We would like to express our gratitude to the kind folks at Escola Das Gaivotas for hosting us, and to Teresa, Fatima, André, and Diogo from the CC Portugal team for being the best hosts ever!

What happens when you put 30 passionate commoners accustomed to meeting only online in a lovely conference venue in an historic city? Lots of talking, group updates, big plans being made, old and new issues being tackled, great projects presented, and new designs of collaboration schemes.

At the end of September, 30 participants from 15 different European Creative Commons teams came together for a meeting in Lisbon, Portugal. CC Representatives from the UK, France, Poland, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Ireland, Slovenia, Greece, Belarus, Ukraine, Austria, Belgium, and Romania joined the meeting, organized by CC Portugal.

From this meeting, we learned that the CC affiliate network is interested (and involved) in much more than just licenses. CC teams are vital in new emerging “commons” activities, the sharing economy, 3D printing, open agriculture, open business models, and copyright reform.

Some highlights of the meeting:

• The School of Rock(ing) Copyright, an information sharing bootcamp on copyright reform organized by Communia, with support from CC’s Awesome Fund. For a full report on this session, see Communia’s website. We all stand for creativity, innovation, access to knowledge, and development. Copyright laws can either boost or limit these goals, so we are actively involved with making progressive changes to copyright to benefit users, education, and the commons. Having some non-EU affiliates with us as well offered an interesting perspective on the importance of training and support on copyright reform in other regions and other languages than English.
• CC business models with a presentation of CC Portugal’s Toolkit for businesses, and an overview of CC’s Open Business Model project. Open business models about more than using the commons for gaining profit.

  

  Open business models are about allowing all actors gain a fair share (above and beyond monetary rewards) for their contribution to the commons. Exploring and supporting open business models can also work to tackle the related discrepancies that can possibly turn a flourishing commons into a closed, feudalistic environment. The use of CC can one aspect for creating open, regenerative, and distributed networks.

• The kick off for the CC Certificates project raises fascinating challenges for CC in terms of education and validation of information about CC. A certification mechanism will formalize many of our efforts to teach about open, which is a challenge for a network with such a grassroots ethos. The project has a dedicated website where you can check for updates.
• A ‘CC infrastructure’ session on what’s going on at tech and legal level. You can check the notes from this meeting here.
• We also discussed the Global Network Strategy and next steps for our European community, which we look forward to continuing to work on over the next months, particularly as we prepare for our Global Summit in April in Toronto.

We’ll keep you updated as we continue our work for CC Europe in support of the commons. In the meantime, if you want to join the discussion, you can find us on Slack!

PS If you are wondering about the marvelous artworks in the photos, they’re by Vhils.

The post CC Europe meetup in Lisbon appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’ve submitted a proposal to get the Creative Commons logo, license, and public domain icons into Unicode (more specifically, the Universal Coded Character Set or UCS). Unicode is the industry standard for encoding characters into text, which means that virtually all text-based editors, or tools with text-based editors, enable those characters and symbols that have been encoded into the standard. Examples of encoded characters range from ancient Greek letters to the current day ©, @, and universal ♲ symbols.

We’re excited about our proposal for several reasons: if encoded, creators will easily be able to mark their CC-licensed works with icons in text; users will be able to provide attribution for CC-licensed works they use with icons; and, if nothing else, in developing the proposal we became better aware of the ubiquitous use of our icons across a diversity of media, contexts, and domains. (Thanks for your contributions of CC-marked physical media on Twitter!)

We wanted to share the proposal (pdf) to get your thoughts as our community, especially if we missed any examples of use you think we should have included for future iterations. We are still planning on submitting a separate proposal for Creative Commons Emoji – adding CC icons to Emoji would put icon attribution in the hands of everyone with mobile devices – so your feedback is valuable. More importantly, we would still like to know: how do you currently indicate the CC license on a work without Unicode? How would you like to be able to indicate the license on a work? See the form below to submit a quick response to these questions.

Lastly, you’ll note in the proposal that the CC logo and icons are governed by a trademark policy, while most unicode characters are not. We address this point directly (we don’t think encoding CC icons in Unicode would jeopardize our trademarks or that having a trademark policy clarifying their usage undercuts the purpose of having the icons encoded), but we also welcome your questions and thoughts.

The post Our proposal to get the CC logo and icons into Unicode appeared first on Creative Commons.

It’s Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual week-long event that highlights the importance of sharing scientific and scholarly research and data. The goal is to educate people on the benefits of open publishing, advocate for changes to policy and practice, and build a community to collaborate on these issues. This year’s theme is open in action.

In keeping with this year’s Open Access theme “Open in Action”, Creative Commons and Authors Alliance are pleased to announce a new tool that empowers authors to learn about whether and when they have the right to terminate licensing arrangements they have made with publishers that prevent them from sharing their works openly.  All authors who transfer copyright under U.S. law have this right under certain circumstances. While many of these transfer agreements last “for the life of copyright” (which in the United States means seventy years after the author dies!), the law takes into account that these terms can ultimately be unfair to authors and artists, and so provides a mechanism for regaining those rights.

