It’s been a very frightening evening and a sombre morning. We are all worried for our friends around the world who are at risk. Last night we saw the attacks in Paris in Beirut, but we also know that this kind of violence is sometimes a daily reality in countries around the world not so fortunate to even merit coverage by the mainstream media. That’s not meant to diminish the horror of what happened yesterday, but to acknowledge that we have friends everywhere who are at risk, and who may need our help.

As news of the Paris attacks was breaking, CC was publishing a post to bring attention to new rumours that our friend Bassel may have been sentenced to death in Syria, and to invite him to become a CC fellow — which only highlights for me that the world is a dangerous place, even for those who only wish to do good things.

Last night, as Parisians fled the attacks, the hashtag #PorteOuverte was being used for those who didn’t feel safe to go home. Strangers took each other in. Even in the face of evil and fear, people helped. The desire to take care of each other is so much more powerful than the urge to harm.

To all of you, take care of each other. My hope is that we will respond to hatred with love, and combat fear with openness.

Ryan Merkley
CEO, Creative Commons

Bassel Khartabil by Joi Ito, CC BY 2.0.

Bassel Khartabil is the lead of Creative Commons Syria. He’s been has been imprisoned in Syria since March 15, 2012. Bassel has been a key contributor to projects that digitize, preserve, and share cultural heritage works. The #NEWPALMYRA project was launched last month, which is an online community platform and data repository dedicated to the capture, preservation, sharing, and creative reuse of data about the ancient city of Palmyra. The project features 3-D models of ruins from Palmyra created by Bassel.

In recognition of this work, Creative Commons is offering Bassel a position as Digital Cultural Preservation Fellow. His numerous and impactful contributions to the open web and the commons has always inspired collaboration, community, and the sharing of culture and knowledge. As a Creative Commons Fellow, Bassel can continue the important work he started years ago.

The Creative Commons Board of Directors called for Bassel’s immediate and safe release in a resolution at its most recent meeting.

The stakes have been raised even higher for Bassel. In October we heard that Bassel had been transferred from Adra Prison to an unknown location, with no other information provided. Now, there’s even more dire news. Noura Ghazi Safadi, Bassel’s wife, wrote on Facebook yesterday that his life is in immediate danger. English translation from Arabic provided here:

I’ve just gotten disturbing and shocking news that Bassel has been sentenced to death. I think this means that the transfer to military prison was very dangerous. I really don’t know other news. May God help him, we hope it’s not too late. We are worried sick about his life.

The EFF published this call for Bassel’s release at the Internet Governance Forum in João Pessoa, Brazil:

The Internet community calls on the governments of the world to reach out to the Syrian authorities immediately and urge them to reveal Bassel’s condition and location to his family and legal representatives, and to exercise clemency in his case.

Bassel’s detention is arbitrary and in violation of international human rights law. The refusal of the authorities to reveal his whereabouts is an enforced disappearance. His prosecution do not meet the standards of a fair trial. Bassel can and should be unconditionally released to the care of his family.

Guest post by Fátima São Simão, CC Portugal Public Lead; Teresa Nobre, CC Portugal Legal Lead

CC Toolkit for Business Handouts
CC Toolkit for Business Posters
CC Toolkit for Business Videos (ENG + PT)
CC Open Business Model Canvas

At the 2013 CC Global Summit in Buenos Aires, Creative Commons launched the CC Toolkits Project, an initiative aimed at developing, collecting, and organizing informational and support resources about CC. As part of that project, CC Portugal proposed to develop a toolkit to help promote the use of CC licenses in business. And last month at the 2015 Global Summit in Seoul, we presented the first “tools” to be included in the business-focused toolkit, including a handout, poster, and short video.

We were particularly interested in developing this project for two main reasons:

• Portugal is a European country in a deep economic crisis for the last several years. Being a small economy (our population is about 10 million), its companies need as many resources as possible to gain and maintain their access to international markets.
• We are an economist and a lawyer with experience, respectively, in business development and legal consultancy for the creative industries.

We’re very thankful for the contributions and valuable input from Paul Stacey, Eric Steuer, Sarah Pearson, Ryan Merkley, John Weitzmann, and Gwen Franck.

Why a CC Toolkit for Business?

Even if the uses of CC seem relatively clear to artists and creators, the licenses have been more difficult to justify when the authors’ activities involve commercial interests. The main goal of the CC Toolkit for Business is to allow companies to understand why the use of CC licenses can be an interesting instrument to consider in their business model.

