Highlights from the Creative Commons Global Summit

Jane Park, September 29th, 2011

With the worldwide CC community now home, or well on their way, we can officially declare the Creative Commons Global Summit 2011 a huge success.

For three days Warsaw, Poland, became the center of the CC world, with almost 300 people – including over 160 CC affiliates, board, and staff – examining all aspects of the movement, the licenses and community. From CC’s ongoing strategy to the latest implementations worldwide to the role of openness in the Arab Spring, the conversations, presentations and debates were diverse and exciting.

Overall, the Summit flew by without a hitch—thanks in great part to the CC Poland team who were our generous hosts, and to the myriad other affiliates and staff who contributed to organizing and running sessions on public sector information (PSI), data, creative CC projects, open education, and more. For more detail, check out the full program (pdf) and the wiki for the unconference track that ran in parallel.

Action items from this outpouring of ideas are still being developed – particularly next steps around the next version, 4.0, of the CC license suite. We’ll be blogging in greater detail on some of these soon (look for a separate 4.0 announcement in the first part of October), but for now we’d like to recap a few other highlights from the summit!

Media

Several affiliates have already covered the summit on their personal blogs; we highly recommend reading Andrés Guadamuz’s (Project Lead of CC UK Scotland) take on the Version 4.0 discussion and Brian Wesolowski’s (CC Qatar) summary post, which includes his showcase of the ways the Qatar Museum Authority is exploring the use of CC licenses to share its collections and resources.

Kristina by DTKindler Photo / CC BY

Such showcases and talks from the CC affiliates and broader community were without question the highlight of the Summit. Many of  these are now available on the CC community group on SlideShare.

Video from the livestream in the main hall is also being uploaded, with the raw footage of several sessions available at CC Poland’s Blip.tv account. An excellent set of high quality crowd-sourced photos are also available at the CC Global Summit Flickr pool. For all media from the Summit, see the Event coverage at the Global Summit wiki.

Some other highlights from community, PSI, education, and culture streams of the Summit:

Community Global Perspectives

This year’s Summit had a particular focus on community and aimed to highlight and facilitate the work of CC affiliates around the world. Central to this aim was the Global Perspectives panel, which featured prominent community members from Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, the Arab World and Africa, all of whom provided their views on the unique challenges, opportunities and goals for CC in their regions.

Chunyen Wang from CC China Mainland, representing Asia and the Pacific, focused on how CC’s message aligned with traditional Chinese notions of sharing. Naeema Zarif from CC Lebanon, representing the Arab World, focused on CC’s role as a cultural and community flash point. Claudio Ruiz from CC Chile, representing Latin America, focused on the role of the CC community as advocates for copyright balance. And finally, Dorothy K. Gordon from The Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT, representing Africa, focused on CC as a way of bringing people together across geographic boundaries. (Video)

Public Sector Information (PSI)

Several sessions focused on the role of CC licenses and tools for PSI. In our PSI “around the world session,” (video) we discussed how CC licenses and tools are adopted in some fashion within governments in over 30 affiliate jurisdictions, hearing updates from affiliates in Poland to Chile to Korea to Australia, and many others. There were other sessions, including one on examining the role of CC within the broader open government and PSI community. We discussed several key points, including:

• In general, governments and public sector bodies want to share what they create with the world, and the civil society communities and projects that support open government continues to explode. CC wants and needs to be a central participant, to make it easy for governments to make informed choices with regard to licensing and sharing, and realize the full potential of PSI; even in affiliate jurisdictions where there is little CC or open licensing uptake at the government/PSI level, the affiliates indicated that this will become an increasingly important area.
• Governments and other public sector bodies would be more willing to adopt CC if specific considerations were addressed. An obvious example of this is addressing sui generis database rights in version 4.0 of the license.
• CC could build a case studies repository of open government successes to assist governments to make informed choices with regards to the legal aspects of PSI, in addition to other educational materials. Perhaps it’s worthwhile to build upon existing frameworks and roadmaps in jurisdictions already moving ahead within the open government and open data space. Other questions that came up: should CC work with related community members on legal considerations for a set of open government data principles? What are other activities and projects that CC can and should be participating in?

