Are you a seasoned, professional US-based photographer with experience photographing in school settings? Do you use CC or CC0 licensing?

Tweet us your portfolio or send it along to info@creativecommons.org. We’re looking to build a list of photographers for our community to contact for projects, beginning with this specific ask.

Please stay tuned for more announcements!

The post Call for photographers! (US based) appeared first on Creative Commons.

In the last year, #wocintechchat has provided Twitter chats, community dialogue, scholarships, and partnerships to provide more opportunities for women of color working in technology. The nearly 500 CC licensed photos have been used in a variety of media, providing positive representations of women of color working in tech.

The widespread acclaim and adoption of the photos has been exciting, though not entirely surprising to Morillo and Morillo, who credit the CC license as one of the reasons for its success. The photos can be found on Flickr, and the #wocintechchat organization welcomes women and non-binary people of color to join their community.

The #wocintechchat and stock photos grew out of a need for better representation of women of color working in tech. How do you feel that CC-licensed stock photos can help meet that need?
Our main goal was to get these photos disseminated and used as widely as possible. Accessibility was our number one priority, and we knew by making these photos available under a CC license, people would be more inclined to use them. We felt that a CC license helped accomplish our goal to make these photos free while ensuring that our organization would be acknowledged as the creators of these photos.

Have you seen any particularly cool or creative uses of the photos? Have you been surprised to see them pop up in any unexpected places?
We’ve seen them in more places than we can count! The company InVision uses them frequently in newsletters, and we recently worked with Buffer to make the photos available in their new social image tool, Pablo. Colleagues and friends will usually ping us whenever this image pops up because both of us (Christina and Stephanie) are in the photo and we’re both the founders of the initiative. Our photos have also ended up in places like TechCrunch, in social media images for tech firms, and recently to promote tech scholarships.

Were you expecting the photos to have such wide acclaim and adoption? Do you think that the use of the CC license contributes to this?
We knew this had the potential to be big because the concept was both novel and obvious: of course we need more images of women of color technologists, but no one has done it before. And the use of the CC license was certainly key. It’s not every day that people make stock images free to use and we know that sometimes people don’t use images because they’d have to pay for them.

We wanted the images to be used in creative ways, and having them available with a CC license has meant they’ve been used by large companies, small companies, college professors, conference speakers, bloggers, and journalists.

Why did you choose to use CC for these photos? Did you consider sharing the photos in any other manner?
We were certain that we wanted to use CC for these photos and didn’t consider any other manner. We knew that Flickr was the best platform for both ease of use and searchability, and we also liked that the platform displays the CC license with the photos. So it was a no-brainer for us.

What’s next for #WOCinTechChat? What kinds of future projects are you looking forward to accomplishing?
We have lots of ideas floating around and we’re both still active in the tech scene and frequently use the #WOCinTechChat Twitter handle to share industry opportunities and news. We’re taking things as they come and are just as excited as everyone else to see where we head to next!

The post “This had the potential to be big”: an interview with #wocintechchat appeared first on Creative Commons.

This guest post is by Erik Moeller, former Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, from 2008 to 2015. He co-organized the migration of Wikipedia to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license, co-authored the Definition of Free Cultural Works, and instigated the world’s largest repository of exclusively freely licensed media, Wikimedia Commons.

Thanks to the free culture movement, vast knowledge repositories like Wikipedia and StackExchange allow content to be re-used freely and built upon, and many major sites offer Creative Commons licensing as part of their user interfaces.

Yet there’s one area in which free culture has made very little progress to date: online reviews. Sites like Yelp, IMDB, Amazon.com, TripAdvisor, Goodreads, and others rely on millions of users to review products and services, but the resulting text and media are licensed only to the operating companies and not available for re-use, which means reviews are stuck in silos.

They may disappear at a moment’s notice. They can’t be translated, remixed or built upon, outside the narrow exemptions granted by fair use. Reviews could be the glue that connects a lot of existing free and open information, including Wikidata and OpenStreetMap if only they were freely licensed.

I believe that we can begin to change the status quo. To that end, I created an open source browser extension, freeyourstuff.cc, which lets you download your reviews for supported sites and, optionally, release them under CC-0, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA, the three Creative Commons licenses consistent with the Definition of Free Cultural Works. freeyourstuff.cc is not limited to reviews and is easy to extend. Here’s a quick video (YouTube version) that shows how it works.

I am also working on a project to build a free and open source community around reviews (of anything!): lib.reviews. We’re still in the early stages (video walkthrough / on YouTube), but if you want to get involved, follow us on Twitter, send us a message, and we’ll send you an invite code to get started.

By building these tools, we hope to go beyond the transactional consumer culture of online review sites, and make it easy to investigate other facets of a product or experience, such as the environmental impact or labor practices associated with it.

Free culture already enriches our world in immeasurable ways. Let’s take a step closer to a world in which sharing freely is the norm, not the exception.

The post Free the Reviews: Why Free Culture Needs Free Opinions appeared first on Creative Commons.

The interdisciplinary artist Caroline Woolard engages with political economy and activism through radically innovative collaborative projects. Through “existing commoning projects like gifting, lending, borrowing, and sharing of land, labor, and capital,” Woolard’s work confronts the economic precarity of the present moment through a variety of media.

