A lot of exciting and critical work awaits us in 2024. While I steer Creative Commons as interim CEO, I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and share details of our key priorities in the upcoming year.

I joined Creative Commons in late September 2019 as Director of Product and partnered with our former Director of Engineering, Kriti Godey, to lead our work on building CC Search. That project was transitioned to OpenVerse, stewarded by the WordPress Foundation, and subsequently I stepped into the role of COO. My background and education have spanned multiple continents and very different spaces (non-profit, start-ups, higher education) but have consistently come back to a theme, from the micro to the macro level: How do we remove barriers? How do we make things work better?

It is a privilege to work at Creative Commons, where the organizational mission so deeply aligns with my own belief system. We cannot hope to work together — within our homes or workplaces, across organizational and cultural boundaries – if we are not able to share knowledge and are not willing to learn from one another.

As I navigate the role of interim CEO, with the support and collaboration of the CC Board of Directors, it is clear where we need to deepen our commitments. We have important work taking place in the fields of Open Culture and Open Science. There are also critical considerations to navigate due to the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and the impact this may have on knowledge sharing and the broader commons. All of this work is rooted in our role as the stewards of the legal infrastructure of the open web.

Key Program Updates 

As many in our community know, in the past three years, we’ve had the good fortune of launching four major projects: our Open Culture program, the Open Climate Campaign, our Open Climate Data project, and a project to openly license preprints.

Our Open Culture program, launched in mid-2021, is focused on developing an open culture ecosystem amongst cultural heritage institutions. These include both the institutions themselves – including galleries, libraries, archives, and museums – as well as their users. The mission of cultural heritage institutions aligns with the work of Creative Commons. Our vision is a world where knowledge and culture are equitably shared in ways that serve the public interest. We want the institutions we work with to be better equipped to openly share the content they steward. Through work in policy and advocacy, infrastructure support, and capacity and community building, the end goal is for the public to have increased, equitable, and ethical access to knowledge and culture. Interested advocates can get involved through the Open Culture Platform. This work is supported by a multi-year gift from Arcadia, and will continue until at least mid-2026.

In mid-2022 we launched the Open Climate Campaign, in partnership with SPARC and EIFL, with support from Open Society Foundations and Arcadia. This four-year campaign has the goal of making the open sharing of research the norm in climate science. The climate crisis is the defining existential crisis of our time, and we cannot hope to collaborate on solutions, or preserve global biodiversity, if the knowledge about this global challenge is not open and accessible to all.

To complement our work on open sharing of research, we were thrilled to receive support for our Open Climate Data project, from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, dedicated to the opening and sharing of large climate datasets and climate data models across the globe. For anyone working to understand and address climate change, the certainty of what they’re allowed to do with climate data is critical to knowledge advancement. We recently shared recommended best practices for better sharing of climate data and are hopeful this work can continue.

To better facilitate knowledge sharing, we most recently launched a collaborative project supported by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative to help make openly licensed preprints the primary vehicle of scientific dissemination, with a focus on the life sciences. Learning from the potential of rapid response and open sharing to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, we are grateful to contribute to strengthening the ecosystem of scholarly communication.

It is imperative that we continue our strategic interventions in cultural heritage, climate science, and the life sciences. All of this work is fully in line with our organizational strategy, in particular our emphasis on transforming institutions to make knowledge and cultural heritage assets as openly accessible as possible. 

Generative AI & the Commons

Over the last year we have been asking ourselves what is the appropriate role, exactly, for CC, when it comes to generative AI – apart from the ongoing and widespread use of CC licenses for software documentation and in open source AI communities. Throughout 2023, we ran community consultations. We met directly with hundreds of community members, brought together different groups in small workshops, intimate roundtables, community conferences (such as MozFest), and public events (such as our symposium on Generative AI & Creativity) to debate copyright law, the ethics of open sharing, and other relevant areas that touch on AI. Our consultations spanned the globe and culminated in the CC Global Summit in October, where the central theme was the impact of AI on the Commons. A set of community-driven principles on AI continue to inform the organization’s thinking as we plan for the year ahead.

We will continue the critically important work of bringing together diverse viewpoints to explore the broad topics of generative AI (inputs, outputs, copyright, choice, provenance, authenticity, compensation, and such). In parallel, we are identifying areas where Creative Commons can play a role and explore community-oriented contributions to the broader ecosystem. This may be through experiments in preference signaling, going back to the fundamentals of the commons and celebrating creativity, or seeing what the implications are of “open” models training on “open” content. (That’s right, we also need to better define “openness” when it comes to artificial intelligence.)

Supporting our Open Infrastructure

Our work is not only focused on particular sectors or policy interventions. We need to actively steward our legal tools and any necessary innovations that help us achieve our mission, to empower individuals and communities by equipping them with technical, legal, and policy solutions to enable sharing of knowledge and culture in the public interest.

