About a month ago, CC moved its daily communications to Slack, the team messaging service popular with communities around the world. You can read more about our decision here.

What a month it’s been. We’ve seen our daily community grow to nearly 500 users, with an average of 110 people posting every day. We’ve also seen significant growth in the geographic range of our community, with dedicated channels for different regions like #cc-europe (55 members), #cc-mena (20 members), #cc-africa (22 members) #cc-latinamerica (19 members), and others. In many of these channels, communities are using their local languages to communicate and collaborate.

In addition, our IRC bridge has allowed users who prefer those tools to connect with each other without leaving their preferred tool, seeing the messages in our #general channel from their IRC clients.

One of the reasons our new tools have been so impactful is that they are free to use, registration is open to all, and we empower the members of our community to organize themselves. We’re making use of 21 Slack channels, and this system has made it simple for people to align around projects and themes. From #cc-opened to #cc-developers, you can select a community that supports your interests and give direct, real time feedback to your community members.

It should come as no surprise that commoners love chatting. We’re sending nearly 4,000 messages per week, with over 80% in public channels and direct messages to one another. We’ve also used Slack to send approximately 300 files, passing documents back and forth in order to collaborate on projects. In addition, channels like #cc-music, #cc-reads, and #cc-certificates allow commoners to engage with each other to talk about specific subjects that matter to them.

CC has never had so much daily activity in our online communities. We’re excited to report that this experiment has been a positive experience, connecting people all over the world to each other, and to the commons.

We hope you’ll be a part of the conversation. Join us on Slack!

The post A month of Slack: Growing global communities every day appeared first on Creative Commons.

Eric Phetteplace is a fellow from our first Institute for Open Leadership, held in San Francisco in January 2015. He is a librarian at California College of the Arts. 

---

I was a member of the inaugural Institute for Open Leadership in 2015. I’m the Systems Librarian at California College of the Arts (CCA), and my IOL project centered around VAULT, the school’s digital archive, which I maintain. To quote from my original proposal:

While the college has an excellent resource in its digital repository, VAULT, items are often visible only within a department; faculty hesitate to share even with the college community as a whole. What is more, this protective attitude trickles down to students in the form of assignment instructions. Faculty train the next generation of artists to lock down their creations rather than embrace sharing and remixing via the Creative Commons suite of licenses.

It has been two years since the IOL, and it is an ideal time to reflect on my project, what was accomplished, and what work remains to be done.

Progress, Slow but Sure

The prime takeaway from the Institute for Open Leadership for me related to increasing the understanding of open licenses and their benefits. As a librarian, most of my colleagues are not only aware of how important open content is, they actively advocate for it in the form of open educational resources and open access research. Librarians are inclined to sympathize with “open” as a concept, and are liable to have produced content licensed under a Creative Commons license or deposited materials in an open repository. But not everyone shares a nuanced knowledge of and appreciation for openness. The IOL, first and foremost, taught me how to clearly articulate what open means, and the tangible benefits it offers. This is evident in a presentation I gave to college administrators where I devote a great deal of time to contrasting Creative Commons licenses and dispelling myths about them. Providing examples and a space to clear up confusions was invaluable, even if my instincts told me to focus on the implementation and policy details at hand.

Secondly, the IOL helped me to identify allies and stakeholders. Obviously, as mentioned above, the libraries were a natural place to build support. However, I was also able to identify individual faculty members who were already utilizing and promoting Creative Commons content within their classes. I could better articulate the benefits of permissive licensing by putting myself in administrators’, students’, or faculty members’ shoes, and framing the conversation around their needs. While my own stance tends towards “a healthy intellectual commons produces a healthy society”, that’s often not the most persuasive point to others. Students, for instance, are intrigued by the prospect of selling their Creative Commons works, or exploring the ways in which readily shareable works are better for self-promotion.

While the IOL helped me develop a strategy for spreading open content on campus, the progress has been rather slow. When I listed the barriers to my IOL project, a few were:

• Misunderstanding or mistrust of open licenses
• FERPA and concerns around student privacy
• Personal lack of time/capacity

We’ve made substantial progress on the first two items. People I talk to on campus are likely to have a positive opinion about Creative Commons and similar efforts, and view FERPA more as a limitation than an insurmountable obstacle. However, the final hurdle has been the most challenging: on top of my other obligations, which included a couple major system implementations recently, I’ve struggled to find time to advocate for open policies. It takes a continual fight to see improvements, yet since my initial presentation there’s been relatively little change to the student and faculty work in our repository.

