Bassel / Joi Ito / CC BY

Bassel Khartabil (also known as Bassel Safadi) is a computer engineer who, through his innovations in social media, digital education, and open-source web software, played a huge role in opening the Internet in Syria and bringing online access and knowledge to the Syrian people. Many people reading this blog know Bassel through his work as lead for CC Syria.

Sunday, March 15, 2015 marks the third anniversary of Bassel’s arrest and imprisonment in Syria, as well as the fourth anniversary of the Syrian uprising.

In San Francisco, #FreeBassel supporters, artists, and members of the open community are gathering at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for a community-building event organized around a Wikipedia edit-a-thon in Bassel’s honor. We’ll be working to improve and add articles and media content related to Bassel and articles of interest to him. We’ll also be discussing his case and brainstorming about new projects and ideas to help bring awareness to his case. Here are the details:

March 15, 2015
2:00pm — 6:00pm
EFF HQ: 815 Eddy St., San Francisco

No prior Wikipedia editing experience is necessary, we’ll have experienced editors present to help you get set up and make your first edit. Artists and activists interested in freedom of expression are encouraged to come contribute to the discussion. Experienced Wikipedians also welcome to come learn more about Bassel, contribute to Wikipedia, and help others to become involved.

For more details on the #FreeBassel Day event, click here.

This entry is remixed from Wikipedia:Meetup/San Francisco/FreeBassel Day 2015, available under CC BY-SA.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announced today its acquisition* of the Creative Commons logo and license icons into its permanent collection, currently featured as part of a new exhibit called, “This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good.” The Creative Commons logo (double C in a circle) and license icons for Attribution, ShareAlike, Noncommercial, and NoDerivatives are featured alongside universal designs such as the @ symbol and the International Symbol for Recycling.

From the MoMA blog,

“The exhibition takes its title from British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, who lit up the stadium at the 2012 London Summer Olympics opening ceremony with a simple tweet: “This Is for Everyone.” His buoyant message highlighted how the Internet—perhaps the most radical social design experiment of the last quarter century—has created seemingly limitless possibilities for discovering, sharing, and expanding knowledge and information.

The Creative Commons logos, and the organization and movement for the commons they represent, fit solidly within this narrative of imagining a better world through design — and Creative Commons is honored to be featured in this new exhibit and acquired as part of MoMA’s permanent collection. We’d especially like to highlight the designers: Ryan Junell of the original and now standardized CC logos, Alex Roberts of the re-conceived Attribution icon.

Read more about the acquisition at the MoMA blog and Wired’s coverage of the exhibit. Also stay tuned for a more detailed post on the origin story of the CC logos.

* Different museums have different criteria for acquiring objects into their collection. Here’s MoMA’s criteria in context of its @ symbol acquisition. To acquire doesn’t mean to own, but to obtain permission for reproducing the work as a matter of copyright. Our logos are still our trademarks!

CC Malaysia Mixtape 2015 by Muid Latif under CC BY NC ND

A guest post by CC Malaysia Lead, Muid Latif.

In the recent years, Malaysia has been more active in adopting open culture. Local mainstream media has provided a continuous platform for Creative Commons Malaysia to reach out to Malaysians in promoting CC, and both government and the community have been proactive in spearheading interesting online projects for everyone’s benefit.

For example, last December I had the chance to approach several local musicians and producers who are familiar with Creative Commons licenses on SoundCloud to find out if they were keen to have their music under a CC license. It was great to see that local musicians are very supportive of CC and how it empowers their works. This resulted in the release of CC Malaysia’s very own Creative Commons Malaysia Mixtape 2015. Inspired by this year’s World CC Mixtape, the Malaysia collection features 12 tracks from eight artists: the notable DJ Rezabudculture, Space Gambus Experiment, Metahingaq, NERO ONE, Z-1, Zam Nayan, Ugendran and Mohammad Yazid. The tracks are mostly uptempo or experimental. Listen to it here.

