have ideas about CC platforms, please share them on social media using #ccplatforms hashtag and in our Slack. We would be very happy to see a broad range of platforms being discussed. Join us.

The post Platforms: A commons-based approach to global collaboration appeared first on Creative Commons.

Our new book was released to Kickstarter backers today and will be available at the CC Global Summit and in wide release May 5.

For the last year and a half, Creative Commons staff Sarah Hinchliff Pearson and Paul Stacey have been writing a Kickstarter backed book about sharing and open business models called Made With Creative Commons.

Here’s a short excerpt:

“When we began this project in August 2015, we set out to write a book about business models that involve Creative Commons licenses in some significant way — what we call being Made with Creative Commons. With the help of our Kickstarter backers, we chose twenty-four endeavors from all around the world that are Made with Creative Commons. The mix is diverse, from an individual musician to a university-textbook publisher to an electronics manufacturer. Some make their own content and share under Creative Commons licensing. Others are platforms for CC-licensed creative work made by others. Many sit somewhere in between, both using and contributing creative work that’s shared with the public. Like all who use the licenses, these endeavors share their work — whether it’s open data or furniture designs — in a way that enables the public not only to access it but also to make use of it.

We analyzed the revenue models, customer segments, and value propositions of each endeavor. We searched for ways that putting their content under Creative Commons licenses helped boost sales or increase reach. Using traditional measures of economic success, we tried to map these business models in a way that meaningfully incorporated the impact of Creative Commons. In our interviews, we dug into the motivations, the role of CC licenses, modes of revenue generation, definitions of success.

In fairly short order, we realized the book we set out to write was quite different from the one that was revealing itself in our interviews and research.

It isn’t that we were wrong to think you can make money while using Creative Commons licenses. In many instances, CC can help make you more money. Nor were we wrong that there are business models out there that others who want to use CC licensing as part of their livelihood or business could replicate. What we didn’t realize was just how misguided it would be to write a book about being Made with Creative Commons using only a business lens.”

The book we ended up writing is so much more than what we set out to do. Made With Creative Commons started as a book about business models, but it ultimately became a book about sharing. Part analysis, part handbook, part collection of case studies, we see Made With Creative Commons as a guide to sharing your knowledge and creativity with the world, and sustaining your operation while you do. It makes the case that sharing is good for business, especially for companies, organizations, and creators who care about more than just the bottom line. Full of practical advice and inspiring stories, Made with Creative Commons is a book that will show you what it really means to share.

We’re thrilled to announce Made With Creative Commons is now ready for release. It will first be released to our Kickstarter backers April 21, 2017 and print copies will be distributed April 28, 2017 to all attendees of the Creative Commons Global Summit. The book will be officially made available to the public on May 5, 2017 at madewith.cc. You can pre-order copies on Amazon now.

We can’t thank our backers, case study interviewees, and Creative Commons colleagues enough for their support and encouragement. Writing Made With Creative Commons transformed and inspired us. We hope it inspires you too.

The post Made with Creative Commons: Available at the CC Summit appeared first on Creative Commons.

In the fall of 2016, a small Toronto-based civic tech group convened around a question: What if we could use technology to connect municipal campaigners and enable them to share knowledge and tools in an open resource kit across traditional geographic and partisan divides?

We were motivated by the significant advantage incumbents enjoy as well as an appreciation of the potential impact thousands more well-run, digitally-savvy campaigns could have on our democracy.

At their best, local campaigns are ideal learning environments for skills to drive community change. They can be:

• Relevant – Issues often directly affect all community members.
• Independent – In jurisdictions with no political parties, individual candidates must make a direct appeal to voters based on their own track record and ideas.
• Diverse – Campaigns draw teams of volunteers across professional, class, ethnic and partisan lines.
• Entrepreneurial – They’re low-resource pressure-cooker environments that form meaningful bonds between community volunteers.
• Risky – Campaigns are time-limited and election day provides a built-in failure mechanism.
• Important! Campaign volunteers make our system of representative government possible by helping civic leaders find their public voice and run for office.

Despite the significant role election campaigns play in our democratic system, the process of planning and managing a successful ground campaign remains a mystery to the average citizen.

DemocracyKit

In October 2016, we founded the Open Democracy Project and launched an Indiegogo campaign that raised $31K – enough to develop the first version of DemocracyKit. Upon release April 25, 2017, DemocracyKit will have a searchable campaign resource library, community directory and campaign orientation with five modules: Explore, Build Your Team, Create a Plan, Choose Technology and Run a Campaign. Documents are stored in Google Drive to facilitate editing by a distributed team of contributors and editors and made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) licence.

Your Input

Open Democracy Project is a distributed team and we use the same technology and tactics as the municipal campaigns we’re preparing to serve. Currently, we meet weekly in Toronto and Ottawa, Ontario and have volunteers organizing to launch this summer in Alberta.

We’re in the process of drafting a 2-year strategic plan and are keen for input on how best to structure the organization to allow for growth and partnerships across Canada and abroad.

We would appreciate your input. Please join our Creative Commons Global Summit workshop on April 29, 5 – 6pm.

Workshop Agenda

1. Introduction to the Open Democracy Project
2. DemocracyKit walkthrough
3. Workshop & feedback:

• Feedback on Mission, Vision, Values
• Preparing to expand in Canada
• Preparing to partner internationally

Hope to see you there!

The post Driving community change through campaigning: Open Democracy Project at the CC Summit appeared first on Creative Commons.