Underpinning all of our work as an organization, and much of the work of our community, is the legal infrastructure that powers open sharing, and it needs, for lack of a better metaphor, care and feeding:

• We need to ensure that the legal tools are translated into as many languages as possible to make open sharing more equitable across the world.
• We need to ensure that when someone brings a nuanced question to the organization that we continue to have expert lawyers and open access advocates on staff to help answer those questions.
• We need to ensure the basic technology is maintained, and when needed, modernized.
• It is critical that we continue to generate educational materials, and train future generations of open access advocates, whether they work in libraries, cultural heritage, education, or beyond.
• We need to find ways to better support our community, including the CC Global Network, with an emphasis on hearing and amplifying the viewpoints of community members in the Global South.

With this in mind, we launched our Open Infrastructure Circle, and are grateful to those individuals and institutions who signed on early to show a commitment to the underlying legal infrastructure that powers open sharing on the web. This will be a central focus in 2024 to help guarantee more predictable support for the legal infrastructure that is CC’s reason for being.

And finally, thank you again to our community, our Global Network members, and all of our supporters, for helping to sustain the organization for future decades and supporting a thriving digital commons. We could not do all of this without you. My (virtual) door is always open to CC friends and new ideas. I firmly believe we can continue to reduce barriers to sharing and cultivate a commons while empowering creators to make the right choices for them.

The post What Lies Ahead in 2024 appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Creative Commons Certificate program launched in 2018 to strengthen our global communities’ efforts to share open knowledge and culture. To date, we have over 1700 graduates of the Certificate program from 65 different countries. 

The program was built for iteration and adaptation.  We regularly revise and update the CC Certificate materials based on direct feedback from our community of participants, facilitators, and alumni. We make all iterations of our course openly available under a CC BY license. As a result, our community has created countless derivative trainings, faculty presentations, workshops, courses and open education, open access and open culture communication materials. Community members have also translated course reading content and made it available as open educational resources in 10 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, English, French, Italian, Slovak, Spanish, Turkish, and Yoruba.

Now, we are pleased to announce the latest revision of our course content available on our Certificate Resources page, accessible and downloadable in multiple file formats.

With the 2024 course content, we hope to reach new audiences, and we invite new translation projects to help us.  Translation work could mean both updating existing translations or creating entirely new ones. If you’re interested in making the CC Certificate course content available in your own local language(s) by participating in a future translation project, please reach out to us at certificates [at] creativecommons.org for more information.

If you’re interested in a CC Certificate course, you can learn more and register for our upcoming June 2024 and September 2024 options on our website. If you are already CC Certified, we encourage you to share your experiences with your colleagues and to become an active participant in our alumni community, where you can read our alumni newsletter, learn about additional training opportunities, and participate in upcoming community projects. Contact certificates [at] creativecommons.org  if you are not already on the alumni listserv and we will add you.

We send a special thanks to the many wonderful CC staff, Certificate course facilitators, community members and volunteers who help make this work possible. We’re looking forward to continued improvements to the CC Certificate program as we explore new audiences and new opportunities to help you reach your open education goals.

The post New Revisions to CC Certificate Course Content = New Opportunities for Translations appeared first on Creative Commons.

Archiving History of Ghana: Case Study of Forts and Castles

Francis Quasie

This project aimed at documenting some of the existing forts and castles in Ghana on Wikimedia Commons with the aim of making these resources available to use by anyone around the world through Creative Commons tools and licenses.

This project has seen remarkable outcomes. We covered our target areas and produced a total of three hundred and fifty two (352) images out of our target number of three hundred (300) images for Wikimedia Commons. We also uploaded eight (8) videos in addition to the images on Wikimedia Commons making the total number of three hundred and sixty (360) images and videos in total all under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 International license. All the 360 images and videos were uploaded in a category of “Forts and Castles in Ghana” on Wikimedia Commons. Also another outcome of this project we are excited about is the relationship established with the Ghana Museum and Monument Board with regard to preserving African heritage. We have shared the images documented on Wikimedia Commons with the Ghana Museum and Monument Board and some of the entities under the Museum. We have also shared our photographs with some of the Senior High School and university institutions which will be used for educational purposes.

These forts and castles on Wikipedia have been updated with the current images documented to provide more understanding of these historical sites in Ghana. We are happy for this project because we provide vital information on Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia as well, and we also had an opportunity to learn a lot about our historical monuments in Ghana as we document for the next generation.

