In a couple of weeks in Toronto, we will welcome a global community of advocates working to improve education and access to information and culture through copyright reform and open policy. The summit’s Policy and Advocacy track will focus on increasing the effectiveness of our community in the current and future hotbeds of law and policy change. We hope you join us in sharing your experiences, learning about what others have been doing, and collaborating with us on education and advocacy activities.
Check out the full programme, and view some of the highlights from the Policy and Advocacy track below.
This session on Friday afternoon, led by CC Portugal’s Teresa Nobre focuses on sharing research and campaign experience on influencing the current copyright reform underway in Europe. If you want a sneak peek of what they have been doing, take a look at the campaign.
Here’s a session that will be led by Vladimir Garay from Derechos Digitales. It will build on the perspectives and lessons learned from advocating for copyright reform from Uruguay to Europe to elsewhere, and explore new ideas and approaches for law reform and open policy adoption worldwide.
Alek Tarkowski of Creative Commons Poland leads this session, building on the “State of Open Policy” report, which provides an overview of open policies in the spheres of education, heritage, science, and data. This session showcases the outcomes and tries to figure out with your help how can the 2017 report be an even better resource.
At the end of April, I’ll be joining hundreds of open culture advocates at the Creative Commons Summit in Toronto. The program is looking amazing and I’m looking forward to meeting up with friends and colleagues, both old and new.
I’ll be wearing several hats at the Summit, and I invite everyone to come and chat with me about any of them!
Greenpeace
To begin with, I can’t wait to be in a place where people believe that “sharing is at the core of successful societies”. I want to talk about how we’re all sharing this critical asset: Our Planet. All of us need to collaborate on ecological issues – it’s the only way we’re going to solve some of the global problems we’re facing.
At Greenpeace, we’re redesigning our global web presence to engage with people and to help them act on behalf of our planet. The project, code named Planet 4, is the first openly run project of its size at Greenpeace International. In the workshop “Negotiating for Open”, we’ll use Planet 4 as a case study and explore open decision and design frameworks to help you and your organization establish relationships that can achieve global impacts.
User-driven and community-based design projects are impactful and fulfilling. In the redesign of Greenpeace.org a remix of the Open Decision Framework, the Open Design Kit and community collaboration is of highest importance. In this interactive session, I’d like to share my experiences in a hands-on way. Participants can bring their ideas, their businesses, their strategic directions, and together we’ll help each other set up structures and processes that invite people in. We’ll give advice, talk through issues and create a working atmosphere that helps people solve real world problems.
The open community is full of people with the skills and attitudes that could truly affect global change. I’m hopeful that wearing my Greenpeace hat will help open advocates see the value in sharing with activists and contributing to the environmental movement.
Image by Bryan Mather, We Are Open Coop
We Are Open Co-op
Not only do we all need to understand how our planet fits into the idea of the Commons, we need to talk about openness outside of what we call Open Source or Open Culture communities. Building bridges is the future of the commons. I want to help find and illuminate connections between different communities.
I’ve spent my career working at the crossroads between technology and a variety of different industries, leading to the combinations of: Technology + Media, Technology + Education, Technology + Activism. Spreading the beliefs, processes and culture of open from the tech community and into other sectors is part of the reason I am a founding member of the We Are Open Coop. Open principles and practices have gone mainstream in the past few years – from open government to open data, open science to open education, we’re working to connect people to the ideals of open.
Over the last year it’s also become more and more clear to me how much open and co-ops have in common. Reading Hal Plokin’s excellent post and attending the Open: 2017 Platform Cooperatives conference are just two recent things that have me thinking about finding ways to translate between open communities and co-op communities. Along with Doug Belshaw, a fellow co-founder of the We Are Open Co-op, I’ll be running a session called “Help us forge links between co-ops and the commons”.
By the end of this session, we hope to have some sort of an artefact that visualizes or structures the commonalities between the Open Movement and the Co-op Movement. We’ll build off the International Principles of Co-operation to create amap or framework (or comic strip!) to help people from both movements understand how they can work together to build a most just and equitable world.
More things to talk to me about
I’m looking forward to digging in deep and having meaningful discussions about sharing, community, and collaboration. I’m bound to get into a discussion about the work we’re doing at Opensource.com, and I always have plenty of thoughts on open education, remix, diversity and inclusion…Basically, just come find me and let’s see what we have to talk about. You can also reach out on twitter in advance of the Summit.
Let’s see how our sharing helps light up the commons.
This week a coalition of scholarly publishers, researchers, and nonprofit organizations launched the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a project to promote the unrestricted open access to scholarly citation data. From the website:
Citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an explanation for how we know facts. They allow us to attribute and credit scientific contributions, and they enable the evaluation of research and its impacts. In sum, citations are the most important vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge.
