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.

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.

Last week, on 7 March, Creative Commons participated in the International Public Domain Day celebration at the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels. Together with our partners meemoo, Europeana, Communia Association, The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision,  and the National Library of Netherlands, we hosted two lively roundtables in the afternoon; the first focused on copyright issues related to the public domain followed by another on the future of the public domain.

The event brought together advocates for the public domain and open access to cultural heritage including members of the Open Culture Platform, Doug McCarthy, who presented on the “Monetization of the Public Domain,” Emine Yildirim, who presented on how to “Decolonize the Public Domain,” and Maarten Zeinstra who previewed for the audience an update to the Europeana Public Domain Charter. On behalf of Creative Commons I was happy to present the new guidelines which were published in February: Nudging Users to Reference Institutions When Using Public Domain Cultural Heritage Materials.

In the morning the sessions focused on Belgian cultural heritage and other initiatives related to the public domain. Notably, Wikimedia Belgium announced and presented prizes to the winners of the 2023 Wiki Loves Monuments Photo contest.

The event was well attended by members of the community including from local cultural heritage institutions, academics, and policy advisors at the European level. We are looking forward to collaborating and contributing  to similar events with our partners in the future.

For more images see here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ter-burg/albums/72177720315300448/

The post Celebrating the Public Domain in the Capital of Europe appeared first on Creative Commons.

Used by permission from the Ministry of Culture of Mexico.

Tenemos un grupo increíble de personas preparadas para ser oradores principales en la Cumbre Global 2023, que se llevará a cabo del 3 al 6 de octubre en la Ciudad de México. En nuestros primeros anuncios, dimos la bienvenida a la escritora Anya Kamenetz y al líder de medios Māori Peter-Lucas Jones. Ahora nos sentimos profundamente honrados de anunciar que el discurso de apertura de la Cumbre estará a cargo de Marina Núñez Bespalova, Subsecretaría de Desarrollo Cultural de México, quien hablará sobre la cultura global desde la perspectiva profundamente arraigada de México y América Latina.

Marina Núñez Bespalova es subsecretaria de Desarrollo Cultural de la Secretaría de Cultura de México desde agosto de 2019. Doctorada en Filología Hispánica, Marina es editora y gestora cultural con casi dos décadas de servicio público en el sector cultural. Anteriormente ha sido Directora General de Publicaciones de Conaculta (el Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes), la Secretaría de Cultura y del Archivo General de la Nación, y estuvo a cargo de la concepción de la plataforma LibrosMéxico. También ha sido encargada del programa Salas de Lectura y del Plan Nacional de Lectura de 2016 a 2018, de la expansión de diversos programas infantiles y juveniles, así como de programas específicos sobre intervención cultural en situaciones de crisis y trabajo con población migrante, entre otros cargos públicos. Ha formado parte del grupo que promovió diversas iniciativas de ley en materia cultural. Ha sido docente en universidades globales en las que, además, ha tenido estancias de investigación, como la Queen Mary University of London, la Complutense de Madrid o la Sapienza de Roma. Recibió apoyos del Ministerio de Educación de España para realizar su tesis doctoral y participar en un grupo de investigación sobre la Edad Media y la cultura laica a través del mecenazgo. Ha participado ampliamente en foros nacionales e internacionales, ha enseñado numerosos cursos y seminarios y ha sido autora de obras en publicaciones académicas y literarias.

Al igual que Marina, todos nuestros oradores principales se conectan directamente con las áreas de enfoque de CC, desde la creatividad contemporánea y el patrimonio cultural hasta los medios, la ciencia, la educación y el periodismo. Con el tema de la Cumbre sobre la IA y los bienes comunes, también esperamos enfrentar el desafío de perspectivas nuevas y renacidas que deberíamos considerar al pensar en la inteligencia artificial y su intersección con el conocimiento y la cultura abiertos. Todas los oradores principales de la Cumbre honrarán tanto la ubicación de la Cumbre en México como el alcance global de la comunidad CC.