Why Use CC Licenses in Business?

As Paul Stacey puts it, Creative Commons licenses amplify the affordances of digital technology and provide an enhanced means for social production in the networked economy. CC licenses do this by:

• removing artificial scarcity constraints;
• removing barriers to access;
• enabling rapid distribution and use;
• allowing for customization, personalization, adaptation, translation, and localization;
• providing a means for mass participation: fellow creators, end users, customers, and partners can contribute their expertise, suggest improvements, add new features, make enhancements, create derivatives, and ensure currency;
• distributing production, and making it possible to produce work faster, generate work of greater breadth and depth, innovate, and increase quality; and
• creating materials that are part of a shared global commons from which resources can be extracted for local use and to which local resources can be contributed.

The 6 Economic Benefits Identified

The toolkit materials focus on the 6 economic benefits of using CC licenses that we have identified so far: 1) reduce production costs, 2) reduce transaction costs and legal uncertainty, 3) increase access to innovation and reduce marketing costs, 4) increase first mover advantage, 5) increase “opportunity benefits” and build a reputation, and 6) promote sustainability. We examine these benefit further in this document. They are a work in progress–we think there is still room for improvement and additional discussion. If you are interested on helping us continue developing these tools, please send us your feedback to creativecommons.pt@gmail.com.

What’s Next?

• The CC Toolkit for Business should also include practical tools (like the different open business model canvases CC has been developing), case studies from different sectors and countries, and a list of Frequently Asked Questions that will help to explain the pros and cons of CC licenses for business. CC Portugal will continue to work on developing the FAQ and other materials we find relevant to the project.
• Creative Commons will soon publish the book Made with Creative Commons: A book on Open Business Models, as the result of an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign.

 

 

Yesterday, Creative Commons joined the U.S. Department of Education (ED) for a series of important announcements that will advance OER in grades PreK-12 across the United States. ED announced the launch of its #GoOpen campaign to encourage states, school districts and educators to use Open Educational Resources (OER). OER, made “open” by CC licenses, will benefit schools in a number of ways including: increasing equity, keeping content relevant and high quality, empowering teachers, and saving districts money.

“In order to ensure that all students—no matter their ZIP code—have access to high-quality learning resources, we are encouraging districts and states to move away from traditional textbooks and toward freely accessible, openly-licensed materials. Districts across the country are transforming learning by using materials that can be constantly updated and adjusted to meet students’ needs.” – U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan

#OER provides ALL kids w high-quality learning materials that can be constantly updated & adjusted to meet students' needs #GoOpen

— Arne Duncan (@arneduncan) October 29, 2015

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#GoOpen announcements include:

(1) Creative Commons will lead OER workshops across the country (with CC US and OER coalition colleagues) with thousands of district leaders to help them scale the use of OER with the goal to replace old, outdated, expensive textbooks in their districts with new, up-to-date, OER. CC will provide the hands-on help that districts need to propel them to a new model of empowering their teachers to create, share, customize, and improve openly licensed educational resources.

(2) Open License Policy

ED has proposed a regulatory change requiring “grantees who receive funding through competitive discretionary grant programs to openly license all copyrightable resources created with ED funds. This open license will allow the public to access and use the intellectual property for any purpose, provided that the user gives attribution to the creator of that work.”

• Notice for the Proposed Rule
• Members of the public can submit comments for 30 days.

“By requiring an open license, we will ensure that high-quality resources created through our public funds are shared with the public, thereby ensuring equal access for all teachers and students regardless of their location or background. We are excited to join other federal agencies leading on this work to ensure that we are part of the solution to helping classrooms transition to next generation materials.” – John King, Deputy Secretary of Education

While the CC BY 4.0 license meets this requirement, and it always better to be specific re: open license requirements (to help grantees understand and comply), and CC will suggest that ED require the CC BY license by name, the following “open license” definition looks pretty good:

The license must be worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable, and must grant the public permission to access, reproduce, publicly perform, publicly display, adapt, distribute, and otherwise use, for any purposes, copyrightable intellectual property created with direct competitive grant funds, provided that the licensee gives attribution to the designated authors of the intellectual property.

With this proposed open licensing policy, ED joins the U.S. Departments of Labor and State, USAID, and other agencies in adding open license requirements to federal grants to ensure the public has access to publicly funded resources. This policy proposal is the first major step the Obama Administration has made toward fulfilling a call made by more than 100 organizations for a government-wide policy to openly license federally funded educational materials.