CC-Licensed Archives

One of the areas where the library has more control over the licensing and distribution of content is the college’s archives. The archives include both physical documents but also digital objects inside VAULT. The Libraries’ collections in VAULT totals over a thousand records, representing everything from historical photos of students from the 1960s to an accreditation report from this October. Since we are in charge of the acquisition and preservation of this content, it was relatively easy to discuss the implications of CC licenses with my library director, who was incredibly supportive of my IOL attendance. We promptly designed a licensing policy and added CC BY-NC licenses to all our public archives content.

Furthermore, I worked to increase the exposure of our archival content by ensuring our metadata records could be harvested and reused by other platforms. By configuring VAULT to publish data using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) standard, our content now appears in Calisphere—a digital library culled from many archives, libraries, and museums located in the state of California—as well as OCLC’s tremendous Worldcat database that collects the holdings of libraries worldwide. These external search engines increase the exposure of our resources and make it easier for people who never heard of California College of the Arts, much less VAULT, to discover our archives. After all, open content isn’t really that valuable if no one knows of its existence. Even if all of VAULT was openly licensed, we would still need to increase its exposure such that it’s not merely a school-wide secret.

A Culture of Open

While my primary project of loosening the licensing restrictions of VAULT has only affected archival works, as an institution California College of the Arts has been improving its understanding of and support for openness. The libraries have started a few projects which relate to Creative Commons and open access to research. For instance, in each of the past two years we hosted an Art+Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thon at a campus library. Wikipedia is one of the most prominent examples of Creative Commons content; it’s ubiquitous, a great topic for information literacy discussions, and the perfect place for students to add to the commons for the very first time. Unfortunately, Wikipedia also suffers from the topical biases that plague other encyclopedias and much of the Western academic canon: male historical figures and Anglo-European subjects are disproportionately represented. Thankfully, events like Art+Feminism exist to train new editors and to encourage people to contribute Wikipedia articles relating to female artists and feminism. We’re not only helping to balance Wikipedia’s topical coverage, but we’re also developing new, open content.

On a related note, the CCA Libraries have made a habit of participating in Open Access Week. Open Access Week is a week devoted to raising awareness around the open access movement that promotes free access to scholarly content online. As part of our participation, we’ve posted informative notices around campus and on our website, created a study guide, and run small contests to encourage faculty to engage with open access. But what’s more: we’ve gone beyond simply advocating for open access content and informing our stakeholders about its value; we’re  actually distributing open content ourselves. Now we have a small but growing Faculty Research collection in VAULT which provides a place for faculty and staff to post open access versions of their research works.

While these feats are modest, they signal a wider change around campus. Open has moved from being a subject of conversation to a subject of action. Each year, the CCA libraries’ activism expands gradually: we license more archival objects under Creative Commons licenses, we host more events surrounding open access scholarship and open content, and we see growing attendance and awareness. It will continue to be difficult to find the time the cause deserves, but we’re committed to participating in the open movement and improving our institution one step at a time.

The post Inching Towards Open at California College of the Arts appeared first on Creative Commons.

Last year, after a series of attacks on refugee centers in Berlin, I saw a Facebook post circulating from my friend Paul Feigelfeld, an academic in Berlin. The post called on his community – academics, artists, translators, and activists – to take action to stop the continued attacks on asylum seekers in Europe. That post and others like it were the spark for Refugee Phrasebook, a CC0 open data project with hundreds of contributors. Taking shape over the past year, the book has spread all over Europe, attracting global press in Wired, Newsweek, STERN, Die Zeit, and Der Spiegel, as well as winning the Prix Ars Electronica “Award of Distinction” for Digital Communities.

With 1.1 million asylum seekers in Germany, the need for language and education support is acute, and the Refugee Phrasebook helps meet that need. As both a physical and digital resource for refugees, the project has spread rapidly across Europe, and contributors are adding more languages, data, and phrases to continue to support an increasing number of refugees.