¡Estén atentos para conocer a nuestros otros oradores principales! Te invitamos a unirte a nosotros en la Cumbre en la Ciudad de México para escuchar hablar a Marina y muchas otras voces diversas. Nuestra esperanza es que los oradores principales, el programa completo de la Cumbre y nuestras conexiones informales en la Ciudad de México y en línea se combinen para permitirnos a todos cultivar la estrategia de CC de compartir mejor, un compartir que sea contextual, inclusivo, justo, equitativo, recíproco y sostenible.

Regístrese para la Cumbre Global CC >

The post Marina Núñez Bespalova Será una Oradora Principal en la Cumbre Mundial CC 2023 appeared first on Creative Commons.

Used by permission from the Ministry of Culture of Mexico.

We have an incredible group of people lined up to be keynote speakers at the 2023 CC Global Summit, to be held 3–6 October in Mexico City. In our first announcements, we welcomed writer Anya Kamenetz and Māori media leader Peter-Lucas Jones. We are now deeply honored to announce that the Summit’s opening keynote will be from Marina Núñez Bespalova, Mexico’s Undersecretary of Cultural Development, speaking on global culture from the deeply rooted perspective of Mexico and Latin America.

Marina Núñez Bespalova is the undersecretary of Cultural Development in Mexico’s Ministry of Culture, starting in August 2019. With her doctorate in Spanish philology, Marina is an editor and cultural manager with almost two decades of public service in the cultural sector. She has previously been General Director of Publications of Conaculta (National Council for Culture and the Arts), the Ministry of Culture, and the National Archive, and was in charge of the conception of the platform LibrosMéxico. She also led the Reading Rooms program, the National Reading Plan from 2016 to 2018, and the expansion of various children and youth programs, as well as specific programs on cultural intervention in crisis situations and work with migrant populations, among other public charges. She has been part of the group that promotes various cultural law initiatives. She has been a teacher at global universities where she has also had research stays, such as the Queen Mary University of London, the Complutense of Madrid, and the Sapienza of Rome. She received support from the Spanish Ministry of Education to carry out her doctoral thesis and participate in a research group on the Middle Ages and secular culture through patronage. She has participated widely in national and international forums, taught many courses and seminars, and authored works in both academic and literary publications.

Like Marina, all our keynoters connect directly with CC’s areas of focus, from contemporary creativity and cultural heritage, to media, science, education, and journalism. With the Summit’s theme of AI and the commons, we also expect to be challenged with new and reborn perspectives that we should consider in thinking about artificial intelligence and its intersection with open knowledge and culture. All the Summit keynotes will honor both the Summit’s location in Mexico, and the CC community’s global scope.

We invite you to join us at the Summit in Mexico City to hear Marina and many other diverse voices speak. Our hope is that the keynote addresses, the full Summit program, and our informal connections in Mexico City and online will combine to enable us all to cultivate CC’s strategy of better sharing, sharing that is contextual, inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable.

Register for the CC Global Summit >

The post Marina Núñez Bespalova to Keynote CC Global Summit 2023 appeared first on Creative Commons.

“Anya Kamenetz” by Will O’Hare.

We have an incredible group of people lined up to be keynote speakers at the 2023 CC Global Summit, to be held 3–6 October in Mexico City. In our first announcement, we welcome writer Anya Kamenetz, who will close the Summit with a keynote that grows out of her work as a journalist, and now, activist focused on climate education for children.

Anya Kamenetz speaks, writes, and thinks about generational justice, and how children learn, grow and thrive on a changing planet. She covered education as a journalist for many years including for NPR, where she also co-created the podcast Life Kit:Parenting in partnership with Sesame Workshop. Kamenetz is currently an advisor to the Aspen Institute and the Climate Mental Health Network on new initiatives at the intersection of children and climate change. She’s the author of several acclaimed nonfiction books: Generation Debt (Riverhead, 2006); DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (Chelsea Green, 2010) ; The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed With Standardized Testing, But You Don’t Have To Be (Public Affairs, 2016); and The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life (Public Affairs, 2018). Her latest book is The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, And Where We Go Now (Public Affairs, 2022). Kamenetz grew up in Louisiana in a family of writers and mystics, and graduated from Yale University. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters and writes the newsletter The Golden Hour.