As a “cultural producer whose interdisciplinary work facilitates social imagination at the intersection of art, urbanism, and political economy,” Woolard’s work is collaborative, confrontational, and cooperative, drawing on a variety of experiences and voices.

Woolard’s newest work, “Of Supply Chains,” will be released this month on the project’s website.

How do you understand “the commons”?

I define “the commons” as shared resources that are managed by and for the people who use those resources. Creative Commons does an excellent job of bringing the Free Culture Movement to everyday life, as image rights are now understood in relationship to the commons. That said, I believe Silvia Federici when she writes that most things we call “commons” today are in fact “transitional commons” because in a true commons, the collective management of resources would be respected by, and even surpass, state and federal law.

Can you discuss the use of political economies in your work and how it relates to the concept of the commons?

If “the commons” refers to the ways in which people share and manage resources together, then the commons is always a political, and economic, concept. Historically, the commons have been enclosed upon by state governance and by privatization. Today, the commons are enclosed upon by neoliberalism, what cultural theorist Leigh Claire La Berge describes as “the private capture of public wealth”. It is my hope that my art and design work can support existing commoning practices like the gifting, lending, borrowing, and sharing of land, labor, and capital. While artists who represent commoning in paintings or photographs might provide necessary space for reflection about the commons, in my work I employ one of two strategies: 1) co-creating living spaces for commoning, or 2) making objects and artworks for existing commons-based organizations. In other words, I try to support the commons, rather than represent the commons.

Because I aim to communicate across social spheres, I make multi-year, research-based, site-specific projects that circulate in contemporary art institutions as well as in urban development, critical design, and social entrepreneurship settings. Though I am often cited as a socially engaged artist, I consider myself to be a cultural producer whose interdisciplinary work facilitates social imagination at the intersection of art, urbanism, and political economy.

I create installations and social spaces for encounters with fantasies of cooperation. Police barricades become beds. Money is erased in public. A clock ticks for ninety-nine years. Public seats attach to stop sign posts. Cafe visitors use local currency. Office ceilings hold covert messages. Ten thousand students attend classes by paying teachers with barter items. Statements about arts graduates are read on museum plaques. My work is research-based and site-specific. I alter objects to call forth new norms, roles, and rules. A street corner, a community space, a museum, an office, or a school become sites for collective reimagining.

To make this shift from object to group, I concern myself with duration and political economy. When I source materials, invite joint-work, share or deny decision-making power, and shape future markets for each work, a community of practice emerges. Experience becomes a criterion of knowledge.

To the conventional labels of Title, Author(s), Materials, Dimensions, Date, and Provenance, I add Duration, forms of Property, Labor, Transactions, Enterprise, and Finance. Objects become materializations of collective debate; entry points for encounters with fantasies of cooperation.

The objects I make cannot be disentangled from their economic and social lives. My Work Dress is available for barter only. My Statements increase in price according to student loan rates. Artists Report Back is made by BFAMFAPhD, a group that accepts community contributions. I understand art as mode of inquiry that expands beyond exhibition and toward life cycle; from display to production, consumption, and surplus allocation. I begin each project with an invitation. I facilitate an experience. A group gathers. I share and develop leadership. The project becomes a group effort, and the objects multiply. The objects are known in the group and shown much later.

You often work collaboratively with other artists. Do you see collaboration as essential to your process? How did you come to that conclusion?

I often work collaboratively because it allows me to refine my ideas in debate and in encounters with difference – difference of experience, of perspective, of values. I believe that a diversity of opinions strengthens projects because collaborators are challenged to confront their individual assumptions and either come to agreement as a group or make space to consent to individual expression or dissensus.

In collaboration, we often take time to speak about our individual and collective approaches to allocating time and money in projects. As collaborators attempt to agree upon which resources to share, collaboration becomes a conversation about political economy. We often ask: Which resources – time, money, space – are most important to us right now? How will we share the resources we accumulate together? Who has more time, space, or money in the group, and which institutions uphold this reality? By practicing shared work and shared decision making in a collaborative project, an economy of shared time and resources emerges. Practitioners of collaboration also become practitioners of solidarity economies, looking at shared livelihoods as always already part of shared production.

Money and debt is a loaded topic for artists, and yet you face debt and economic precarity head on in projects like “BFAMFAPHD.” How did that project come about? Why did you decide to take on that topic?

In the classroom, arts educators confront the socially idealized occupation of the cultural producer and the frequent disavowal of a relationship between cultural production and the contemporary political economy. It is my aim to articulate existing economies of cultural production as well as plausible futures of cooperation in art. I do this in my teaching, scholarship, and independent work. Most recently, my co-authored articles (On the Cultural Value Debate) and teaching tools (Of Supply Chains) speak to these concerns. In Of Supply Chains, co-authored with Susan Jahoda and co-designed with Emilio Reynaldo Martinez Poppe, a recent graduate of Cooper Union, we write:

“We aim to articulate the relationship between art making, pedagogy, and political economy. We believe that practices of collaboration and solidarity economies are foundational for contemporary visual arts, design, and new media education. ” Our text, workbook, and game are online this month. For now, you can see an early version of our game here.

You have described NYCREIC as “creative commons for land.” Can you elaborate on that statement?