Building a sustainable social, technical & legal infrastructure for Open GLAM in Pakistan; the quantitative analyses for the development of open heritage science for Pakistani heritage

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Muhammad Imtiaz Subhani, PhD.                           Amber Osman
Lead, Creative Commons, Pakistan                         Co-lead, Creative Commons, Pakistan
(Project Principal Investigator)                                (Project Co-Investigator)

This project aimed to establish a comprehensive and sustainable social, technical, and legal infrastructure for Open GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) in Pakistan, focusing on fostering open heritage science for Pakistani heritage. The initiative has undertaken in-depth analyses to quantify and assess the cultural heritage sites and institutions, their current state and their accessibility, while identifying their legal frameworks, technological and social infrastructures and also addressing the technological aspects for digitization and preservation. The cultural heritage sites and institutions were investigated in terms of their counts in each province and city, their types, location addresses, level of access including license types. Further, in order to better quantify Pakistani heritage, a self-administered focused group survey was conducted through deploying eight focused group volunteers. 2000 respondents/cultural stakeholders (250 respondents through each of eight focused groups) were reached out from all over Pakistan to quantify the several positions of legal, technological and social frameworks pertaining to Pakistan heritage.

In our endeavor to establish a robust and sustainable social, technical, and legal infrastructure for Open GLAM in Pakistan, we’ve achieved significant milestones and gained valuable insights. Through meticulous analysis, we quantified and assessed the state and accessibility of GLAMs, heritage sites, and institutions across provinces, identifying legal frameworks, technological infrastructures, and avenues for digitization and preservation. Notably, our study confirmed the presence of 424 heritage entities spread across all provinces, with Punjab exhibiting a dense concentration. We’ve successfully facilitated open access to heritage resources, particularly in Sindh, through collaborations with Creative Commons and governmental bodies.

Technological advancements include the launch of a beta version Dashboard for easy access to heritage details and the establishment of XploreOpen, a dedicated web platform catering to Pakistan’s heritage. Furthermore, we innovatively mapped all heritage sites onto the map of Pakistan using padlet.com. Our work underscores the importance of open heritage science and sets the stage for continued preservation and celebration of Pakistan’s cultural heritage. The test version of the platform can be accessed at www.xploreopen.org. This project also mapped out all of the cultural heritage sites and institutions on the map of Pakistan while using innovative solution padlet.com. To enhance XploreOpen and foster technological advancement and growth, additional funding will be crucial for its future success.

GLAM institutions in Colombia open to their citizens

Viviana Rangel

This project aimed to unite key stakeholders within the GLAM community at local, district, and national levels to comprehend their primary needs arising from: (a) the integration of new technologies into the daily operations of GLAMs as cultural affairs managers at district and national levels, and the resulting implications for the national copyright system; and (b) the challenges confronted by local communities in safeguarding their traditional cultural heritage. To respond to this objective, five workshops were held in different cities and districts of the country with managers of different community, district and national GLAMs. These workshops used a collaborative dialogue methodology among stakeholders, which was designed as part of the project and is expected to serve as a reference point for other initiatives.

The main result of these workshops was the possibility of dialoguing with community members in Bogota, Medellin, Cali, Pasto and Tumaco, representing approximately 15 GLAMs located in different departments of the country and at different territorial scales. These conversations served as input for the construction of two documents: (a) a roadmap for the GLAM community; and (b) a document of recommendations designed to improve the capacities of decision-makers. These documents, in turn, opened the possibility for us to dialogue with policymakers about the need to advance in a reform of the national copyright law, but also allowed us to strengthen the organization of the GLAM community for political advocacy.

Findings

As part of the findings in the stakeholder dialogues, it was obtained that:

• There is a delay in national regulations regarding exceptions and limitations for GLAMs, but there are significant advances in the implementation of new technologies for GLAMs serving large or medium-sized audiences.
• There is a constant concern in the country about the risk of copyright infringement by GLAMs, coupled with a lack of knowledge about copyright exceptions and limitations.
• The territorial approach of the project shed light on the asymmetries between territories and the various challenges they face in terms of copyright. The approaches to the different territories revealed the difficulties in protecting the intellectual property of the traditional knowledge and expressions of the ancestral, artisanal and indigenous communities of our country.
• The GLAMs in the different territorial levels have recognized the need to hold workshops on the exceptions and limitations that cover their current activities. Additionally, discussions have highlighted the importance of organizing advocacy efforts in this area.
• Failure to put this discussion on the table has put at risk the defense of the public interest and the guarantee of cultural rights for Colombian citizens throughout the national territory.

Outcomes

As results of the project, the following were achieved:

• Design material and promote the organization for political advocacy aimed at holding a hearing with the National Directorate of Copyright for the updating of the national regulations.
• Opening a necessary discussion for the country that had been postponed due to lack of organization. Resumption of the discussion with decision makers.
• An exhaustive review of the progress of the exceptions and limitations in the country’s copyright legislation.
• Mapping and diagnosis of the needs and problems of the GLAM in the country. Using a territorial approach that allowed the identification of needs, considering the specific context of each department and community with which we were able to relate.
• Mapping of actors and characterization of the relationships between GLAMs, public policy makers and international organizations working on issues related to copyright reform in the country.
• Identification of challenges in the coordination between GLAM institutions in charge of preserving and defending cultural heritage and national entities responsible for building and supervising the copyright system in the country.

