#FREEBASSEL / Kennisland / CC BY-SA

As of today, CC Syria community leader Bassel Khartabil has been in prison for two years. Today, we join the worldwide open community in honoring Bassel and insisting that he be freed.

Amnesty International and Front Line Defenders have produced this excellent video about why Bassel’s story is important to our community, featuring interviews with CC co-founder Lawrence Lessig and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jillian York.

“Bassel could have gotten out, but he chose to stay. And that decision was very costly for him, and it was an important decision for us. It symbolized his commitment to making this democracy possible, and to continuing the work to spread that message. And we owe him for that, and we have an obligation to do as much as we can to keep the world aware of this incredible person.” – Lawrence Lessig

In honor of Free Bassel Day, our friend Niki Korth has compiled a cookbook in honor of Bassel, featuring recipes submitted by people who know Bassel or are involved with the #freebassel campaign. You can read the cookbook online or download a PDF (469 KB).

Niki is planning to release a Version 2 of the cookbook, so it’s not too late to submit a recipe.

We honor Bassel today and look forward to the day he is freed.

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Alaska’s Pavlof Volcano: NASA’s View from Space (cropped)
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / CC BY

The global CC community: building a more open world

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been featuring some of the amazing activities of our global affiliate network. Learn about a Finnish team building a CC plugin for WordPress, an open data symposium in Japan, a series of School of Open workshops in Kenya, a booksprint in Morocco, and much more. Take a tour of the CC communities in the Arab world, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Europe.

Open educational resources aren’t just a good idea; they’re the center of a global movement that’s transforming how education works worldwide. Browse the resources from Open Education Week to learn more.	Bassel Joi Ito / CC BY Longtime CC community leader Bassel Khartabil has been in prison in Syria since 2012. Join the worldwide open community to honor Bassel this Saturday, March 15. If you’re in the Bay Area, join us at the Wikimedia offices in San Francisco.
Don’t Look At The Sign! smlp.co.uk / CC BY Learn how a proposed US law would weaken public access to federally funded research.	Kristina Alexanderson CC BY-NC-SA Is Getty Images’ new photo embed service a step in the right direction?

• Join us in San Francisco for a discussion on free culture and social justice.
• The CC Europe team has been following the proposed changes to EU copyright law. Read their analysis and recommendations.
• “People should support Creative Commons if they care about what they’re doing, and they want to get their work to as many people as possible; if they care about collaborating with people all over the world together and coming up with something beautiful.” Khalid Albaih is on Team Open.

CC10 Party in San Francisco / David Kindler / CC BY

Creative Commons is thrilled to announce that we will be reviving CC salons on a quarterly basis starting March 27!

Years ago, CC ran a series of CC Salon events in the Bay Area, informal events that brought together creators of all kinds to talk about how and why they choose open in their fields. CC salons continue to occur all over the world, but on March 27, CC will host a salon on social justice and open innovation right here in San Francisco.

This informal event will feature short talks from guests in local nonprofits and the free culture community, as well as lots of interesting people to network and socialize with. It’s free and open to everyone.

Thursday, March 27, 2014
6:00 – 7:30 PM Pacific time
Cafe Royale, 800 Post St, San Francisco, CA 94109
Bart: Civic Center, Powell St.
Facebook invite

Speakers

Joshua Knox, Brute Labs

Joshua Knox is co-Founder and CFO for BRUTE LABS, a non-profit out to prove that anyone can do good. BRUTEs use design and technology to create sustainable social entrepreneurship. Our small, all-volunteer team has launched 11 projects around the world and across a broad spectrum of causes; from cyclone relief in Myanmar, to clean water wells in Ghana, to a bio-diesel project with Stanford. Our open source altruism has also garnered multiple design awards from AIGA and Adobe as well as partnerships with local businesses, the city of San Jose, Google, Nike, Facebook and many more.

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Niki Korth, Writer and Free Culture Activist

Niki Korth is an artist, writer, and free culture enthusiast/activist who resides in the triad of the creative arts, technological literacy, and human rights. Together with Clémence de Montgolfier, she co-founded The Big Conversation Space (TBCS), an art, research, and consulting organization based in Paris and San Francisco that acts as a participatory production platform for books, media, and games involving free speech, art, technology, politics, philosophy, and the occult. TBCS has exhibited and lectured internationally at venues including Palais Tokyo (Paris), TCB Gallery (Mellbourne, Australia), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and Human Resources (Los Angeles).

Their most recent projects include Letters for Bassel and The #FreeBassel cookbook, both dedicated to creative and participatory methods of advocacy for the release of CC community member Bassel Khartabil, who has been detained in Syria for the last two years. They also have a book coming out in summer 2014 titled I Can Do Anything Badly II, which uses conversational interviews to explore the intersections of DIY and Free Culture in the arts, the internet, sociology, and design.

Korth is also an advocate for trees and sustainable urban planning, and works in marketing and operations at DeepRoot Green Infrastructure, a San Francisco–based company that provides arboriculturally-oriented products and services for the built environment.

