thank you note for every language / woodleywonderworks / CC BY

As we take stock of our achievements in 2013 and plan our legal work for the year ahead, we would be remiss not to pause and express our deepest gratitude to the many individuals and organizations whose contributions made one of CC’s most significant projects in 2013 – the development of license version 4.0 – an overwhelming success. This milestone was made possible because of the dedication of our diverse, talented, and extensive CC community. Our community brought legal expertise and practical experience to bear in our policy deliberations, and continued to hold us accountable for running an inclusive, transparent process. CC is thankful for your ongoing efforts and your trust in our stewardship. The version 4.0 licenses are all the better for your participation.

Although many more could be thanked, we in particular wish to recognize the contributions of a few:

• the CC global affiliate network for their legal analysis and drafting assistance, which included participation by representatives from more than 55 jurisdictions over the course of four license drafts;
• the larger CC community of creators and license users who contributed constructively, thoughtfully, and often passionately to our policy debates through 1000+ posts to our license development email list;
• other public license stewards, including the Free Software Foundation and Artlibre.org, for carefully navigating the intricacies of license compatibility and sharing ideas for (hopefully) achieving that goal in the new year;
• our friends and colleagues at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Library of Science, Software Freedom Law Center, Wikimedia Foundation, and other sister organizations, who contributed expertise and insights on difficult policy decisions and considered with us the potential implications of our policy choices;
• CC fellow Mike Linksvayer and consultant Eric Steuer, for their perspectives on past policy decisions and insight into opportunities and challenges for future license adoptions;
• former staff members including Chris Webber, Greg Grossmeier, and Aurelia Schultz, as well as the CC board of directors, particularly Michael Carroll and Molly Van Houweling who provided instrumental guidance and legal expertise throughout the process; and
• as always, our trusted pro bono counsel at Latham & Watkins and Wilson Sonsini.

Looking ahead to 2014, our community will have many additional opportunities to participate in our legal work. In close collaboration with our worldwide affiliate network, we will shortly begin the process of creating and publishing official translations of the 4.0 licenses and related educational materials, including FAQs and implementation tool kits. We will also be returning our attention to ShareAlike compatibility. We will be finalizing the (currently Draft) ShareAlike Statement of Intent, which will be followed by development of ShareAlike compatibility criteria and processes and evaluation of leading candidates for compatibility with BY-SA 4.0. Starting this month, we will also begin publishing a series of blog posts that focus on new features of the 4.0 license suite. The series will explore in more depth implications of the underlying policy decisions reflected in our new licenses, such as the operation of our licenses in the context of text and data mining.

We will also be turning our attention to legal projects set aside while finishing 4.0, such as our work on CC0 translations and other public domain-focused efforts. You can also expect us to solicit your input on important new projects under evaluation and in development. There will be no shortage of opportunities for our community to lend their expertise (and opinions!) as we move forward in 2014.

Thanks once again for contributing to a successful version 4.0 launch. We look forward to continuing our collaborations with all of you in the new year!

Here’s another end of year list: all the awesome things the School of Open community accomplished in 2013. Last year, we highlighted the work we put into materializing School of Open as a concrete entity with goals and people involved. This year, we actually launched the School with a full set of online courses and kick-off events around the world!

But we didn’t stop there. All year long, our volunteers have been contributing in so many fantastic and unexpected ways that it’s been hard to wrap our brains around all the activity. So here’s my attempt at collecting and distilling everything here, as a teaser for the new School of Open landing page that will happen in 2014.

The biggest thing you should note about the School of Open is that it is no longer just a set of online courses sitting on the P2PU platform. It is a global community and movement of volunteers developing and running online or hybrid courses, face-to-face workshops, and real world training programs — all with the purpose of helping people do what they already do better with the aid of open resources and tools.

