3d Globe at Seattle Central Library / J Brew / CC BY-SA

CC is very pleased to announce the reboot of two of our longest running and most prolific teams – Creative Commons Australia and Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand.

The new CC Australia team was launched at the recent Australian Digital Alliance‘s Copyright Forum 2015. Those who have followed CC for a while are no doubt familiar with CC Australia. Since 2006, the team has been operating out of the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) initially under the direction of Brian Fitzgerald and Tom Cochrane, and more recently under Professor Cochrane, Nic Suzor and Nerida Quatermass. Over its tenure at QUT CC Australia has achieved some amazing things, from launching the CC Case Studies project to having CC BY adopted as the default licensing policy for the Australian Federal government.

The new CC Australia team keeps QUT as its Creative Sector, GLAM, Private Sector and Legal Lead but adds two new groups to expand its expertise:

• the National Copyright Unit (NCU) lead by Delia Browne, who will be the new Education Lead
• AusGOAL lead by Baden Appleyard, who will be the Publicly Funded Information Lead.

Both these organisations are already extremely prominent in the open community locally and internationally, and have been two of the strongest advocates for CC in Australia for many years. They have both already undertaken collaborative projects with Creative Commons, from the NCU’s Smartcopying website (updated to celebrate the launch) to an exciting IT project soon to be released by AusGOAL. It’s long overdue that they are recognised by welcoming them into the CC family officially. Together the new team of QUT, NCU and AusGOAL combines years of experience and expertise.

In a similar vein, a few months ago CC New Zealand changed its official host organisation from the Royal Society of New Zealand to the Open Education Resources Foundation. While hosted by the Royal Society of New Zealand, CC Aotearoa New Zealand has consistently been one of CC’s strongest and most impactful affiliates, a great example to our whole community. It has particularly excelled in the education and cultural sectors, and New Zealand remains a world leader in the take up of CC by educational and GLAM institutions. At the same time we welcome the Open Education Resources Foundation to CC, and can’t wait to see where they lead us. We expect great things.

Welcome to CC!

In support of the #FreeBassel Day Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at the EFF, the Creative Commons Arab World will organize a virtual Arabic Wikipedia Edit-a-thon to translate and expand pages that cover topics of interest to him.

• Updating Arabic Creative Commons Wikipedia Page
• Updating Arabic Creative Commons Licenses Wikipedia Page
• Creating a Wikipedia Page about Copyright law of Syria
• Creating an Arabic Wikipedia Page for Bassel
• Add resources to Arabic Open Content Wikipedia Page
• Create an Arabic Wikipedia Page for Patent Troll
• Enhance Arabic Wikipedia Page for EFF
• Create an Arabic Wikipedia page for Open Music Model
• Create an Arabic Wikipedia page for Smart Contract

The virtual Edit-a-thon will take place on Sunday the 15th of March from 5pm to 8pm GMT. The list of topics can be viewed in Arabic on this Google Doc

The activity will be coordinated through the @ccArabWorld twitter

Starting with the first round of grants in 2011 Creative Commons and a team of partners have been actively supporting US Department of Labor (DOL), Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grantees. This multi-year, nearly $2 billion grant program provides funds to US community colleges who in partnership with industry, employers, and public workforce systems create stackable/latticed credentials that can be completed in two years or less. The goal of TAACCCT is to expand targeted training programs for unemployed workers, especially those impacted by foreign trade and to move unemployed workers into high wage, high skill jobs in high growth industry sectors.

There are many unique aspects to the TAACCCT program. Creative Commons involvement stems from the DOL requirement that grantees allow broad access for others to use and enhance project products and offerings by licensing newly developed materials produced with grant funds with a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). DOL is the first US department to require this in such a large grant program. Its size makes TAACCCT the largest Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative in the world.

There is a high interest in seeing curricula and course materials coming out of TAACCCT. This is partly due to the high level of investment but also due to the high growth industry sectors for which curricula is being created including health, IT, energy, transportation, and advanced manufacturing – areas where little prior OER exists. However, grantees get 3-4 years for development so examples of work are only now emerging.

In Oct-2014 at the TAACCCT-ON convening in Topeka Kansas, Creative Commons hosted a round 1 TAACCCT grantee showcase fair. All round 1 grantees were invited to showcase, share, and describe some of the best work coming out of their projects.

Using a participatory process all the other grantees attending were invited to visit round 1 TAACCCT grantees at their showcase table to see and learn more about the work they are doing. To make it interactive and fun we asked grantees to put stickers on round 1 TAACCCT projects that were standouts for them. We sought standouts noteworthy for the way they fulfill TAACCCT grant priorities and standouts by industry sector.

