CCKorea / CC BY

Representatives from CC affiliates in Asia and the Pacific were once again hosted by CC Korea for the CC Asia-Pacific Regional Meeting this year. Asia-Pacific CC affiliates have a regular face-to-face meeting every two years to share their experience and know-how, to discuss common issues, and to seek opportunities for collaboration. Last September, 13 representatives from CC affiliate teams in China Mainland, Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, Mongolia, and South Korea came all the way to Seoul for this rare opportunity to get inspired by each other and meet Ryan Merkley, new CEO of Creative Commons, whom many of them met in person for the first time.

This year’s regional meeting was held in conjunction with the 3rd CC Korea Conference, “Share Everything, Connect Everything.” Ryan Merkley, CEO of Creative Commons, opened the event with an inspiring keynote speech on sharing and the commons attended by more than 200 people from various fields including government, business and academia. Around the three main themes of Creativity, Sharing City, and Civic Hacking, insightful presentations were given by various local and international speakers including Todd Porter, Co-founder of FabCafe and Hal Seki from Code for Japan. As the closing session, Won-soon Park, Mayor of Seoul City, and Jay Yoon, Project Lead of CC Korea, discussed how we could shape our future with sharing and cooperation.

Following the successful conference on the first day, the CC affiliate representatives sat down together for a full-day meeting dedicated to the discussion of internal issues, from individual activities to regional and global cooperation. After a round of warm greetings to each other, each presented not only their success stories but also exchanged experiences in projects that did not turn out as they had expected, focusing on what they could improve and how they could do better in the future. Challenges faced by teams varied from fundraising to support and sustain their activities to restructuring their volunteer community. Discussion revolved around how to address these by facilitating regional collaboration both among individual affiliates and with CC headquarters in California.

After a lunchtime walk along the Cheonggye stream, Ryan Merkley joined the group to share CC’s new vision and strategies and solicit feedback from the participants. Generally participants were glad for his willingness to share and to engage more closely with affiliates, welcoming opportunities to contribute and work more closely on various fronts. A theme of the day was ways that CC could collaborate and engage more actively with global affiliates on specific projects such as conducting research, developing tools to improve usability of CC licenses and reuse of CC-licensed content, etc. Some representatives also pointed out that more practical support from CC such as toolkits and resource repositories would be useful, especially for teams who are new or restructuring. Regional activities, such as the creation of a regional website and combining efforts in popular areas such as education, were also important part of the day’s agendas.

The meeting was followed by a CC Salon, held as a wrap-up event of the whole program at a cozy book cafe down an alleyway, away from the noise and bustle of the Hongdae area. Conference speakers, CC Asia-Pacific representatives, and members and friends of CC Korea were all invited to meet old and new friends, try different traditional beverages brought by the participating CC representatives, and get inspired by interesting ignite talks ranging from a fantastic dance performance by Muid Latif from CC Malaysia to Ryan’s “20 things I love from the commons” and a 3rd-grader girl’s talk about her coding projects.

CC Korea would like to once again thank all representatives who participated and hopes that this could lead to more cooperation in the region and beyond.

For more details, see post-conference resources, including videos, all available under CC licenses. You can also read about the previous regional meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 2012.

bssmile / CC BY 3.0

The thoughts below are from Muid Latif, Project Lead of CC Malaysia:

Visiting Seoul is life-changing experience. As a creative person, each turn you take around the city gives a perfect visual story-telling of its culture and economic progress. Since I was very familiar to the design community in Korea through Behance Network and Creative City project curated by Jackson Tan (Singapore) this year in conjunction of Kaohsiung Design Festival, I was introduced to amazing designers like Yoon Hyup and the talented Na Kim who I had the privilege to meet in September this year in Penang, Malaysia.

I was blown away by the amount of art galleries located in each district. I could easily be overwhelmed by so much talent. It shows how organised and cultured Koreans are in accepting creativity as a part of their daily routine.

While I was in Seoul, attending the CC Korea International Conference provided me with such an insightful experience to know how enthusiastic creators are in ensuring citizen could access better, organised public information and allowing transparency of the government, through projects like CodeNamu. And Randomwalks, for example, amplified various media and data and turned it into phenomenal info-graphics, as shown in Sey Min’s presentation and demonstration. An aspiring young girl named Hannah enlightened us about the best creative way to have fun by creating DIY ear-folding rabbit and a fun wrist-band. I also had the chance to do a contemporary dance performance during the CC Salon featuring music of DD.85’s ‘Adaptation’.

