Felix Naartey, 2017’s Wikipedian of the year, on the need for cross-collaboration in the open movement
Ruby Mizrahi / Wikimedia Foundation CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons”
Felix Naartey is the Global Coordinator for the Wikipedia Library and has been a Creative Commons advocate since 2014. In advance of the Creative Commons Global Summit, we’re gathering the stories of inspiring humans working around the world to shape the Commons’ future. We want to share your story, too — drop by the “Humans of the Commons” listening lounge at the Summit to get interviewed and add your voice. Here’s an edited transcript of Felix’s story:
One of my major goals is cross-collaboration in the open movement. I’ve realized that there isn’t enough cohesion between the different programs and individual projects that exist here in Ghana and elsewhere. We need a coalition.
Last year I spoke at the OpenStreetMap “State of the Map Africa” conference, for example, to propose closer collaboration between OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the most notable website in the world — so why not continue the work we do with OpenStreetMap by adding map data to locations that already exist on Wikipedia?
I created the Summer Open School for the same reason: to bring projects together and do trainings that combine Creative Commons, OpenStreetMap, Mozilla and other open projects. When people learn about Creative Commons, for example, they also learn about Wikipedia in the process, and vice versa. You can’t talk about these other projects without mentioning the underlying licenses. It creates continuity for our work, and allows more people to see it. These are ways that Creative Commons can push the agenda.
Some of our students have gone to their schools and instituted programs or set up open collaborations and conferences. We want to extend this further to the West African sub-region, and expand Summer Open School to the whole of that area.
Growing Creative Commons in Ghana
Four years ago I learned about the open movement. I wanted to increase knowledge-sharing and improve education in my country. I use this platform [the open movement] because it’s an opportunity to tell my story and the story of my country through sharing.
We started our CC Ghana group through Open Foundation West Africa, an NGO that supports the open movement in the West African sub-region. We’re nearly finished the process of becoming a Creative Commons chapter in Ghana.
As a result of our work here in Ghana, I’ve seen companies adopt Creative Commons licenses on their websites. I’ve seen schools change their policies for printing research work using Creative Commons licenses. And I’ve spoken to teachers creating publications under CC licenses so their students will have access. They’ve realized it doesn’t make sense to publish their works in publications students won’t be able to access.
Knowledge without barriers
I think a vibrant Commons and a better world are directly related. When you improve collaboration and access, because content can be shared, you directly improve knowledge. The more knowledge people have, the more they can do. Without factors like the Commons, there’s no continuity and there’s no creativity. The world just stands still and nothing grows.
For me, knowledge crushes all barriers. I want to see a Ghana that is free from knowledge barriers, because once those barriers are crushed, people will begin to move freely, learn freely, and grow. Once we begin to open up knowledge for people, the barriers that exist – being able to buy textbooks, for example – can be solved with things like open educational resources.
My interest is focused on Ghana but I’m also referring to the African continent more broadly. I feel we are under-represented. Most of our knowledge resides in books, and our people just don’t know how to put it online – whereas everything you’d want to know about the U. S., for example, already exists there.
We need to give people the training and knowledge that they have a voice through platforms like Creative Commons licenses and Wikipedia. We have a voice, we just don’t know how to use it.
Based on a StoryEngine.io interview with Felix Naartey. Interview by Christine Prefontaine, story by Matt Thompson.
Jon Phillips and Bassel Khartabil at the Creative Commons Summit, Warsaw, 2011. (Eric Steuer/Flickr/CC license 2.0)
Jon Phillips on gratitude, the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship, and the evolution of the Commons
In 2017, the global open movement mourned the loss of a dear champion, colleague and friend. In August we learned that Bassel Khartabil, Creative Commons’ Syrian project lead, open source software programmer, Wikipedia contributor and free culture advocate, had been executed by the Syrian regime. Here, Bassel’s long-time friend and Creative Commons advocate, Jon Phillips, shares his thoughts on continuing Bassel’s work, the new fellowship being awarded in Bassel’s honor, and how the Commons has shaped a generation of programmers and activists.
At this year’s Global Summit we’ll announce the recipient of the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship. It’s a partnership between Creative Commons, Wikipedia, Mozilla and the Fabricatorz Foundation, which I’m a co-founder of. Noura, Bassel’s wife, and Jamil Khartabil, his father, will also be at the Summit to present the award.
I joined Creative Commons as an engineer back when the organization was only two or three years old. I initially met Bassel online. I was working on OpenClipArt and sent out some different announcements — and he responded to them with code. Free code. I thought it was amazing someone would do that.