Digitization and Protection of Specialized Heritage Institutions

Seyi Osunade

Heritage institutions, also known as cultural heritage institutions or memory institutions, are organizations that preserve, protect, and provide access to cultural and historical materials of significant importance. These institutions play a vital role in safeguarding and promoting our shared cultural heritage. Heritage institutions encompass various types of organizations, including: Galleries, Laboratories, Libraries, Archives and Museums.

University of Ibadan plays host to a number of specialized cultural heritage institutions that are not visible online but used for teaching and research. This project seeks to identify such centers across the three campuses, 16 faculties and numerous centers so as to encourage digitization and use of CC protection mechanisms. The production of a draft institutional policy and an e-book with available artifacts and location of the specialized cultural heritage institutions are the deliverables from this project.

Outcomes: 

These are some documented outcomes from the work done:

1. Pictures taken at the UI Cultural Heritage Museum are shared on Flickr
2. Lecture presentation materials on Digital Preservation at the University Library
3. Sample Certificate of Participation given for Knowledge transfer of digitization methods for artifacts
4. Lecture material used for Workshop
5. Poster presentation shared at CC Summit from the work
6. A draft institutional policy for Open Access to Cultural Arts
7. E-book with available artefacts and location of the specialized cultural heritage institutions

A Public Domain Database of Digitized Creative Works in Nigeria

Isaac Oloruntimilehin

The initial plan by Free Knowledge Africa to onboard enumerators across different libraries in Nigeria didn’t work out as expected. We released a call for librarians across libraries in Nigeria to join the campaign to help identify works in the public domain in their libraries. However, the librarians we selected faced difficulties in accessing the collections of the libraries. Some of them were junior librarians at these institutions and didn’t have enough influence to help advocate for the project, because of some institutional factors and gatekeeping, and they were just librarians who were interested in participating in the campaign. A better approach would have been to work with one library at a time which we later adopted with the National Library of Nigeria where we identified a friendly stakeholder. We also reached out to private libraries and archives, as well as State and government libraries and archives to help identify works in the Nigerian public domain, but most of these Information centers didn’t have books that dated back to the pre-colonial era and books that fall under the Nigerian public domain according to the Nigerian Copyright Act.

After much deliberation and back and forth with these institutions without much progress, we decided to write to the National Library of Nigeria which is the apex library of the country. As expected, they had most of these public domain works which were acquired through legal deposits and donations.

Free Knowledge Africa moved ahead to establish a partnership with the National Library of Nigeria through the Virtual Library Services Department, through which we were able to identify works in the Public Domain. We also held an outreach and training at the National Library Headquarters where we trained the staff of the Virtual Library Services Department about the open movement, open licenses, public domain and digitization.

We were able to complete the digitization of 449 works (books, newspapers, and images) in the public domain in partnership with the National Library of Nigeria. The project is progressing slowly so far because of limited manpower and outdated technology in finding works that are in the public domain in the library’s collection. We uploaded the works on Wikimedia Commons in the Nigerian public domain category, and we intend to create Wikidata items and transcribe the books on Wikisource to make them citable and discoverable.

We identified some works that are also in the public domain according to the Nigerian Copyright laws, but some of these works were copyrighted and had all rights reserved. We decided to not digitize these works to avoid potential lawsuits from the publishers.

We were faced with a few challenges during this project. Some of them include:

• Bureaucracy lies within most of these institutions as some processes which normally should have taken a few days were prolonged to as long as a month.
• We were able to identify a few government publications which according to the Nigerian Copyright Act are expected to be in the public domain. However, some of them were copyrighted with the ‘All Rights Reserved’ mark. To avoid copyright infringement, we didn’t digitize those works after the effort had been put into sorting and identifying them.
• Due to insufficient funding, we were limited in the number of books we were able to digitize. We were unable to digitize special works such as delicate materials and voluminous books because such works would need special care and could only be handled by experts. We were able to digitize only a few books that fell under this category due to limited funding.
• Last but not least, there was a lack of understanding on the part of the librarians. We had to go through several meetings and even organize a training session for the librarians to give them insight into what we hoped to achieve. This training session was organized to enlighten them on the importance of the public domain and why we must digitize these precious works.

Some of our key learnings include:

• Identifying the key stakeholders saves time and money, as they can cut through the bureaucracy. The challenge lies in identifying them.
• Partnership helps in cutting costs and sharing what the other parties stand to gain helps in bringing them on board and getting invested in the project.
• Advocacy needs to be done to change the perception of open licensing by librarians in Nigeria, they need to be more involved in the open movement, to see the big picture.

Building Open GLAM Community for Sustainable Open Licensing Practices in Nigeria

Bukola James

Under the Creative Commons Open Culture Platform Activity Fund, we launched the Building Open Culture Community for Sustainable Open Licensing Practices in Nigeria project. Over two months, from July to September 2023, the project aimed to cultivate an open culture ecosystem in Nigeria, focusing on Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM). Goals included raising awareness and understanding of Creative Commons licenses among GLAM professionals, increasing digitization and online visibility of collections using appropriate CC platforms and licenses.

