If you’ve been following along on the blog this year, you’ll know that we’ve been thinking a lot about the future of open, particularly in this age of AI. With our 2025-2028 strategy to guide us, we’ve been louder about a renewed call for reciprocity to defend and protect the commons as well as the importance of openness in AI and open licensing to avoid an enclosure of the commons. 

Last month, we took some of these conversations on the road and hosted the Open House for an Open Future during SXSW in Austin, TX, as part of a weekend-long Wiki Haus event with our friends at the Wikimedia Foundation. 

During the event, we spoke with Audrey Tang and Cory Doctorow about the future of open, especially as we look towards CC’s 25th anniversary in 2026.  In this wide-ranging conversation, a number of themes were reflected that capture both where we’ve been over the last 25 years and where we should be focusing for the next 25 years, including: 

• The Fight for Technological Self-Determination: Contractual restrictions are increasingly being used to lock down essential technologies, from printer ink to hospital ventilators. The push for openness and economic fairness must go beyond just content-sharing and extend to fighting for the rights of people to repair, modify, and use technology freely.
  
• Shifting from Resistance to Building Alternatives: The open movement is not just about opposing corporate restrictions but also about creating viable, open alternatives. Initiatives like Gov Zero show that fostering decentralized, user-controlled platforms can help counteract monopolistic digital ecosystems.
  
• The Power of Exit as a Lever for Change: Simply having the option to leave restrictive platforms can influence corporate behavior. Efforts like Free Our Feeds and Bluesky aim to create credible exit strategies that prevent users from being locked into exploitative digital environments.
  
• Beyond Copyright: New Frameworks for Openness and Innovation: While Creative Commons began as a response to copyright limitations, the next phase should focus on broader issues like supporting an infrastructure for open sharing, ethical AI development, and open governance models that empower communities rather than just limiting corporate control.
  
• Reclaiming the Ethos of Open Source and Free Software: The movement must reconnect with its ethical roots, focusing on freedom to create, share, and innovate—not just openness for the sake of efficiency. This includes resisting corporate capture of “openness” and ensuring technological advances serve public interest rather than private profit.

Since the proliferation of mainstream AI, we’ve been analyzing the limitations of copyright (and, by extension, the CC licenses since they are built atop copyright law) as the right lens to think about guardrails for AI training. This means we need new tools and approaches in this age of AI that complement open licensing, while also advancing the AI ecosystem toward the public interest. Preference signals are based on the idea that creators and dataset holders should be active participants in deciding how and/or if their content is used for AI training. Our friends at Bluesky, for example, have recently put forth a proposal on User Intents for Data Reuse, which is well worth a read to conceptualize how a preference signals approach could be considered on a social media platform. We’ve also been actively participating in the IETF’s AI Preferences Working Group, since submitting a position paper on the subject mid-2024 .

As CC gets closer to launching a protocol based on prosocial preference signals—a simple pact between those stewarding the data and those reusing it for generative AI training—we had the opportunity during SXSW to chat with some great thought leaders about this very topic. Our panelists were Aubra Anthony, Senior Fellow, Technology and International Affairs Program at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Zachary J. McDowell, Phd, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago; Lane Becker, President, Wikimedia LLC at Wikimedia Foundation, and our very own Anna Tumadóttir, CEO, Creative Commons to explore sharing in the age of AI.  A few key takeaways from this conversation included: 

• Balancing Norms and Legal Frameworks: There is a growing interest in developing normative approaches and civil structures that go beyond traditional legal frameworks to ensure equitable use and transparency.
  
• Navigating AI Traffic and Commercial Use: Wikimedia is adapting to the influx of AI-driven bot traffic and exploring how to differentiate between commercial and non-commercial use. The idea of treating commercial traffic differently and finding ways to fundraise off bot traffic is becoming more prominent, raising important questions about sustainability in an open knowledge ecosystem. From CC’s perspective, we’ve found that as our open infrastructures mature they become increasingly taken for granted, a notion that is not conducive to a sustainable open ecosystem.
  
• Openness in the Age of AI: There is growing reticence around openness, with creators becoming more cautious about sharing content due to the rise of generative AI (note, this is exactly what our preference signals framework is meant to address, so stay tuned!). We should emphasize the need for open initiatives to adapt to the broader social and economic context, balancing openness with creators’ concerns about protection and sustainability.
  
• Making Participation Easy and Understandable: To encourage widespread participation in open knowledge systems and for preference signal adoption, tools will need to be simple and intuitive. Whether through collective benefit models or platform cooperativism, ease of use and clarity are essential to engaging the broader public in contributing to open initiatives.