From that process, based on grantee selection, nine round one TAACCT grantee projects emerged as standouts. For each of the nine standouts we created a vignette with a video interview, a written story, and a graphic visualization of the project.

We’re pleased to share the results with all of you – see TAACCCT Standout Profiles. These nine round 1 TAACCCT vignettes are a small, early sampling of the work coming out of the TAACCCT program. All TAACCCT grant projects are standouts in their own way. We hope these early examples satisfy some of the interest around seeing TAACCCT work and wet your appetite for seeing even more.

Special thanks to all the grantees for agreeing to be interviewed and profiled in this way. Special thanks to Giulia Forsythe for the visuals she created to graphically illustrate each project, to Hal Plotkin for writing the stories, and to Billy Meinke for managing the whole production process. And most of all special thanks to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for funding our support of TAACCCT grantees.

We hope to see similar vignettes for rounds 2, 3 and 4.

More information on the support Creative Commons and its team of partners provide to TAACCCT can be found at Open4us.org.

Banner by Open Education Consortium / CC BY

Open Education Week is an annual convening of the global open education movement to share ideas, new open education projects and to raise awareness about open education and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. Open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve education access, affordability and effectiveness. Participation in all events and use of all resources are free and open to everyone.

There are many ways to participate:

• Connect with fellow Open Education Week participants on social media with:
  • #openeducationwk
  • YouTube/openeducationweek
  • FaceBook/openeducationwk
• Check out and participate in events throughout the week (most are online, some are in-person)
• Review shared open education resources and projects
• Teach someone at your university, college, school, government or company about open education and CC licenses

While all of the events are worthy of your attendance, here is a quick preview of events to be hosted by Creative Commons affiliates and staff:

• OER and Creative Commons in Brno (CC Czech Republic)
• OER Student Conference and video on the importance of OER organized by Alliance for OER in Macedonia (CC Macedonia)
• OER in the Arab World (CC Arab World)
• Creative Commons Road Trip (including open education) (CC Aotearoa New Zealand)
• Education Innovations with Creative Commons – from OER, to Pedagogy, to Policy (CC staff)
• Open Policy Network: Launched! (CC staff)
• Institute for Open Leadership (CC staff)
• Sustainability Strategies For Open Educational Resources (CC staff)
• K12 OER Collaborative (CC staff)
• 24-hour twitter event: #AllAboutOpen on Wednesday, 11 March (CC staff)

We look forward to seeing you online!

Creative Commons has long celebrated everyone who uses our licenses. TeamOpen profiles give a good sense of the diversity of use and purpose. The creative ways individuals, not-for-profits, governments, and businesses use our licenses is inspiring.

For every TeamOpen example there are many others who want to move in that direction but don’t know how. The question we frequently hear is, “How do I earn a living, pay the bills, and keep the lights on if I openly license my work and give it away for free?” This question is asked not just by entrepreneurs but by people in non-profits and government too.

We are pleased to announce, through gracious funding from the Hewlett Foundation, that we’re launching a Creative Commons open business models initiative aiming squarely at showing how our licenses can, and are, used by businesses, non-profits, and governments.

Building an open source business by Libby Levi licensed CC BY-SA

We aim to help businesses see how to use and contribute to the commons in a way that aligns with the norms and values of the commons, while at the same time operating as a business. We want to show what sustainability models look like. We’re planning to generate designs for how to move from closed to open. We want to provide models for businesses whose aim is to provide products and services that have both economic and social value. We aim to make visible how open business models work and provide tools and strategies for designing and developing your own.

We want to do this work in a community-based way with all of you. So this blog post is an open call for participation.

The Creative Commons open business models initiative provides you with a set of interactive tools which you can use to design your own open business models. You can use the tools to model anything from a new startup open business to an existing open business, or something in between.

The Creative Commons open business models initiative asks you to share the models you come up with including your analysis of your own models and provide suggestions for improvement of the open business model tools themselves.

Creative Commons invites you to participate in these open business model activities:

1. Join us in designing, developing, and iterating a set of interactive Creative Commons open business model tools that anyone can use to design an open business model.
2. Use these open business model tools yourself to generate your own open business model(s).
3. Share the results of your participation including the open business models you generate.
4. Provide feedback and recommendations for improving the Creative Commons open business model tools and process.
5. Partner directly with Creative Commons on developing an open business model for your specific initiative.
6. Participate in a Creative Commons workshop on generating open business models.
7. Contribute to a Creative Commons open business models report.

See our Creative Commons Open Business Models Participation Activities document for further details on each of these activities, including specifics for participation, and links to the tools.

We’re excited about doing this work with all of you and growing the commons through open business models.