Like Anya, all our keynoters connect directly with CC’s areas of focus, from contemporary creativity and cultural heritage, to media, science, education, and journalism. With the Summit’s theme of AI and the commons, we also expect to be challenged with new and reborn perspectives that we should consider in thinking about artificial intelligence and its intersection with open knowledge and culture. All the Summit keynotes will honor both the Summit’s location in Mexico, and the CC community’s global scope.

Stay tuned to learn about our other keynote speakers! We invite you to join us at the Summit in Mexico City to hear Anya and many other diverse voices speak. Our hope is that the keynote addresses, the full Summit program, and our informal connections in Mexico City and online will combine to enable us all to cultivate CC’s strategy of better sharing, sharing that is contextual, inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable.

Register for the CC Global Summit >

The post Anya Kamenetz to Keynote CC Global Summit 2023 appeared first on Creative Commons.

These sessions on artificial intelligence (AI) and open journalism will extend our work to support the public interest commons and a better internet for everyone, by following our strategy to support better sharing, sharing that is contextual, inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable. Both topics will also be part of the program at CC’s Global Summit during 3–6 Oct 2023 in Mexico City, now open for registration and session proposals!

Exploring the values that will shape AI for a better internet

“AI for a Better Internet at RightsCon 2023” by Creative Commons is dedicated to the public domain via CC0 1.0.

In-person session: Tue 6 June 2023 16:30–17:30 Costa Rica time

We have all witnessed the internet’s ability to democratize speech and access to knowledge, give voice to the voiceless, and support shared online spaces. We have also seen how the internet’s evolution can cause unanticipated harms and how tools for sharing can be misused to manipulate, mislead, and limit choice. With AI coming online, we now also see how both benefits and harms can be augmented and accelerated at scale.  Organizations that have been championing digital human rights to benefit internet users everywhere are collaborating on an emerging Movement for a Better internet. Together we are working to crystallize shared values about what would constitute “better” and paths to get to a better internet from different perspectives, with a primary goal to produce a statement of values that underpin a broader public interest vision, and a collaborative policy agenda for a better internet.

At CC, we’ve been exploring issues around AI for some time — for example, see our 2023 blog post series and our 2021 blog post: Should CC-Licensed Content be Used to Train AI? It Depends. But the way forward is still not clear. Our workshop with other members of the Movement for a Better Internet will distill thinking from the RightsCon community about the opportunities and challenges AI brings to the commons and the internet, and explore potential solutions to shape AI for the better.

Open journalism: Why many newsrooms open and share their content, and how you can help!

“Open Journalism at RightsCon 2023” by Creative Commons is dedicated to the public domain via CC0 1.0.

Virtual online session: Wed 7 June 2023 09:30–10:30 UTC

Journalism is a critical public service to all of us. Unfettered access to verified information is essential for a healthy information ecosystem — which is essential for democracy and social justice. Yet, journalism is challenged by broken revenue models, the closures of local news outlets, and declining trust among readers. Misinformation and disinformation campaigns in the media challenge collective notions of ground truth. They also challenge the bedrock and meaning of an open internet, as most proposed solutions involve limiting speech.

To go beyond the session at RightsCon, you can read our report, From Broken Revenue Models to Embracing an “Open” Ethos, based on research with over 500 journalists from 18 different countries, and use our guide, A Journalist’s Guide to Creative Commons. Are you a journalist or part of a news organization? Get in touch with CC to hold a workshop on open journalism with your team.

The post Join CC at RightsCon: AI for a Better Internet and Open Journalism appeared first on Creative Commons.