Did you know that many social justice and public good organizations are unable to participate in influential and culture-making events like SXSW due to a lack of funding? CC is a nonprofit organization and all of our activities must be cost-recovery. We’d like to sincerely thank our event sponsor, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for making this event and these conversations possible. If you would like to contribute to our work, consider joining the Open Infrastructure Circle which will help to fund a framework that makes reciprocity actionable when shared knowledge is used to train generative AI.

The post CC @ SXSW: Protecting the Commons in the Age of AI appeared first on Creative Commons.

A lot has changed in the past few years, and it is high time for Creative Commons (CC) to be louder about our values. Underpinning our recently released strategic plan is a renewed call for reciprocity. Neutrality serves only the status quo and there is nothing neutral about fighting for a more equitable world through open practices and sharing knowledge.  

Since the inception of CC, there have been two sides to the licenses. There’s the legal side, which describes in explicit and legally sound terms, what rights are granted for a particular item. But, equally there’s the social side, which is communicated when someone applies the CC icons. The icon acts as identification, a badge, a symbol that we are in this together, and that’s why we are sharing. Whether it’s scientific research, educational materials, or poetry, when it’s marked with a CC license it’s also accompanied by a social agreement which is anchored in reciprocity. This is for all of us.

But, with the mainstream emergence of generative AI, that social agreement has come into question and come under threat, with knock-on consequences for the greater commons. Current approaches to building commercial foundation models lack reciprocity. No one shares photos of ptarmigans to get rich, no one contributes to articles about Huldufólk​ seeking fame. It is about sharing knowledge. But when that shared knowledge is opaquely ingested, credit is not given, and the crawlers ramp up server activity (and fees) to the degree where the human experience is degraded, folks are demotivated to continue contributing.

The open movement has always fought for shared knowledge to be accessible for everyone and anyone to use, to learn from. We don’t want to slow down scientific discovery. If we can more rapidly learn, discover, and innovate, with the use of new technologies, that’s wonderful. As long as we’re actually in this together.

What we ultimately want, and what we believe we need, is a commons that is strong, resilient, growing, useful (to machines and to humans)—all the good things, frankly. But as our open infrastructures mature they become increasingly taken for granted, and the feeling that “this is for all of us” is replaced with “everyone is entitled to this”. While this sounds the same, it really isn’t. Because with entitlement comes misuse, the social contract breaks, reciprocation evaporates, and ultimately the magic weakens. 

Reciprocity in the age of AI means fostering a mutually beneficial relationship between creators/data stewards and AI model builders. For AI model builders who disproportionately benefit from the commons,  reciprocity is a way of giving back to the commons that is community and context specific. 

(And in case it wasn’t already clear, this piece isn’t about policy or laws, but about centering people). 

This is where our values need to enter the equation: we cannot sit neutrally by and allow “this is for everyone” to mean that grossly disproportionate benefits of the commons accrue to the few. That our shared knowledge pools get siphoned off and kept from us. 

We believe reciprocity must be embedded in the AI ecosystem in order to uphold the social contract behind sharing.  If you benefit from the commons, and (critically) if you are in a position to give back to the commons, you should. Because the commons are for everyone, which means we all need to uphold the value of the commons by contributing in whatever way is appropriate. 

There never has been, nor should there be, a mandatory 1:1 exchange between each individual and the commons. What’s appropriate then, as a way to give back? So many possibilities come to mind, including:

• Increasing agency as a means to achieve reciprocity by allowing data holders to signal their preferences for AI training 
• Credit, in the form of attribution, when possible
• Open infrastructure support
• Cooperative dataset development
• Putting model weights or other components into the commons

When we talk about defending the commons, it involves sustaining them, growing them, and making sure that the social contract remains intact for future generations of humans. And for that to happen, it’s time for some reciprocity.

Part of CC being louder about our values is also taking action in the form of a social protocol that is built on preference signals, a simple pact between those stewarding data and those reusing it for generative AI. Like CC licenses, they are aimed at well-meaning actors and designed to establish new social norms around sharing and access based on reciprocity. We’re actively working alongside values-aligned partners to pilot a framework that makes reciprocity actionable when shared knowledge is used to train generative AI. Consider joining the Open Infrastructure Circle to help us move this work forward.

The post Reciprocity in the Age of AI appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’re pleased to introduce four new members to our Board: Alwaleed Alkhaja, Melissa Hagemann, Melissa Omino, and Colin Sullivan. 

Familiar faces within the CC community, Alwaleed, Melissa, Melissa,  and Colin bring prior experience within our organization, having previously partnered with us as community advocates with a history of dedicated support for the open movement.