Education

DTKindler Photo / CC BY

We ran several sessions on open education, all of which helped to focus our education strategy and next steps for specific projects.

In the “School of IP, Copyright & CC,” panelists discussed their work on and the potential for shared curricular materials (video, lesson plans, sample projects, talking points) around Copyright, IP & Creative Commons designed to encourage students and teachers to practice the 4 R’s (reuse, revise, remix, redistribute) as part of their learning and teaching. It was evident that there is widespread need for such materials. Outcomes from this panel fed into the CC Education Strategy Workshop where groups met and prioritized the following CC Education projects:

1. School of Open with P2PU
2. Open Policy / Legislation exchange
3. Improving OER search and discovery. The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI).
4. Ability to track use and reuse of CC-licensed works.

The “School of Open,” which would aim to collaboratively develop and run curriculum and courses on copyright and CC license training for educators, librarians, and others, was the most popular, gaining lots of buy-in from affiliates and external partners. “Open Policy / Legislation exchange” was seen as being able to be incorporated in the “School of Open,” with some policy-strategic conversations remaining offline and private to the CC community. The LRMI is already funded and running, and the session gained lots of preliminary support for adopting, tagging, and educating around the metadata schema when it is published. #4 — the “Ability to track use and reuse of CC-licensed works” — was the most technically and legally focused project discussed. In general, the education field wants and needs this, and CC will continue to push to keep it on the agenda for education and other domains. The education domain in particular can help describe some use cases and needed features.

Culture

In addition to the cultural evening events, the culture sessions resulted in some excellent showcases around CC license use in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums sector (GLAM) and CC use in other creative projects from around the world.

In the GLAM session, Chiaki (CC Asia Regional Project Manager) presented a wonderful showcase from Japan where, as Brian notes, “visitors were encouraged to take photos of art in the museum and share the photos under [CC licenses].” Paul Keller (CC Netherlands) and Brian Wesolowski (CC Qatar) also talked about GLAM projects in their regions, which included a Wiki Loves Art project that took place in the Netherlands and as previously mentioned, ways the Qatar Museum Authority, including the Museum of Islamic Art, Mathaf and the Qatar National Museum, are exploring the use of CC licenses to share their collections and resources.

In the CC Project Showcase session, organized by Renata Avila (CC Guatemala), a diverse array of projects were presented in quick ten-minute slideshows, including Herkko Hietanen’s (CC Finland) PowerPoint plugin for finding and attributing CC-licensed images (screencast), Dadae Choi’s presentation of CC Korea’s own search engine for CC-licensed works, plus Jennifer Kang’s overview of open culture in Korea, Claudio Ruiz’s (CC Chile) talk on Derechos Digitales’ work to open academic journals in Latin America, Bilal Randeree’s talk on CC use in Al Jazeera, and more project showcases by CC Mainland China and CC Guatemala.

Where are we?

Since CC was founded in 2001, our network of affiliates has come a long way. CC VP Mike Linksvayer gave an excellent overview of what’s happened in CC and the open community over the last three years. CC CEO Cathy Casserly, CC Chair Joi Ito, and Affiliate Network Coordinator Jessica Coates led a discussion on the CC Vision, how it has changed, and how it might be refined going forward.

Today, with our new regional managers on board, in addition to our existing managers, Chiaki (Asia), Donatella (Middle East), and Aurelia (Africa), we are excited to renew progress and make even greater strides. We’ve already noted improvements we can make in communications, and will work closely with the affiliates to form taskforce groups on this and other matters.

The Summit has been a key step in each of these goals, and will be a catalyst to CC’s ongoing growth as we move into our second decade.

