I’m excited to share an update on the implementation of the CC Global Network Strategy, and to move forward on an important next step that will, for the first time, put the Network in the hands of the Network: the first meeting of Chapter representatives to the Global Network Council.

We started this process together in 2015, at the Global Summit hosted by CC Korea, in Seoul, South Korea. Many leaders in our community wanted to revitalize our network and help it grow, and it was soon after I had joined CC with a mandate from the Board of Directors to put community back at the center of our work.

The previous affiliate structure was top-down, where each affiliate was selected by CC HQ, and only those with a memorandum of understanding with HQ were permitted to join. The affiliates had only the rights granted by MOU, and their workplans were approved by HQ. While much good work was done, there was a desire from the community to do more, and work more collaboratively. Together, we initiated a community-driven process to evaluate, evolve, and invigorate the network.

A small group of community leaders — both new and longstanding contributors from around the world — formed a strategy committee, chaired by myself and Alek Tarkowski from CC Poland. We designed a global consultation and collaborative design process to create a new network. We commissioned independent research, and a committee of affiliates and community members explored new models and ways of engagement and governance. They reviewed hundreds of comments, and drafted a new strategy, a new charter, and a new code of conduct.

The model, built around a structure of Chapters and a Global Council, was designed by the network, and the members are being approved by the network, for the first time in our history. We decoupled the local teams from institutions to allow leading individuals to join and remain connected no matter where they went. We built clear processes, so that anyone who shared our values and had done work to contribute to the Commons could join. We also added a layer of governance that allows the network to lead the network, with partnership and support from the global organization.

To support these new Chapters, we built a network website to drive engagement and support a connected, active community. CC hired new staff to support local communities and develop a strong global ecosystem. We made our Global Summit an annual event to give us more opportunities to organize and connect. We provided financial support to local projects.

The network decided that each of its members must be endorsed or vouched by two other community members who know them personally and who know their work. It has been quite meaningful to me to be asked to vouch for community members, to share my endorsements of their accomplishments, and to read the statements others write about their colleagues to extoll their virtues and achievements over the years. We have a lot to celebrate, and much more to do.

This is a major shift, and I respect that it comes with some adjustment, especially for longtime affiliates. Change can be difficult and frustrating, and I’m grateful to each of you for working together to make it work.

Today, the new Global Network is growing rapidly, with a dozen formally-established chapters, over 252 individual members and 19 institutional members in 62 countries, and more coming online every day. We are more decentralized, collaborative, and community-led than ever before. I’m proud of the work we’ve done together, and inspired by the energy and passion for the CC community.

What’s Next?

With many Chapters now established, and many more to come, it’s time to hold the first meeting of the Global Network Council. The meeting will take place in late September or early October. We’ll canvass Chapters on the ideal times and provide lots of advance notice.

If you are in a community that hasn’t set up its Chapter yet, now is the time. Our staff are here to help — it’s a simple process of connecting with the members in your country, hosting an online meeting, and selecting a public lead and a representative to the Global Network Council. For some Chapters, there will be more structure needed, and for others it will be less formal. We’ve produced a guide to help you through the process, and there’s a #network-support channel in the CC Slack to get help from your peers.

Thank you again for all your energy and passion for Creative Commons’ community. In particular, I want to thank the network strategy group, the transition team, and the Interim Membership Council, who have all given their time to help establish the new Network. I also want to single out Claudio Ruiz, Simeon Oriko, Rob Myers, Diane Peters, Sarah Pearson, and George Hari Popescu for their work as staff to support this new strategy.

The post Flipping the Switch on a Revitalized CC Network appeared first on Creative Commons.

On July 16, the first four Creative Commons Certificate courses began. Two cohorts of 25 librarians and two cohorts of 25 educators joined us from Bangladesh, Canada, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, and the US. Immediately apparent in this group is the diverse experience, impressive expertise, and personal interest participants bring to the courses. Participants have already begun working on assignments and volunteering openly licensed resources they’ve created. We are compiling a list of the participant-shared Open Educational Resources (OER) which we will share at the end of the courses.

As an instructor, I’m humbled and delighted by the chance to learn from so many new colleagues. I look forward to seeing the number of CC-certified, commons experts increase, and the network of “open” advocates grow. We also recognize that the CC Certificate course is not yet available to many people who would like access to it. We aim to increase course accessibility through a scholarship program, language translations, building instructor capacity, and other improvements. We will be working on all of these efforts over the next year.

In the short term, here are some immediate ways you can get involved.