The tool, dubbed the Termination of Transfer Tool, is in beta form and now available for public feedback.

One early analysis estimates that control over more than 2.5 million works may be reclaimed by authors in the United States, but this is just a starting point. Anyone, including artists, photographers, scholars and scientists, can use this new tool to discover whether they have the right to take back rights they previously assigned away. While this tool is currently U.S.-based only, CC plans to internationalize it for use worldwide. Author Sidonie Smith of University of Michigan tested the tool with us just prior to its release. Check out our video demo to learn more. Feel free to test the tool, and contribute feedback via our public discussion forum. We’ll be taking feedback for the next month or so and hope to launch the final version of the tool in early December.

This is just one of several new tools that Creative Commons will be launching in the next two years in support of authors and other creators who want to retain and regain control of their copyright. Watch this space for more information as we roll out betas of our reinvigorated Scholars Copyright Addendum Engine (SCAE) and a new tool still in very early development that will allow time-based movement to more freedoms automatically. All three of these tools will be internationalized in collaboration with our affiliates around the world, and are being developed in part through generous funding by the Arcadia Fund.

Watch this space for more information. We look forward to receiving your feedback on this exciting new tool.

Happy Open Access week!

The post Regain Control Of Your Work — Announcing the Termination of Transfer Tool (beta) appeared first on Creative Commons.

While IRC has been a good choice for us in the past, Slack is more mobile friendly and integrates with the workflows of users who are using Slack for other projects, creating a more robust (and chatty) community. In the words of Open edX, who made a similar community decision last year, “Slack essentially presents a beneficial network effect: it is easier to integrate our Slack team into your workflow, rather than adding another tool.”

In addition, Slack scores high for accessibility, public familiarity, and adoption. If you want, you can still get in touch with us via IRC. We built a bridge from IRC to Slack so you can continue hanging out in #creativecommons on Freenode if that’s where you feel most comfortable. We’ll also continue to monitor the IRC channels for those who come looking for support.

This won’t replace our other methods of communication, like email lists and social, but it will give us a great tool to engage existing and new communities. It’s important to us that we have an open space for collaboration, and we hope you’ll join and invite others as well.

We encourage you to join at https://slack-signup.creativecommons.org/ (you’ll be automatically validated via your email), and come say hi in the #general channel. We’ll be adding channels as communities form around particular topics or
areas of interest, so please do start a conversation about what you want to
see in our Slack organization.

Questions? Feel free to ping us on social or send an email to info@creativecommons.org.

The post We’re on Slack! Join us! appeared first on Creative Commons.

Since 2014, CC has published an annual State of the Commons report that tracks the growth of CC-licensed content on the web. Last year, we reported a milestone of 1 billion CC-licensed works in the commons. This year, we are shifting our reporting focus to align with our new strategy.

Quantitatively, we will still report on growth of CC-licensed content for year-over-year comparisons. Qualitatively, we want to offer a meaningful reflection of the year by providing short, digestible impact stories tied to real creators around the world working in various mediums and domains to surface vibrancy and usability of the commons and its contributors.

This is where you, our community, comes in. We are opening a public call for submissions of commons content, its creators, and the creative uses that have resulted.

The submission form is below and asks for the relevant details we need to start visualizing an impactful statistic tied to real use. Strong submissions include all three features of the Creative Commons story: 1) the creator/entity and the choice to openly license, 2) the user and the act of adapting and remixing, and 3) the resulting positive impact for a broader public.

The deadline for initial submissions is the end of the month: 31 October. We’ll be shaping the best submissions with their contributors in November.

Please submit your idea below.

The post 2016 State of the Commons: Call for submissions appeared first on Creative Commons.

Next weekend, 30 participants from 15 different countries will meet for a regional meeting in Lisbon, Portugal. In this packed weekend, we will work on a variety of subjects such as Copyright Reform during a School of Rocking Copyright session, OER and Open Science, CC Business models, Tech and Infrastructure, and we’ll also kick off the GLAM certificates project. Many thanks to the fabulous CC Portugal team for hosting us!

Stay tuned for a recap in the next few weeks.

The post Announcing the CC Europe meeting! appeared first on Creative Commons.

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.

One of the projects I knew I wanted to take on when I joined Creative Commons as CEO was a major website redesign. The CC site has always been a valuable source of information about our mission, our community, and the legal tools we offer. While there’s a lot of new things happening at CC, our website didn’t reflect that with an old design. Also, with 1.1 billion works in the commons, it’s sad not to show any of that vibrancy in our site. My goal was for Creative Commons to have a website that more clearly communicated what we do, reflected the commons back to our community, and also looked modern, clean, and beautiful.