Each of our new Board members brings a unique expertise that will help strengthen CC’s impact and guide our strategic vision forward. Their diverse backgrounds and commitment to the open movement strengthen our already dedicated Board, representing exactly what we need as we continue to grow and evolve our work to achieve our 2025-2028 goals.

Alwaleed Alkhaja

Alwaleed Alkhaja serves as the Head of Open Access and Copyright at the Qatar National Library, where he oversees the library’s open access program and all copyright-related matters. Throughout his academic and professional career, he has held various roles in open access publishing and open science. His experience ranges from editorial positions at Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals to overseeing academic publishing at Hamad bin Khalifa University Press/QScience.com (the first open access publisher in Qatar).

Alwaleed’s passion for open science is rooted in his background in scientific research. He earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Leeds and received his master’s and PhD in Molecular Biology from the Max Planck International School of Molecular Biology in Göttingen, Germany. He also holds an MBA from the University of Manchester. Alwaleed voluntarily supports several international organizations, including serving on the board of Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) and advisory board of the Forum for Open Research in MENA (FORM).

In his free time, he enjoys photography and exploring experimental techniques, including macro photography, pinhole photography (constructing a room-sized camera obscura), cyanotype printing, and infrared photography.

Melissa Hagemann

Melissa Hagemann has been at the forefront of the Access to Knowledge movement for over twenty years. She managed the Open Society Foundations’ work to define open access to research through the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) and went on to support the development of the global open access movement. To mark the 20th anniversary of the BOAI, she spearheaded the development of new recommendations which emphasize that open access is not an end in itself, but a means to further ends, above all, to the equity, quality, sustainability, and usability of research. Currently she is the Director of the BOAI Org, which advocates for the equitable development of open access globally.

Melissa co-organized the meeting that led to the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, which offered strategies for the growth of the global open education movement. In addition, she supported the advancement of progressive copyright reform at the national and international levels.

She has served on numerous boards, including the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as the Open Climate Campaign. 

Melissa Omino

Dr Melissa Omino is currently the Director of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (CIPIT) at Strathmore University, where she oversees the research direction of the leading Eastern African AI Policy Hub and Data Governance Policy Centre with a range of funding partners that includes the IDRC, Hewlett Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Open AIR.

Her research direction is focused on utilizing an African lens and a Human Rights lens. Part of the research conducted under Dr Omino’s leadership at CIPIT involved mapping AI applications in Africa as the initial step in answering the question of what determines African AI and the problems it aims to solve in Africa. Dr Omino is also an intellectual property (IP) expert with a research focus on the development and negotiation of IP provisions in international trade agreements by and with Global South countries.

She has served as an Advisory Board member in several African and Global Projects that intersect between AI and IP, including a National AI Strategy Process, and leading the IP Advisory to a global entity funding AI research in Africa. 

Colin Sullivan

Colin Sullivan is the General Counsel at Patreon, where he oversees the operations teams that ensure the platform remains a safe and stable home for creators. His responsibilities include leading the legal, trust & safety, payment operations, fraud and compliance teams. With a focus on protecting creators and maintaining a trustworthy environment, Colin plays a pivotal role in Patreon’s mission of funding the creative class and safeguarding their creative freedom. Before joining Patreon, Colin founded his own law firm where he served as outside general counsel to entrepreneurs and startups.

A Big Thank You to Alek Tarkowski

Please join us in thanking outgoing CC Board member, Alek Tarkowski who completed his five year term at the end of 2024. Alek is the Director of Strategy at Open Future and brought to the CC Board over 15 years of experience with public interest advocacy, movement building and research into the intersection of society, culture and digital technologies. As a longtime CC community member, in 2005, he co-founded Creative Commons Poland. During his time on the Board, Alex supported the development of CC’s organizational strategy and provided leadership in developing CC’s approach to sharing in the age of AI. Thankfully, Alek won’t be going too far away as he now joins the CC Advisory Council. 

Welcome Alwaleed. Melissa, Melissa, and Colin, and thank you Alek!

The post Welcoming New CC Board Members appeared first on Creative Commons.

The team here at Creative Commons was delighted to publicly release our new organizational strategy on January 22, after almost a year of intensive team, community, and board consultations. For the next several years, our focus will be to:

• Strengthen the open infrastructure of sharing
• Defend and advocate for a thriving creative commons
• Center community

These goals are high level, as they tend to be when packaged up as part of a multi-year strategy. These goals should also feel familiar, for an organization whose mission it is to empower individuals and communities around the world through technical, legal, and policy solutions that enable the sharing of education, culture, and science in the public interest. But there are important nuances included in these goals and subsequent short-, medium-, and long-term objectives that point to intentional and meaningful shifts in the ways we operate to meet this moment. 