In this panel, hosted on 16 March 2021, we examined the fields of Open Data, Open Science, and Open Source Medical Hardware with panelists Dr. Tarek Loubani (Medical Director and Physician, The Glia Project) Dr. Tim Hubbard (Professor of Bioinformatics, Department of Medical & Molecular Genetics at King’s College London), and Dr. Uma Suthersanen (Professor of Global Intellectual Property Law, Queen Mary University of London).

Moderator Brigitte Vézina (Director of Policy, Creative Commons) opened the panel with this question: What does “open” mean in the context of COVID-19?

Dr. Suthersanen explained that “open” can mean a lot of things—from open science to open data to open GLAM—but the past year and a half has especially illustrated the importance of open platforms. “You can have a lot of ‘openness,’ but if there are no bridges and if the platforms are all closed [behind a paywall, for instance] then is anything really open?” she asked. Open platforms are especially important for the dissemination of scientific research. “One of the things that have happened as a result of COVID,” Dr. Hubbard responded, “is we’ve seen a vast amount of people publishing in open journals or on free publication platforms.” In fact, the pandemic has pushed scientists into pre-publishing their work almost immediately rather than waiting for journals and/or peer review. 

This pandemic illustrated the necessity and effectiveness of public pressure on companies to open up their intellectual property when it’s in the public’s interest.

In general, the panelists agreed that the open movement had been strengthened through the crisis. Dr. Suthersanen, in particular, pointed out that the number of discussions around patents and intellectual property (IP) over the last year has grown immensely—this is a positive development because it means the IP conversation has taken on momentum. “IP has not descended from a god,” she explained, “they are state-granted property rights…What they give, they can take away.” To take advantage of this momentum, we need to change the narrative around IP to combat the fear that pharmaceutical companies have. Dr. Loubani also recognized that during the pandemic we saw what happens when the supply chains fall apart: the momentum behind open source medical hardware during COVID-19 came out of an urgent need for supplies and devices. He also mentioned that the pandemic illustrated the necessity and effectiveness of public pressure on companies to open up their IP when it’s in the public’s interest.

So what does the future of “open” look like? 

While openly sequencing the genome of the virus wasn’t really an issue, explained Dr. Hubbard, the primary challenge to more openness in science, especially healthcare, is sharing individual patient data for research purposes. We need to figure out how to protect people’s privacy regarding their health data but also openly share that information with scientists to inform medical innovation and research. “Maybe we’ll get away from the idea of data sharing,” he suggested, “and lean more towards sharing information that is the summary of a set of data while the raw data itself stays locked away.” Dr. Loubani agreed, saying that data privacy is a major issue in open-source medical hardware and open science because it can impact people’s trust in their healthcare systems and providers. That’s why, he explained, Glia is focused on designing with privacy and trust in mind. There is no other option. “Open isn’t only the most ethical way forward, it’s the most practical,” Dr. Loubani emphasized, “We can’t go back.”

“We’re convinced that you have to be a ‘giant’ to actually do something that matters, but you don’t—and I’m not. It’s all of these little movements that help us move forward”

CC’s Director of Policy Brigitte Vézina explained why hosting these conversations and asking these questions are so important. “The open movement doesn’t exist for its own sake, it’s there to try and achieve higher goals, such as access to education or healthcare,” she said, “The open movement enables citizens to exercise their fundamental rights.” 

Finally, we ended the panel on a hopeful note as Dr. Loubani reminded everyone of the responsibility and capabilities we all have to carry this movement forward. “We’re convinced that you have to be a ‘giant’ to actually do something that matters, but you don’t—and I’m not,” he explained, “It’s all of these little movements that help us move forward…We’ve gone forward 20 or 25 years in open access in the past year during the pandemic, and now it’s ours to lose.”

Of course, there’s a lot more conversation that isn’t mentioned here—from questions about combatting vaccine hesitation to a discussion around marrying human rights and open access—that’s why we highly encourage you to watch the full panel (with subtitles in Français and Español)!