Just as Creative Commons provides a legal framework for authors to easily share their intellectual property, I believe that we need an entity to provide legal frameworks for land owners to share their land easily. This is what I would call a “Creative Commonwealth.” The New York City Real Estate Investment Cooperative, and so many initiatives related to community land trusts, could be considered examples of projects that would utilize the Creative Commonwealth framework, if it existed. Janelle Orsi at the Sustainable Economies Law Center, is working on something of this nature with the Agrarian Trust.

How do you see investment in affordable physical space as essential to a commons?

Since co-founding and co-directing OurGoods.org and TradeSchool.coop in 2008 to enable resource sharing, I’ve seen how solidarity economy platforms build resilience and mutual aid — often for those of us on the privileged side of the digital divide. I’ve also seen that online platforms are not enough. All people need affordable space, so that they can take risks and fail. Where will we meet to swap or share goods and services without affordable space? Ensuring affordable space is the only way creativity and innovation can occur. And so I started thinking: How might we as artists utilize the strengths of a networked information era to cooperatively finance, acquire, and manage space? What can artists do to help ensure affordable space and reduce displacement?

You’ve used open licensing in a variety of projects like “Queer Rocker” and “Origin of the World Dress.” Why did you decide to open source your work? Have there been any surprising outcomes?

The Queer Rocker is an example of what I call a Free/Libre/Open Source Systems and Art project. I made the designs, files, and assembly process for the Queer Rocker available for use and modification because I learn by doing, and by uniting research with action. I want to furnish gathering spaces with objects that are as imaginative as the conversations that occur in those spaces. I want to contribute to an economy of social justice, solidarity, sustainability, and cooperation. I hope to add spaces of reflection and healing to social movements, so many of which are, at present, focused on immediate protest and progress. Many students, activists, and grassroots organizations cannot afford to purchase furniture, but they may have time to create things with the materials around them.

My aim with open source projects is that through communal production and alteration, a radical politics will emerge; a politics of cooperation.

The post A politics of cooperation: Caroline Woolard on free culture, fine art, and everyday life appeared first on Creative Commons.

Photographer Carol Highsmith has donated her life’s work of tens of thousands of photos to the Library of Congress during her decades long career. Originally trained as an architectural photographer, Highsmith embarked on an ambitious project to photograph every American state in the 1980s, traveling up to ten months a year across the country to photograph small towns, big cities, roadside attractions, and everything in between. Highsmith’s photographs have appeared in films and television as well as in books, gallery exhibits, and even on a postage stamp. In 2009, Highsmith was chosen as one of four women highlighted as part of the Library of Congress’s Women’s History Month profiles. Highsmith has been in the news lately due to her lawsuit regarding Getty Images’s use of her images.

Highsmith’s project predates our work as Creative Commons, but her work is very much in the spirit of our community. By removing copyright restrictions from her photographs, Highsmith is engaged in the important work of growing a robust commons built on gratitude and usability; her singular archive at the Library of Congress is a testament to one woman’s passion and generosity. In this interview with CC, Highsmith shared some of her favorite photographs and stories from the road, her inspirations, and why she has hope in a new generation of innovation.

Over your career you’ve chosen to give away a lot of your work to the commons. Why is that? Can you talk about why you decided to share your work, and why in particular with the Library of Congress?

I am following in the footsteps of a woman named Frances Benjamin Johnston. She worked at the turn of the last century, and her photographs are kind of the cornerstone of the Library of Congress prints and photographs division. She was an architectural photographer like I am but she also did people and other things, also like I do.

I thought it was such a good idea, that it makes sense for me to share my work. There is no better place for preservation than the Library of Congress, so I decided to follow in her footsteps and I’ve never looked back. I’ve traveled America for 35 to 40 years now…  I thought it would be a good idea to have a collection where someone knew what they were doing and cared about what things looked like and to give that to the people of the world.

Film is almost gone, and over time, will digital move on as well? Will we have a record of our country? The LOC has images from early portraits taken in America, 176 years ago to what I’m shooting now, so my collection makes their collection richer. It is considered the most historic photographic collection on earth and I’m honored and humbled that I’m in that collection.

Did you always imagine that the photos would be widely available, or did you think of it initially as a physical archive?

When I started giving, I wanted to give something that wouldn’t sit for years before it got scanned (at the time I was giving film.) We decided that I would make prints, because at that time scanning was not a common thing. As it became easier for me to scan, then I started scanning my own work. Finally, I gave a very large swath of my 4×5 collection, the cream of it, scanned on a very sophisticated scanner. I have always had my hand in it because I’ve always felt that it was extremely important that if I was going to give, that I needed the images to be up sooner rather than years and years from now.

The other turning point was when I decided that I should scan my own work so people could use them now in addition to donating them to the Library of Congress. That was extremely important to me and I’m very glad I did it.

It’s important to me to bring quality to the map so that these images can be used for hundreds of years. Now, obviously technology is going to change, but as long as I’m on the edge of technology, it’s a good thing for everyone who’s going to use it.

Have there been any surprising outcomes you’ve seen from working with the Library of Congress?

Well, I am very honored that [the Library of Congress] is holding my hand.

I came up with the idea [to do long term studies of states] around 2008– I was traveling around America doing books for Random House for years, and I would always race through towns and I wanted to stay longer and do more. One day I came up with the idea that maybe if I found funding, it would help me stay longer, and I could photograph more thoroughly. I went to the Library of Congress to see if there was a way I could raise some funds for me to actually go out across America and rather than just catch the best of a city or a town or a rural area that I actually stay for a while and try to do interiors and exteriors and really research it. [After my first project in Alabama,] I realized what a difference that made when I could actually take my time. I could be there when it wasn’t raining!