1. We offer the CC Certificate content to everyone as OER, under the CC BY license, in downloadable, editable file formats on our website. We invite you to reuse and remix the content! Please let us know what content is useful to you and/or how you use it by emailing jennryn@creativecommons.org. Understanding how our shared content is useful to you helps us further advance a culture of sharing and engagement.
2. We are piloting work with Hypothes.is, a non-profit organization that enables anyone to annotate resources online, to make it simple for everyone to publicly add comments to the CC Certificate content. Join CC Certificate participants in this public forum for annotation of Certificate content. CC will monitor these public annotations to learn how we can make improvements to future iterations of the CC Certificate. Your feedback in this global conversation will help strengthen the course. Get involved on the CC Certificate Resources page, or annotate content directly.
3. While the CC Certificate is currently sold out for 2018, we will open 2019 course registration in the fall and look forward to sharing additional updates with you as our 2018 courses progress. For example, we will share compiled lists of CC licensed resources and projects participants generate, and invite you to use them for your own learning and advocacy efforts. Follow #cccert on Twitter, join our newsletter and check out our CC Certificate website for updates.

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Melody Kramer is a media expert with a special gift for uplifting open knowledge and demonstrating the power of the Commons. Previously, she held roles in public media and government and currently works as the Senior Audience Development Manager at Wikimedia. A prolific content producer and media mover and shaker, Kramer is also the Reese News Lab Fellow at the UNC School of Media and Journalism, where she’s completing research to better understand the needs of journalists across North Carolina. She writes a weekly column on the future of news for the Poynter Institute and devoted that column to CC and its necessary role in journalism in 2016.

Melody also runs an email newsletter about creative and magical projects and tweets brilliantly @mkramer.

You wrote in Poynter in March 2016 that “it’s time for news organizations to embrace Creative Commons.” With the events of the past few years and the increasing awareness of so-called “fake” news, do you still feel that way? What’s changed since you wrote that article? What can newsrooms do to leverage the power of Open?
I point to ProPublica as an organization that leverages Creative Commons licensing in an incredibly strategic and smart way. ProPublica is an organization that deeply cares about the impact of their journalism, and they want their journalism to reach the widest audience possible — even if that means that other organizations publish their material under the CC license. But ProPublica also requires organizations to add a snippet of Javascript so that they can track metrics, and also has a list of requirements (none particularly taxing) that ensure reprints are on the up-and-up. In short, this helps fulfill ProPublica’s mission, gives them audiences they might otherwise not have, and does all of this leveraging the power of free and open licensing.

I do not think Creative Commons licensing is right for every news organization or every story published – there are different revenue strategies for every news organization. But for enterprise stories that will deliver a large impact, I think it makes sense to examine whether following ProPublica’s lead makes sense — particularly if showing greater impact can lead to greater funding. (And the uptick in misinformation and disinformation makes getting good, enterprise journalism out to audiences all the more important.)

Publishers should be allowed to determine their own revenue strategy and the way in which others can use their work. Josh Stearns once outlined 52 different revenue strategies for news organizations and many of them (but not all) benefit from having their content freely available to the public.

In your role as Senior Audience Development Manager at Wikimedia, you work to better communicate free and open access to knowledge around the world. How can open movements better communicate our message? How can we leverage our collective power?
It’s a tricky message to convey, and I’m grateful that we’re part of a larger ecosystem of organizations that think deeply about how to talk about this stuff. I really like tools like Choose a License which basically give people the information that they need in a really easy-to-understand way. I’m a big believer in thinking through:

What does someone need to know?
When do they need to know it?
Why?
What’s too much information?

I also look outside of the open ecosystem for really good examples of explaining tough concepts. For example, Khan Academy takes tough academic concepts and creates very easy-to-understand, short videos. I think about their videos a lot.

The hidden labor (particularly by women) in Open is a major issue for the movement. You have a prolific output as a writer and culture maker on the web. How do you balance your personal projects and interests with the work you do for Wikimedia? How do you value your labor in the Commons and make the choice to share? Not to put too fine a point on it, but where do you find the time?
It’s really, really hard. I really love writing and it’s both a passion and a discipline for me — so it is relaxing and enjoyable for me. But I’m also a relatively new mom, and have cut back a bit recently because I don’t always want to be in front of a screen; I want to focus my full attention on my son when I’m not working. In my writing, I try to abide by the philosophy of “good enough.” It would take me a very, very long time to write something perfect that I would be perfectly content and happy about, so I don’t do that. I write “good enough” which gets the point across, but maybe isn’t the most eloquent way of putting something (for the writing I do in my personal time.) And I’ve also started saying no more. I may Skype into something that I previously would attend in person. I might do a phone call or a Hangout instead of something more taxing. Balance is something I’m constantly striving towards (which doesn’t sound very balanced.) It helps that I live in a small town in the South, where a lot of people get off screens to make music and enjoy each other’s company.