Building Awareness and Capacity

Through collaborative efforts, the project increased open culture practices among GLAM professionals in Nigeria. Extensive planning from July to September 2023 led to a series of offline and online activities aimed at enriching GLAM professionals’ skills and understanding of Creative Commons licenses.

The initiatives included a two-day online session and in-person events discussing open culture practices and offering practical guidance on platform utilization. This enabled professionals to effectively use platforms like Wikimedia Commons, to enhance the global visibility of their collections through active participation.

Audience Reached

Through an extensive recruitment campaign and pre-community assessment, we’ve built a dynamic network of 175 Open Culture advocates across Meta, Facebook, and WhatsApp, connecting them to the Creative Commons global and open culture platform. This network is poised to lead Creative Commons programs and open culture initiatives in Nigeria. Concurrently, the project facilitated six GLAM institutions in Nigeria to share over 100 aesthetics and collections on Wikimedia Commons, enriching a growing repository for future generations. Our project’s impact is evident in promoting the use of Creative Commons licenses, enhancing accessibility and visibility of GLAM collections online.

Lessons Learned

The project period was not just about achieving milestones but also about learning and evolving. The journey taught us the tremendous potential that lies in the collaborative efforts of GLAM professionals in achieving openness and how open knowledge platforms like Wikimedia Commons can help increase the use and re-use of CC licenses and  GLAM collections in Nigeria. We learned that structured training, comprising theoretical understanding paired with practical exposure, can play a pivotal role in empowering professionals. Moreover, the enthusiastic participation and feedback from the attendees emphasized the appetite for such initiatives, showcasing a promising road ahead filled with collaborations and knowledge-sharing.

Conclusion

The strides made toward open culture advocacy are celebrated as we embrace the future. Through collaborative efforts, a vibrant community of advocates has been established, alongside project initiatives and virtual platforms for ongoing engagement. The Building Open Culture Community project exemplifies the power of clear vision and determined execution. Gratitude is extended to all contributors. The project’s insights will shape Nigeria’s open culture narrative and shared knowledge in the GLAM sector. Excitement abounds for the continued growth and impact of these efforts.

Creative Commons thanks each of these contributors for their inspiring efforts towards making culture around the world more open. Their pioneering work and advocacy helps to spread the message that access to knowledge and culture is a human right around the world. We can also learn from these awardees about some of the challenges that are faced in different contexts around the world, and bring visibility to the varied strategies for the open movement in each of these contexts.

Congratulations to each of you for your successful projects, and we look forward to sharing the projects selected by the Open Culture Platform for 2024 in the coming months.

The post Updates on Open Culture Platform Activity Fund Winners 2023 appeared first on Creative Commons.

As we end 2023, we want to showcase the incredible work of CC community members to translate the CC Certificate content. Thanks to 21 volunteers this year and numerous volunteers in the past, the reading content of our CC Certificate training is now available in 10 languages. This makes our fundamental open licensing and open advocacy training more accessible to over one billion people in their native languages. 

The CC Certificate program offers in-depth courses about copyright, CC licenses, open practices and the ethos of our global, shared commons. CC Certificate courses target (1) Academic Librarians, (2) Educators and (3) Open Culture advocates, but are open to everyone. Learn more about the CC Certificate and other professional learning opportunities, then register for a Certificate course today. If you are a CC Certificate graduate and would like to translate course content in 2024, please contact certificate administrators on the alumni listserv. 

Slovak

The Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information contacted CC in 2022, noting the need for CC Certificate content in Slovak. Thanks to Gabriela Fišová, Judita Takačová, Jakub Klech, and Barbora Bieliková, who translated content earlier this year, the Centre now has a complete translation. 

Download the Slovak translation files, view them on the CC Certificate translations webpage, or on Zenodo. 

Bengali

Bangladesh Open University (BOU) faculty, Sadia Afroze Sultana and Mostafa Azad Kamal, translated the CC Certificate content to make open licensing training more accessible to the 184+ million Bengali-speakers worldwide. Sadia is a CC Certificate alumna and facilitator; Mostafa is the CC Bangladesh Chapter Representative and also a CC Certificate alumnus. CC thanks Mostafa and Sadia; CC also thanks BOU faculty Asma Akter Shelly and Ananya Laboni, and graduate students Aminul Islam Rana and Mir Khadija Tahera for reading the translated copies and providing feedback. 

Download the Bengali translation files, or view them on the CC Certificate translations webpage.