Refugee Phrasebook is accepting contributors who want to get involved and collaborate with organizations like the P2P Foundation, CC, and Wikimedia. Visit their website to contribute to their global knowledge community.

What was the impetus for the Refugee Phrasebook? How did the project come about?
The urgency of the refugee situation in the summer of 2015 made it immediately clear that language aids were needed for both refugees and helpers. Infrastructure was bad, people had short battery life on their smartphones – if they had one at all – or no data plans to use translation apps, so along with many other small simple projects, a shared document with often used phrases for basic communication and central questions spread over several Facebook groups.
It grew exponentially and was quickly transformed into a Google spreadsheet to make the data easier to expand and maintain. Hundreds of people contributed; there were anonymous contributors, brief contributors, and others on a more long term basis. People started creating the first print versions after only a few days and distributed them at train stations in Vienna or Berlin. It soon found its way to Lesbos, Idomeni, and even Norway. It spread very quickly and received a lot of positive feedback and support from private individuals and institutions like universities, art schools, and art institutions, who provided printers, design expertise, etc.

How did the Refugee Phrasebook evolve from nascency to a global project of this size? What kinds of tools, both digital and physical, helped you scale the project so rapidly? How do you organize the data and translations?
The Google spreadsheets were shared only on Facebook at first, but soon it became clear that we needed more translators beyond the initial group based in Berlin. We created a website as a contact point for contributors, and thanks to Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland e.V., we could also handle donations and provide an official donation receipt. As the media woke up to the topic, our website was also covered a lot, which helped to reach other initiatives.
To coordinate the project, we mostly use Skype or Zoom calls, Etherpads, Slack, and Trello. In several hackathons, developers helped to improve the structure of the tables and how to display them on the site. But the main factors were a strong sense of urgency, the network effect of personal recommendations, and the data being open, which is still exceptional in this field.

How do the physical and virtual interact in this project as both a virtual collection of data as well as a collection of physical booklets?
It continues to be interesting how virtual and physical realms overlap in this project. First, of course, there are very pragmatic practical problems that arise: how can we create a layout that fits as much information as possible in the best way onto as few pages as possible to keep costs down? Where can we print? This is always done differently: everyone can use the data and create and print their own booklets, or download existing print versions from our website, but often we collaborate with the people who need booklets, help raise money for printing costs, locate affordable printers, organize transport and distribution. Creating the phrasebook alone from data to print to distribution and usage is already an act of conversion and conversation.
All these aspects give us valuable feedback on how to make things easier, where the data is inconsistent, what is lacking in terms of phrases, languages, information and so on. At the moment, we are working on making the conversion from language data in the spreadsheets to printed booklets easier, so people can simply select what they want and don’t have to go through tedious conversion processes. Refugee Phrasebook is a tool for places with the worst infrastructure, which is why it has also been used as insulation during cold weather and to kindle fires. It’s a simple and versatile resource. In this case, it can be helpful to burn books.

What kinds of outcomes have you seen from sharing the data under CC0? Has the use of CC been particularly relevant in terms of your work and what you are setting out to do?
Thanks to the open CC0, the translations could be used in several apps and other translation projects. Designers used it to create signs and other communication aides, local initiatives created custom print versions.

Being able to adapt the content to a specific use was especially important for the camps, as refugees encountered different languages across Europe and often could only stay for a few days. In a situation that required urgency, we wanted everyone to be able to adapt and share the translations freely. We will continue to share content under a CC license.

The next step is an automatic solution to create custom pdf files as well as more icons.

What kinds of outcomes have you seen from this project, more generally? How have you balanced the project’s growth in terms of the usage of the physical and virtual assets as well as the ever expanding scope of a project such as this one?
The demand for print versions was a surprise at first, but electricity and wifi is often not available in refugee camps and shelters. A decentralized structure with independent and connected regional projects helped develop our community and supports the project’s growth. The printing of the phrasebooks is often organized locally. Updating the tables is a time consuming task, so feedback from helpers is an important motivation. In the last month, we saw the demand shift to the south of Europe, where current policies have moved refugees out of sight without providing substantial support. The need for shelter and welcoming culture has not diminished, and language support is only a very small part of what is necessary.