Of course the legal layer of the open infrastructure—the CC licenses and legal tools themselves—must be strengthened. But also, new sharing frameworks must be explored for changing times. 

Of course we must ensure the ongoing survival of the commons. But strategies need to evolve from solely being a sensible argument around opening up access to information. We know that greater access facilitates advances in education, in the scientific arena, and in our ability to understand and appreciate the diversity of cultural heritage that exists. However, those who previously saw the obvious benefits to sharing may now be hesitant, uncertain about how their works will be used or contextualized, through advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning. 

Finally, one might think that centering community goes without saying, but actually, it doesn’t. As an organization that has only achieved what it has because of a strong community of advocates bringing their expertise and passion to bear, we know we cannot continue to impact the social norms and legal frameworks of sharing without full participation.

So what does all of this mean for our work today, and throughout this year? Since we are currently operating in the age of AI, where all content also functions as data, we are focusing our work in two key areas:

1. Data governance, shaped by legal and norms-based infrastructure to facilitate sharing.
2. Sustaining open licensing in the age of AI, as high value contributions to the commons at scale that must be sustained through reciprocity.

This focus is guided by CC’s core principle: ideas and facts should not be commodified. As we reimagine sharing in the age of AI, we also draw on our history which reminds us to resist the reflex to expand copyright. Instead, we believe developing new norms, as part of a healthy data governance framework that prioritizes sharing in the age of AI, is the best approach to meeting our mission.  

Data Governance

Our friends at Open Future define data governance as “how rules for data use are created and enforced. This includes laws, standards, and social norms that guide what people can and can’t do with data. Good governance ensures fair and responsible data sharing.”

CC plays a unique role within data governance across the open internet. The CC licenses provide a form of legal and social norms guidance that has facilitated sharing on the internet for the last 25 years. We think of CC’s role within data governance as providing critical infrastructure that enables community-driven, fair, and responsible data sharing. The challenge is that what is considered fair and responsible data sharing is not static; it evolves based on context. And while this has always been true, AI has brought issues of fairness, transparency, trust, accountability, and more to the forefront for CC and for our many collaborators and colleagues who are committed to human-centered approaches to data governance. 

In 2025, we need to continue to explain how the CC licenses interact with AI training, and champion preference signals as a way to advance the data governance we need to meet this moment. You’ve heard from us on this subject in the past, and there is much more to come as we find partners to pilot this work with in the coming months. Policy and legal environments will also continue to play a significant role in both driving and influencing the data governance landscape of the future. CC’s role in advocating for balanced copyright and policies that drive access to knowledge, especially as new legislation, particularly around AI, is passed and implemented, is instrumental in representing civil society and advocating on behalf of the public interest.

Sustaining Open Licensing in the Age of AI

The use of the CC licenses has resulted in billions of items being released openly. Today, these items have also become parts of AI training sets—this is a significant shift that is influencing the norms around open licensing. Our priority is increasing sustainable sharing and access, but we now must consider “what about AI?”. We believe that openly licensed collections of content, which act as high-value contributions to the commons, must continue to be prioritized. 

However, many creators (artists, researchers, educators, and everyone in between) are understandably concerned about their contributions to the commons being reduced to small pieces of data within huge datasets where they lose agency over how their works are being used. We believe that the antidote to this is reciprocity. We believe it is time for the open movement to ask for something in return when there is disproportionate benefit from use of open datasets. We aim to do this by developing relationships with AI model builders on behalf of those who contribute to the commons, ensuring that training datasets remain collectively owned, sustain the commons, and that data governance principles are respected.

We need more open educational, cultural, scientific, and research data to allow more rapid scientific discovery and collaboration. Sharing must continue in the age of AI and we are committed to supporting open licensing at scale, taking the context of AI into consideration. 

There are new and layered complexities in the open sharing world, and we’re excited and determined to help clarify and address these challenges. We’d like to see open sharing grow as a collective strategy  to advance the public interest. In 2025 (and beyond, I’m sure), we will be finding ways to facilitate agency for the movement and facilitating even more sharing and access, while ensuring that the commons remain resilient and sustainable.

If you’d like to support this work, consider joining the Creative Commons Open Infrastructure Circle. Our most dedicated supporters ensure that every day we can show up and do the valuable work of preserving and growing the global commons of knowledge and culture from which we all benefit.