This good news caps a busy month for OER where: legislation was introduced in the U.S. Congress to provide support for open textbooks, the White House blogged about how OER provides equitable access to education for all learners, and the U.S. government released its 2016 Open Government National Action Plan, which includes a commitment to expand open licensing of federally funded resources.

(3) CC licenses in new OER Platforms: Creative Commons is thrilled to be working with the following platforms and congratulates them for committing to integrate CC licenses into their tools – making it easier for the public to share, find and reuse OER. CC is actively working with these (and other) organizations to ensure their platforms and terms of service are compliant with and fully support CC licenses. We will make joint announcements with each platform when the CC / OER integrations are complete.

• Amazon will leverage its technology and expertise in content discovery and distribution – and add CC licenses to a new content sharing platform – to support OER initiatives in K-12 education. Amazon will also provide infrastructure and developer support for ED’s Learning Registry for two years.
• Microsoft announced new features to Docs.com, Sway and OneNote Class Notebook to enable educators to create, discover, rate, and share OER. The products are integrated with Microsoft Office and will enable tailored curation of resource collections, and encourage reuse by supporting CC licenses and metadata sharing. In addition, Microsoft will index content from the Learning Registry by creating a new app so educators can search and access OER through LTI compliant learning management and publisher systems.
• Edmodo announced an upgrade to its resource sharing platform, Edmodo Spotlight, to enable searching, curating, and sharing OER – using CC licenses – with the Learning Registry. Edmodo will also provide professional learning resources for districts to curate, organize and share OER in Spotlight.
• The Illinois Shared Learning Environment released a redesigned version of their IOER platform that makes it easier for teachers and school leaders to find OER by CC license and learning standards. Additionally, IOER developer code is available as open source for other states interested in implementing a similar functionality.

(4) First US Government Open Education Adviser: Andrew Marcinek is now working with school districts, education platforms, civil society, and open education leaders to expand awareness of OER in PreK-12.

(5) Ten school districts will replace at least one textbook with OER within the next year.

(6) Six #GoOpen Ambassador Districts will help other school districts move to openly licensed materials. These #GoOpen Ambassador Districts currently use OER and will help other districts understand how to effectively discover and curate OER.

(7) ASCD will provide ongoing professional development resources and webinars for Future Ready school districts committing to help train educators on the use of OER. ASCD will work with district leaders to support districts pledging to replace one textbook with openly licensed educational resources by next fall.

We look forward to working with ED on its new open licensing policy proposal and other exciting OER initiatives in this new #GoOpen campaign. This is another positive sign that both OER and open licensing policy are going mainstream!

Will your country be next to #GoOpen? Send me a note if you want to shift to OER in your country: cable at creative commons dot org

—————–

Additional resources for the #GoOpen campaign:

• http://tech.ed.gov/open
• ED Press Release
• Open Education Fact Sheet
• #GoOpen

Yesterday the Obama administration released an updated version of its Open Government National Action Plan. Ever since the launch of the global Open Government Partnership in 2011, participating nations have made commitments to work on initiatives “to promote transparency, increase civic participation, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to make government more open, effective, and accountable.” Included in the U.S. plan is a section aimed at supporting open educational resources and open licensing.

Expand Access to Educational Resources through Open Licensing and Technology (p.3)

Open educational resources are an investment in sustainable human development; they have the potential to increase access to high-quality education and reduce the cost of educational opportunities around the world. Open educational resources can expand access to key educational materials, enabling the domestic and international communities to attain skills and more easily access meaningful learning opportunities. The United States has worked collaboratively with domestic and international civil society stakeholders to encourage open education initiatives. Building on that momentum, the United States will openly license more Federal grant supported education materials and resources, making them widely and freely available. In addition to convening stakeholders to encourage further open education efforts, the United States will publish best practices and tools for agencies interested in developing grant-supported open licensing projects, detailing how they can integrate open licensing into projects from technical and legal perspectives.

You’ll recall that Creative Commons and over 100 other organizations called on the White House to act so that federally funded educational materials are made available under liberal open licenses for the public to freely use, share, and improve. One way for the Obama administration to meet this goal is to make open licensing policy a major commitment in their updated Open Government National Action Plan.

The newest White House plan—released during the Open Government Partnership Summit in Mexico City this week—is not as progressive as our earlier recommendations. Still, it mentions open education and open licensing as important areas for action. And this type of work could help move the U.S. toward a default open licensing policy for the digital education and training resources created with discretionary federal grants funds.

Text of the updated U.S. Open Government National Action Plan (PDF)