Stay tuned for more on Version 4.0, regional community updates, CC in science, and a report on the Board meeting at the summit.

$500 million awarded to first round grantees for community college career training program

Timothy Vollmer, September 26th, 2011

Today the U.S. Department of Labor, in coordination with the Department of Education, announced the first wave of grant winners in support of ”targeted training and workforce development to help economically dislocated workers who are changing careers.” Today’s announcement commits nearly $500 million to 32 grantees, with a $2 billion investment expected over the next 4 years.

Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis said in the Department’s press release:

“Making it possible for unemployed Americans to return to work is a top priority of President Obama’s. This initiative is about providing access to training that leads to real jobs,” said Secretary Solis. “These federal grants will enable community colleges, employers and other partners to prepare job candidates, through innovative programs, for new careers in high-wage, high-skills fields, including advanced manufacturing, transportation, health care and STEM occupations.”

As we mentioned in January when the program was announced, we’re excited that the grant guidelines includes a requirement that where new learning materials are created using grant funds, those materials must be made available under CC BY. Creative Commons, with its partnering organizations, is positioned to provide support to grantees on open licensing, learning and course design, professional development, and adoption and use.

Congratulations to the first round winners and to the Department of Labor and Department of Education in supporting this innovative education initiative.

Announcing new CC Board Member Brian Fitzgerald

Joi Ito, September 26th, 2011

Creative Commons is delighted to announce the appointment of Prof. Brian Fitzgerald as a new Director of the corporation and member of the Board.

Brian Fitzgerald by Joi Ito / CC BY

Many of you may be familiar with Brian, who has been the legal lead of CC Australia since 2004 and has made an outstanding contribution to the CC and broader open access communities. The adoption of CC licenses by the Australian government, in which he was critically involved, continues to be a leading example of CC implementation, particularly as data management becomes a more and more prominent issue in open access debates.

Brian is Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. He holds postgraduate qualifications in law from Oxford University and Harvard University and is acknowledged as a leading scholar in the areas of Intellectual Property and Internet Law. From 1998-2002 he was Head of the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University in New South Wales, Australia and from January 2002 – January 2007 was appointed as Head of the School of Law at QUT in Brisbane, Australia. Brian is currently a specialist Research Professor at QUT and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.

Brian’s appointment is a product of the first Affiliate Recommendation Process for Board Candidates, which petitioned members of its Affiliate network to recommend new members of the Board of Directors. Having supervised law students from over 30 different countries in his role as director of the Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic at Queensland University of Technology and beyond, Brian brings to the Board not only his own formidable expertise but also that of a significant international network.

Brian was formally elected to the Board on Friday, September 16, and his appointment was announced publicly at the Creative Commons Global Summit.

We thank the Affiliates and especially the nominees for their willingness to undertake the recommendation process and to contribute even further to the future of Creative Commons.

Europeana adopts new data exchange agreement, all metadata to be published under CC0

Diane Peters, September 22nd, 2011

Europeana — Europe’s digital library, museum and archive, and the first major adopter of the Public Domain Mark for works in the worldwide public domain — has adopted a new Data Exchange Agreement. The agreement, which data providers and aggregators will transition to by the end of 2011, authorizes Europeana to release the metadata for millions of cultural works into the public domain using the CC0 public domain dedication. All metadata for cultural works accessible via the Europeana portal, including previously-delivered metadata, will then be available for free and open re-use.

Additionally, the new agreement requires data providers to make best efforts to correctly identify content that is public domain as being public domain. Last October, Europeana announced plans to use the PDM as the standard mark for works free of known copyright that are shared via the Europeana portal, playing an important infrastructural role in the EU’s efforts to ensure that all works shared online are marked with rights information.

Europeana has also published non-binding Usage Guidelines that users of the metadata are asked to follow, including a specific request that users “actively acknowledge and give attribution to all the sources” of the metadata.

