Together with re:3d, an Austin-based 3D printing company, and the #NEWPALMYRA project, a community platform dedicated to the virtual remodeling and creative use of architecture from the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, Creative Commons has produced a 200 pound, 7.5 feet tall 3D rendering of one of the Palmyra Tetrapylons. This rendering will be on display at the Creative Commons Global Summit in Toronto, CA from April 28-30, bringing the commons to life through the work of its community.

This large-scale rendering is one of the four quad-column pylons, or gateways, that would have marked a central place in the city. Palmyra is a desert oasis, a UNESCO world heritage site, and is considered one of the most important global archaeological sites. Since 2015, large sections of Palmyra have been destroyed by ISIL and many of its precious artifacts lost or sold on the global market.

In January 2017, it was confirmed by satellite imagery published in the New York Times that Palmyra’s ongoing destruction by ISIS continues – including this section of the Tetrapylon.

The #NEWPALMYRA project was begun in 2005 by CC Syria leader Bassel Khartabil, a Palestinian-Syrian open source software developer, educator, and free culture advocate. Working with the publisher Al-Aous and a team of artists in Damascus, Khartabil began remodeling the endangered ruins of Palmyra in 3D until 2012, when he was unlawfully imprisoned by the Syrian government. Much of this work was never published, though Bassel was committed to its free dissemination and use. In 2015, Khartabil was sentenced to death by the Assad regime. His whereabouts remain unknown.

A nonprofit founded by Bassel’s family, friends, and community, #NEWPALMYRA is freeing Syrian culture digitally, providing agency and advancement for the Syrian people through cultural heritage and digital preservation. Khartabil’s visionary work ignited a community that stands for transparency, openness, and free culture and continues to grow via the remix, reuse, and sharing of his foundational work.

In the words of Ryan Merkley, Creative Commons CEO, “Creative Commons wanted to bring the commons to life for its 2017 Summit in Toronto. CC brought Austin-based re:3D together with the #NEWPALMYRA project team. The Gigabot, re:3D’s spectacular printer, renders massive models at commercial quality. Together, we produced a huge replica of one of the models of Palmyra: the Tetrapylon.”

re:3D began with a digital 3D model of Palmyra provided by the #NEWPALMYRA team and transformed the digital into the physical using their Gigabot printer, which uses a rope-like filament resembling hot glue to precisely build the model layer by layer. Each layer is between .2-.6 mm thick, depending on layer of detail. The entire structure was assembled from 25 separate pieces with an internal wooden frame for support. It weighs 91kg and took about 800 hours to print.

As an in-kind sponsor of our Global Summit, re:3D Inc. participated in the project pro-bono, including the development, design, printing, and shipping of the final model to Toronto, Canada. re:3D is a full service socially focused additive manufacturing company based in Houston, Texas USA.

Creative Commons would like to thank re:3D and #NEWPALMYRA for their collaboration on the project and commitment to the global commons. Follow us on social media for pictures of the display on our Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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Today marks another milestone for the commons: the release of the 2016 State of the Commons, our annual deep dive and celebration of the global community working to further collaboration, creativity, and access to creativity and knowledge.

This year’s report goes beyond data and metrics to focus on the people that power the commons in every region of the world. These stories illustrate how our movement is growing and evolving, driven by people who choose to share. The commons continues to grow, with the total number of CC licensed works now at 1.2 billion in 2016, including the increased use of licenses that invite remix, commercial use, and collaboration – up to 65% of all content shared this year.

TL;DR: 2016 was our biggest year yet. From incredible sharing of 375,000 public domain works with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to our massive Global Summit, we’re seeing CC communities organize around renewed focus on movement building, free culture, policy reform, sharing, and global collaboration powered by gratitude.

The commons is the largest collection of free and open knowledge in the world. In order to bring you this report, we’ve partnered with a handful of the hundreds of platforms that provide CC licensing to bring you more data and user spotlights in a new and attractive format.

In October, we issued a Call for Submissions that asked our community to report on their favorite projects from the commons this year. These impact stories were beyond what we could have imagined: we heard stories of portals that use open data to predict and plan for earthquakes in New Zealand, a citizen-led civic data portal in El Salvador, a series of medical photographs that surfaces the untold struggle for independence against Portuguese colonial rule, and the “world’s most beautiful slideshow” of historic monuments submitted by over 10,000 Wikipedians. These examples, only a few of the many, tell the vibrant and life-altering stories of the people behind the commons.

Highlights from our partners include the Freeharmonic Orchestra, a group of 12 musicians who met in a virtual room on the Free Music Archive to produce the most collaborative album ever. From our friends at Flickr comes the Multimedia Commons Initiative, where teams of researchers around the world utilize the epic 100 million image dataset to build new applications and explore people’s interaction with places.