Curious about what the panelists are up to? Check out Dr. Suthersanen’s latest work on reframing the TRIPS agreement into a dignity framework vs. trade, Dr. Hubbard’s work with Health Data Research UK and the UK Reproducibility Network, and Dr. Loubani’s work with Glia, which recently announced they’re producing and distributing open-source medical hardware in the United States!

The post A New Era of Open? COVID-19 and the Pursuit for Equitable Solutions appeared first on Creative Commons.

Yes, you read that right! Over 150 sessions and more than 200 speakers! 

There’s a lot of exciting activities in store, and between now and the 19th of October we’ll feature a few of them on our blog and social media. To kick things off, we’re sharing some exciting highlights:

Art by Marco Villar (CC BY)

• 150+ Sessions: This year we’re hosting sessions on a range of topics, such as artificial intelligence and creativity, traditional cultural expressions and the public domain, open science and research, ethics of “open,” collaborating across regions and cultures, increasing language diversity, internet censorship, and more!
• The Playground: For years you’ve told us you wanted a space of your own, 2020 is the year we’re giving it to you! The Playground is a community-driven space where you can hold open office hours, create an ideation room, share a virtual “coffee” with a friend, network with experts in your field, or just have a good laugh with an old friend! 
• Hack4OpenGlam: We’re co-hosting @hack4openglam, a four-day culture hack for all creators and tinkerers to get creative with open access cultural heritage. Register your interest, and submit your project here!
• CC Summit Closing Celebration: This is a virtual event featuring live DJ sessions, performance art, co-creative experiences, and music to celebrate the artistic side of our global community.

Throughout the 2020 CC Global Summit, there will be sessions for both newcomers to Creative Commons and long-time supporters. We welcome anyone interested in issues related to open education, open science, open source, copyright reform, cultural heritage, and more to join us for discussion and debate, workshops and planning, talks and community building. 

View the full program for the 2020 CC Global Summit here!

It’s been a wild ride as we’ve transitioned our annual in-person event to a fully virtual one, and we’re proud of what we’ve created. We’re excited to kick off the event and we can’t wait for you to join us, from wherever you are in the world.

Questions? Check out our short FAQ below!

• Is the CC Global Summit free?

Yes! This event is 100% free to attend. 

• How do I register?

In order to ensure a safe, engaging, and welcoming space for event attendees, we’re asking you to fill out the Intent to Register form. Once you’ve done so, you’ll receive a welcome email and confirmation of receipt. Closer to the event, we’ll send you more details on how to access our virtual platform. We’ll also email you information on the additional tools we’ll be using during the event, including Slack channels, social media handles, and hashtags to follow. Finally, we’ll share with you tips and tricks, networking opportunities, accessibility considerations, our code of conduct, and more! 

• How do I attend sessions?

The event will be held virtually through our event platform and across multiple time zones. Our event platform is accessible on desktop or mobile and has multiple interface languages available. With 150+ sessions, we know you won’t be able to attend everything so we’ll try our best to ensure that live content (e.g. keynotes, sessions, performances) is recorded and shared following the end of the event.

• How do I receive communication about the event?

We’ll be sending detailed instructions, program information, and more via email. When you fill out the Intent to Register form, the email you provide will be our primary contact. Be sure to check your email regularly for updates!

• Are you accepting volunteers?

Yes! Our call for volunteers is open until October 1, 2020. We’re looking for Community Liaisons and Summit Website Content Translators. Learn more about these volunteer opportunities here! 

? Fill out this form to attend the CC Global Summit!

The post Registration Is Now Open for the CC Global Summit! Join Us on 19–23 October! appeared first on Creative Commons.

Photo of Claudio Ruiz by Sebastiaan ter Burg (CC BY 2.0) for Faces of the Commons 2017.