The post From Strategy to Action: Focus Areas for 2025 appeared first on Creative Commons.

On February 10 and 11, 2025, the government of France convened the AI Action Summit, bringing together heads of state, tech leaders, and civil society to discuss global collaboration and action on AI. The event was co-chaired by French President Macron and Indian Prime Minister Modi. This was the third such Summit in just over a year, the first two in the UK and South Korea respectively. The next one is to be hosted in India, with a firm date not yet set.

Creative Commons was invited to be an official participant in the Summit, and given room to speak on a panel about international AI governance. Given our continued advocacy for public interest AI, and on-the-ground work, particularly in the US and EU, to interrogate new governance structures for data sharing, open infrastructures, and data commons, the Summit was an important venue to contribute to the global conversation.

We focused on three things in our panel and direct conversations:

1. Civil society matters, and must continue to be included. While we may not hold the pen on drafting declarations, or be in the negotiating room with world leaders and their ample security teams, we must continue to (loudly) bring our perspectives to these spaces. If we aren’t there, then nobody is. Without civil society, there can be no public interest. 
2. The importance of openness in AI. What it means, who benefits from it, and how we think critically about ongoing (dis)incentives to participate in the open knowledge ecosystem.
3. Local solutions for local contexts, local content, and local needs.

Civil Society Matters

Civil society matters because we represent real concerns from real people. A people-centered approach to AI must inevitably be a planet-centered approach as well, one simply cannot and should not exist without the other.

Included in the civil society contingent at the Summit were also major philanthropic foundations who have long focused on public interest technology. Encouragingly (we hope) they have joined forces with private investment and governments to launch Current AI, a coalition which is advocating ‘global collaboration and local action, building a future where open, trustworthy technology serves the public interest’. The Summit also saw the launch of ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools), which was born out of a conversation at a prior Summit around the absence of reliable, robust, high-quality open source tooling for trust and safety. ROOST adds a critical building block to the open source AI ecosystem as tools to allow anyone to run safety checks on datasets before use and training should (hopefully) result in safer model performance.

But philanthropy is not a business model for something that is set to become ubiquitous public infrastructure at a greater level than is already the case with the internet currently. The investments of philanthropy alone will not be enough to steer the public interest conversation to the top of the action agenda. There must be matching political will and public investment, and we’ll be watching closely for evidence that actions are following words.

Our view is that governments should prioritize investment in publicly accessible AI, which meets open standards and allows for equitable access. These are key drivers of innovation and every sector stands to benefit. Governments can lead the way on investing in compute, (re)training people, and preparing and encouraging high quality openly licensed datasets, to level the playing field for researchers, innovators, open source developers, and beyond.

Openness in AI

Openness in AI continues to be a broad and multifaceted topic: how do we continue to foster open sharing, making it resilient, safe and trustworthy while we’re hearing from our community some examples of creators and organizations choosing more restrictive licenses now, or hesitating to share at all in an attempt to regain agency over how their content is used as training data. Our future depends on protecting the progress of the last 20 years of open practices. The answer does not lie in a misguided shift from CC BY to CC BY-NC-ND. We have to think more holistically.

The CC licenses alone are not a governance framework in and of themselves, but what they represent are absolutely critical components of legal and social norms that support data governance that can serve the public interest.

In the context of data governance, we see our role in helping negotiate preferences for reuse of datasets containing openly licensed works. We need to ensure that folks are still incentivized to participate and contribute to the commons, while feeling their voices are heard and their work is contributing in mutually-beneficial ways. If you are the steward of a large open dataset, we want to hear from you.

Local Solutions for Local Contexts

From CC’s perspective, local solutions for local contexts are where we need to put our energy. As Janet Haven from Data & Society frames it, let’s focus on collaboration for AI governance, rather than striving for a single, global governance structure. One size does not fit all, and even issues that are global needs, like planetary survival, will require very different efforts by country or region. It was rather encouraging to hear examples of “small” language models from across the world, that emphasize language preservation and cultural context. Efforts to record, catalog, and digitize language and cultural artifacts are underway. This is yet another area where we see a need to systematically articulate and clearly signal preferences for reuse, so that local efforts thrive and are respected appropriately.

Where We Go From Here

We heard from many fellow civil society organizations that the tone in France differed markedly from previous Summits in the UK or South Korea. There was a welcome diversity of civil society voices on panels and in workshops, with a steady drumbeat of calls for safe, sustainable, and trustworthy AI. “Open source” and “public interest” were phrases uttered in many major interventions. But aside from us collectively being able to fill a few volumes on how we define these terms anyway (sustainable for who?) the real impact of the Summit will be seen in the ways in which we collaborate from now on.