In 2013, we

• Launched 12 stand-alone courses for anyone to take at any time, with or without others.
• Ran a total of 11 facilitated courses on topics such as: Copyright 4 Educators, Designing Collaborative Workshops, Open Science, CC licensing, Writing Wikipedia Articles, and Why Open?
• Conducted initial research on the impact of some of these courses and completed a research residency with the OER Research Hub in Milton Keynes, England
• Hosted multiple workshops, course sprints, and other events across 5 continents (in countries like England, Germany, Kenya, China, Sudan, Argentina, South Africa, the U.S.)
• Started School of Open Kenya, an after school program for high school students teaching about open educational resources, CC licenses, and the open culture that they engender
• Put on an engineering and design challenge incorporating open source and CC licensing education for university students in China
• Ran a two-week OER summer camp for kids on Luxi island, an island in rural China (more info to follow in a guest blog post)


OER summer camp on Luxi island ( ZHU Renkai / CC BY)

• Launched WikiProject Open, a community of new and experienced Wikipedians, dedicated to improving Wikipedia’s coverage of all things “open” and to using openly licensed content to improve Wikipedia articles in general
• Got the School of Open’s Writing Wikipedia Articles course adopted as part of a formal university course (the University of Mississippi’s “Open Educational Resources and Practices”)
• Piloted P2PU badges for 7 of our facilitated courses! For examples, check out this Remix OER badge and this Intro to Open Science Open Access badge
• Built a human timeline of the open education space! Which we want anyone and everyone to contribute to
• Helped turn a “collaborations across the open space” session at Mozfest into a funded part-time position that will help coordinate our open communities! (more info at this pad)
• Developed support resources for course facilitators, including this comprehensive tip sheet by a facilitator with a 95% retention rate
• Created a couple videos for online conferences, like this one for K-12 educators and this one for Open Ed Week
• Showcased School of Open projects by CC affiliates at the Creative Commons Global Summit in Buenos Aires…

…and more, all of which you can check out in detail on the CC blog at http://creativecommons.org/tag/school-of-open.

In 2014, we will

• Launch our third round of facilitated courses in March. Sign up to be notified when registration opens
• Revamp the School of Open landing page to better reflect our multi-layered activity
• Build out courses in different languages. So far volunteers have expressed interest in translating courses into Spanish, Romanian, Hindi, Swedish, Chinese, Korean, Dutch, French, Arabic, German, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Hebrew… yes, we’ve got our work cut out for us!
• Expand current training programs to other regions; for example, we hope to have similar programs to School of Open Kenya in place in Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania
• Start new courses and training programs in South Africa, Colombia, Uruguay, El Salvador, Argentina, and more!
• Collaborate with our fellow open organizations such as OKFN, Mozilla, Wikimedia, P2PU, and more!
• Do more research! And completing a report of our findings with the OER Research Hub
• Get more SOO courses adopted as part of formal university courses
• Secure professional development credit for teachers/librarians taking Copyright 4 Educators in Australia (and elsewhere)
• Collaborate with the California School Librarians Association (CSLA) to increase CC and OER education in K-12 schools!


Fireworks / Jack-Benny / CC BY-SA

• Run more workshops, especially one for SOO volunteers to get together and grow their respective projects
• Take more pictures. We didn’t have enough this year!

And I could go on, but I’ll stop there. On behalf of the School of Open community, we wish you a Happy Holidays and a wonderful New Year!

If you would like to join us in our endeavors to provide free education opportunities on all things open, introduce yourself at the School of Open Google Group, sign up for announcements, and check out a course (or two or three).

About the School of Open

The School of Open is a global community of volunteers focused on providing free education opportunities on the meaning, application, and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, research, and more. Volunteers develop and run online courses, offline workshops, and real world training programs on topics such as Creative Commons licenses, open educational resources, and sharing creative works. The School of Open is coordinated by Creative Commons and P2PU, a peer learning community and platform for developing and running free online courses.

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Sudanese political cartoonist Khalid Albaih pushes boundaries with his art to reach new viewers and ignite change. “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… this is what we’re supposed to be doing — what the internet was made for.”

