We’re happy to announce the selection of our 2020 interns from Outreachy—a remote internship program that “supports diversity in free and open source software.”

Over the next three months, these interns will work with several members of the Creative Commons’ team on three different projects related to the CC Vocabulary, the CC License Chooser, and the CC Platform Toolkit.

Meet our 2020 interns! 

Ana Paula Rocha

Ana is from Brazil and will be working on the CC Platform Toolkit—a guide for developers creating platforms and tools in which it makes sense to offer CC licensing to users. She’ll use her background in advertising and interest in user-interface (UI) development to help us rethink and upgrade the guide.

Olga Bulat

Olga is originally from Kazakhstan but is currently living in Turkey. She will be working on the CC License Chooser, applying her experience as an open source, freelance developer to create a new version with a greater focus on helping people learn more about CC licenses.

Chidiebere Onyegbuchulem

Chidiebere is from Nigeria and will apply his skills as a front-end developer, network engineer, and mobile web specialist to improve the recently developed CC Vocabulary, an open source software project that provides a cohesive web-design system for CC.

We’re very excited to be working with these talented individuals and can’t wait to get started! 

Want more technical updates? Including the latest updates on these projects? Follow the Creative Commons Open Source blog and @cc_opensource on Twitter! You can also join #cc-dev-license-chooser, #cc-outreachy-platform-toolkit, and #cc-dev-vocabulary on our community Slack.

The post Meet Our 2020 Interns From Outreachy appeared first on Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is thrilled to announce that the second Public Domain Day celebration is happening on January 30, 2020 in Washington, D.C. We’re working with our friends at the Internet Archive, the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University Washington College of Law, Creative Commons USA, the Institute for Intellectual Property & Social Justice, and SPARC to put together a terrific line-up of artists, organizations, and thinkers working on issues related to the public domain.

Registration is free—and open now! Please join us for an evening of celebrating our shared culture and heritage. Be on the lookout for more information coming soon.

January 30, 2020 | 5:30-8:30pm
American University Washington College of Law, Grossman Hall
4300 Nebraska Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20016

See also: A Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain, our January 2019 event marking the “re-opening” of the public domain in the United States.

The post Save the Date: Public Domain Day 2020 Is Happening in January in Washington, D.C. appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’re happy to announce that our collaboration with the American Library Association (ALA) to create the print companion to the CC Certificate has finally come to fruition! 

The book, Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians, is now published under CC BY and offers an additional way to access the openly licensed CC Certificate content. It’s available in print at the ALA store, or it can be downloaded from our website! 

Whether you’re a volunteer, professor, instructional designer, researcher, administrator or technologist—or simply looking for a great holiday gift—this book offers a background on copyright law, as well as a clear guide to open licensing and open advocacy. You can read this book on its own or while taking the CC Certificate course. 

The ALA is the oldest and largest library association in the world, “providing leadership for the development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.” 

After initial collaboration with the ALA on “Copytalk” webinars, we were delighted to partner with them for this project under the shared goal of increasing equitable access to information. 

Download or buy a hardcopy of Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians today!

Interested in taking the CC Certificate? Check out our website to learn more. For additional information about this collaboration with the ALA, read our previous post, “Book Preview: “Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians.”

 

The post Our Book, “Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians,” Is Now Available appeared first on Creative Commons.

In just over a year, we’ll celebrate our 20th anniversary—and although this is the perfect time to reflect on our history, we’re also looking to the future by improving our products and services in order to serve you better. 

With that in mind, we’re excited and proud to announce that we’ve been awarded an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Imagine Grant—a public grant for non-profit organizations that are “using technology to solve the world’s most pressing challenges.”

As recipients of this grant, we’ll receive $100,000 in unrestricted financial support and $25,000 in AWS promotional credits, as well as training, marketing, and technical support to improve CC Search and the CC Catalog API through image recognition and machine learning (ML). 

How we’re going to improve CC Search

We believe that CC Search and the CC Catalog API will drive greater use of openly licensed content and public domain works across the Web, but we know its capabilities can be vastly improved, particularly in regards to cataloguing and discoverability.

That’s why our technical team will use the AWS Imagine Grant to apply artificial intelligence (AI) image analysis and machine learning (ML) technology to enhance the metadata of the openly licensed content that we’ve indexed, starting with 100 million of the highest quality images in our database. 

“By making these improvements, we want to build the foundation for better discoverability and curation of openly licensed works…”

Currently, CC Search is powered entirely by manually entered data, but this system has its limitations. For example, users might tag an image with a few descriptive words or none at all. However, with the application of metadata enhancements, a significant number of openly licensed images integrated into CC Search will come with a robust, searchable list of descriptive language. This additional language will not only help our algorithm surface more interesting content, but also make it easier for users to find specific types of content. This data will also be available through the CC Catalog API for use in other applications.

“By making these improvements, we want to build the foundation for better discoverability and curation of openly licensed works, as well as contribute to the body of openly licensed works online by making this data available to everyone,” explained Director of Engineering Kriti Godey, “Through sharing our source code, infrastructure, and data, we’re helping to strengthen the global commons, which is what CC is all about.”

What’s next?

Our technical team will be working on this project over the next few months, with the goal of completing the improvements by the end of 2020.

Of course, as we embark on this project, we want you to be involved. Please follow CC Open Source on Twitter, check out the CC Open Source blog, join #cc-usability in the CC Slack, or keep an eye on the Active Sprint and Backlog in GitHub for the latest technical updates, as well as open calls for research volunteers and more. 

We’re incredibly excited for this next phase of CC Search and the CC Catalog API, and sincerely grateful to AWS for helping us move it forward. We would also like to send congratulations to the other recipients and runner-ups of the AWS Imagine Grant. Here’s to the future!

The post Creative Commons Receives an AWS Imagine Grant to Improve CC Search appeared first on Creative Commons.

The term “global commons” usually brings to mind the biosphere’s natural resources that everyone shares and benefits from, like water or air.

But the global commons is also home to what’s called the noosphere—all the resources and artifacts created by human reason and scientific thought, such as music, art, language, and research.

Creative Commons has fostered a movement reimagining the idea of the commons as a digital environment of infinite abundance rather than scarcity and red tape. We believe that an open, shared noosphere is key to expanding innovation, quality education, and equitable collaboration around the world.

Today, on Giving Tuesday, make a gift to Creative Commons and support greater access to the noosphere!

The Creative Commons team works to ensure that people around the world can access and contribute to the global commons through tools like CC Search, advocating for open education, supporting a vibrant community through the growing CC Global Network, and consulting with national galleries, museums, universities, and governments to adopt open policies and practices. The more people who can access historical and current ideas, art, and data, the better our world will be.

Our goal is to give everyone access to resources to change the world—but we can’t do it without you. Donate today to help keep the noosphere open and thriving!

Thank you!

The post What’s New in the Noosphere? appeared first on Creative Commons.