I was a little nervous about it at the very beginning because I didn’t know [Alabama] very well, but it turned out that I love the state and I learned so much. I gave about 4,000 or 5,000 images of Alabama to the Library of Congress and I think they started looking at me differently as well and saw that I was really serious about what I wanted to do.

You’ll go to a state and you’ll donate 4,000 or 5,000 images. How do you choose those images? Is it everything you’ve taken?

Not by a long shot! If I’m donating 4,000 images I’ve probably taken 50,000. I can take and take and take, work and work and work. The most important thing is that I give them the best. Everything has to be scanned and color corrected, and metadata has to go on it. It was a tremendous amount of work, but we set up all the systems, and I realized how valuable it was. People from the state can use them, people from all over the world can use them. [They also put out a collection of my born digital images] of the Library of Congress and we started to realize the value of crisp and clear digital imaging. They still have those on display today, which I’m very happy about… The building is just gorgeous.

You photograph a lot of buildings and places, but you also photograph a lot of people. You mentioned that the people of Alabama, for example, can use your photographs. Can you talk about some of the people you’ve met and as well as interesting uses of your photographs?

I’m a little untethered to it because I get a lot of requests for photos via email, and I’m glad for that. I’m happy to let people use them. My images have been used for television (like House of Cards) and in all sorts of other places. These images can be used as long as they credit me, that’s fine, or if they don’t charge because I’m not charging and the Library of Congress doesn’t charge.

I have met a tremendous amount of people, as you can imagine, particularly in small towns. Yesterday I was in Colorado, and I met a Japanese farmer who has been very successful. To learn his story was fascinating! The only state that would accept interned Japanese people was Colorado, and he started farming, and he’s been tremendously successful. I was thrilled to photograph him… It is really the small towns that give me the thrill, I must admit. I photograph people all the time because I realized that if I was just doing architecture, that would be a shame because there are people who live in those buildings and they use those buildings.

Roadside America remains a particular focus for you. What have you seen that has changed in the past few years in these small towns and on the roadside?

In 1984 I started really traveling seriously and I’ve been in towns where they just whizz by and the rotary sign is hanging from a thread, which makes me sad…

Two lane highways, or what I call disappearing America, like wooden barns, are falling apart and disappearing, but time marches on. This is my time and I’m recording it.

Across America I have seen that a lot of towns are starting to realize the importance of historic architecture. So yes, some of America is worse, but a lot of America is better. Some of the small towns are hanging by a thread, but many others have picked themselves up and moved on. There’s a lot of suffering towns with closed stores, but a lot of other towns that have reinvented themselves by fixing the stores and making them different, bringing people back downtown… I’ve been in towns where they’ve lost a lot, but there’s a lot of innovation going on around the country—it’s just so thrilling to me because I record everything. For young people to move into these places, it’s fabulous.

So you’re seeing a Renaissance of downtown, you’re saying?

I really have, yes. Where downtowns were kind of passe and people would go to the suburbs, a lot of downtowns have changed, and it’s where you want to go! It’s where the good food and movies and theaters have been restored. It’s fascinating and wonderful that it’s where people congregate.

What kinds of spaces do you take the most inspiration from?

I’m in an industry that’s kind of common – photography – and at that point America was kind of common… Well, I thought it was fascinating and I can’t really say that I just like certain parts.

I have just finished Colorado and Wyoming, to die for states… and I’m on my way to the midwest– Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio. It will all be different– I may not look out and see mountains of magnitude, but I’ll look out and see other spaces that will be fascinating because America is fascinating. It’s a little bit of an out of body experience for me because I sometimes don’t realize how important my collection is in the sense that it’s showcasing our country. When I’m out doing it, I’m just out doing it!
I just love this country and I love all of it. As gorgeous as Colorado and Wyoming are, I could stand in a cornfield in Iowa on a clear day and just love it because it’s all part of who we are. I can meet just as many fascinating people as I can in Iowa as I can cowboys and cowgirls in Colorado or Wyoming. We’re all Americans, and we’re fascinating. It’s a fascinating country, so I don’t have a favorite, I’m just moved by it all. I’ll have been out in America ten months this year, which is more than we’ve been home, but it’s just that important to me to capture it.

My last question has to do with gratitude and sharing. At Creative Commons, one of our focuses is on how a culture of gratitude and sharing is “essential to a more equitable and accessible world.” How does gratitude move you to do your work, and how have you instilled a sense of gratitude in your photography?

There are a lot of very, very good images online, but if we show our cornfields and make them shine, people are going think we’re pretty special, and we are–that’s the whole point. So if I can share this and go into a small town and share these images of their town, then they can use them too. This is how it comes around and goes around as well.

When I was in Trinidad, CO this week, for instance, they went out of their way to welcome me and to show me things, and now they can have those images and use them and people around the world can see what Colorado looks like. Colorado not just the purple mountain majesty, it’s also 1/3 plains! Do people know that?

By showing us, the people in the fields, the farmers, the mountain climbers, then people can really see us. They can realize that we’re all all here on earth together and that we have a lot in common.

It doesn’t make me special because I share them because it’s really not about me, it’s about them.