This is hugely exciting news for CC and open culture! Read more about the Data Exchange Agreement. Congratulations Europeana on your leadership!

Update: Europe’s national librarians support opening up their data via CC0

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license enforced in Germany

Mike Linksvayer, September 15th, 2011

The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (BY-SA) has been enforced by a judicial injunction in Germany. Legal analysis will be added to our case law database in the coming days. Till Jaeger reported the case (in German; English machine translation) at ifrOSS (Institut für Rechtsfragen der Freien und Open Source Software), where one may also find a PDF scan of the ruling. John Hendrik Weitzmann of CC Germany has provided an English translation of the ruling, below.

Thilo Sarrazin am 3. Juli 2009 by Nina Gerlach / CC BY-SAThe photo at left was used without providing attribution to the photographer and without providing notice of the license used, both core requirements of all CC licenses. This is an exciting ruling for CC, as the attribution and notice requirements are very clearly stated and upheld.

Additionally, we have been permitted to reveal that the defendant was a far-right party. This is somewhat ironic, given that an occasional objection to using a CC license is that one’s work could be exploited by Nazis (or other extremely objectionable parties). Of course the defendants could have correctly complied with the license (if they were smart and diligent enough), but then CC licenses contain further protections for reputation and integrity.

The photographer and plaintiff, Nina Gerlach, is an active editor of German Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects (all of which use BY-SA as their default license), and a member of Wikimedia Germany, where her spouse, Mathias Schindler is employed. The case was handled by Till Jaeger (who wrote about the case at ifrOSS, see above), a partner at the law firm JBB and a widely recognized expert in open licenses.

Gerlach said “I wanted to support the concept of free licenses that give permission for everybody to use content but come with a set of requirements, such as attribution.” She will donate any damages awarded by the court if there is money left in the end, and has already donated 100 euro to a project that created public domain and freely licensed songbooks for kindergartens.

Creative Commons is once again pleased that among millions of uses of its licenses, the courts are rarely involved — the licenses allow licensors and licensees to easily avoid transaction costs, let alone the costs of court. We are equally pleased that when a case involving a CC license is taken to court, whether to uphold the rights of the licensor (as in this case) or the licensee, that courts have held that the licenses are enforceable copyright licenses as one would expect.

English translation of ruling

PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION RULING

In the preliminary injunction matter

of Ms. …
Applicant,

- Proceedings Representatives:
JBB Lawyers,
Christinenstraße 18/19, 10119 Berlin,-

against

the …
represented by its chairman
Defendant,

it is commanded by way of preliminary injunction, due to special exigency without oral hearing, according to s. 935 ff., 91 ZPO:

1. The Defendant is, in order to avoid a penalty to be ordained by the Court for every case of non-compliance of up to 250.000,00 EUR, alternatively arrest for disobedience to court orders, or an arrest of up to six months, the latter to be executed in the person of the party chairman, prohibited, to reproduce and/or make publicly available the following photo without naming the creator and adding the license text or its full internet address corresponding to the license terms of the Creative Commons license “Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported”:

[photo of Thilo Sarrazin]

2. The Defendant has to bear the costs of the proceedings.

3. The proceedings value is set to 4.000,00 EUR.

Rationale:

I.
The Applicant has credibly shown the following:

She has created the photo mentioned in the decision and released it for further use under the terms of the so-called Creative Commons license “Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported”. According to these terms, in case of use the creator must be named and there must be either a copy of the license text attached or the full internet address in the form of the Uniform Resource Identifier must be provided. The Defendant published the photo on its website under the address www.die-rechte.info without giving the aforementioned information. The applicant first took notice of the publication on September 9th 2010.

II.
This triggers the urgent entitlement to injunctive relief according to s. 97 ss. 1 in combination with s. 19a UrhG.

The photo enjoys copyright protection as a photographic work in the meaning of s. 2 ss. 1 No. 5 UrhG or as a photograph in the meaning of s. 72 UrhG. As the Defendant put the photo on its website while in breach of the aforementioned license terms, this constituted a use not covered by the permission of the Applicant and thus an unlawful use in the meaning of s. 97 ss. 1 UrhG.