The political discussions at the Summit focused heavily on the false dichotomy of regulation versus innovation – and yes, the language used heavily fed into the narrative that those are mutually exclusive. Much emphasis on the desire for regional investment (and superiority), while offering global collaboration, was mildly disheartening but also fully expected. Political statements around public interest were repeated but vague. Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, who emphatically urged everyone to not forget the people, stating that “the benefits must accrue to everyone”. Whether those in power will pay attention to that message is anyone’s guess. Take, for example, The Paris Charter on Artificial Intelligence in the Public Interest, which says all of the right things but lacks in terms of both widespread endorsement and meaningful steps towards implementation.

We are clear-eyed on the fact that AI is here, has been for quite some time, and will not go away. We need collaborative, pragmatic approaches to steer towards what we see as beneficial outcomes and public interest values. While there were glimmers of hope from some who hold legislative and executive power, it’s clear that civil society has a lot of advocacy work ahead of us.

The Summit culminated in countries signing onto a declaration, with notable omissions from the United States and UK. As always, it is once the media cycle moves on where we will see any lasting impact. In the meantime, let’s not wait for another global Summit to take action.

The post The AI Action Summit & Civil Society’s (Possible) Impact appeared first on Creative Commons.

For over 20 years, Creative Commons (CC) has provided self-serve solutions to address the limitations of copyright in a digital world. CC is a beloved symbol of sharing and knowledge freedom that resists a restrictive sharing and re-use environment and brings people together. Thanks to organizations like CC and many others, creative, cultural, educational, and research works are more accessible than ever before, and yet, our work is not done. At a time when there are increasing concentrations of power online, and when monopolization of knowledge is amplified exponentially through technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), CC has been called upon to intervene with the same creativity and collective action as we did with the CC licenses over 20 years ago. If we continue down this path without intervention, the internet and our ways of connecting online will be controlled by the few who disproportionately benefit from the many in ways that deepen inequities.

Over the next few years, our priorities will focus on ensuring a strong and resilient open infrastructure of sharing, and enabling a healthy and thriving creative commons powered by reciprocity and community in the public interest.

Download your copy of CC’s 2025-2028 strategy

Let’s get into the details! Our 2025-2028 strategy is guided by three interconnected goals: 

1. Strengthen the open infrastructure of sharing
2. Defend and advocate for a thriving creative commons
3. Center community

Goal 1: Strengthen the open infrastructure of sharing

We imagine a world where CC’s foundational open infrastructure is funded by default, and where individual creators and rightsholders reclaim agency in contributing to and benefiting from the commons. If we can ensure a strong and resilient open infrastructure of sharing that enables access to educational resources, cultural heritage, and scientific research in the public interest, we’ll have a viable alternative to the concentrations of power that currently exist and are restricting sharing and access. Because the commons must continue to exist for everyone. 

As we look to the future, we will know we’ve been successful in meeting this goal when a strong and resilient open infrastructure empowers sharing and access in the public interest.

Goal 2: Defend and advocate for a thriving creative commons

Stronger open infrastructure enables the thriving creative commons that is required to solve the world’s greatest problems. Knowledge must be accessible, discoverable, and reusable. In tandem with a strong and supported open infrastructure of sharing, a thriving creative commons redistributes power from the hands of the few to the minds of the many, and cements a worldview of knowledge as a public good and a human right. We cannot and must not take the commons for granted. 

As we look to the future, we will know we’ve been successful in meeting this goal when a thriving creative commons exists to solve the world’s greatest challenges.

Goal 3: Center community

We steward the open infrastructure of sharing and contribute to a thriving creative commons with, and for, community. Community is central to everything we do and at the heart of our mission and vision. We need to recalibrate our commitment to serve and recognize those who have built the commons on which we all rely. We aim to better center the community of open advocates, who are credited for the global usability and adoption of the CC legal tools, alongside the rich generational and geographical diversity of open advocates with varying needs and awareness of CC.

As we look to the future, we will know we’ve been successful in meeting this goal when communities leverage CC’s open infrastructure to share knowledge in the public interest.

Over the next several weeks we will be outlining more about our plans for 2025 and the ways that we are bringing this ambitious strategy and optimistic view of the future to life. In the meantime, you can read the full published strategy on our website. 

The creation of this strategy would not have been possible without the input and vision of the CC global community, including the CC Board of Directors, members of the CC Global Network, and our engaged and enthusiastic platform communities. Thank you! 

The post CC Launches its 2025-2028 Strategic Plan appeared first on Creative Commons.