Our community also wants to play a greater role in open data. One of the biggest outcomes from this is Sinar Project, a mainly volunteer-run organisation which uses open technology and applications to make government information–such as budget expenditure and assets of those holding political office and parliamentary bills–public and more accessible to the Malaysian people. The Sinar project won a 2014 Information Society Innovation Fund (ISIF Asia) Award, under the “Rights” category (see more here). The Malaysian government has also taken the initiative to progress open data by setting up www.data.gov.my as well as adopting Big Data Analytics (BDA) mandates to the Ministry of Communication, the Multimedia, Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) and Multimedia Development Corporate (MDeC).

In this context, I have recently had the chance to contact the founder of the Big Data Malaysia network, Tirath Ramdas, about his view on open data here in Malaysia and concerns about citizen engagement. He thinks that open data is not a one way street. Any investment into open data from government will be a waste of taxpayer funds if the Malaysians do not make productive use of the data released. Raising general awareness of open data is therefore be highly important at this point in time. With this in mind, MDeC and Tentspark, an IT solutions provider, recently launched the National Big App Challenge to stress the importance of big data analytics in solving Malaysia’s challenges related to national issues and societal well-being.

In the near future, we would love to see Malaysia join the Open Government Partnership (OGP), following the Big Data Analytics Framework goal to have the framework ready by the end of this year and in line with the Digital Malaysia 354 Roadmap (DM354 Roadmap). With increased focus on sharing by both the government and private citizens, there seems to be a good chance for this to happen.

Today we commemorate Fair Use Week, a week-long celebration of the doctrines of fair use and fair dealing.

Creative Commons is proud of how its licenses respect fair use and other exceptions and limitations to copyright. CC licenses end where copyright ends, which means you don’t need to comply with a CC license if you don’t need permission under copyright. You will hear us repeat this fundamental design principle about our licenses often because it is important in practice, but even more so as policy. Anything that claims to grant “permission” to do things allowed under fair use is problematic because it promotes “permission culture” and increases FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about fair use. This maxim goes for open licensing just as it does anything else, which is what makes the treatment of fair use in our licenses so important.

Even so, there remains some potential tension between open licensing and fair use. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that relying on fair use to include content in an otherwise openly-licensed work can make it difficult for people around the globe to reuse your work. While most countries have some form of fair-use-like rights, those rights are not harmonized internationally. That means it is possible that the portion of your work used under fair use would have to be carved out before it is reused in some jurisdictions. Proper marking of what content falls outside the scope of the license can help minimize this problem.

The other potential tension results from the gray area around where fair use begins and ends. Thanks in no small part to the work of Peter Jaszi and Patricia Aufderheide, the public has a much better idea of how fair use plays out in practice than it used to. But inevitably, some challenging fair use questions remain. When reusers are faced with those close cases, some opt to use CC-licensed work instead of relying on fair use of an all rights reserved work. By providing a licensed alternative, CC licenses provide a nice cushion for fair use in those situations. But in other contexts, reusers have to decide whether to rely on fair use when reusing a CC-licensed work. While it is common practice to give attribution when using something under fair use, complying with other CC license restrictions is often impossible when relying on fair use. This is exactly how it should be. As we know, using a work under fair use means the CC license is irrelevant and the license terms do not apply.

Creative Commons never discourages reusers from relying on fair use or other exceptions or limitations to copyright, even when that means not complying with a CC license. Respect for fair use was written into the code of our licenses from the start, and that has not changed. We recognize that fair use is a muscle, and it needs to be exercised. Now go workout.

Creative Commons and the Open Policy Network hosted the first Institute for Open Leadership meeting in San Francisco 12-16 January 2015. The Institute for Open Leadership (IOL for short) is a training program to identify and cultivate new leaders in open education, science, public policy, research, data and other fields on the values and implementation of openness in licensing, policies and practices. The rationale for the IOL is to educate and empower potential open advocates within existing institutional structures in order to expand and promote the values and practices of the idea that publicly funded resources should be openly licensed.