The risk of recurrent infringement as a prerequisite for the entitlement follows from the occurrence of the breach; the risk could have been dispelled only by a declaration under penalty of law to cease and desist (BGH GRUR 1985, 155, 156 = NJW 1985, 191, 191 – Penalty up to … ! – mentioning further sources).

A preliminary ruling seems also “necessary” in the meaning of s. 940 ZPO, because the Applicant cannot be expected to tolerate a possible further infringement of her rights until main proceedings are run.

The set value of the proceedings equals two thirds of the value of the main proceedings (see KG WRP 2005, 368, 369).

Dr. Scholz Klinger von Bresinsky

CC is seeking a Senior Project Manager and Senior Project Analyst

Jennifer Yip, September 12th, 2011

Creative Commons is seeking highly motivated and organized individuals to fill two positions: Senior Project Manager and Senior Project Analyst.  Both positions are full-time with full benefits. Both positions will be key members of the team supporting Department of Labor TAACCCT grantees.

Ideal candidates have contributed to open source, open education, open licensing, and/or other open content projects, are proficient in required technologies, and possess at lease two years of work experience. Joining CC means getting the chance to interact with motivated staff and a brilliant international network of affiliates and community members.

Please feel free to share these jobs descriptions as far and wide as possible. We will be accepting applications on a rolling basis until we find the right candidates. Please be sure to indicate the job title you are interested in applying for in the email subject line, and send to “jobs@creativecommons.org”

Application Deadline: Friday, 7 October.

Celebrating Freesound 2.0, retiring Sampling+ licenses

Mike Linksvayer, September 12th, 2011

Freesound is a collaborative database of nearly 120,000 sounds. We first posted about the project in 2005. Freesound specializes in sounds, not songs, and those sounds have been used thousands of times from ccMixter remixes to a major motion picture.

The project has just launched a complete rewrite of its site, with a new, modern look, and a new, modern codebase that will enable the project to grow and add features over the coming years. Congratulations to Bram and the entire Freesound community! Hop over and get involved.

Freesound 2.0 also brings a long-awaited licensing migration, which the rest of this post delves into. Later in 2005, we interviewed Freesound project leader Bram de Jong:

CC: What led you to mandate use of a CC license for all samples in Freesound?

BdJ: Simply because the creative commons licenses are clear licenses, well thought of, well documented and above all quite modular. We doubted a long time about which license to choose, and in the end decided to go with Sampling+. In retrospect we chose wrong, and we’re planning to ask our users to switch to Attribution/Attribution-NonCommercial, but that’s a bit further in the future.

In 2006 the project started a poll which would inform the eventual license migration:

A large fraction (37%) of the community also wanted a public domain option (and fortunately we launched the CC0 public domain dedication in the interim). The image below shows what the Freesound 2.0 license migration options look like for existing users:

We expect this migration to result in greatly increased use of Freesound-hosted sounds, and of Freesound itself, especially to the extent users choose to migrate to CC0 and CC Attribution — this will be the first time Freesound samples will be available under fully free terms, and thus usable by anyone for any purpose, including massively in massively collaborative projects such as Wikipedia, which insists on such terms.

Creative Commons is taking this opportunity to retire the Sampling+ license, as well as the NonCommercial-Sampling+ license (the latter was not used by Freesound, nor by any major project, and probably should have been retired years ago). For a big picture explanation of why we’re retiring these licenses, and why now, see the following text from an email explaining plans for retirement to the Creative Commons board of directors:

[In 2007] we retired the sampling and devnations licenses due to low usage and failing to permit a minimum of noncommercial verbatim distribution worldwide (retirement means we don’t recommend use for new works and add to http://creativecommons.org/retiredlicenses — the deeds and legalcode stay up forever for anyone already using them).