They’re showcased in the Library of Congress, the library of magnitude, and I don’t think there is anywhere else in the world where people can download images like this. The Library of Congress is also sharing in kind by offering this service, which is why I’m so happy to be aligned with them, to be part of their family. The towns have gone out of their way for me to show me their best–I’ve been able to capture it, come back, put metadata to it, color correct it and make sure it’s good, the way it should be, and then it goes to the Library of Congress and they do a lot of work to get it up and then it’s there for thousands of years. How can any of us lose on this? And it’s for the world to see, for the world to see what we look like–that’s wonderful.

I photographed a carousel last night that was more than 100 years old. Will that last? Will that be here 500 years from now? Will we, as time goes on, all look the same? I don’t know. It’s not for me to know. I know that I marvel at Dorothea Lange’s photographs and Frances Benjamin Johnson’s photographs and Ansel Adams. I’m in with all those collections, and I’m hoping to carry on their legacy.

What is America? It’s a million things, from small towns to rural areas to huge cities. I was very lucky (if you can call it that) to catch the World Trade Center two months before it fell. I caught it on 4×5 film from the air and it’s probably one of the most important images I’ve taken, but I really don’t know what’s important. A lot of things will change. I just know what I’ve seen in my lifetime, and I’ve been traveling America since I was a child. I’ve been traveling all my life and looking at America out of the back seat window, so it’s not an unusual thing for me, It’s like normal and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I love what I do. I’m not tired of traveling– it’s just fascinating to me. Absolutely fascinating, no matter where I am… I really think that I will be doing this for the rest of my life. I’ve done it for so long that I think it will carry on.

The post “This is my time and I’m recording it”: Carol Highsmith and the nature of giving appeared first on Creative Commons.

In your Kickstarter video, you explain that the Open Building Institute came about because of your inability to find adequate, eco-friendly housing when you moved to Missouri. Can you share more about that story?
A couple years ago, shortly after getting married, we moved to Marcin [my husband]’s farm in Missouri. A few months before that, Chris Reinhart [our friend] had built us a tiny house there (144 sq ft) and we were excited about moving into it. It quickly became evident that such a small house, by itself, was not adequate as a living and working space for two people. We talked to some contractors about expanding it and they provided us with budgets. Unfortunately, those budgets were all outside our price range—and didn’t even include the eco-features that were important to us: solar design, water catchment, local materials, etc. So we had to do it ourselves.
There was only one thing to do: we had to develop a method so efficient that it could be quickly learned and executed. Modular construction seemed to be the obvious solution. As we developed and prototyped these module designs, we also focused on streamlining them—to use locally produced and easy to source materials, to make the best possible use of available resources and to be easily built.
Very early in this process, we also became aware that we weren’t the only people facing challenges with adequate, affordable housing. Being open source advocates, it was very clear what we had to do: share everything that we had learned (including the mistakes) so that others could use it, build upon it, improve it. That’s how the Open Building Institute was born.

In 2011, you successfully raised money for the “Global Village Construction Set” through your project Open Source Ecology. How is this project an extension of your previous work? How is it different?
Open Source Ecology (OSE) is working on the Global Village Construction Set—a set of 50 open source industrial machines needed to build a small civilization from raw materials. Although OSE’s focus is very much on developing the technologies—and making them replicable by others—it’s also evident that they are tools, a means to an end to build houses. So the Open Building Institute is a direct application and extension of the Global Village Construction Set in that it uses our previous tools and techniques to manufacture local materials and build affordable housing. This, in turn, provides OSE with valuable test data that is used to refine the GVCS technologies. Building houses requires tools and technologies, and tools make no sense without an application—so the two projects perfectly complement each other.

The term open source is historically used to refer to software, but you’re using it for building modules. How does the Open Source ethos inspire other forms of creativity?
What we now call Open Source Hardware began mostly with electronics: creators who were accustomed to sharing their code decided it made sense to also share the designs and schematics for their devices. From small electronic devices it was only a hop to open source robots, aerial and aquatic drones, cars, wind turbines, tractors, industrial machinery, looms, laser cutters, 3D printers—the list is very long! And, from these, to open source garments, materials recipes and chemical formulas. And then houses and greenhouses, of course. Today, the term open source hardware can apply to any material object.

You’re building a physical space in which to construct these modular buildings and a training institute to teach the principles, but providing the designs for free, creating an interplay between virtual and physical space. Tell me more about this interaction between physical and virtual.
The interplay between physical and digital is one of the most exciting and promising aspects of this century. Today, most physical objects begin as bits: digital designs, specifications, schematics, etc. Add to that a means to quickly and cheaply share information with the whole world, and hardware starts to look a lot like software. In the case of OBI, this is manifest in 3D models and other digital representations of house components, utilities and machines. Before we build anything, we first model it using open source software and a library of virtual components/parts.
Of course, we still need a means to transform those bits into atoms. 3D scanners and printers are one of the most innovative ways of doing this. However, although we do use 3D printers extensively in our work, not all parts of a house can be printed (yet). For this reason, we also use old-fashioned ways of converting information into physical objects: build instructions and recipes.

Once you start thinking of material objects as embodied information, it becomes easier to see how they can be shared and remixed, just like any other digital creation.