French 2.0

Building on last year’s French Translation, a community of volunteers from seven countries embarked on a two-week French translation 2.0 sprint, to increase the accessibility of the French translation for different francophone audiences. Nicolas Simon, a CC community member who provided the original French translation supported the sprint, and reviewed the final draft. Adou Jean-Constant Atta, Aman Ado, Emmanuelle Guebo Kakou, Fawaz Tairou, Karen Ferreira-Meyers, Kamel Belhamel, Nyirahabihirwe Clementine, Touré Kahou, Namon Moussa Traore, and Yao Hippolyte Bondouho added local contextual considerations such as recommended links. 

Download the French translation files, or view them on the CC Certificate translations webpage.

With these translations, the CC Certificate reading content is accessible in 10 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Slovak, Turkish, and Yoruba. The latest translations make our open licensing training more accessible than ever before and we thank open community members for making that possible. 

The post CC Certificate Translations in Slovak, Bengali, and localized French appeared first on Creative Commons.

Prior to Creative Commons, Jennryn worked at the U.S. Department of State, engaging in public diplomacy strategy and programming for nearly 300 U.S. Embassies and Consulates. She has a Masters in Ethics, Peace and Global Affairs from American University. Jennryn was a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, a Boren fellow in Thailand, and a Critical Language Scholar in Egypt. 

She was most influenced by education efforts for homeless children in Thailand, as well as under-resourced farming communities in Niger. Seeing the extreme obstacles learners faced in education impelled Jennryn to work toward opening access to knowledge.  Nowadays, Jennryn enjoys time with her kids and husband, and feeding her more daring friends cooking experiments.

The post Jennryn Wetzler appeared first on Creative Commons.

Whether you work for a smaller newsroom seeking high quality, newsworthy photos that are free to use, or are part of a larger operation, like Propublica, that CC licenses all news to increase access and spread, CC licenses are free, powerful tools at your disposal.  

Yet, some journalists may not be aware of the potential and ease of these tools. Open Newswire and Creative Commons partnered to offer a practical primer on Creative Commons for journalism, and how to make the most of CC licenses. Enjoy!

For more information about Open Newswire, the global aggregator of CC-licensed articles, contact info@opennewswire.org.

For more information about CC licensing your works, or reusing others’ CC licensed content, visit the CC FAQ page, the CC Certificate training resources, or contact learning@creativecommons.org for a consultation. 

CC also offers free “office hours” with our copyright lawyers and periodic trainings. We will run open journalism trainings at the 2023 Collaborative Journalism Summit June 6, online at RightsCon June 7 in partnership with Open Newswire, and The Conversation, and at Media Party June 8. CC will host additional open journalism training at the CC Summit, October 3-6. We hope to connect with you. 

You can view the guide below (click at the bottom to navigate through pages), or download it in a PDF format.

“A Journalist’s Guide to Creative Commons 2023” by Zac Crellin and Jennryn Wetzler for Creative Commons, licensed CC BY 4.0.

The post A Journalist’s Guide to Creative Commons 2023 appeared first on Creative Commons.

This January, Creative Commons led a CC Certificate Bootcamp, or condensed training for 12 faculty and staff from 11 California Community Colleges implementing Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) degree programs. Building on a successful pilot ZTC Pathways program, the California Legislator invested $115 million to expand Zero Textbook Cost degrees and OER within the California community college system. The California ZTC programs reduce the overall cost of education and reduce the time to degree completion for California community college students. With the average costs of course textbooks estimated at $100/student/course, ZTC programs have the potential to save students nearly a billion dollars in the coming years, offering a more than 800% return on investment, according to SPARC. 

The CC Certificate Bootcamp provided needed training and tools for ZTC program staff to legally and effectively implement the open licensing requirements of the $115 investment. 

But, beyond open licensing lessons, the CC training strengthened a network of open advocates. The week offered engagement with copyright lawyers, and open advocates, space for collaborative brainstorming, play, and iterative problem solving. From participant-focused brainstorms emerged three clear interventions to address needs in the ZTC program development and expansion. Participant work kickstarted (1) a guide to support faculty in using and integrating LibreTexts OER in Canvas; (2) a ZTC Conversion Faculty Resource guide, sharing resources for both OER liaisons and interested faculty supporting the process of ZTC course development; and (3) the outline of wholistic considerations and needs for roadmapping ZTC programs efficiently and effectively, as the Michelson 20MM Foundation highlighted.  In less than two months since the bootcamp, faculty and staff have continued to collaborate and champion for OER in their institutions, by:

• Presenting simple guides and presentations for faculty and administrators to absorb to mitigate overwhelm with the program;
• Presenting Creative Commons License tutorials, as well as additional needs for adjacent networks, at professional development days, to the Academic Senate and Deans of various departments;
• Planning OER conferences;
• Launching a survey for the ZTC program;
• Setting up mapping to the degrees in smartsheets, which can pull survey data to courses and identify what courses have been converted to ZTCs;
• Sharing a guide about what the ZTC funding (with legislation definitions, how is the funding working and more) 

CC Bootcamp collaborations moved beyond the initial goals of supporting cost savings for students–faculty and staff worked toward interventions addressing barriers to teaching and learning in their systems. As Cailyn Nagle notes, OER are worth more than their cost savings. “They have the power to free, to be liberatory. When educators are able to craft the ideal materials their students can use without barriers, and librarians are able to curate that knowledge for everyone’s benefit, we come closer to the promise of Open.” We applaud California Community Colleges increased collaborative work–strengthening a foundation for that freedom. 