What are some CC things you love? What gets you psyched about working on the web these days?
I really find myself missing the old days of the web, when you would stumble down a random rabbit hole and learn about topics like bicycle repair or cheesemaking or advanced math. There were so many syllabi online in those days, and they really helped me with my own coursework (and with just learning material on my own.) I’m always happy to see when professors still put their syllabi online with a CC license. (Example.) It really helps spread knowledge and make it accessible.

What’s psyching me about working on the web these days is how many people seem to be returning to the wild quirky 90s days of the web. I love blogs. I love single purpose sites. They’re increasingly hard to find due to search engines – but I return again and again to sites like Metafilter which surface all sorts of links I wouldn’t otherwise see.

The post All the news that’s fit to share: Melody Kramer on CC and the power of media appeared first on Creative Commons.

Last week, we launched a redesign of Creative Commons’ various license (aka “legal code”) pages. See one for yourself. In this post, I’ll spell out what the changes are and why we made them.

The most obvious change we made is updating the overall look of the pages so that they resemble the rest of the Creative Commons website, which was redesigned back in September 2016, as well as the CC license “deed” pages (e.g. the CC BY 4.0 deed), which were redesigned in 2017. We’d always intended to pull the design of the license/legal code pages up in line with the deeds, but the deeds took precedence, since they are the most frequently viewed pages on our website. I’m happy to say that we’ve finished the project with this latest design update.

Along with this look-and-feel overhaul, we wanted to ensure that the license/legal code pages were more mobile-friendly. The previous design was released well over a decade ago, before the typical web user was likely to be viewing CC licenses in a mobile display. We noticed that reading the text of a CC license was difficult on many types of mobile devices, and it was important to us to fix this. Text and images in the new design automatically adjust to better fit the type of experience you are using to view the license.

We also added a brand new feature–one we liked so much that in tandem with the license page overhaul, we ended up extending it to the deed pages as well. This is the translation menu pulldown tool, also known as the “language switcher.” Previously, to see the content of a license or deed page in another of its translated languages, you would hit a link at the top of the page (“Official translations of this license are available in other languages”) or scroll to get to the very bottom of the page where you would then see a list of the other available languages, each one linked to the corresponding translated page. This worked fine, but we wanted to improve the experience of getting to a new translation. The new translation menu tool sits right at the top right of the license and deed pages and enables you to easily identify which languages the page has been translated into, and more quickly select the one you’d like to view. We also kept the list of translated languages at the bottom of these pages intact, in order to accommodate those who are used to identifying and viewing translations that way.

Additionally, we made a handful of smaller changes that are intended to help people better use the licenses. First, the new design includes the website header that is used across the rest of creativecommons.org. The old license design did not include this, making it somewhat difficult for a person who landed on the license page via a search result or a link from an external site to understand where exactly on the web they were. By adding the website header to the license pages, we hope to do a better job contextualizing for people that the license is part of a much larger system, and to give them a much more direct path to learning about Creative Commons generally and getting involved with the CC community.

Lastly, we made two more tweaks focused on improving the experience of using the licenses. There have long been two pieces of text that precede the actual terms of a Creative Commons license on the license pages–a disclaimer at the top followed by a brief list of considerations (the part entitled “Using Creative Commons Public Licenses”). This content is extremely important, but we realized that in the previous design of the pages, it could be tough to differentiate between it and the license terms that follow. In the new design, the disclaimer appears in italics, while the considerations are presented in a truncated style–the first few lines of each of the two considerations appear above a small button that enables you to expand these sections to read more.

We’re excited about these changes and hope that the public finds them useful. A big thank-you to Diane Peters and Sarah Hinchliff Pearson, CC’s general counsel and senior counsel, respectively, for all their help in getting our list of changes into shape. Also a huge thanks to the folks at Affinity Bridge, the web development and design firm who helped us take our ideas for these revised pages and make them live.

The post We’ve Redesigned the CC License “Legal Code” Pages appeared first on Creative Commons.

In a unique joint translation process, community members from Creative Commons Portugal and Brazil came together to release a single Portuguese translation of the CC 4.0 license suite. Portuguese is the sixth most spoken language in the world, and the translation will reach over 220 million Portuguese speakers around the world.

Thank you to our translation team: Teresa Nobre, CC Portugal; Mariana Valente, CC Brazil; Pedro Mizukami, CC Brazil; Luiz Moncau, CC Brazil; and Eduardo Magrani, CC Brazil.

The first draft of the license translation was submitted in July 2014, with a public comment period from November 2014 to January 2015. This month’s translation represents years of work by the Creative Commons Portuguese and Brazilian communities, and marks the 18th translation of 4.0 (with many more to come!)

Parabéns pela tradução, CC Brasil e CC Portugal!

View the translation

Veja a tradução

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