With the CC0 public domain dedication tool, we’re actively stewarding and helping grow the public domain, with 92.9 million public domain works to date. CC0 has served a diversity of purposes, this year most notably supporting the release of 375,000 digital works into the commons from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0 has also supported photographers on emerging platforms such as Unsplash, which now hosts a robust community of photographers “giving their work away for free” and gaining exposure and acclaim in the process.

These stories also echo the work we’ve been doing in areas like 3D printing, usability, and global community building. A spotlight on the British Museum, which released 128 models of sculptures from the Roman and Egyptian periods on the 3D design sharing platform Sketchfab and a tale of remix and community among the more than 1.5 million CC licensed objects on Thingiverse is proof that our community is front and center, and it’s working together better than ever.

Lastly, the report itself was translated by 30 volunteers into a dozen languages as part of our efforts to make our community more accessible to international communities.

Like everything else, we truly couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you so much for your support in 2016 and beyond. Read, excerpt, share, and tweet the report at http://stateof.creativecommons.org with the hashtag #sotc.

The post Our biggest report yet: State of the Commons 2016 appeared first on Creative Commons.

Imagine a Vilhelm Hammershøi painting printed out and hung over your fireplace, a 3D printed sculpture in your garden, or maybe a party that mixes Spotify playlists with an opera singer performing romantic songs in front of the newly acquired Friedrich’s painting. Sounds like something John Lennon dreamed up in the song “Imagine?” These are actual examples of a museum keeping up to date and using technology to its advantage.

Engaging with users: a closer look at the strategies of GLAM institutions

After almost 30 years of “the modern internet” and ten years of “Internet 2.0,” we already know that technology won’t open all the doors. As GLAM (Galleries Libraries Archives and Museums) practitioners our objective is clear: how can we make sure people stay connected to knowledge and heritage, and become inspired by it? How can technology be our ally?

Heritage institutions improve accessibility and access to knowledge, art, and culture. . In addition to access, they also provide the inspiration and building blocks for further innovation and creativity. How can the (digitised) commons serve as the means to both heritage institutions’ and their audiences’ ends? What are the different institutional strategies and user behaviours related to them? What works and what doesn’t in delivering access, use and reuse? To what extent are CC licenses already promoting this? And, last but not least: why?

We are going to address these questions during our Creative Commons Summit 2017 session. The idea behind the session is to shift the conversation from the abstract ideas and values to the actual institutional strategies and user behaviours. Our implicit hypothesis is that the only way for the commons to stay relevant over time is for increased usage. The context of who and how they can be used is, on the other hand, ever-changing. There are no absolute responses. The research that has already been done in a field will serve as a point of reference and a context for studying particular examples. We propose to explore the examples of how GLAM institutions successfully engaged the users basing on their (different) behaviours, rather than assumptions or declarations. And we welcome participants’ own reflections on both the present, and future, of heritage institutions’ use of open licenses to deliver creativity and innovation.

Our session will kick off with presentations and later take up a form of an open discussion. Let’s talk commons, and let’s talk GLAM. You are invited. See you in Toronto!

The post How Can The Commons Stay Relevant? Let’s Talk GLAM. appeared first on Creative Commons.

Nearly a quarter of the participants coming to the Creative Commons Global Summit in Toronto, CA from April 28–30 are scholarship recipients. They are representatives from a variety of communities and issues, including free and open culture, copyright reform, GLAM, open education, and global information systems. They represent every CC world region, with the majority coming from Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.

Of the 95 scholarship recipients, 23% are from Africa, 18% are from Latin America, 29% are from Europe, 18% are from Asia-Pacific and 6% are from the Arab World. In addition, we’ve nearly doubled our scholarship numbers this year both in terms of community participation and organizational funding. This is a big investment for CC, and we’re proud to support our community members to help them join the conversation.

Through our scholarship program, we are creating a healthy community by recognizing and engaging with gender, cultural, and geographical diversity in order to fulfill our organizational mission of a vibrant commons and community. As you’ll see, the diversity of the scholarship recipients extends beyond geography in order to provide opportunities to summit first timers as well as CC veterans and moves the community conversations beyond licenses toward advocacy, art, law, education, usability, and growth of the commons.

Creative Commons believes that providing pathways to participation is crucial to our goal of lighting up the commons and we’re proud to support so many participants from our Global Community. Below, read about some of the ways our community is looking forward to engaging during the summit and beyond.

Lia Hernandez, CC Panama Legal City Leader

I am almost ready to attend the CC Global Summit in cold Toronto. I am so excited because its my first global summit and I am looking forward to meeting all of you in real life.