As we revel in the offerings of Open Education Week and our collaborations, I hope we can draw from the energy of California Community Colleges’ faculty and staff, striving toward increasingly liberatory structures in the future. 

CC thanks the Michelson 20MM Foundation for generously funding the bootcamp. 

Special thanks also go to the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges for their liaison work, expertise and support, to Skyline College for hosting the event, and to Fresno Pacific University for providing professional development credits to faculty.

At Creative Commons, we offer an array of learning and training opportunities to support our global community in developing open licensing expertise and a deeper understanding of recommended practices for better sharing. Visit the CC Trainings page to learn about our workshops, consulting options, lectures, and our CC Certificate courses.

The post Creative Commons Bootcamp for California Community Colleges appeared first on Creative Commons.

“Better Sharing With AI” by Creative Commons was generated by the DALL-E 2 AI platform with the text prompt “A surrealist painting in the style of Salvador Dali of a robot giving a gift to a person playing a cello.” CC dedicates any rights it holds to the image to the public domain via CC0.

Over the last year, innovation and use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded, providing new ways for people to create content of all sorts. For example, it’s been used to help create award winning art, develop educational materials, expedite software development, and craft business materials. Recently, three artists filed a class action lawsuit in the USA against StabilityAI and Midjourney, two companies that use the Stable Diffusion tool to enable people to generate images using simple text prompts. It follows on the heels of litigation brought by the same attorneys and other plaintiffs against GitHub and OpenAI for their Copilot and Codex tools for generating software code.

AI is an area that Creative Commons has long focused on, including most recently in a webinar series we held last fall. We are going to expand on our views in future posts, including exploring why we think the legal arguments in the US court case against StabilityAI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt are ill-founded. (Getty Images also subsequently filed a similar suit against StabilityAI in the US, as well as apparently commencing litigation in the UK, but we have yet to see that complaint.)

But before digging into all of the legal issues, we wanted to take a step back and restate our general approach to generative AI.

CC on Generative AI

Creative Commons has always sought out ways to harness new technology to serve the public interest and to support better sharing of creative content — sharing that is inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal and sustainable. We support creators to share their works as broadly and openly as they want, so that people can enjoy them globally without unnecessary barriers. We also advocate for policies that ensure new and existing creators are able to build on a shared commons, while respecting creators’ legitimate interests in control and compensation for their creative expressions.

A founding insight of Creative Commons is that all creativity builds on the past. When people learn to play the cello or paint a picture, for instance, they necessarily learn from and train their own skills by engaging pre-existing works and artists — for instance, noticing the style in which cellists like Yo-Yo Ma arrange notes, or building on surrealist styles initiated by artists like Dali. Similarly, while Star Wars invented the character of Luke Skywalker, it built on the idea of the hero’s journey, among many other elements from past works. People observe the ideas, styles, genres, and other tropes of past creativity, and use what they learn to create anew. No creativity happens in a vacuum, purely original and separate from what’s come before.

Generative AI can function in a similar way. Just as people learn from past works, generative AI is trained on previous works, analyzing past materials in order to extract underlying ideas and other information in order to build new works. Image generation tools like Stable Diffusion develop representations of what images are supposed to look like by examining pre-existing works, associating terms like “dog” or “table” with shapes and colors such that a text prompt of those terms can then output images.

Given how digital technologies function, training AI in this way necessarily involves making an initial copy of images in order to analyze them. As we’ve explored in the past and will discuss in future posts about these recent lawsuits, we think this sort of copying can and should be permissible under copyright law. There are certainly nuances when it comes to copyright’s interaction with these tools — for instance, what if the tools are later used by someone to generate an output that does copy from a specific creative expression? But treating copying to train AI as per se infringing copyright would in effect shrink the commons and impede others’ creativity in an over-broad way. It would expand copyright to give certain creators a monopoly over ideas, genres, and other concepts not limited to a specific creative expression, as well as over new tools for creativity.

Copyright, and intellectual property law in general, are only one lens to think about AI: It’s still important to grapple with legitimate concerns about this technology and consider what responsible development and use should be. For instance, what impact will these tools have on artists and creators’ jobs and compensation? How can we ensure that AI that is trained on the commons contributes back to the commons as well, supporting all types of creators? What about the use of these tools to develop harmful misinformation, to exploit people’s privacy (eg, their biometric data), or in ways that perpetuate biases? More generally, how can we ensure human oversight and responsibilities to ensure that these tools work well for society?