This year, we’re pleased to work with an amazing group of volunteers who make up our 2020 CC Global Summit Program Committee. This committee is the backbone of the CC Summit; curating the program, identifying speakers, fielding questions, and exemplifying the open culture. The theme of this year’s CC Summit is “Designing the Commons of the Future: Reflecting on the values that shape the Commons.” This event will be the perfect space for the open community to begin an exercise of internal reflection on how to build a more equitable, inclusive, and accessible world.

As you can imagine, it’s been a particularly challenging year, as we pivot from an in-person event to a virtual event. Therefore, we are so grateful for the hard work, expertise, and vision shown by our Program Committee members this year. 

Meet the 2020 CC Global Summit Program Committee members below!

First, we’d like to introduce our Program Committee Chairs, Susanna Ånäs, and Claudio Ruiz.

• Susanna Ånäs—As the CC Global Network Council representative for Finland, Board member of Open Knowledge Finland, and the GLAM coordinator at Wikimedia Finland, Susanna has worked on Open GLAM initiatives for several years. With Wikimedia Finland, she focuses on serving Saami languages and exploring ways for Indigenous communities to manage their online representations. She also manages other open culture projects like hackathons and tools development for open platforms.
• Claudio Ruiz—As the Director of Ecosystem Strategy, Claudio works to shift Creative Commons to a more open, global, and inclusive organization led by its community. He has experience in free software licensing, as well as advocating for fundamental digital rights and freedom of expression. He is on the board of Derechos Digitales, a nonprofit organization that works to promote, defend, and develop digital rights and civil liberties in Latin America.

Africa

• Kamel Belhamel—A professor of chemistry at the University of Bejaia in Algeria, Kamel is the author/co-author of several scientific papers in international scientific journals focused on open access and open science. Kamel is also the chapter lead of CC Algeria and was a member of the 2018 and 2019 CC Global Summit Program Committee.
• Mary Job—A Philosopher and Open Source Enthusiast. Mary currently works remotely with Paid Memberships Pro and runs How Do You Tech on the side. She teaches digital skills through their village Uwani Hub to women and teenagers in underserved communities and she is passionate about tech for empowerment, jobs, entrepreneurship, and community building. She believes we have a lot to learn from each others’ stories, she runs a personal blog and believes everyone should do too! She is an active member of the WordPress Communities in Nigeria, & Africa, and the global team rep for 2020. She also volunteers for the Netsquared communities in her free time.

Asia-Pacific

• Amber Osman—With over ten years of experience in research and scholarly publishing, Amber is a passionate expert in open science, an award-winning journal editor for advancing the publishing process by adopting innovative research and publishing solutions. She is also serving as a member of renowned scholarly publishing committees, Amber advocates for best practices in open access scholarly content. She currently works for the Law Offices of Osman & Co. in Pakistan.
• Prodip Roy—Prodip Roy is currently a library officer (Monograph and Digital Collections) at RMIT University, Melbourne. He has been serving as Co-Chair (Elect) of the Special Interest Group for International Information Issues (SIG/III) of Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) for 2019-2021. Mr. Roy is a member of the Creative Commons Australia Chapter and the Creative Commons Global Network and leads responsible for Open Ed (Tertiary). 

Photo of Prodip Roy by Sebastiaan ter Burg (CC BY 2.0) Faces of the Commons 2019.