In the spirit of McLuhan but in the age of the Internet – she believes that we all own the message, humans as much as plant life. But the medium may have a mind of its own.

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Supriya Misra, TeachAIDS

Supriya Misra is a Senior Project Manager at TeachAIDS, where she helps lead the development, maintenance, and expansion of TeachAIDS products. Founded at Stanford, and recognized as an innovation that will “change the world” by MIT Technology Review, TeachAIDS is a nonprofit social venture that creates breakthrough software to solve persistent problems in HIV prevention. Used in more than 70 countries, TeachAIDS provides the most effective HIV prevention software to educators, governments, and NGOs around the world – for free.

With a background in behavioral health research and expertise in innovative applications of new technologies in preventative care, she has previously worked at HopeLab and the Institute for Brain Potential, and co-authored a handbook on the neurobiological basis for forming positive health habits. She holds an M.A. and a B.A. with Honors in Psychology, with a concentration in Neuroscience, from Stanford University.

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Rachel Weidinger, Upwell

Rachel Weidinger is the Founder and Executive Director of Upwell, a nonprofit PR firm with one client, the ocean. At Upwell, Rachel leads the development of cutting edge big listening practices. She couples this big data approach with the resiliency-increasing tactic of campaigning across a distributed network to increase online attention to ocean issues. Because of Rachel’s vision, the ocean community knows the baseline of online conversation for its issues for the first time.

Previously, Rachel was the Senior Manager of Marketing and Communications at TechSoup Global where she provided marketing vision and leadership for TechSoup Global, and the TechSoup Global Network of partners in 36 countries. She has also worked with social enterprises including NTEN, Common Knowledge, the Black Rock Arts Foundation, SF Environment, Copia, and the Xtracycle Foundation.

Rachel has a B.Phil. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Miami University’s Western College Program, and completed the coursework for a masters in Arts Policy and Administration at Ohio State University. When she’s not working to save the ocean, she makes preserves, swims in the Bay, and gardens at her tiny home in San Francisco. She is obsessed with whale sharks.

This week the US House Representatives introduced H.R. 4186, the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology Act of 2014 (FIRST Act). The stated goal of the proposed law — “to provide for investment in innovation through scientific research and development, [and] to improve the competitiveness of the United States — is worthy and well received. But part of the bill (Section 303) is detrimental to both existing and proposed public access policies in the United States.

According to SPARC:

Section 303 of the bill would undercut the ability of federal agencies to effectively implement the widely supported White House Directive on Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research and undermine the successful public access program pioneered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – recently expanded through the FY14 Omnibus Appropriations Act to include the Departments Labor, Education and Health and Human Services. Adoption of Section 303 would be a step backward from existing federal policy in the directive, and put the U.S. at a severe disadvantage among our global competitors.

The White House Directive, NIH Public Access Policy, Omnibus Appropriations Act, and the proposed Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) all contain similar provisions to ensure public access to publicly funded research after a relatively short embargo (6-12 months). These policies make sure that articles created and published as a result of federal funding are deposited in a repository for access and preservation purposes. In addition, the policies provide for a reasonable process and timeline for agencies to development a plan to comply with the public access requirements.

The FIRST Act would conflict with each of these practices. Instead, if enacted it would permit agencies that must comply with the law to:

• Extend embargoes to federally funded research articles to up to 3 years after initial publication, thus drastically increasing the time before the public has free public access to this research. We’ve said before that the public should be granted immediate access to the content of peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research. Immediate access is the ideal method to optimize the scientific and commercial utility of the information contained in the articles.
• Fulfill access requirements by providing a link to a publisher’s site. However, this jeopardizes long-term access and preservation of publicly-funded research in the absence of a requirement that those links be permanently preserved. A better outcome would be to ensure that a copy is deposited in a federally-controlled repository.
• Spend up to 18 additional months to develop plans to comply with the conditions of the law, thus further delaying the plans that are already being organized by federal agencies under the White House Directive and Omnibus Appropriations Act.

This bill is scheduled to be marked up in the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology tomorrow, March 13.

But there are better alternatives, both in existing policy (e.g. White House Directive), and in potential legislation (e.g. FASTR). Here’s what you can do right now:

• Send a letter to members of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee opposing Section 303 of the FIRST Act.
• Use the SPARC action center to customize and send letters directly to your legislators. Tweet your opposition to Section 303 of the FIRST Act, or post about the bill on Facebook.
• Write a letter to the editor or an op-ed for your local or campus newspaper. You can write directly to them or by using the SPARC legislative action center.
• Share this post with your colleagues, labs, friends and family.

This is part four of a five week series on the Affiliate Team project grants. So far, you’ve heard from our affiliates in Africa, Arab World, and Asia-Pacific. Today, we’re featuring our Europe projects, including a revived CC WordPress plugin from Finland, an awareness raising event in Dublin, Ireland, and a course for librarians and academics led by CC Romania.