These are just some of the tricky issues that will need to be worked out to ensure people can harness AI tools in ways that support creativity and the public interest. Along with other policy and legal approaches to governing AI, it’s important to look to community-driven solutions that support responsible development and use. Already, StabilityAI will let artists opt-out of its training data set, as well as opt in to provide greater information about their works. While this precise approach raises a variety of views, indexing of the web has functioned well using a similar sort of opt-out approach — set through global technical standards and norms, rather than law. Creators of some generative AI tools are using licenses that constrain how they are deployed, which also carries various trade-offs.

What’s Next? Community Input

Supporting community-driven solutions has also always been at the heart of Creative Commons’ approach to creativity. If you’re interested in this subject, we are going to be holding meetings with the Creative Commons community, and we also plan to continue meeting with diverse stakeholders to explore what sorts of solutions may be helpful in this area. As we go along we’ll continue to report on what we’ve learned and seek out more community feedback.

Join the CC team at a community discussion about generative AI: How can we make it work better for everyone and support better sharing in the commons?

To enable participation around the world, we’ve scheduled three times for this conversation. Come to the one that works best for your schedule, or join as many as you like. We’ll be focused on the same questions and issues at each meeting, but different participants will bring different perspectives, reshaping each conversation. To enable participants to speak freely, these meetings will not be recorded, but the CC team will be taking notes to share outcomes from the conversations.

Community Meetings: Wednesday 22 February 2023

Register for 2:00–3:00 UTC

(check the schedule in your local timezone)

Register for 14:00–15:00 UTC

(check the schedule in your local timezone)

Register for 18:00–19:00 UTC

(check the schedule in your local timezone)

Stay in touch with CC: subscribe to our mailing list, follow us on social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn & Twitter), or join CC on Slack.

The post Better Sharing for Generative AI appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Artist’s Garden at Saint-Clair by Henri-Edmond Cross, The Metropolitan Museum; Public Domain

Since its creation in 2001, Creative Commons (CC) has helped release nearly 5 million digital open images of cultural heritage held in cultural heritage institutions using CC tools. We have also been promoting open culture to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world, and it is based on this rich experience that our Open Culture program now supports better sharing of cultural heritage globally.

Today, we are proud at CC to announce the publication of Towards better sharing of cultural heritage — A Creative Commons Call to Action to Policymakers, a simple, concise, and accessible resource that aims to support policymakers with key arguments to reform policy — in particular copyright — to achieve better sharing of cultural heritage in the public interest. 

Drafted by a small group of open culture advocates of the Creative Commons Copyright Platform and Open Culture Platform — Shanna Hollich (CC US), Emine Ozge Yildirim (KU Leuven), Maarten Zeinstra (CC Netherlands) and Brigitte Vézina (Director of Policy and Open Culture) — this resource: 

• summarizes key takeaways from the 2022 CC policy paper Towards Better Sharing of Cultural Heritage — An Agenda for Copyright Reform; 
• applies the lessons learned during a CC virtual workshop for policy experts and open culture enthusiasts held in May 2022, and;
• distills numerous conversations with and by the CC open culture community held between June and October 2022, as well as direct document input gathering ideas, feedback and real-life examples.
  

This publication offers a basis for a shared vision on better sharing and makes a call for five actions: 

• ACTION 1: Protect the public domain from erosion
• ACTION 2: Reduce the term of copyright protection
• ACTION 3: Legally allow necessary activities of cultural heritage institutions
• ACTION 4: Shield cultural heritage institutions from liability
• ACTION 5: Ensure respect, equity, and inclusivity

Read the full document >

We’ll be presenting the publication at Open Nederland’s Public Domain Day 2023 on January 13, 2023, at the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague. More information and registration for this hybrid event: https://publiekdomeindag.nl/.

?Do you want to know more about open culture at Creative Commons? Write to us at info@creativecommons.org. 

The post CC Publishes Global Open Culture Call to Action to Policymakers appeared first on Creative Commons.

Photos courtesy of Dr. Beth Harris (left) and Dr. Steven Zucker (right)

Hi Creative Commoners! On this episode, we’re joined by art historians, Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, the co-founders and executive directors of Smarthistory. Smarthistory is a center for public art history, with thousands of free and CC licensed videos and essays written by experts who want to share their knowledge with learners around the world. Previously, Beth was dean of art and history at Khan Academy and director of digital learning at The Museum of Modern Art. Before joining MoMA, Beth was Associate Professor of art history and director of distance learning at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she taught both online and in the classroom. Previously, Steven was dean of art and history at Khan Academy. He was chair of history of art and design at Pratt Institute, where he strengthened enrollment and led renewal of curriculum across the Institute. Previously, he was dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY and chair of art history. He has taught at The School of Visual Arts, Hunter College, and at The Museum of Modern Art.

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• Episode transcript: Text // PDF // Doc

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The post Open Minds Podcast: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker of Smarthistory appeared first on Creative Commons.