Creative Commons (CC) has—and continues to be—fortunate to have an expert and passionate board of directors, many of whom have been instrumental to the success of CC at both the organizational level, as well as nationally and regionally. A healthy board of directors regularly welcomes new members following its bylaws, which means that we must also say goodbye to board members who have completed their term of service on our volunteer board.

Effective October 30, 2024, Angela Oduor Lungati has been voted by the CC board of directors as CC board chair for a term of two years, replacing Delia Browne who served as chair of the board from late 2022. Glenn O. Brown will continue his service as vice chair of the board. “It has been a tremendous pleasure and privilege to work with Delia and Angela. Their expertise, integrity, global perspectives, and down-to-earth demeanors make them ideal teammates and leaders for the org. I am thrilled to continue to work with Angela in her tenure as chair, with Anna as CEO, and with the great teams they lead,” says Glenn.

Meet Angela Oduor Lungati, CC’s New Board Chair

Angela is a technologist, community builder, and open source software advocate passionate about building and using appropriate technology tools to impact the lives of marginalized groups. She has over ten years of experience in software development, global community engagement, and non-profit organizational management.

Angela is the Executive Director at Ushahidi, a global non-profit technology company that helps communities quickly collect and share information that enables them to raise voices, inform decisions, and influence change. In addition to her service on the CC board of directors, Angela is a member of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team board of directors. She is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Data Equity, and was recently named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2024 and a Mozilla 2024 Rise25 Honoree. 

Angela joined the Creative Commons board in 2021. Her tenure as board chair begins at the same time as CC launches its refreshed strategic plan, which charts the path for sustaining and advancing CC’s open infrastructure of sharing, and advocating for and defending a thriving creative commons. As the first CC board chair from Kenya, Angela’s commitment to centering the global community at a time of immense change and innovation will steer CC into a future of sharing in the age of generative AI.

“I’m thrilled to be appointed the chair of the CC board of directors by my fellow board colleagues. I look forward to collaborating with the CC team and, of course, open advocates and all those who contribute to a thriving commons globally. In particular, I’m keen to support CC as it shifts towards a model of movement building alongside a global community as we accomplish more together than we can apart,” says Angela. 

Celebrating and Giving Gratitude to Delia Browne

This is also a bittersweet moment for CC as we celebrate the accomplishments of Delia Browne, who has been the CC board chair since 2022, and a board member since 2018, as she steps down from the board following the end of her term. Delia’s energy, directness, and unwavering commitment to CC will be sorely missed and we are so thankful for her many contributions over the years. For those of you who haven’t had the chance to meet her, Delia is a copyright lawyer and policy advocate who leads the National Copyright Unit (NCU) in Australia, providing specialist copyright advice to Australian Schools and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutes with a focus on the rapidly changing digital teaching environment. Delia is a co-founder of Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) and a board director of the Australian Digital Alliance. She is also a member of the editorial board of Media and Arts Law Review and has taught Intellectual Property at the University of New Wales, Griffith University, and the University of Auckland (her alma mater). Delia has also represented Creative Commons at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) at the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights. Perhaps most significantly for us, though, Delia is a long time member of the CC Global Network.

Delia’s contributions to CC are far too many to list, but we’d like to highlight a few in an effort to capture the powerhouse that is Delia Browne:

• Delia has attended every CC Global Summit since 2007.
• Delia represented CC at the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights and is dedicated to furthering the WIPO Limitations and Exception agenda, particularly with regard to education.
• Delia was a key member of the community team that authored CC’s Global Network Strategy in 2017.
• Delia oversaw and supported a CEO transition in early 2024.
• Delia was CC’s first chair appointed from outside the United States, providing a global lens to CC’s strategy and priorities at the board level.

“Throughout my time on the CC board of directors, we’ve navigated immense change and capitalized on opportunities that drive us towards CC vision. It has been an honor to work with my fellow board colleagues and collaborators over the last seven years and I’m so pleased to hand the baton to Angie who will continue to guide the organization into the future,” says Delia.

Thankfully, Delia won’t be going too far as she will now join the CC Advisory Council and will be actively involved in supporting CC’s strategic efforts with regards to sharing in an age of generative AI. On behalf of the CC global community, board of directors, and team, we wish to thank Delia for her unwavering support, and we look forward to working with you in this new capacity.

Other CC Board Updates

The CC Board’s Governance & Nominations committee is currently wrapping up new board member recruitment and anticipates that we will welcome several new board members in the coming months.