YouTube celebrity Jonathan Mann gets excited when his work encourages others to create. “So many people, when they hear what I do, they tell me that they wish that they could be making more of whatever it is they make. They wish that they were more tapped into their creativity.” He has certainly tapped into his. He began writing and recording a song a day and posting them online under a CC license for anyone to reuse or remix, garnering worldwide attention.

Illustrator and activist Miyoung Yi wants to show other Korean artists the value of sharing. She uses her own CC-licensed drawings to carry her message of open across South Korea. “[Creative Commons] can pave an alternate path to success outside of big capital, big companies, and big industries.”

Stand with Miyoung, Jonathan, Khalid, and thousands of other creators who believe that art is best when it’s shared. Support Creative Commons and make collaboration and creativity flourish. Please donate now.

In November we released version 4.0 of the Creative Commons license suite, and today the Open Definition Advisory Council approved the CC 4.0 Attribution (BY) and Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) International licenses as conformant with the Open Definition.

The Open Definition sets out principles that define “openness” in relation to data and content…It can be summed up in the statement that: “A piece of data or content is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike.”

Prior versions of Creative Commons BY and BY-SA licenses (1.0 – 3.0, including jurisdiction ports) are also aligned with the Open Definition, as is the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. Here’s the complete list of conformant licenses. None of the Creative Commons NonCommercial or NoDerivatives licenses comply with the Definition.

The Open Definition is an important marker that communicates the fundamental legal conditions that make content and data open, and CC is working on ways to better display which of our licenses conform to the Definition. We appreciate the open and participatory process conducted by the Open Definition Advisory Council in evaluating licenses and providing expert assistance and advice to license stewards. Individuals interested in participating in the Open Definition license review process may join the OD-discuss email list.

Last month, Creative Commons and several other groups responded to the European Commission’s consultation on licensing, datasets and charging for the re-use of public sector information (PSI). See our response here. There were 355 submissions to the questionnaire (spreadsheet download), apparently from all EU Member States except Cyprus. The Commission hosted a hearing (PDF of meeting minutes) on the issue on 25 November.

This week the Commission released a final summary report (PDF) to the consultation. There were several interesting data points from the report concerning licensing. First, the questionnaire respondents preferred a “light-weight approach, limited to a mere disclaimer or consisting of allowing the reuse of data without any particular restrictions…” (pg5). In our submission, we said that there should be no conditions attached to the re-use of public sector information, with the best case scenario being for public sector information to be in the public domain, exempt from copyright protection altogether by amending national copyright laws.

Second, when asked about licensing conditions that would comply with the PSI Directive’s requirement of ‘not unnecessarily restricting possibilities for re-use’, the most respondents indicated support for the requirement to acknowledge the source of data. In our submission we said we believed every condition would be deemed restrictive, since ideally PSI would be removed from the purview of copyright protection through law. At the same time, we realize that if the Commission were to permit public sector bodies to incorporate a limited set of conditions through licensing, then they should be expected to use standard public licenses aligned with the Open Definition. The preference should be for “attribution only” licenses, like CC BY.

The report noted that a majority (62%) of respondents believed that greater interoperability would be best achieved through the use of standard licences. And 71% of respondents said that the adoption of Creative Commons licenses would be the best option to promote interoperability. The report states, “this may be interpreted as both a high awareness of the availability of standard licences and a genuine understanding of their role in ensuring licencing interoperability across jurisdictions” (pg7).

The report also mentions the fact that several respondents chose to provide feedback on which Creative Commons licenses would be deemed suitable for PSI re-use. It noted that the most prevalent licenses mentioned were CC0 and CC BY, while a few respondents suggested BY-SA. Others provided a more general answer, such as “the most open CC license could be used…But [the] BEST OPTION is no use of any of license: public domain” (pg9).

The report concludes (pg16):

There is also a widespread acceptance of the need to offer interoperable solutions, both on the technical and licencing levels. And even if opinions differ as to the exact shape of re-use conditions, the answers show that a general trend towards a more open and interoperable licencing system in Europe, largely based on available standard licences is gaining ground.