There’s now open citation data from 14 million scholarly papers. Both open access and subscription-based scholarly publishers are contributing to the project. These publishers include the Association for Computing Machinery, PLOS, Wiley, SAGE Publishing, Springer Nature, eLife, Taylor & Francis, and many others.
The goals of project is to promote the availability of data on citations that are “structured, separable, and open.” According to the I4OC website:
Structured means the data representing each publication and each citation instance are expressed in common, machine-readable formats, and that these data can be accessed programmatically. Separable means the citation instances can be accessed and analyzed without the need to access the source bibliographic products (such as journal articles and books) in which the citations are created. Open means the data are freely accessible and reusable.
In order to ensure that the data are freely accessible and reusable, the structured citation metadata will be published using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, which means that the data may be used without restriction. CC0 enables creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.
Congratulations to I4OC on the launch of this important initiative. We hope that the open sharing of citation data can aid in the discoverability of all types of research, and generate new and interesting connections in our understanding of scientific and scholarly works.
It’s been a big year for community at Creative Commons. At summit we’ll move ahead on the Global Network Strategy. We have identified platforms for people to start analysing and have network discussions for deeper conversations. The Global Network Strategy began at the last Global Summit in Seoul in 2015. No doubt you’ve either read the document, participated in a webinar or in person meeting or joined the Slack channel. This is the first time CC has spent time seriously looking at the affiliate network and the broader community. We heard you, we’re ready to jump in.
credit: Lara the Yellow Ladybird , Illustrated by Catherine Holtzhausen , Written by Martha Evans, Designed by Nadene Kriel, CC-BY 4.0
With all this energy, the Community & Movement track is filled with new voices as well as established members. If you want to learn how CC licenses work in the wild, be sure to visit the session with projects like Book Dash, African Storybook Initiative and Pratham in their session Addressing the Scarcity of Multilingual Reading Resources for Children.
Look out also for a discussion on CC in the South Seas: Lessons Learned in Aotearoa New Zealand from CC New Zealand Public Lead Elizabeth Heritage. CC New Zealand has always been a strong team, with effective newsletters and content, and this talk is sure to be inspiring to community members of all types.
Open Science nerds don’t worry! We’ve got you covered in Community & Movement. Brian Bot from SAGE Bionetworks will be there to share insights on their project in decentralized biomedical research ecosystems. Interested in hadron colliders? The ATLAS experiment at CERN is will be in Toronto to talk about Outreach and Education by large Scientific (or just Physics) collaborations.
Ready to get your hands dirty and dig in? Open educational resources (OER), Galleries, libraries and Museums (we call them ‘GLAM’), and copyright reform they will have their own space to discuss in depth regarding their actual challenges and how our movement will actively contribute to those spaces. No matter what your level of experience, join the conversation!
In addition, at summit we have three great discussions: one on Building a Culture of Gratitude and another called How Can we Work Together? Another exciting session is called Thinking BIG for the Commons.
Come find your people at the Community & Movement track! In the meantime, you can find me on Slack in the #cc-summit channel. Looking forward to seeing you in Toronto.
An interview with Dave Mitchell of Beautiful Trouble
After Occupy and the Arab Spring in 2011, the artist-activists of Beautiful Trouble burst on the scene with a number of seasoned professionals ready to change the dialogue by utilizing creative, radical protest. Since then, the organization has created a number of invaluable online resources for social movements through their online book (CC BY-NC-SA), technology tools, case studies, and network mapping across societal and international boundaries.
Dave Mitchell, one of the founders of Beautiful Trouble, describes their goal as to “make social movements more creative, more effective, and more likely to win,” and credits CC licensing with enabling them to adopt a modular, agile approach that contributes to their message of social good. Focusing on social movements around the world, the book, game, toolbox, and litany of online and offline resources provides a much needed dose of unity, levity, and practical focus in a divisive political era.
The Beautiful Trouble toolbox can be found online, and the organization is creating a number of new tools to support social movements, including a chatbot and a game. In addition, their network of in-person artist-activist trainers provide vital resources both online and offline to support change agents around the world.
Workshop in Oaxaca, MX. Photo by Dave Mitchell
Beautiful Trouble is a toolbox for revolution, a training manual, a collection of case studies, a network map, and more. What was the impetus to start this collection of resources? Why is it important for people to be able to access a toolbox like this online?
Beautiful Trouble emerged in 2011, the year of Occupy and the Arab Spring, and with much the same creative DNA as those flashpoints. We set out to create a common platform where people could come together to share experiences, learn from the ideas and innovations of organizers all over the world, contribute their own ideas, get inspired, get involved, make something happen.