How does the Open Building Institute encourage sharing and remix?
In this project, sharing and remix are not afterthoughts—they are essential to the system. Rather than offering only a few house or greenhouse designs for users to choose from, we offer a modular library of components that can be combined, like building blocks, to design a variety of structures. The modules themselves can also be remixed. This applies not just to things like walls and roofs, but also to utilities and machines. We basically take a complex object (a house, a machine, an appliance, a fixture) and keep breaking it down into modules—so that every single aspect of the object can be more easily remixed. A lot of work goes into creating 3D models and other digital representations of each module/component, as well as instructionals on how to use them. Then we publish this information online in standard formats (compatible with freely accessible software) to facilitate and encourage sharing.

Why is licensing important to this project? Why did you decide to use Creative Commons and why did you choose CC-BY-SA in particular?
Licensing digital designs for physical objects is complicated as we’re unsure whether any given design is considered a creative work (covered by copyright), an invention (covered by patents), or neither (public domain). Due to this uncertainty, applying free culture and free software licenses to open source hardware designs may end up being just a symbolic gesture. But it’s an important gesture. It’s important to take a stand and clearly tell the world how you wish your creation to be used. We think of licenses as pieces of information and signals of where a creator stands on the sharing spectrum.
We follow the Open Source Hardware Definition to select licenses for our work. Without getting too deep into details, this definition states that OSHWA-compliant licenses must allow everyone (without exception) to use, replicate and sell the designs and resulting physical objects. There are number of licenses that fit this criteria, but we love the CC system because it’s so easy to use and understand—thank you Creative Commons!

The license we use most frequently is CC-BY-SA because it encapsulates the core offer and request that we make. The offer is simple: you are free to use, share, remix and sell our work—in fact, we really, really hope you’ll do all of these things. The request is equally simple: please share any improvements you make so we can all benefit and achieve faster development through information sharing.

This is the most important value of the project: our belief in the benefits of open knowledge and know-how. The problems the world currently faces are so massive than nothing short of mass collaboration can address them.

Environmental sustainability is a key aspect of the project. How do you see your project influencing the future of environmentally sustainable building as a whole? How is it influenced by your previous projects?
What we hope to do is make eco-building a standard by lowering the barriers—by making it cheaper and easier to achieve—through a triple approach. The first component is to design low-cost houses that make economical use of resources—this includes things such as high-efficiency refrigerators, structural elements that block out cold/heat and conserve ambient temperature, low-flow faucets, etc. The second is to think of houses not as consumers but as producers of resources—this includes solar energy capture, rainwater catchment, food production with attached greenhouses, biogas, etc). The third component is the production of local materials from abundant resources: bricks made from soil, insulation made from biomass, lumber made from local forests, bioplastic made from starch, and so on so forth.
Rethinking housebuilding in these terms is not only more sustainable from an environmental point of view, but also from an economic one. Can you imagine how much lighter your financial burden would be if your house was made from abundant/renewable locally-sourced materials, consumed significantly less resources, and produced most of its own energy, water and food? Eco-houses should cost less—not more—than standard houses. This is what we see as the future of environmentally and economically sustainable building.

The post The future of housing is here: CC Talks with the Open Building Institute appeared first on Creative Commons.

The delightfully quirky sewing site Make my Pattern.com is the work of self-proclaimed “sewcialist” Joost de Cock, a Belgian designer with a flair for fashion.

When he started Make my Pattern, de Cock set out to solve a major issue for amateur sewers: patterns fit best when hand-drafted, but hand-drafting is inaccessible to most hobbyists. Make my Pattern takes the difficulty out of design through a simple input that creates a bespoke pattern out of your specific measurements.

Sharing under Creative Commons is “a no-brainer” for de Cock, who’s seen some surprising outcomes from his project, including formal trousers done as sweatpants, a hipster take on his “Homeboy Hoodie,” and endless variations on his “Singular Shirt.”

de Cock talks to CC about learning to sew, pattern making, auto-didacticism, and why more men should pick up a needle and thread.

What inspired Make my Pattern?

When I started making clothes, I quickly discovered that, at 6’6 tall, store-bought patterns didn’t fit me well. This is also true for anybody who deviates from whatever standardized body the pattern was tailored for.

Patterns can be altered, but it’s not trivial to translate a fit problem into a pattern alteration. The best way to get a pattern for your own needs is to draft it yourself, based on your measurements. As I gained sewing experience, I started to think about how I could abstract my measurements from the drafting process so I could simply plug them in and have an updated pattern draft. So I set out to build something that would take measurements for input, and would spit out a pattern draft based on those.

Why did you start sewing? Why did you decide to share out your designs?

I got into it about 5 years ago when illness kept me home for a number of weeks. I had an old sewing machine that I had used for small projects like tablecloths and curtains and I decided I would try to make trousers. The result wasn’t great, but I got hooked and have been making my own clothes ever since.

To me, sharing is a no-brainer. I started drafting patterns for my own needs, and from the start decided to share them online. (Example here, warning: broken links).

I think sewing is a wonderful hobby, and I want other people to discover it. Sharing my patterns is a way to enable that.

It’s also about giving back: to the sewing community (which is wonderful), but also more in general. MakeMyPattern.com is only possible because I could piece it together from software projects who shared their code.  On a more meta level: I’m a college dropout, so almost everything I learned in life, I learned from information freely available.

Why did you decide to use a Creative Commons license for the patterns, and a CC-by-NC license in particular?