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The meeting was organized by Creative Commons, Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Future, and Wikimedia Europe in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation. The goal of the meeting was to create links between different advocacy efforts so that a shared advocacy strategy for the Knowledge Commons can be created.

One of the calls that jumped out for us was a call for defining new open principles – principles that could clarify what openness means in the context of today’s digital space and ensure its pro-public, democratic potential. Formulating such principles could help against several challenges, e.g. open washing.

Another clear call is the one confirming the assumptions behind the Common(s) Cause project: it is the call for a shared advocacy agenda, which could help ensure that Knowledge Commons are treated and sustained as critical digital infrastructures.

The event welcomed over 55 participants from 20 countries, most of whom traveled to Katowice to attend the Wikimania conference. The majority of attendees were from open advocacy communities. The event not only enabled the organizers to build stronger working ties with one another, but with the many other organizations who were represented at the event.

The participants acknowledged that the power of the open movement is only as strong as the bonds of the people working to advance an open, equitable agenda, and collective impact can only be achieved through individuals from different organizations working closely together.

The report identifies a few common causes that can be found at the intersection of open movement organizations’ strategies, the socio-technological zeitgeist, and current policy opportunities, such as:

1. (Re)defining openness in a new technological era.
2. Creation of a shared advocacy strategy and enhanced regional and thematic cooperation across the organizations.
3. Developing and testing governance approaches for our digital commons.
4. Advancing openness and sustainability for the technology, data, content, and governance of Digital Public Infrastructure.

This report is a starting point and serves as an invitation to the wider open community to join these causes as well as to formulate their own, which could then be backed by other organizations. The next step in this process will be disseminating its findings, hopefully resulting in further backing and refinement of the causes and additional feedback from the wider community, which this small convening could not fully represent.

Read the full report. 

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We’re proud to announce Creative Commons’ Legal Tools have been reviewed and accepted into the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) DPG Registry. The DPGA is a multi-stakeholder initiative, endorsed by the United Nations Secretary-General, that is working to accelerate the attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals in low- and middle-income countries. DPGA does this by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods (DPGs) in order to create a more equitable world.

Being recognized as a DPG increases the visibility, support for, and prominence of open projects that have the potential to tackle global challenges. To become a digital public good, all projects are required to meet the DPG Standard to ensure that projects truly encapsulate open source principles. 

Creative Commons provides and stewards the CC licenses and public domain tools that give every person and organization in the world a free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works. In addition, the licenses support proper attribution and enable others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works. CC legal tools are digital public infrastructure that make the legal sharing of DPGs possible. 

At Creative Commons, we are thrilled to have our Legal Tools recognised as DPGs as they can empower people to dramatically improve access to open content. By advocating for the use and implementation of DPGs, global communities can work together in prioritizing and mobilizing resources to help solve global challenges. CC’s legal tools and our programs play a critical role in helping to advance the DPG ecosystem.

For any inquiries about CC’s involvement in the Digital Public Goods Alliance, please reach out to Cable Green. For more information on the Digital Public Goods Alliance please reach out to hello@digitalpublicgoods.net.

Join us by supporting this ongoing work. You have the power to make a difference in a way that suits you best. By donating to CC, you are not only helping us continue our vital work, but you also benefit from tax-deductible contributions. Making your gift is simple – just click here. Thank you for your support.

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Sarah Hinchliff Pearson is returning to Creative Commons as General Counsel. She will manage in-house legal work and play a leading role in shaping CC’s stewardship program and its work in emerging technologies. Sarah spent the last couple of years at DuckDuckGo, where she spearheaded legal risk management for the launch of the company’s first paid service. She brings a fresh perspective on distributed leadership and working in the open after her experience with DuckDuckGo’s unique company culture. CC has missed Sarah, and we are pleased she is back to once again serve as the organization’s General Counsel. 

Kat Walsh will be transitioning from General Counsel to Copyright and Licensing Counsel, where she will focus squarely on stewardship of the CC licenses and public domain tools. We are delighted that Kat can bring her full expertise to matters of copyright and licensing, especially as questions arise daily about how the licenses interact with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. We are grateful to Kat for all of her work while serving as General Counsel these past couple of years. She is a mainstay in the open community, and on our team.

All of us are excited to be working together again. Kat and Sarah first worked closely together in the 4.0 licensing version process more than a decade ago! We could not be happier that we’ve been able to bring these two long-time experts of open licensing back together as CC faces hard questions around artificial intelligence. Between the legal experts on our team, our board, and in our global community, we are ready to move the dialogue forward. 

If you are trying to reach the legal team and do not know where to direct your message, use the legal@creativecommons.org email address. 

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