That led to a close working relationship, and Bassel’s work helped turn OpenClipArt into the world’s largest collection of public domain images. Bassel and I became best friends. Later he invited me to Syria, to help launch Creative Commons Syria.
Bassel was swept up in a wave of military arrests by the Syrian government in 2012. I helped launch the #FreeBassel campaign, and thousands of people and organizations around the world demanded his release. But then last year, in August 2017, we learned that security services had executed him in 2015, after torturing him in prison.
The #FreeBassel campaign drew supporters from around the world (Kennisland/Flickr/CC license 2.0)
Obviously we were devastated; his friends and family had been worried since losing communications contact with him, but we still held out hope. His loss was profound. Bassel was one of the great ones. He could have done so many more things, or become the next Steve Jobs. But instead his light was extinguished.
There was a period of time, after we learned Bassel had been executed, where I did a lot of reflection. It made me think a lot about what I want to do. About how to move forward.
I believe life is inherently optimistic. It would be easy to become toxic and decide that the world sucks and everything’s over. But I believe the right answer is to find the best people and help unblock them. Help unblock problems.
That’s a big part of what I’m working on with the Fabricatorz Foundation. Our projects include #NEWPALMYRA, which Bassel founded. It’s an effort to reconstruct the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria, which was destroyed by ISIS, as an immersive virtual environment. Fabricatorz has also collaborated on projects like WeiWei Cam with Ai WeiWei and other artists speaking out about oppression around the world.
Still from “WeiWeiCam,” a self-surveillance project by artist Ai Weiwei, which Fabricatorz assisted with
“The Commons is in our DNA”
Like Bassel, I believe in sharing. It’s a statement. It’s powerful. I believe everyone should share. The Commons is the foundation for everything for me.
I think for millennials and people in their early 20s, this is now built into their DNA. For young developers who have grown up with this, the open, sharing, Commons mentality is built in. If it’s on Github and it’s public then you can use it.
St. Louis artist Bill Smith and his artwork construction system, “Synthetic BioStructures”. Photo by Fabricatorz Foundation, CC Zero 1.0.
It’s really a way of thinking — that you have something and you can share it, and that creates more energy than not sharing it. The diverse cultures of non-majority innovators are seriously advantaged by having some type of shared system that’s not locked in.
“Peer-to-peer is back in force”
I believe it’s only really now that we’re truly entering the internet age, the digital age. We thought we were already in it, but I believe the internet age truly began with the blockchain and transaction networks. It will be the foundation going forward.
All the peer-to-peer stuff is now back in force — all the different ways of removing middlemen. Innovation-wise, that will be some of the most interesting stuff that happens this year. Right now we’re in the equivalent of the blockchain “dot-com” era — the current blockchain bubble comes out of that. But there really is true innovation emerging.
Bill Smith “Synthetic BioStructures” (2018) detail. Photo by Fabricatorz Foundation, CC0 1.0.
Take, for example, Creative Commons. The legal and technical innovation with licenses that Lawrence Lessig adapted from the free software movement — and that have since been optimized — can now be implemented with blockchain.
Blockchain provides a mechanism to improve the system.
That ultimate goal can now be completed, because now we can have unique digital assets through a shared knowledge base — essentially a shared public anonymous database. That’s what the blockchain is.
Based on a StoryEngine.io interview with Jon Phillips. Interview by Christine Prefontaine, story by Matt Thompson.
What is the Open Web Fellowship? It’s a 10-month fellowship program that brings together individuals interested in technology, policy, and advocacy and embeds them within civil society organizations from around the world to advance and protect the open internet. The program aims to 1) increase public awareness and understanding of internet policy issues, 2) support and enable career paths in the internet policy and advocacy sectors, and 3) celebrate and nurture a vibrant network of internet advocacy organizations.
Applications for the fellowship program opens today and closes on Friday, April 20th (5pm ET).
Creative Commons is an international organization that works with a global network of supporters, legal experts, activists, and educators. We are open to a variety of project ideas from fellows. Applicants with the following kinds of experience would fit well with the fellowship:
Design / systems thinking
Data collection, analysis, visualization
Communications
Grassroots advocacy and digital campaigning
Community organizing
Interoperability/open standards experience
Here are some more specific project ideas we are interested in pursuing.
Educational program for copyright reform
We would like to create education programs that explain and connect CC’s work on open licensing and open policy with our work on copyright reform. We will use the expertise within our network (and beyond) to explain in understandable language how—and why—positive copyright reform for the Commons is crucial to meet our progressive vision, and affects all/most of our programmatic areas. We want to be able to develop creative and informational materials (including educational articles, white papers, toolkits, comics, etc) to make it easier for non-experts to explain why this conversation and debate matters to CC and its broad base of users and supporters.