It’s more extraordinary to learn that Koreans take seriously into sharing culture thus seeing Creative Commons as a medium to empower their creations. From sharing innovation of technology through open source, mobile apps and web-based programmes are easily accessible to all. It facilitates greater alternative in cost-saving, and yet at the same time, some generous users would donate through PayPal as part of their appreciation. This is what CC is catered for its content users, the power to appreciate and attribute. The support does not only stop there, a local renowned KPOP artist expresses interest in offering to become an ambassador of CC Korea to increase more awareness. This is indeed admirable and I see that other CC affiliates could adapt and follow the same strategy to advance CC movement into the next level. If people would ask me, what’s the next big thing for CC? Well, this is it.

• See CCKorea’s photo sets from the event: 1, 2, 3
• See Muid’s photo set.

Leicester City Council / CC BY 4.0

Leicester City Council is the first local government authority in the United Kingdom (UK) to provide 84 community schools with blanket permission to openly license their educational resources. The council is recommending that school staff use the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to share materials created in the course of their work. The Council has also released guidance and practical information for school staff on using and creating open educational resources (OER).

As part of Josie Fraser’s (ICT Strategy Lead, Leicester City Council) work with the council, she leads on a citywide project to raise school staff skills and confidence in using technology to support teaching, learning, and school community development. The project has surveyed staff across the city to identify strengths and gaps in their use of technologies and digital resources. While the results on the whole have been very positive, the survey identified that school staff knowledge about OER and open licensing is very limited.

In response to this, Josie worked with Björn Haßler and Helen Neo (from the University of Cambridge) to create accessible OER schools guidance and practical resources for schools on finding, attributing, remixing, creating, and sharing CC licensed resources. School staff were invited to participate in the development of the resources, by review and discussion, and by taking part in pilot workshops for school staff and leaders.

“The response to the guidance has been very positive, with schools keen to raise the profile of excellent work being produced through the use of Creative Commons licenses. Schools want to raise staff knowledge in relation to copyright and open licensing, and see the classroom modelling of good practice in using and accrediting resources as important for their learners.”
– Josie Fraser

Schools routinely make use of web-based resources to support their learners, but don’t routinely benefit from the range of openly shared resources available if they aren’t aware of open licensing. The permission and guidance are designed to work together in raising awareness about CC licenses and OER, and support schools in promoting the work they are doing by sharing – enabling them to create, and to connect and collaborate with other educators. At a time when so many resources used in schools are digital, and accessed and shared online, understanding copyright and the role that open licenses play is essential for education professionals.

“Leicester City Council is the first local authority in the UK to provide its school employees with permission to openly license their resources. This is a highly commendable and visionary step. We very much hope that this will inspire other councils and schools to look at how they can also support staff in sharing their work.”
– Dr. Björn Haßler, University of Cambridge

Resource packs, which including model policies, guidance and resources for schools, are available at: http://schools.leicester.gov.uk/openeducation. The resources themselves build on existing openly licensed materials, and all new materials are all released under CC BY 4.0 and are available in editable versions for adaptation.

Josie concludes:

“Open licensing is an important step in making cultural change happen – for educators and learners to benefit from public work, and for schools across the city to move towards open practice. Change will not happen overnight, but the permission and guidance provides a great way for schools to think about how they share and collaborate, and how they would like to take their communities forward.”

Links:

• OER Guidance for Schools was commissioned by Leicester City Council, as part of the Council’s award winning digital literacy school staff development project, DigiLit Leicester.
• The OER Guidance resources were produced by Björn Haßler, Helen Neo, and Josie Fraser, and are available under CC BY 4.0.
• For further information please contact Josie Fraser (fraser@leicester.gov.uk) or Björn Haßler (bh213@cam.ac.uk).

Related: Creative Commons policies grow in New Zealand schools

Sketchfab – an awesome website for sharing 3D models – just unveiled an option to make files downloadable. All of the files marked for download are available under Creative Commons licenses, including those from some big players like HTC, Microsoft, the British Museum and celebrated designer Francis Bitonti.

From the announcement:

This makes Sketchfab not only the best and easiest way to publish and embed a 3D file, but also a great place to find and use 3D content – for example for 3D printing, to build video games or VR experiments – or just to share and collaborate privately on 3D designs. Any user can now chose to publish 3D content for display only, or for display and download under Creative Commons licenses.