It is approaching time to retire the sampling+ and nc-sampling+ licenses due to low usage and lack of interoperability with the six main CC licenses. We’ve further come to understand the importance of interoperability and clarity. While niche licenses in theory could attract more creators do the commons by addressing specific needs, they detract from the commons by subdividing it into incompatible pools and making the commons harder to understand.

The only major site using sampling+ (there are none of significance using nc-sampling+) is Freesound, a sound sample repository. Freesound 2.0 will be launched, with CC0 as the recommended option, but also support for BY and BY-NC, and a push to ask contributors to re-license (or dedicate to the public domain) previous uploads. We intend to retire the sampling+ licenses in conjunction with the launch of Freesound 2.0, giving that important community the respect and attention it deserves while at the same time demonstrating our continued rigorous commitment to an interoperable commons.

If you’re interested in even more details concerning why Sampling+ was not right for Freesound, and right for Creative Commons to retire, continue reading…

After the initial suite of 11 CC licenses (cut back to 6 in version 2.0) was launched in late 2002, it wasn’t clear that CC shouldn’t create even more licenses to address particular niches. Those following the free and open source software world knew that “license proliferation” had a bad name, but the world outside software is very diverse, so CC explored, including an education-specific license (never developed, which was just the right thing, as CC’s standard licenses have turned out to work just great for learning materials), a license which only granted broad permissions in the developing world (retired, see link above), and perhaps most interestingly, a remix-only license, at one point briefly be called the Recombo license (a tribute to CC’s popularity in Brazil), in the end launched as the Sampling license.

The Sampling license was on one hand very restrictive — it did not permit any verbatim distribution — a CC license that did not permit simple sharing(!) — but on the other hand, permitted commercial use of licensed works, provided they were used transformatively. In theory, such a license could be very good for the commons. It might encourage conservative entities to license some works in a way that would not sanction their bugaboos such as P2P filesharing, but could ultimately be incorporated into free works through remixing.

Sampling was never widely used, perhaps because lack of allowing verbatim sharing just broke too many use cases — including CC’s. When WIRED did its magnificent issue on CC, featuring prominent artists using the new license to promote remix, not being able to share the verbatim originals would have made a site like ccMixter (launched with the issue) rather unwieldy. So CC created the Sampling+ license, the plus noting that it added permission to share verbatim copies.

However, this process resulted in one of the oddities that made it very hard to remember how Sampling+ worked: it only allowed non-commercial verbatim sharing, but at the same time, it allowed commercial use if transformative. This is one instance in which CC’s practice of developing a simple machine-readable description of its licenses alerted us that something was amiss. The flat CC REL statements permits Distribution and prohibits CommercialUse would not be adequate for describing Sampling+. We were forced to define a new permission, Sharing, which we defined as non-commercial distribution. This allowed us to say Sampling+ permits DerivativeWorks and leave out prohibits CommercialUse, which would be too broad. This exercise wasn’t enough to stop Sampling+, but it did highlight another (in addition to helping computers facilitate discovery and use of licensed works) use case for machine-readable license descriptions — informing the development of licenses (and other legal tools; such an exercise was helpful in defining the scope of the Public Domain Mark) themselves.

Some of the artists (or their management) involved in the WIRED CD did not want to permit any sort of commercial use, thus we created the NonCommercial-Sampling+ license. The WIRED CD and issue and launch of ccMixter were each huge successes and major milestones for CC. However, the Sampling licenses themselves proved to be a nearly instant “legacy” problem. In 2005 ccMixter discouraged their use in favor of CC Attribution and Attribution-NonCommercial and as the interview above shows, Freesound knew that was the right move almost immediately as well. Please read Victor Stone’s delightful ccMixter memoir for a history of that project, including licensing.