Improving CC’s ability to run effective digital issue campaigns
We would like to improve our ability to run impactful digital campaigns that support our advocacy strategy. This work should be able to address urgent or timely issues as they arise, as well as longer-term proactive campaigns. It should take into account our truly global network of advocates, thus the need to be flexible enough to utilize across various communities, political/social cultures, and languages.
Survey of organisational research needs in support of evidence-based policymaking
As CC continues to engage in advocacy that protects and expands the commons, there is a need to improve the ability of the organisation to think and act systemically regarding research in service of evidence-based policymaking. We would like to build the expertise and network of researchers to be able to provide more in depth analysis, evidence, and expert commentary on important public policy issues. A useful first step would be to assess the situation with regard to the academic research community related to CC, with a particular focus on identifying specific issue areas that could be well served by improved data and other evidence-based research to aid copyright reform aligned with our vision and mission.
CC is a distributed and virtual organisation (no headquarters office), and we welcome applications from anywhere. We will work to provide the necessary support to ensure that the fellow is connected with the mentor and other relevant CC staff and community.
Again, applications for the fellowship program opens today and closes on Friday, April 20th (5pm ET).
The CC Summit is only a month away, and we’re so pleased to announce our schedule of over 110 community-led sessions. We’ve also planned excellent special events including a screening of Yasmin Fedda’s film in progress “The Disappeared” and the announcement of the recipient of the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship and Memorial Fund (applications are open until March 24th, so there’s still time to apply.)
This year’s summit also features a podcasting popup salon called “Humans of the Commons,” which will tell the stories of our network and community through an integrative storytelling practice. In addition, Sebastiaan Ter Burg will be back with his popular interactive photography studio, you’ll hear keynotes from three major players in open licensing and culture, and the weekend will crescendo with a Saturday night dance party that’s sure to show you what we all have in common(s). (Dancing!)
This year, we have sessions from nearly every continent and 65 countries. The seven tracks are volunteer led and organized and represent the facets of Creative Commons’s work in Open. From the CC Global Network to Open Education to GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) to the Future of the User-Centered Commons, we’ll be conferencing and un-conferencing for a better world. It’s a can’t miss event if you care about the future of open knowledge.
As a vision of the sacred, Vincent Moon’s Hibridos project melds text, music, and ritual through a breathtaking series of films produced in collaboration with his partner Priscilla Telmon. Traveling Brazil over three years, Moon and Telmon pursued the divine through their art, becoming increasingly immersed in culture, ritual, and community. The result is a multilayered piece that includes video, music, performance, text, “trans-cinema,” and exhibition. Moon and Telmon recently screened the film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and produced a number of “live” or “trans” cinema events featuring sacred music from around the world.
Moon first rose to prominence through his Creative Commons licensed Take Away Shows series, which illuminated global indie music in an intimate, cinema verité style – his work radically breaks down distance between documentarian and the traditional notion of subject. With Hibridos, Moon puts his ethos of radical sharing and relationship building at the center of his cinematic vision – the films are evocative, adventurous, and intense. Shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license, the Hibridos project is freely accessible through its online portal and on Vimeo.
Can you talk about your particular interest in ritual and sacred music?
I started the Take Away Shows from my Blogotheque a long time ago, which was an online project where we were filming mostly indie rock music, and I eventually got tired of that kind of music. I discovered other forms of music which seemed to me way deeper, on many levels. Not only musically but also on what they were engaging in terms of culture, history, and especially the invisible. More than sacred music, it was my relationship to the invisible, this quest to explore, not following any academic kind of research – trying to explore other cultures in an artistic way, not representing them but trying to approximate myself with them in a sense. It’s a very personal work. You could see it as an archive, but I see it as an experimental take on reality.
The Creative Commons license is a very much at the core of my own way of doing those recordings. I do not see them as fixed, I see them as still living and changing and the idea that people can use those recordings is very much at the core of my own research in spirituality. I do find it very spiritual actually, the way that we allow people to touch and to change. In nature, there is no property, there is always constant change and mutations.
Why did you choose the particular license you chose? I chose that license because I’m interested in what it means to really start from the beginning.
How can we see the digital age as a completely new way of living together? It’s not a tool; it’s a new paradigm that we have to integrate.
And I do not see our society doing this at all. I think we’re treating the digital age as sort of like an extension of an old, ancient society of living together. That’s too bad. We have to go way deeper into our way of creating. How and where can we go together if we all apply such a license? How can we get out of the business related to art forms?
I use BY-NC-SA because I do not like the idea that anybody could make any commercial use of my work. And the noncommercial factor comes from the fact that I’ve been recording people for free – I just give them the recordings. I don’t do this for money.