[…]

This launch comes with another important milestone: more than 200,000 3D files have been uploaded on the platform so far, making Sketchfab one of the largest repositories of 3D content, and the leading platform to publish and embed interactive 3D models. We want to thank all of our users for that, we are proud to be home for your work. This milestone, combined with our new download option, is strengthening our position as The place to be for 3D files.

Sketchfab co-founder Alban Denoyel told us that his team knew from the start that they wanted to use CC licenses rather than create a new license for model use. “As soon as we started looking into adding a download option on Sketchfab, we wanted to find a legal framework to cover the way people could use the files, and CC was top of mind as the perfect solution to do that.”

And did the high-profile users like Microsoft and HTC have any qualms about CC? Not really, says Alban. “We had a pretty straightforward approach, exposing our plans of enabling download under CC, and asking if they were in or not. No special concerns were raised, they quickly jumped in!”

Congratulations, Sketchfab!

We are in New Delhi and Mumbai for a number of presentations, workshops and meetings. Please come say hello if you are at these events or in the area.

SciDataCon2014 in New Delhi

The International Conference on Data Sharing and Integration for Global Sustainability (SciDataCon) is motivated by the conviction that the most research challenges cannot be addressed without attending to issues relating to research data essential to all scientific endeavors. However, several cultural and technological challenges are still preventing the research community from realizing the full benefits of progress in open access and sharing. CODATA and WDS, interdisciplinary committees of the International Council for Science (ICSU) are co-sponsoring and organizing a high profile international biennial conference at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Nov 2: A day long Text and data mining (TDM) workshop offered in collaboration with ContentMine

TDM is an important scientific technique for analyzing large corpora of articles used to uncover both existing and new insights in unstructured data sets that typically are obtained programmatically from many different sources. While the science and technology TDM is complex enough, its legal complications are equally dizzying. Not only is its legal status unclear at best, it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction making cross-national collaboration difficult. Besides the license status of the original material, contractual agreements between research institutions and publishers, who are often the gatekeepers of the corpora, can create significant hurdles. The workshop offers an introduction to TDM, presenting the legal considerations through hands-on exercises.

Nov 3: How well is the data chain working?

Effective and efficient application of scientific data for the benefit of humanity entails agreed goals, clear and reproducible methods, and transparent communication throughout the data chain from producer to user via data organizer and research publisher. How well is that working? A Panel Discussion at the close of each day will summarise that day’s conclusions, and respond to the question of how well the data chain may be working from a trio of perspectives: Conference Organizer, data-management expert, and data producer.

Nov 5: Citing Data to Facilitate Multidisciplinary Research

Synthesis Data Citation Principles and Their Implications for TDM: Importance, Credit and Attribution, Evidence, Unique Identification, Access, Persistence, Specificity and Verifiability, and Interoperability and Flexibility: these eight important phrases describe the data citation principles agreed upon by the community and published under a joint declaration and endorsed by 185 individuals and 83 organizations. But, what are the implications of these principles beyond just citation, particularly with respect to automated analysis of large corpus of articles? This presentation will briefly present the principles, and then explore some of the issues that we have to come to grips with in order to make text and data mining (TDM) easy for scientists.

Nov 5: Challenges and Benefits of Open Science Data and International Data Sharing

Maximizing Legal Interoperability Through Open Licenses: Many scientists do think about interoperability as they have to work with colleagues from other domains. However, common interoperability efforts are focused on technical, and if we are lucky, semantic interoperability. Rarely do scientists think of legal interoperability in the design of their science experiments. Can my work be legally mixed with someone else’s work without violating any intellectual property (or worse, privacy and security) laws? Is my work portable across not just scientific domains but also across judicial boundaries? We attempt to shed light on some of these questions in this presentation.

Nov 5: Talk on CC/OKF open science activities to be given at the computer science dept., Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi

Jenny Molloy, OKFN Open Science and I will be introducing the young computer science students at IIT-Delhi on the various open science and data activities around the world. This talk is organized by Prof. Aaditeshwar Seth, Computer Science, IIT-Delhi.

Nov 6-8: Meetings on citizen science and sensors at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), Mumbai

HBCSE at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai is a National Center with the broad goals to promote equity and excellence in science and mathematics education from primary school to undergraduate college level, and encourage the growth of scientific literacy in the country. We will be discussing with HBCSE’s metaStudio potential areas of collaboration in citizen science and the use of sensors in projects to accelerate the growth of scientific awareness in the country through direct public participation in science.