What’s next for the Refugee Phrasebook? How do you see it evolving?
Though it might be easy to start projects like this it can be harder to sustain them. At the moment we are focussing on consolidating the project while expanding the target language base to improve on translations of prominent but lesser known African languages like Tigrinya.
The growing and changing data set has been included in various other projects from the beginning, often without us even knowing about it. The evening before Refugee Phrasebook received the Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in the category Digital Communities, we received an email that someone in Washington had used it in an app.

It lives forth in apps, language learning cards, other aid websites, etc. and is a great example for open data and peer to peer.

We do not see it growing and growing, but are looking to build it into a sustainable, stable resource that is easy to use, to expand and adapt into other projects. We hope to continue to develop the global community we have established through the phrasebook.

The post A simple and versatile resource for refugees: an interview with Refugee Phrasebook appeared first on Creative Commons.

Read the Global Open Policy Report

Open Policy is when governments, institutions, and non-profits enact policies and legislation that makes content, knowledge, or data they produce or fund available under a permissive license to allow reuse, revision, remix, retention, and redistribution. This promotes innovation, access, and equity in areas of education, data, software, heritage, cultural content, science, and academia.

For several years, Creative Commons has been tracking the spread of open policies around the world. And now, with the new Global Open Policy Report (PDF) by the Open Policy Network, we’re able to provide a systematic overview of open policy development.

The first-of-its-kind report gives an overview of open policies in 38 countries, across four sectors: education, science, data and heritage. The report includes an Open Policy Index and regional impact and local case studies from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, Latin America, Europe, and North America. The index measures open policy strength on two scales: policy strength and scope, and level of policy implementation. The index was developed by researchers from CommonSphere, a partner organization of CC Japan.

The Open Policy Index scores were used to classify countries as either Leading, Mid-Way, or Delayed in open policy development. The ten countries with the highest scores are Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, France, Kyrgyzstan, New Zealand, Poland, South Korea, Tanzania, and Uruguay.

The Index scores show that open data policies are the most common, while the rarest open policies are in the heritage sector. Our data also shows a clear correlation between the scope of policy and the level of its implementation. “The Open Policy Index is the first measurement tool that aims at cross-sector comparison of policies, at global scale. The 2016 edition is a prototype which we will be developing further in coming years. We would like to double the number of indexed countries to cover all those in which Creative Commons is active,” says CC Poland’s Alek Tarkowski, one of the leaders of the project.

In his introduction, Creative Commons Public Policy Lead Timothy Vollmer calls us to action, saying that with open policies we have the opportunity, the infrastructure, and the ability to “improve educational opportunities and help solve some of the world’s toughest scientific challenges.”

This report documents global achievements from teams all over the world. Each section was written by experts in open policy in their region. Kelsey Wiens, Project Manager for the Global Open Policy Report, emphasizes the importance of communities and open policy: “We need to leverage effective open policies with vibrant, active communities to embrace, embed, and enhance policies in addition to written statements. Without communities like Creative Commons and OPN, policies are simply paper, not actions.”

Our partners in collaboration are:

Carolina Botero – Karisma Foundation (Colombia)
María Juliana Soto – Karisma Foundation (Colombia)
Laura Mora – Karisma Foundation (Colombia)
Tomohiro Nagashima – CommonSphere (Japan)
Tomoaki Watanabe – CommonSphere (Japan)
Alek Tarkowski – Centrum Cyfrowe (Poland)
Kelsey Wiens – Currently CC Canada, formerly CC South Africa (Canada)
Nicole Allen – SPARC (United States)
Delia Browne – Australia National Copyright Unit (Australia)
Baden M Appleyard – AusGOAL (Australia)
Jessica Smith – Australia National Copyright Unit (Australia)
Nancy Salem – Access to Knowledge for Development Center (Egypt)
Editor: Isla Haddow-Flood (South Africa)
Graphics: Atramento.pl (Poland)
Survey Partner: CommonSphere (Japan)

We would not have been successful without the participation and support of the Creative Commons Affiliate Network. We give thanks to all who participated in the survey, interviewed for the case studies or provided research support.