I want to encourage people to not only use the pattern, but also change it, adapt it, and try to improve on it. That’s why I don’t merely distribute a PDF, but also the SVG source file.

Creative Commons was a natural fit. I picked the CC-by-NC license because I didn’t want people to sell my patterns to others who were unaware that they could get them for free.

However, the Non-Commercial clause often causes concern for people, and raises questions like “Can I sell clothes made from these patterns?” I’ve tried to clarify things in a blog post recently, but I am still mulling on switching to CC-by or perhaps CC-by-SA.

Have you seen any surprising remixes or sharing of the patterns?

Patterns are more like cooking recipes than music or images. People use them, tweak them, improve them, but the focus is on the garment, not the pattern.

That being said, I’ve made many updates to my patterns that are the direct result of feedback and tips from people who’ve used them. So if this was a software project, let’s say there’s patches but no real forks.

It’s a great boost for morale when this happens, and I think that flying the Creative Commons banner is a big enabler. There’s a certain suspicion online when you give away things for free. Seeing a Creative Commons license takes away that anxiety because people understand where you’re coming from.

Can you give an example of some cool projects you’ve seen made from your designs?

Nani sent me some pictures of his take on my hoodie pattern.

Danto’s version of formal trousers in sweatpant fabric was something that I didn’t expect to see.

I’ve also seen pictures of some really cool shirt variations, but they are not available online. When people send images to me, I always ask if I can share them, but not everybody is comfortable with that. I recently got my first pictures of somebody posing in my boxers pattern!

What’s next for Make My Pattern?

I would like to make these patterns accessible to people who don’t have access to a printer to guide them through the process of drafting the garment onto the fabric, skipping the printing and cutting of the pattern altogether.

I also want to design sneakers with a 3D-printed sole and fabric upper. Ideally, you’d be able to customize the sole, and the 3D model would be generated for you.

Then there’s the never-ending task of adding patterns and creating documentation. I’d like to venture into womenswear too at some point, as I’m squarely focussed on menswear now.

How do these patterns inspire community sharing and gratitude?

The sewing community is predominantly women, so I get a lot of love from men who sew, but gratitude comes in many forms. Messages, emails, and sometimes money. I’m not in this for the money, and every year on my birthday, I donate all the contributions to charity. But it does wonders for my motivation to experience appreciation in such a tangible way.

What is the greatest challenge you’ve faced with Make my Pattern?

It’s an ongoing challenge, honestly. I am not a professional tailor, nor am I a pattern designer, nor am I a software developer. I know a bit about these different domains, and I try to bring them together to create something valuable. But most of what I do is at the outskirts of what I’m capable of. When I figure something out, I’ll share what I have and just maybe it will be useful to others.

The post Let’s make some clothes: Joost de Cock on Make my Pattern appeared first on Creative Commons.

One of the greatest strengths of the Creative Commons organization is the dedicated volunteers worldwide who help build openly licensed projects and educate the public about CC in their local communities and internationally.

A few months ago, we provided mini grants to these communities through The Awesome Fund. A dedicated team of organizers evaluated all proposals and selected 19 awesome projects (out of 34 applications) that will take place in the second half of 2016.

That’s Awesome! What can I expect?

These grants fund projects that align with CC program areas like creative communities, policy, and business. They include a wide variety of activities across the CC spectrum including performance, free culture, translation, and copyright reform.

We are pleased to announce that the following projects have been granted financial support through the Awesome Fund:

Many of the projects focus on the collaborative nature of CC networks, with affiliates teaming up to create shared resources across their regions. For an overview of all these awesome projects, check this wiki page. We will be posting blog posts, photos, and celebrations of all this work in the upcoming weeks.

Missed out on this round? No worries! We’ll have another call for proposals in September.

You can also follow #ccisawesome on Twitter and Facebook for updates on these projects and more.

The post CC is Awesome! appeared first on Creative Commons.

“We need to talk,” begins the first letter from the organizers of “Letters for Black Lives,” a new writing project aimed at opening up intercultural and inter-generational dialogue about the Black Lives Matter movement. Letters for Black Lives began with a single, collectively written document from a group of Asian-American millennials to their parents about Black Lives Matter; in a week the project has expanded to over twenty languages and a variety of interpretations, working completely in the open under CC0.

Through open collaborative practices, the LFBL network has collectively written, adapted, and translated letters into over twenty languages in only eight days. Their work aims to compassionately facilitate crucial conversations within families about immigration, race, police violence, and anti-blackness. “Using public domain doesn’t just say ‘take this and make it your own’ to me, in a context like this, it also says ‘let’s do this together,'” writes B Cordelia Yu, an organizer with the project.

Letters for Black Lives chatted over their Slack channel about solidarity, remix culture, bottom-up organizing, community dialogue, free tooling, and how they’ve used maximum flexibility for maximum effect.

How did Letters for Black Lives come about? How have you effectively organized as a collective? What kinds of challenges have you faced as the scope has grown over the past week?

Gary Chou: This all came about because of Christina’s tweet. It was a lightning rod that drew all of the pent up energy that was simmering as a result of the events of the past few weeks.