We wanted to popularize the idea that social change isn’t about just mindlessly repeating the same tactics over and over again — but also that it isn’t rocket science. That many small groups of clowns and pranksters can change the world; indeed, maybe it’s the only thing that ever has.
While Beautiful Trouble is best known in its book form, from the beginning it has also been accessible online, where so many of us live. And because it’s modular, interlinking, and constantly expanding, it lives more comfortably online. Now we’re experimenting with letting people access the toolkit as a chatbot, accessible through various messaging apps like Telegram, Slack, and Facebook Messenger.
Beautiful Trouble Workshop in Oaxaca, MX by Dave Mitchell.
Why did you decide to license your work under CC BY-NC-SA? How does the CC licensing play into your work?
Creative Commons licensing made sense to us both politically and practically. Politically, our goal is to make social movements more creative, more effective, and more likely to win, and we believe that happens by promoting the kind of agile, creative and modular thinking that Beautiful Trouble embodies.
Basically, we want the ideas in Beautiful Trouble to become common knowledge — to be used, shared, repurposed, translated, adapted — so it made no sense to throw barriers of intellectual property in the path of that, beyond those required by our excellent and supportive publisher.
Practically, as the project took shape, we realized how much of it involved referencing and codifying other people’s ideas and methods. We tried always to give credit where it was due, but we also never wanted to suggest that any one person (certainly not us) owns any of the concepts or methods we included. Creative Commons licensing was one way to signal all of that.
World Social Forum Workshop, by Dave Mitchell.
“Artist-activists” are at the heart of Beautiful Trouble’s work. How do you define “artist activists?” How does someone join your network?
“Artist-activist” is such an awkward, artless term — we really struggled to come up with something better… artivist? pranktivist? bohemshevik? Nothing quite fit, but what we wanted to signal was the marriage of two distinct worlds: the elegance, eye for detail, and outside-the-box creativity of the art world with the time-bound, eyes-on-the-prize, immediate-results focus of the organizer. That sweet spot is where minds and hearts open and revolutions take flight, and it’s something anyone can (and should!) seek to embody in their work. Folks who want to pitch us an idea can drop us a line at getintouch@beautifultrouble.org.
How do you define “the commons?”
The commons represents our best hope for a liveable future. It’s an important enough concept to us that we included it as one of the ‘theories’ in the book, in a piece written by Peter Barnes. In that piece, he proposes that by building a system that protects and expands our common wealth rather than one that exploits it, we can address both our ecological and social imbalances.
What kinds of stories can you tell about your work and how you support global social movements? What kinds of wins are you celebrating? What has your work looked like since November? Has it changed?
For the past few years we’ve been busy working with ActionAid and activists from across the Global South to document the tools and tactics of creative activists operating under authoritarian regimes. That project is available online at beautifulrising.org, and will be published this year as Beautiful Rising: Creative Resistance from the Global South (OR Books).
After last November’s presidential election, that focus on authoritarian regimes is sadly much more relevant and timely for activists in the United States. Specifically in response to the Trump moment, we’ve started a “Trouble vs. Trump” series to update our toolbox for the current moment. We’ve been hard at work expanding our training program to meet the explosion of interest in nonviolent direct action training, and we’ve just launched a resistance hotline to help support the surge of new progressive activists planning their first actions and campaigns.
Creative Action Training in NYC, by Dave Mitchell
You have a number of projects in addition to Beautiful Trouble including Beautiful Rising, Climate Action Labs, and Beautiful Solutions as well as your in-person trainings for activists. How do you balance this work?
Much like the book we produced, we’re basically a modular organization — a motley crew of activists, trainers and editors scattered around the globe who are organizing horizontally together to spin out related projects that align with our goal of making social movements more creative and effective. That loose structure means we’re able to respond fairly quickly to new opportunities, but also that we sometimes struggle to keep everything running smoothly, since we’ve got no central office, no dedicated development director, and a dispersed leadership structure. Somehow we’ve managed to produce a lot of great tools and keep all the plates spinning so far. Folks who want to support this juggling act are welcome to kick in a few bucks on our Patreon page, and get a copy of our next book as a token of our thanks.
As a bunch of communicators, what do you think messaging is going to look like on the left in the upcoming months and years? What should it look like?
There’s a battle raging right now for the future of the electoral left. It has taken different forms in different countries, but at its core, that struggle is over whether or not the traditional left/liberal parties can be repurposed to present a compelling, broad-based, radical alternative that speaks to people’s 21st-century fears and frustrations, hopes and dreams, or whether these parties will continue to play the role of neoliberalism’s good cop. The outcome of that battle will basically determine whether or not we can bring the fight for a better future from the margins to the mainstream.
Another way to say it: the left needs to get much better at speaking to people’s values hopes, and desires for a better future, and then put that messaging to work in service of a shared political project.