Europe

• Teresa Cardoso—As a member of scientific/editorial committees, a teacher, author, and assistant professor, Teresa focuses on open education, mobile learning, and ICT in educational contexts. By working at Universidade Aberta, an “open university,” they’ve had the opportunity to teach about open licensing to a wide audience including students, fellow professors, and administration officials.
• Louise Hisayasu—Louise M. Hisayasu is an independent researcher based between Sāo Paulo and Berlin. Her master’s research focused on Indigenous protagonism in Brazil, studying the movement through the lens of technology and culture production. Through her work, she is primarily interested in understanding memory, as being both individual and collective, intangible and immortalised in things, as intergenerational and the implications in its institutionalisation, within archives. She currently works at Tactical Tech and was previously a guest researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
• Douglas McCarthy—As an active member of the Open GLAM community, Douglas researches, writes about, and promotes open access to digital cultural heritage. He leads a global survey of Open GLAM with Dr. Andrea Wallace and co-edits the Open GLAM Medium publication with Scann. Douglas is the Collections Engagement Manager at Europeana and lives in the Netherlands.
• Diogo Morais Oliveira—An attorney-at-law based in Poro, Portugal, Diogo works in intellectual property (IP) law for the cultural and creative sector. Currently, he’s the legal advisor of DÍNAMO10, a creative hub based in Viana do Castelo, Portugal,  and the legal co-coordinator of CC Portugal Chapter. He is coordinating the project “CC Local Point” that aims to create contact points at creative hubs in order to support the use of CC licensing and the adoption of open business models.
• André Rocha—Starting their career in 2003 designing products with a group of artisans in southern Portugal, André became interested in the parallel environments of tech, education, and design. Today they are an adjunct professor at ESELx – IPL and Fab Manager / Scientific Coordinator at Fab Lab Benfica (ESELX-IPL); open design lead for Open Product Design; and maker community lead at Creative Commons Portugal. 
• Mahmoud Max Wardeh—With a background in technology and media, Mahmoud founded the Open Connective, a platform that helps open projects build diverse communities of contributors. As an adjunct lecturer at Loughborough University London, he has developed OER for online education platforms. He is the founding member of the CC UK Chapter and was a member of the 2017 and 2018 CC Global Summit Program Committee.
• Brigitte Vézina—As the Open Policy Manager at Creative Commons, Brigitte gets a kick out of tackling the fuzzy legal and policy issues that stand in the way of access, use, re-use and remix of culture, information and knowledge. She worked for a decade as a legal officer at WIPO and then ran her own consultancy, advising Europeana, SPARC Europe, and others on copyright matters.

Latin America

• Marcela Basch—Born and raised in Argentina, Marcela is a journalist, teacher, and activist. Since 2013, she’s focused on collaborative, free, and open systems—and founded El Plan C, the first website in Spanish focused on these issues. She’s also the co-founder of Encuentro Comunes (Commons Conference) with the goal of spreading awareness about those initiatives.
• Scann—Accidentally living in Uruguay, Scann is a longtime contributor to CC. Her main work has been around digital cultural heritage, the public domain, and copyright. Fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab (2018) and International Visiting Scholar at the American University (2019). Currently is working on the Open GLAM initiative for CC.
• Emilio Velis—An industrial engineer based in San Salvador, Emilio explores how sharing knowledge and technology can impact communities. He was recently appointed as the executive director of the Appropedia Foundation, which shares open content to build sustainability.

North America

• Andrew Lih—As one of the world’s foremost experts on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement, as well as the author of the book, The Wikipedia Revolution (2009), he has worked with multiple cultural and governmental institutions to advance Wikipedia multimedia content and structured metadata in Wikidata. He currently serves as the Wikimedia Strategist at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
• Jonathan Poritz—As a mathematician, Jonathan has worked in various IT firms, from start-ups to multinationals, doing things like AI, cryptography, and consulting on public policy towards technology. He is currently an associate professor of mathematics and OER coordinator at Colorado State University-Pueblo. He’s also written two OER math textbooks and serves on the state OER Council.

Photo of Marcela Basch by Sebastiaan ter Burg (CC BY 2.0) for Humans of the Commons 2018.

Again, we’d like to thank each and every one of our 2020 CC Global Summit Program Committee members for their hard work. We can’t wait for October!

The CC Global Summit will be held online from 19-24 October 2020. See the latest updates, including when to register, at summit.creativecommons.org!

Interested in becoming a sponsor for the 2020 CC Global Summit? Learn more about our sponsorship opportunities by contacting CC’s Director of Development Jami Vass at jami@creativecommons.org.

The post Meet the Program Committee Making the 2020 CC Global Summit a Reality! appeared first on Creative Commons.