For completeness, it’s worth noting a couple other problems the Sampling licenses had, in addition to Sampling’s not allowing verbatim sharing (the reason it was retired in 2007) and Sampling+’s hard to remember commercial/non-commercial mix.

All of the Sampling licenses only allow adaptations that make “partial” and “highly transformative” uses of the original. This caused three sub-problems: (1) for some short works, samples on Freesound in particular, “highly transformative” and (especially) “partial” use potentially severely limits natural uses of the works; (2) these conditions are fairly open to interpretation — had any of the Sampling licenses been very popular, “what is transformative/partial” would be another consuming question, a la non-commercial; and (3) it is not clear just how much the Sampling licenses permitted beyond what one can (or at least ought be able to) do based on copyright exceptions and limitations such as fair use.

Finally, the Sampling and Sampling+ licenses also have a complete prohibition on advertising and promotional use (except for promoting the work and artist themselves), which resulted in four sub-problems: (1) prohibition of such a broad class of uses greatly limits the value of the commercial use permission, and considering “promotional”, even many otherwise non-commercial uses; (2) what constitutes advertising or promotion?; (3) limitation to non-promotional uses accentuates the question above about what is permitted above and beyond default exceptions and limitations; and (4) the Sampling and Sampling+ licenses are not compatible with any of the 6 main CC licenses — one can’t incorporate a work under Sampling or Sampling+ into a work distributed under one of the 6 main CC licenses, as none of them, even those with the NonCommercial term have a complete prohibition on advertising, let alone all promotional uses.

Obviously CC has become much more focused on interoperability since its beginning — we have released no new niche licenses since 2004, and as of today, have retired all of those. Version 4.0 of the main CC licenses will present another opportunity to take a hard look at interoperability, and fix any rough edges we might find, with your help. If you’re interested, please join the discussion virtually or at its kickoff later this month in Warsaw.

If you’ve read this far, now take a break and check out Freesound 2.0.

WikiSym 2011 is open for registration and student volunteers!

Jane Park, September 9th, 2011

Earlier this year, we announced that Creative Commons is an official sponsor of the 7th annual WikiSym, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. WikiSym is taking place right near Creative Commons headquarters in Mountain View, CA on October 3-5 at Microsoft Research Campus in Silicon Valley.

WikiSym is the premier conference on open collaboration and related technologies for researchers, industry, entrepreneurs and practitioners worldwide. It is supported by relevant organizations and companies such as Microsoft, Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, the National Science Foundation, and CosmoCode. As an Associate Partner and like-minded organization concerned about the instrumental role of open content and open licenses in today’s society, Creative Commons supports WikiSym to further disseminate the goals of this forum among their audience around the world.

Key topics in WikiSym include open collaboration and related technologies, open content, open licenses and their connections and implications for different areas of interest (education, e-democracy, data transparency and industry). A CC Salon on Open Educational Resources organized in San Francisco in June already served as a preview of some interesting discussions in this field that will be developed at the conference.

The conference program is packed with presentations, workshops, panels, demos and keynotes. Alongside is the Open Space, an unconference track in which attendees can self-organize their own agenda with discussions, presentations and informal gatherings.

This year, WikiSym is proud to host 3 outstanding keynotes by world-renowned figures in their fields.

• Cathy Casserly (CEO @ Creative Commons) will talk about the forthcoming challenges for open content and open licenses, with special emphasis in their implications for the critical field of educational content.
• Jeff Heer (Assistant Professor @ Stanford) will present a tour around the most compelling and innovative advances in information visualization (InfoViz), a field that is evolving rapidly, along with the emergence of open data sources, public transparency and data analysis.
• Bernardo Huberman (Senior HP Fellow and Director of the Social Computing Lab @ Hewlett-Packard Laboratories) will emphasize the implication of the latest advances in the study of virtual communities, distributed systems and dynamics of information in large networks to understand the way open collaboration will likely evolve in the future.