I’m extremely happy to say that Creative Commons now has that website. Over the summer we soft-launched a brand new version of CreativeCommons.org. Today, after several weeks of fixing bugs and tidying up content, we’re celebrating with a public announcement about the redesign to our partners, friends, and followers online.

Besides a much-needed aesthetic overhaul, you’ll notice that the new site more clearly outlines our work across all fields, from arts and culture to education to science. Some other highlights include a newly designed blog and a dynamic section at the bottom of our homepage that will keep you apprised of the wide array of incredible creative projects in the growing commons.

We worked closely with the Vancouver-based web firm Affinity Bridge on the new site, and I cannot say enough what a joy it was to collaborate with such a talented and insightful group. I’m also grateful to Matt Lee and Rob Myers for their efforts to bring the new site online, and preserve over a decade’s worth of content. A huge thank you to our community and members of the Creative Commons board and advisory board for all their feedback on the new design.

We’re not finished, of course. A website is a living, breathing thing, and we’ll continue improving and building ours out over time. The next phase of our work will include improvements to our fundraising infrastructure, and also the development of a WordPress template that our affiliates can customize for their own pages. It will build on the look and feel of the main site, but will make it easy for affiliates to set up their own pages without building new sites.

I hope you’ll find a few minutes to explore the new site, if you haven’t already. As you come across any bugs or issues that you think we should take a look at, please feel free to report them to us on GitHub.

The post A long-awaited new look for our website appeared first on Creative Commons.

Open education is at the core of our work and with many countries going back to school this week, we wanted to kick off our #backtoschool week some more practical advice about how you can use open educational resources in your classroom. From textbooks to courses to entire degree programs, the OER movement has your back with free, CC licensed materials that will help your students access and keep high quality, effective learning resources. Supporting OER means supporting maximum equity and access within education, allowing all students to learn with the up-to-date content, regardless of their economic background.

This post is for teachers and students who want to learn more, get going, and start using OER this year.

Learn about OER

The best place to start is at the OER Strategy document, a living document that tracks the progress of a global OER strategy. This document will help you think through what actions you might take to create, adopt and share OER this year. This OER for K-12 Educators FAQ might also be helpful.

OER must be both free (no cost) for anyone to access and to legally modify (according to the 5R activities: retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute).

Find others’ OER and reuse, revise or remix it

Replace expensive textbooks with an open textbook your students can access, keep, and you can modify. Check out the Open Textbook Library or BC Campus for a list of free, CC licensed textbooks.

Why start from scratch every time you need to create a lecture or assemble a slide deck? By using OER, faculty can easily supplement their lectures and learning materials with content that is already openly licensed and available for sharing. By sharing their own work as OER, faculty can maximize the impact and visibility of their scholarly work across the global learning community.

Openly licensed learning materials are easy to find and access, encouraging more independent and flexible learning opportunities for students. OER courses allow students to explore materials before enrolling, making them better prepared before they arrive in the classroom.

Share your work as OER

Using others’ OER is a great first step, and other educators will be thrilled you used their OER and improve it. But don’t forget – you create amazing learning resources for your students all the time as well.

Do you think other teachers, professors, and/or students could benefit from your good work? If yes – and you are willing to share – CC licensing your work is a snap. Many educators openly license their content on technology platforms like Flickr or YouTube, but you can also use the Creative Commons license chooser to put an open license on your work. See also: Marking your work with a CC license.

Give gratitude for OER

When someone gives me a gift, I say “thank you” to express my gratitude. When you use someone’s OER, you are benefitting from the gift that author donated to the commons. Make sure you say “thank you” by giving credit – or providing proper attribution on slides and other materials. Check out CC’s best practices for attribution.

Conclusion

We believe OER will replace much of the expensive, proprietary content used in academic courses – it’s only a matter of time. When OER becomes the default for learning resources, we can have a world in which the public has free, legal and unfettered access to effective, high quality education and research resources, and learning opportunities generating more equitable economic opportunities globally for all learners.

The post How can educators find and use OER in their classrooms? appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Toronto summit will be a launchpad for the next phase of work for Creative Commons and its global communities. Earlier this year, we unveiled a new Strategic Plan, which focuses on collaboration, vibrancy, gratitude, and usability as our key principles. This is our first summit since this announcement, where we expect to draw together nearly 500 participants from a variety of disciplines including policy and law, arts and culture, open education, GLAM, free culture, open science, open access, and technology. This event is for the global open community, broadly construed, and its focus all aspects of “open” work in education, free culture, open data and research, open knowledge, and more.

Communities around the world are at the heart of our work. Without activists, advocates, professionals, and supporters around the world, Creative Commons would not be the globally recognized standard it is today. Our summits have historically kickstarted actions to help creators make connections and celebrate the commons, and the 2017 summit is poised to be our most successful yet.

We wholeheartedly invite you to join us in Toronto next April. For information about how to participate, please sign up for our special summit email list below. Thank you for your support.

The post Announcing the 2017 Creative Commons Global Summit appeared first on Creative Commons.