Today Creative Commons CEO Catherine Stihler is announcing the conclusion of her time leading the organization. We are grateful to Catherine for over three years of leadership at CC. 

During her tenure as CEO, Catherine demonstrated tremendous energy. Joining as a leader in August 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, meant navigating challenging times. Like many nonprofits during that time, the organization struggled financially. Under Catherine’s leadership the organization recovered from that. A successful 20th Anniversary Campaign that concluded in December 2022 led to more predictability for some of CC’s core program areas, due to multi-year funding commitments.

Organizational highlights from Catherine’s tenure at CC include a year-long campaign of thought leadership and community consultation on AI & the commons, which culminated in the 2023 CC Global Summit. This was CC’s first in-person community gathering since 2019. We also launched the Open Climate Campaign in partnership with SPARC and EIFL, and the organization has invested deeply in the Open Culture sector. Both initiatives are the result of generous funding from Arcadia. These are achievements that we can all be proud of.

The Creative Commons Board of Directors remains as committed as ever to CC’s mission of empowering individuals and communities around the world by equipping them with technical, legal, and policy solutions to enable sharing of knowledge and culture in the public interest.

On behalf of the board, I want to express our thanks for Catherine’s service to the organization. During this transition period, Anna Tumadóttir will serve as Interim CEO. As we look to the future, we are excited to come together with CC’s staff, global network, and broader community, to interrogate what our role is in protecting the commons in a very different world than the one we lived in 20+ years ago, when the CC licenses first came into existence.

New challenges lie ahead, and we are grateful to have the privilege of working on public interest solutions together with our dedicated staff and community.

Yours,

Delia Browne, Chair of the Creative Commons Board of Directors

The post Leadership Transition – Thank You to Catherine Stihler appeared first on Creative Commons.

This December, Creative Commons led a CC Certificate Bootcamp, or condensed Certificate training, for faculty and staff from 16 different California Community Colleges implementing Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) degree programs. This marked the second CC Bootcamp for California Community Colleges after the California legislature invested $115 million to expand ZTC degrees and the use of open educational resources (OER) within the statewide California community college system. ZTC degrees and increased use of OER reduce the overall cost of education and shorten the time to degree completion for students. With the average cost of course textbooks estimated at $100/student/course, ZTC degrees are crucial for students’ higher education. Further, students’ grades achieved in ZTC programs are higher than in traditional courses.

The CC Certificate program provides training and tools for ZTC program faculty and staff to legally and effectively implement the open licensing requirements of California’s historic investment in education. After learning about copyright basics, fair use, the public domain, and CC licensing, participants brainstormed and initiated some great ways to support ZTC program faculty and student needs. Examples of participant work include using generative AI to create “Creative Commons Bots,” tools to help others learn about licensing, and test their own knowledge with quiz questions; creating a grants guide for OER funding; drafting a potential strategic plan for OER/ ZTC work (work in progress), and remixing previous courses or resources to address ZTC communications and learning needs for localized audiences (works in progress). See what participants are saying below.

“This is one of the best professional development experiences I’ve had in years”

“Thank you so much for sharing wonderful resources and CC practices. I will share this knowledge with my colleagues”

“You’ve nailed the condensed week workshop. So much fun, and creating work groups was really beneficial”

We are proud to support California Community Colleges’ collaboration as they strengthen their foundations for open education. CC is grateful to the Michelson 20MM Foundation for generously funding this bootcamp at San Bernardino Valley College. Special thanks also go to the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges for their liaison work, expertise and support, to San Bernardino Valley College for hosting the event, and to Fresno Pacific University for providing professional development credits to faculty.

If you’re interested in advancing open education efforts in your own institution, Creative Commons offers an array of learning, training, and consulting opportunities to support our global community in developing open licensing expertise and a deeper understanding of recommended practices for better sharing. Visit the CC Training & Consulting page to learn more about our training services, workshops, lectures, and CC Certificate courses. Register for our next CC Certificate online courses, starting 29 January.

The post More California Community Colleges Get CC Certified! appeared first on Creative Commons.

Join Creative Commons, Internet Archive, and many other leaders from the open world to celebrate Public Domain Day 2024. The mouse that became Mickey will finally be free of his corporate captivity as the copyright term of the 1928 animated Disney film, Steamboat Willie, expires along with that of thousands of other cultural works on the first day of 2024.

The year 1928 brought us a host of still relevant, oft-revived and remixed culture, from H.P. Lovecraft’s classic horror story, “Call of Cthulhu” (originally published in Weird Tales; now currently a popular video game), to the Threepenny Opera, a critique of income inequality and the excesses of capitalism that is surprisingly on point for our current era.

And further, classic works of literature such as Orlando by Virginia Woolfe, Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, and Black Magic by Paul Mourad; children’s literature like House on Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne, which introduced the character Tigger, and Millions of Cats by Wanda Gág; movies like Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus, and Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman; and music like Dorothy Field’s “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby” and Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” will grow the rich set of materials that are freely available to all of us as part of the public domain.