This project was a part of the Open Policy Network grants made possible by a generous donation from the Hewlett Foundation and the Open Policy Network supported by Creative Commons.

The post Solving some of the world’s toughest problems with the Global Open Policy Report appeared first on Creative Commons.

In March we hosted the second Institute for Open Leadership. In our summary of the event we mentioned that the Institute fellows would be taking turns to write about their open policy projects. This week’s post is from Alessandro Sarretta from the Institute of Marine Sciences (ISMAR), part of the Italian National Research Council.

---

2016 has been a great year for me both personally and professionally in understanding, embracing, and disseminating the culture of sharing open knowledge. One thing that really helped was my participation in the second Institute for Open Leadership (IOL), held in March in Cape Town, South Africa. Creative Commons brought together 15 fellows from 14 different countries to learn and discuss about open knowledge, and to propose a specific open policy project to be improved and supported by the contribution of other fellows and mentors.

As a researcher in the field(s) of Coastal and Marine Environment and Geospatial Information, I’m constantly dealing with data. Data are the core of science, and research has to be based on sound and reliable data.

Since at least 2002, there’s been a strong movement to allow online research outputs (referring principally to scholarly papers) to be published “free of all restrictions on access (e.g. access tolls) and free of many restrictions on use” (Open Access movement).

When talking about data, things usually get more complicated, and the open access community is still working to find the best way to allow open access to research data. One part of this requires working to convince both researchers and funders that this is the way to support better science.

In the marine community there is already a solid history of common standards for metadata and formats. There are also various portals (e.g EMODnet, Jerico) and projects (e.g. SeaDataNet) that exist for accessing a great variety of research data related to seas and oceans.

However, data policies and licences that regulate access to data are, when available, usually custom-made, requiring the filing of specific forms before use. Oftentimes these custom licenses do not clearly address the reuse of data and information.

The use of common, standard, open licences would help users to understand what they can do with the data. It would also ensure that the data providers would be able to easily share their products, with easy to understand conditions for reuse.

My goal as an IOL fellow is to inform relevant marine communities of the benefits of an open research data policy and, more specifically, to apply these principles to the practices within my institute—the Institute of Marine Sciences (ISMAR), part of the Italian National Research Council.

One of the deliverables for the Italian flagship project RITMARE (Italian research for the Sea), was to clearly define a data policy for the initiative. The document (written in Italian) defines categories of data for which different moratorium periods apply for the release of data; for all data in the project, the document requires that an open license is applied, mentioning Creative Commons licences as one of the standard options, with CC BY as the recommended first choice.

Another way to help RITMARE researchers share their data—and also ensure they receive recognition for their scientific outputs—is by launching a grant program that will provide funding for researchers who wish to publish data papers. These grants will be provided to support the payment of the article processing fees required by open access data journals. The main requirement of the funding is that researchers must deposit their data in an open access data repository under a CC BY or CC0 license.

We are working on other initiatives that represent a bottom up, collaborative research approach. Among them, two are very well established and almost finalised. First, a repository is being developed that includes digital images of both historical and recent materials belonging to multiple typologies: a historical library, that includes books, photographs, manuscripts, etc. from the end of 16th century; a collection of maps from the 16th century, mostly devoted to the Adriatic Sea and the Lagoon of Venice; an algal collection including an historical section performed during the Second World War containing more than a thousand vouchers, and a modern collection in progress. All these materials will be released under a CC BY license through two main interoperable data portals based on open source infrastructures. Second, the data from six meteo-oceanographic buoys in the Adriatic Sea, has been recently organised in a common database containing time series related to various parameters. This data will be made available as under a CC BY license and will be published an open data in a research data repository.

Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, said in a speech on “Open Innovation, Open Science, Open to the World” that researchers should be able to rely on free access to research data—and that data needs to be “Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable” (“FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship”). The Institute of Marine Science is embracing these principles by opening its data to the marine community and the wider society. While a comprehensive open data policy for the institute is not adopted, various initiatives are fully supporting this vision. We are making valuable data open and reusable using advances to technical infrastructures, standard formats, interoperable services, and Creative Commons licenses.

The post Open Practices and Policies for Research Data in the Marine Community appeared first on Creative Commons.