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Finland: WpLicense Revived
by project lead Tarmo Toikkanen

CC Finland is working on a revived Creative Commons WordPress plugin, building upon the existing official plugin built by Nathan Yergler, former CC CTO.
The renewed plugin will work in multi-author blogs with varying license needs, which displays correct author information on all pages in the license RDF, and which is localized to several languages. As an additional feature, integration with online CC-licensed image banks for searching and using figures in blog posts would be extremely useful in helping bloggers use pictures legally.
As WordPress is the most used CMS in the world, it should have robust Creative Commons functionality, officially produced by CC. The plugin would both make it easy for bloggers to share their content openly, and would educate many about CC licenses.
On February 19th, we announced an alpha version of the renewed WpLicense plugin. Download it here: https://github.com/tarmot/wp-cc-plugin/releases/tag/release-2.0-alpha
We welcome any bug reports, issues or general feedback on WPLicense on the cc-devel mailing list or as issues in Github.

Ireland: Awareness-raising Event in Dublin, November 2013
by project lead Darius Whelan

Creative Commons Ireland held an awareness-raising event in Dublin on “Maximising Digital Creativity, Sharing and Innovation” in January 2014. The event took place in the National Gallery of Ireland and was attended by 100 people working in technology, libraries, academia, galleries/libraries/museums, media and education. The speakers represented a cross-section of perspectives, and the event was an opportunity for CC Ireland to develop relationships with organisations such as the Open Knowledge Foundation, Digital Rights Ireland, and Ireland’s Copyright Review Committee. Eoin O’Dell of the Law School, Trinity College Dublin talked about copyright law reform and its impact on Creative Commons licences. The Copyright Review Committee, which was chaired by Dr O’Dell, published its proposals for change in Ireland in October 2013 (see http://www.djei.ie/press/2013/20131029.htm). O’Dell said his committee’s report had provided the first legal definition of metadata, which particularly aimed to protect the rights of digital photographers. The report also proposed that parody and linking should be allowed without any infringement of copyright, as well as a nine-point ‘fair use’ doctrine. Kristina Alexanderson of CC Sweden spoke about how she uses CC licences in her work and her work has been accessed by very large audiences as a result.

Conor McCabe / CC BY

Alek Tarkowski, European Policy Advisor, CC, discussed open policies for user rights and freedoms, and highlighted a Polish project for providing open education textbooks. Gwen Franck, CC Regional Co-ordinator, highlighted the work of CC Affiliates throughout Europe. Professor David Post, of Temple Law School, Philadelphia, USA said there were between 400 million and 800 million Creative Commons licences in use today, and Creative Commons represented people “taking the law into their own hands.” He said copyright law had “run amok,” with copyright protection running for too long and being too wide. The event was chaired by Darius Whelan and Louise Crowley of CC Ireland and the Faculty of Law, University College Cork. Photos, videos and slides are available at www.creativecommonsireland.org.

Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/114281612@N04/
Videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/creativecommonsirl
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/cc-ireland

Romania: OER Awareness Activities for Librarians and Academics in Romania
#schoolofopen
by Jane Park (project lead: Bogdan Manolea)

Many librarians and academics in Romania are not aware of or knowledgeable about open educational resources (OER) and how they can best leverage them for their needs. CC Romania, along with the Association for Technology and Internet (ApTI), the National Association of Public Libraries and Librarians in Romania, and Kosson and Soros Foundation Romania teamed up to put on a series of workshops to raise awareness among librarians and academics on the topics of open educational resources (OER), copyright, and CC licenses.
The project was launched during the National Association of Librarians and Public Libraries (ANBPR) annual conference which took place between 10-12 October 2013 in Sibiu, Romania. The presentation prepared by the team project and delivered by Andra Bucur from the Soros Foundation explained in short about copyright issues and their limits, how to apply an open license to a creation, what are open educational resources (OER) and where to find them.
From this conference, participants signed up for a series of workshops which focused on the correct attribution of the CC licenses, aspects of OER, online courses and MOOCs delivered by Bogdan Manolea from ApTI and Nicolaie Constantinescu (ANBPR & Kosson.ro).
The series kicked off in 15 November in Brașov, Romania, as part of the International Colloquium on Social Science and Communication, a social science academic event.
Subsequent workshops were held in December 2013 and January 2014 at V.A. Urechia Regional Library in Galați; at Octavian Goga Regional Library in Cluj; at Polytechnical University in Timișoara; and University Vasile Goldiș in Arad. Future workshops wil take plece in Iași and Bucharest in February 2014.
The partners of the project are also organizing a conference in Bucharest during the open education week to share the best practices on education taught, but also learned in the project.
CC Romania also attended BVCCC – the first CC Film Festival to be ever organized in Romania that took place in Brașov in November 2013. This was a great opportunity for the team to reach out to a different type of public — mostly local artists and digital content creators.