WikiSym 2011 registration is still open. Don’t miss this unparalleled opportunity to tap into the latest trends and ground-breaking advances in open collaboration–the force that is reshaping the way we work, live and interact with each other everyday.

For updates, follow the WikiSym blog and Twitter feed. We look forward to seeing you this October in Mountain View!

Volunteer at WikiSym 2011!

You can also volunteer to help run WikiSym if you are a student (undergrad, grad, PhD). Volunteers will receive free access to the conference (including meals, reception and dinner) for the entire 3 days. Apply to be a volunteer by September 24!

CC News: Open Government Policy Developments

Jane Park, September 9th, 2011

Stay up to date with CC news by subscribing to our weblog and following us on Twitter.

While we gear up for the CC Global Summit that is just a week away, governments around the world continue to open up their data and adopt policies for maximum transparency and citizen engagement.

Open government developments in Austria, New Zealand, and Australia

In Austria, the City of Vienna, along with the Chancellor’s Office and the Austrian cities of Linz, Salzburg and Graz, coordinated their activities to establish the Cooperation OGD (Open Government Data) Austria. In its first session, the group agreed to eight key points, the first of which was, "All public administration will be free under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), meaning it can be reused and shared for any purpose, with only attribution necessary.” Read more.

In New Zealand, the Ministers of Finance and Internal Affairs adopted a statement detailing a new Declaration on Open and Transparent Government that directs, encourages, and invites various departments, state services agencies, and state sector agencies to commit to releasing high value public data actively for re-use, in accordance with the Declaration and Principles, and in accordance with the NZGOAL Review and Release process. Read more.

In Australia, AusGOAL, the nationally endorsed Australian Governments Open Access and Licensing Framework, recommends the suite of CC licenses for copyrighted material and the CC Public Domain Mark for non-copyrighted material. Read more. CC Korea also recently translated the excellent Australia Gov 2.0 Taskforce Report to further open government in their own region.

In other news:

• $20,000 is available via the Open Textbook Challenge by the Saylor Foundation. If a textbook is submitted and accepted for use with Saylor.org's course materials, then the copyright holders receive $20,000 while the referrer receives $250.

• Our affiliates in Europe have published a new dossier on the EU sound recording copyright extension.

• We also filed brief comments for the EC consultation on scientific information in the digital age.

• In response to the Moore Foundation's call for community feedback, we developed this idea on Data Governance. We hope you participate and vote, and not just on our idea — participation in processes like this is a great way to increase their usage by foundations in making funding choices that can benefit the commons.

• The Technical Working Group is underway for the Learning Metadata Resource Initiative (LRMI). EdTechMag recently covered LRMI in this great article. To learn more, sign up for the first in a series of webinars on LRMI.

• We documented the present state of CC licensing options in a summary on CC Labs.

• And we updated our Kickstarter page with a couple new CC licensed projects seeking sustenance. Check it out, and let us know if you are using CC for a project with an upcoming deadline.

Webinar to learn about the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative

Jane Park, September 8th, 2011

The Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) and Creative Commons are hosting a webinar to introduce publishers, content developers, educators, and the general public to the Learning Metadata Resource Initiative (LRMI). Many of you read about its launch in June, and maybe even saw that the Technical Working Group had been finalized and is starting work. This webinar is the first in a series of webinars on the LRMI, and is a chance for you to get your questions answered directly. Official description:

Metadata Tagging in Education – What Every Publisher and Content Developer Needs to Know

Join AEP and Creative Commons to learn about the effort to establish a common vocabulary for describing learning resources. This webinar will review the background of the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, the roles of the organizations involved, and the goals for this major initiative. As a framework is created and then adopted by publishers and content developers, many opportunities lie ahead. Weigh in, ask your questions, voice your concerns, and help us keep the dialogue moving forward. The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative will have a valuable impact on the way educators search for and use online educational material.

The webinar will occur on Friday, September 23, 2011 at 2:00-3:00 PM U.S. EDT. Register now!