IOL group shot by Cable Green under CC BY

There was significant interest in the first iteration of the IOL program: we received over 95 applications and selected 14 fellows for the first Institute. The fellows came from around the world (Bangladesh, Barbados, Chile, Colombia, Greece, Nepal, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Somalia, United States ), and reflect a wide range of institutions–from community colleges to government sector to public radio.

The central component of the IOL program requires fellows to develop, refine, and implement a capstone open policy project within their home institution. Creative Commons staff and other selected mentors provided guidance throughout this process.

Week’s activities
The week was deliberately structured with the fellows at the center of the conversation, with a specific focus on providing them with the information and tools to develop and successfully implement their open policy project in their institution. We constructed the week’s activities to cover a wide range of topics, including:

• Overview of Creative Commons and open licensing, as this is a key aspect to all open policies.
• Deep dive into open policy, including identifying existing real world examples, sharing lessons learned, discussing the value proposition, sharing typical opposition arguments.
• Discussion of practical development of policy roadmaps and roll-out strategies across different sectors/institutions.
• Campaign planning and advice/best practices about how to communicate with decision makers about open policy.
• Identification of resources in support of open policy development and implementation, including presentations, reports, videos, informational and promotional materials.
• Sharing of best methods for educating and informing decision makers about open policy, including workshops, courses, hackathons.
• Testing fellow’s open policy knowledge and expected challenges through an open policy “shark tank.”
• Hewlett Foundation communication team interviewed multiple IOL fellows for a Hewlett story on the power of CC licensing.

Mentors included Cable Green, Paul Stacey, Timothy Vollmer and Puneet Kishor from Creative Commons and Nicole Allen and Nick Shockey from SPARC. Each of these persons had specific subject-area expertise and acted as a “mentor” for two or more of the fellows. We grouped the fellows based on their project ideas with a mentor in the following categories: Open Educational Resources, Open Access, Open Data, Open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums), and Open Business Models. During the week, we provided time for fellows to work individually, with other fellows, and with their mentors.

IOL session by txtbks under CC BY

On the final day of the in-person Institute we asked each fellow to report back on their progress from during the week, and asked each to answer common questions, such as talking about their open policy project objectives, planned activities to meet those objectives, identification of challenges they expect to face, partners they plan on working with, and metrics for success.

In addition to the whole group discussions, mentor breakouts, and individual work, we included informational and motivational speakers to talk with the fellows over our lunch breaks. These talks were given by individuals with experience working in open policy across a variety of sectors, including Hal Plotkin (former Senior Policy Advisor within the U.S. Department of Education), Abel Caine (OER Program Specialist at UNESCO), Heather Joseph (Executive Director at SPARC), Laura Manley (Project Manager at Open Data 500) and Romain Lacombe (Plume).

Next steps
With the successful completion of the in-person portion of the IOL, the fellows have now returned to their home countries and will begin the process of implementing their open policies. The mentors are committed to continue working with their respective fellows, including providing advice and assistance. Fellows and mentors will meet to discuss progress over webinars planned for the following months. The goal is for the fellows to have implemented their open policy at the institution within a year. The fellows will be able to share more information about the implementation of their capstone policy projects in the coming months.

We’ve already solicited feedback from fellows and are currently evaluating the activities and structure of the just-completed IOL. There are already several improvements we’d like to see as we begin to develop the second round of the IOL, to be held outside of North America in January 2016. We plan to open the application process for round two in mid-2015. The demand for IOL is large and additional funding is being sought to support additional ones beyond the first two.

Yoda Fountain by Nasir Khan under CC BY-SA
Note: Lucasfilm has offices inside The Presidio, where the IOL took place. Thus, Yoda.

One of the aims of the Institute For Open Leadership is to link participants together into a global network. Participants from this inaugural Institute for Open Leadership, and all future ones, become part of a peer-to-peer network providing support for each other, asking and answering questions, and getting ongoing help with open policy development and implementation. This network helps participants overcome barriers and ensure open policy opportunities come to fruition.