Vincent Moon, CC BY-NC-SA
As a French filmmaker in Brazil, how do you balance your own outsiderness with recording and also with releasing these recordings online, particularly within the French tradition of patrimoine and ethnographic film? I do not see myself as an ethnographic filmmaker. I don’t see myself even as a filmmaker. I’m experimenting with the tools of recording and the tools of sharing. The fact that I’m using a camera is just one detail within a larger vision. We do not live in the same form of society we used to live in even 20 years ago. I think culture is problematic, because we’re extremely focused on this idea that we are actually separated, particularly in our globalized Westernized society, so I think of reality in terms of separation from the realities of others.
This is great when it comes to defending diversity and sharing incredible, fantastic knowledge of different traditions. But this is not great when it comes to building physical and invisible walls in between us, in the way we relate to the other.
How can we overcome this? How can we overcome the idea of identity? To not only see it from a political point of view? Most of our vision of the world these days is only informed from a very materialistic, political point of view, which is not the way of the people I record. They do not see the other, in the way that Western culture has been inventing the other.
We should allow people to be more free in creating, allowing all those energies to circulate much more freely – it’s like liberating spirits.
I learned a lot while being with indigenous people – I think that their revision of reality is completely new, and it’s very, very beautiful to realize this.
I’m trying to create an exchange by using my own tools. But at the same time, trying to create that exchange away from any commercial relationship, away from any manipulative interchange approaches. I feel that all the recordings I’ve been making actually help people. That’s the goal, the first thing. Give the recordings to them. It’s a gift exchange. It’s an ancient way of living together.
Lewis Hyde writes in The Gift that gifts are cyclical, that they come back to you culturally– that it’s an ancient form of relating to other people.
Absolutely. It’s like with the potlatch. What allows our new tools in a sense is to renew that ancient type of relationship with the other. This is very beautiful, and we have to dive into it as much as possible. I try to complete my own personal research there by doing a lot of what I call live cinema or performances, and it’s quite new for us. It is basically a live improvisation based mostly on ritualistic music. And sometimes we invite some of those people that are a part of it. For example, last year in Morocco, we invited for five days some Sufi Brotherhood in Fes, and they invited us to an incredible healing transritual in a house, and then two days later, we created this show, where we were showing the images we recorded by mixing the images live, and they were also coming over this speaker. They were creating a new layer over their own ritual, and it was amazing! It was completely breaking down this distance that we create all the time, especially in terms of representation of music. I’m very excited about bringing back the sacred everywhere. So we brought the guys on stage, and they fucking nailed it. It turned out to be another ritual. Some people fell in trance again.
You work in a variety of media, not only film and live performance, but also music and exhibition. How does trans-cinema and live cinema fit into the Hibridos project, and also your projects going forward? And how does your work lend itself to that kind of cross-media or trans-media representation?
I’m excited to explore all different forms – to talk about the power of images on our society. And I think it’s so very important to mention, especially when you start to talk about trends or so-called trends in cinema, that our society has turned into a society that is so obsessed by its own images, and reality is actually created by our image, which is dangerous. The way we treat images and the way we share images is very poor and very damaging, damaging a lot the way we see reality. Images are extremely powerful because they deform reality. That’s what’s happening now.
What’s reality? It’s a subjective experience. You make the right images, let’s say, but what I’m excited about are images that are trying to work around the idea of beauty and you might end up making a better society – a more beautiful one. It sounds very simple but it’s exactly how it works. So basically, what we’ve been trying, especially with Hibridos, is to celebrate in a sense, all those different forms of rituals to show the beauty, incredible magic in them, and to share this for free. We’ve been making many films – 94 films. It’s crazy. It’s ridiculous in a way. It’s a sacrifice. We did it with our own money and without any production companies. I still have no idea what’s going to happen with it now. Our desire to use trans-cinema is very much based on the idea that images have a very strong impact. What about images of rituals? What about images of bodies in trance? What kind of impact can they have?
I’m excited about reintegrating the trance into the bodies of the viewers. It’s an experiment. It’s not easy and it’s not easy for everybody. A lot of people don’t feel free in front of these images and they put this on certain idea of manipulation of culture of the image of the others. We actually believe that’s what our society needs. Trance and trance bodies – we need to get out of our own brain. We need to let it go. We need to get to an assent that there is something superior. I’m not going to use the word God or anything. There is something very superior, spiritual in nature. We have to regain humility, and to regain this humility, we need to pass by the trance state. I absolutely believe so. I’m absolutely certain because I had this experience. I did my own. I went to a ritual and I tried to participate as much as possible. I tried to get out of my brain, get out of my intellectual relationship to reality. And it was a life-changing experience. And a very much needed one. But I do not believe that everyone can go there. Of course not. We have to be subtle, very subtle. We are trying to present it as sort of a documentary type of experience, but it’s not, absolutely not in any way. Especially the live-cinema. It’s much more about trying to reach the energy of the ritual and bring it to people would never go there, who might see it through a distance.