Join us for a virtual celebration at 10am PT / 1pm ET on 25 January, 2024, with an amazing lineup of academics, librarians, musicians, artists and advocates coming together to help illuminate the significance of this new class of works entering the public domain!

Of course our program wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of Generative AI, which to some has become a new kind of Eldritch God unleashed upon humanity—a Chtulhu of sorts—out to alter or control human reality. New AI technologies have raised all kinds of questions about human creativity, and the various monsters we must vanquish in order to preserve it. We’ll get into all that and more in our panel discussion of AI, Creativity and the Public Domain.

REGISTER NOW

This event is co-hosted by Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Authors Alliance, Public Knowledge, Library Futures, SPARC and the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

The post Celebrate Public Domain Day 2024 with us: Weird Tales from the Public Domain appeared first on Creative Commons.

On 22 November, we organized a webinar with a group of experts to discuss their unique approaches to reparative metadata practices: considering the ways that harmful histories and terminologies have made their way into collections labeling and categorization practices and finding ways to identify those terms, contextualize them, and/or replace them altogether.

Jill Baron, a librarian at Dartmouth College (USA) shared some of her learnings from a project to change subject headings in the United States Library of Congress after working with a student who encountered the subject heading “illegal aliens” in Dartmouth’s library catalog. The journey is captured in the documentary Change the Subject that she co-produced. Marco Redina spoke about his work on the DE-BIAS project, identifying harmful terms and adding context and more appropriate terminologies to more than 4.5 million records currently published on the Europeana website. Amanda Figueroa spoke about her efforts on the Curationist team where reviewers work to recontextualize collection descriptions with more contemporary and respectful descriptions through review and research. Carma Citrawati, a lecturer at Udayana University (Indonesia) spoke about her efforts to preserve traditional Balinese manuscripts in consultation with communities in Bali.

In the conversation, you will hear more about some of the nuances around the choice to keep legacy terminology in the record in order to preserve the history of harm, or replace it in order to make for a less harmful experience during discovery today. You will also hear from the experts about how they have engaged their communities around the work they do and get some advice on how you might think about confronting some of the harmful histories that have made their way into descriptions and metadata at your institution.

→ Watch the recording 

Further reading, as shared by webinar participants:

• Change the Subject Documentary | Full Length 
• Respectful Terminologies Project for Indigenous People Launches in Canada
• The New York Public Library Research Guides The Change the Subject Project at NYPL, BPL, and BookOps About
• DE-BIAS – Detecting and cur(at)ing harmful language in cultural heritage collections | Europeana Pro
• 1 The Plan for Dartmouth’s Freedom Budget: Items for Transformative Justice at Dartmouth We, the Concerned Asian, Black, Latin
• Cataloging Lab

Sign up for our newsletter, Open Culture Matters, to learn about our upcoming webinars and keep up to date on news and events related to Cultural Heritage and Open Access and join the Open Culture Platform to get involved in our work.

 

The post Open Culture Live Recap & Recording: Respectful Terminologies & Changing the Subject appeared first on Creative Commons.

The complexity of climate change is on display at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP). The conference is arranged into two major zones, blue and green, with the former accessible only by parties  with UNFCCC accreditation. The green zone is a landscape dotted by venues with booths inside representing  different climate change stakeholders. Each booth delves into a different dimension of climate change – energy transition, the role of mangrove forests in carbon capture and climate education just to name a few. 

At COP 28, the Open Climate Campaign highlighted another critical dimension of climate change – open access to climate change research. A common theme in presentations and statements at COP is that we know a lot about both the mechanistic causes of climate changes and its effects. Yet, most of that knowledge is in research publications, half of which is not accessible to read without a subscription. At the Open Climate Campaign we are on a mission to make the open sharing of research the norm in climate science. We know that to develop solutions, mitigations or adaptations to climate change, the knowledge about it must be open. The Open Climate Campaign teamed up with EQTYLab and the Endowment for Climate Intelligence (ECI) for the launch of their Climate GPT and a discussion of the pivotal role open plays in not only understanding climate change, but leveraging that knowledge into new technologies. The Open Climate Campaign is also embarking on a pilot project with ECI to elevate the accessibility of climate change research beyond just physical access to the publication and the data associated with it. Our collaboration will show the potential of combining openly licensed publications with generative Al.  Across the conference venue the Frontiers Research Foundation was also discussing the critical role open plays in addressing climate change. They hosted a series of panel discussions including open science for inclusive and transformative climate and sustainability innovation and embracing open science for the climate crisis. 

The Open Climate Campaign is looking forward to participating in COP 29 in Azerbaijan where we will continue to raise the need for open access to knowledge about climate change. We are looking to partner with other organizations at the intersection of climate and open to organize panels, presentations and/or workshops to amplify our shared message. If you would like to collaborate please reach out to: contact@openclimatecampaign.org

The post Open Climate Campaign at UNFCCC Conference of the Parties 28 appeared first on Creative Commons.