Huy Hong: A core group of contributors emerged within ~6 hours [on a Google doc], who got looped into a private Twitter DM group of 11-12 (most of whom did not know Christina personally), that helped refine the focus of the letter. A Slack group emerged as soon as many of the core decisions were made, and as more folks got involved we need a broader, more public forum to discuss issues and direction. A list of free technology platforms we used to get all this done: Google Docs, Twitter, TinyLetter, Slack, Heroku, Medium, Facebook, GitHub, Gmail, YouTube, Dropbox.

Gary: Anytime you scale a network you run into communication challenges, but given the distributed model of work, people have been highly productive – together the network has peer produced 22+ translations, and the broader community has introduced their own letters (see the Latinx letter).

Someone just emailed us stating they’ve translated it into Lakota.  It’s gone far and wide beyond our expectations, thanks to CC0. 

On your website, you write, “Every family has a different experience, and this is merely a resource for you to use. That’s why this letter, and its translations, are published with a CC0 Public Domain [waiver] — anyone can use any part of it, though we’d appreciate a linkback.”
Why did you decide to use Creative Commons, and why CC0 in particular?

Christina Xu: We knew early on that we wanted the letter to be a resource, which meant that people should be able to adapt it and customize it for their own purposes. Personally, I prefer to license everything I make at least CC-BY-NC (I was a copyfighter in college), so going Public Domain with this—especially since it was something many contributors worked on anonymously—just felt natural.

Huy: CC0 came up as we started to explore mediums (like video, audio) that tend to have a bit more litigation attached with regards to rights, and we felt that it was necessary to keep all interpretations/mediums of the letter as open as possible.

Gary: The first law of Asian America is that it’s not a monolith. We knew one letter couldn’t speak for all and that people would need to feel free to modify it as they so pleased in order to reflect their community, experiences and lens.  Also, we wanted the letters to be part of a collective effort and in that sense it made sense that no one own it.

Huy: +1 on “no one owns it”, which is largely how we’ve approached the effort in large.

Gary: The letter we started with was meant to be a spark to encourage people to speak up who didn’t have the words, rather than a single letter to represent a community, and so it needed to exist as a portfolio of remixes in order to accurately reflect the community, and that lent itself well to CC.

Translation is a key part of this project. Have any of the translations surprised you in terms of both content and languages? How do you work with translations and new community members who want to build upon the already existing work? Who want to create new work?

Christina: The translations have been fascinating—many groups not only translated the letter verbatim, but went a step further and customized the letter for their own communities. As with everything else in this project, the translations are organized bottom-up—so, someone starts a document and adds it to the list, and then they/we recruit translators together.

B Cordelia: [As an aside], the section defining harassment in our code of conduct was lifted straight from another CC0 code of conduct.

The letters have received a lot of positive media attention, but what kind of response has the letter received from your communities and families so far? Have you heard feedback from other communities?

B Cordelia: My dad’s only response was “good job, keep going” and liking the Chinese translation on Facebook.

Lea Yu: We’re in the very early stages of figuring out if and how this can go offline, and at the very least (as others have pointed out) we’ve started to share resources on offline efforts that each of us is already participating in. We have a lot of energy going in that direction, but we want to make sure this particular project is adding to the ongoing national and local conversations, rather than speaking in place of the groups who have already been actively working on these issues for years, if not decades.

Sarah Chen: This group helped me plug in with APIs for Black Lives Los Angeles for an ally action yesterday where we, White People 4 Black Lives, and other people of color encircled LAPD HQ with crime scene tape and held teach-ins with our community members before joining BLMLA members sitting in at LA City Hall.

Huy: We have a bunch of posts in the #highlights section of our Slack channel that you can check out.

What’s next for Letters for Black Lives? Where do you see the project going moving forward?

Christina: This week, we’re mobilizing around creating audio and video recordings of the letter in as many languages as possible. Written translation is also ongoing, for our letter as well as the Canadian version and the African immigrants versions.There are people working on other versions of the letter as well: #college and #people-of-faith, for example…
Because we’re a bottom up, decentralized group, it’s hard to say what people will be excited by & willing to put their energy into next. Personally, I’m excited by the idea of continuing to create resources in a variety of languages, as well as the maintenance of these digital spaces as places for people to connect.

B Cordelia: I think evergreen resources and having a place to for us to connect are what I hope will last.

Huy wrote that you used CC0 to make this letter as open as possible. Can you all tell me more about the power of open collaboration within this project and how you see as a vehicle for social change more generally?

B Cordelia: I feel like top-down organizing and holding onto intellectual property rights makes people territorial, which in a coalition of orgs means everyone is spending energy guarding their own instead of making the best damn thing we can.

Using public domain doesn’t just say ‘take this and make it your own’ to me, in a context like this, it also says ‘let’s do this together.

Huy: My general philosophy with getting things done properly, and quickly, is to give passionate/committed contributors immediate trust to do what they think is “right.” Given our narrow focus and the self-corrective nature of collaborative groups, we’ve been able to get a lot done in an absurdly short period of time.

Lee-Sean Huang: For me, the rationale with both the open organizing and open [waiver] was the only way to be representative, or at least respectful, to all stripes of diverse people and their experiences. An 800 word letter can’t speak for everyone, not even all Asians or all East Asian Americans, and it doesn’t claim to do so. By keeping the [waiver] and the governance/organizing as open as possible, folks can feel ownership and agency to fork and adapt as necessary. 

The post “Let’s do this together”: an interview with Letters for Black Lives appeared first on Creative Commons.