Your films do have an extremely intimate quality.
I’m very interested in breaking down any distance. There is no distance because my desire is to do the exact opposite of putting myself at a distance, to write or to study. It’s not our take. Our take is actually to break down a distance, to go very, very, very close, and when you see the feature film, especially on a big screen, it’s almost suffocating at some points. It has a strange type of quality because it’s very close. You never breathe, and you’re in it all the time, constantly.
After making many films, I still had no idea what I was doing, and little by little I have a bit of a different vision, and that’s why I’m so close, to create that feeling. But that’s also because we are there, we are in it. It vibrates more, and we love that, and we want that.
We want to vibrate more with them. We want to respect them and for me, that’s the only way of respecting, is getting closer, not stepping backward, stepping really forward to one another. And I’ve always done that everywhere I went. In the center of places, just feel at home, because that’s the best way to do it. That’s the greatest thing.
What are the next projects you have planned? What’s next for Hibridos? Where do you see this project going and where do you see your next project?
What we’re excited about is that we’ve been able to produce all the material, and now that it is freely available it can circulate and disseminate.
I trust the curiosity of the people. We just try to let it go. Hopefully, some people are gonna find it and then they’re gonna use it and then they’re gonna share it, and others will make things with it. This is a project to make other projects, right? So hopefully, it’s going to inspire people in many different ways.
The Hibridos project is mostly online. It’s not the entire project, which is a web project, but basically sort of like the ground of the house and now, we’re finding the water and putting up the roof. But basically, the roof is made of other experiences. We’re gonna experiment. Research and consciousness, that’s what it is about.
Vincent Moon, CC BY-NC-SA
Thinking about my own first encounter with Hibridos, which was on my laptop, I’m curious to know what your thoughts are on the difference between encountering the project on a smaller screen versus these large scale immersive experiences you create?
One complements the other. At some point you have to acknowledge the fact that you are not really the owner of anything. Basically you just believe, trust, that people might encounter the films here or there. Things are very organized in the invisible. Things are supposed to happen the way they happen. It’s destiny – some people have to encounter this project, and they will, but I’m not gonna force it. There’s no need.
Someone may end up seeing this on their laptop one night because someone sent them a link. People could be researching their next trip to Brazil, and suddenly they bump into this. Or people might come see a show tonight because they take a look at what’s in town and they see us by accident. Many things, but it’s all accidents. It’s all made of little accidents, tiny accidents – which we feel are not really accidents at all. And that’s the beauty. It’s a game with reality. You play your role. You just play it the best you can, and that’s what we’re going to do.
There has been sacrifice, complete sacrifice, but we’re very happy. We’ve been researching, filming, recording, editing, publishing things about beauty. What people do with those rituals are amazing. That’s the core of the project. It’s the heart of everything.
What kinds of differences did you find across the country, from urban to rural?
I would not really define urban and rural differences like that. Every place is always very different and some places might be much more populated by people that would have a poorer economic background than others. That might change a lot of what their relationship with spirituality is, but we’ve really been exploring in lots of different places, urban, rural, jungle, forest, the sea.
What we need these days, especially artists, we need to be inspired to create new forms — call it culture if you want. We create new forms of being together and Brazil is the most inspiring place for me in that regard. I learned so much, so much about myself as well.
Now we’re ready to move onto other projects with this absolute certitude that we have to experiment. That’s the only way to go.
Vincent Moon, CC BY-NC-SA
Would you talk about some of the rituals and some of the ways you engaged?
They are all so different and all so complementary. I’m really researching deeply on spirituality and I think you’ll find spirituality as well in religion sometimes, not always.”
All of those places we went to, we’ve been trained to look for those little encounters with the invisible. We just published some new films of rituals that are already online. Especially there is in this last batch of films, there are a few from Fraternidade Kayman. It is amazing – complete hybrids. That’s sort of like what Brazil taught us a lot, that you can experiment
The evolution of rituals is creating new forms of rituals all the time. It’s normal, and it’s magical.
We have to break down those barriers, to break down the idea of identity. We’ve been trying to question our own identity. I think lots of those rituals are really guarded by the people who have the money to make the films. We’ve been very curious, and especially we wanted to represent people who are not represented, to give them a voice, to show them in their beautiful life.
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