Christian Villum, CC Denmark

As always, I look forward to the summit in order to reconnect with the global community and have important discussions that help drive forward the expansion of the global knowledge commons. Specifically I am excited to be part of a few of the sessions around new open business models because I believe this to be a cornerstone in building the future that we want.

Cherubim Mawuli Amenyedor, CC Ghana

I’m excited about the summit because I will get to meet, share and learn from equally passionate and knowledgeable community members working tirelessly to explore the future of the Commons and sharing for users, creators and activists.I’m grateful to CC for providing the needed platform to free-up the results of creative work for re-use, sharing and collaboration. I believe this will help me unlock Africa’s creative potential in the digital economy.

Leslie Chan, University of Toronto Scarborough

Usually I have to travel to attend conferences of this scale, and it is a nice change to welcome the world to Toronto instead. I am committed to ensuring that the Web will continue to be inclusive and open to diverse knowledge making and sharing, and I am looking forward to meeting so many like minded folks and to share experience. I will be speaking on Lessons from Failures in Open Advocacy and how I would do things differently on Sunday morning April 30.

Dimitar Dimitrov, Wikimedia Brussels

I have always believed that instead of several parallel movements we are one big free and open movement. I am particularly excited to meet the great girls and guys who are actively working on freeing up creativity and knowledge in Africa.

Paula Eskett, CC New Zealand

I’m most excited about the amazing speaker lineup and connecting and learning from the other Summit participants, but can’t deny the obvious excitement of traveling to the other side of the world too!

Last year I was so lucky to be part of IOL2 — a life changing learning experience, and I’ve recently joined the CC Aotearoa New Zealand Advisory Panel as an education representative.

As a professional librarian I see CC and Open as integral to the sustainability and future focused thinking of all libraries regardless of sector, and strongly believe in libraries providing equitable access to information and spaces to create and share new knowledge.

I’ll be delivering a session Friday 4pm : Preloading not backfilling : Preparing our children for a life of Open.

Mohamed Rahmo, CC Morocco

I’m excited about the summit because I will meet my open counterparts from all over the world. I’m from Morocco and I have an idea for all the people of the CC community in the world — I would like to launch a global content creation day, and I will advocate about the copyright policy back home so I want to learn from the other people. Back home we will also start a series of workshops to educate people about CC.

John Weitzmann, CC Germany

I’m excited about the CC Global Summit because it is most important and inspiring to meet many of the fantastic people in the network in person. My connection with the CC idea is based on the fact that such legal tools are simply necessary as long as the defaults of the law continue to hinder exchange and sharing.

Bastian Greshake, Germany

I’m super excited to finally meet all of the commoners again, as we’re not getting the chance to meet in person that often. I’m involved as I’m running a website that uses Creative Commons to enable research by putting genomes into the public domain. While I’m a strong believer in all things open*, my professional background makes me especially interested in the Academic Commons, that’s why I’ll be facilitating a session on “Towards the Scholarly Commons” on Saturday from 2:30–3:30PM.

Kayode Yussuf, CC Nigeria Tech Lead

I am a member of the CC Africa . School of Open team, I was a member of the CCSummit program committee and I plan and execute CC Nigeria’s projects.

I am excited to attend the Global Summit because I’d get the opportunity to meet with community members in real life. I am also looking forward to seeing the CCSummit program play out. The committee did a lot of work, making calls, sharing documents across several times zones to put the program together. As one of the committee members put it — this will be the best summit ever.

Carlos Guerrero, Hiperderecho, Peru

I’m really excited about the summit because it’s a big opportunity to share experiences and to enhance the ecosystem of CC. I’m especially enthusiastic about the work on my region; Latin America. Nos vemos ahí!

Clint Lalonde, CC Canada

I have been involved with the CC community for a number of years through my work with Open Educational Resources, and believe that the work of CC is vitally important in empowering people to fully maximize the affordances of new and emerging digital technologies. This will be my first CC Global Summit and, while I am looking forward to connecting with others working in the OER space, I am very excited at the opportunity to connect and learn more about the burgeoning Platform Co-operative movement and am happy to see the connections being made between the CC community and this exciting new movement.

Yi-hsuan Lin, CC Taiwan

I am mainly in charge of the license translation/localization issues. I’m excited to participate in the summit and I’m looking forward to networking with others who have reconciled 4.0 license issues.

Thanks for CC HQ for providing me this great opportunity to participate 2017 CC global summit!

Aristarik Maro, Public Lead CC Tanzania

I’m so excited about the 2017 summit because I’ll get to meet community members from different parties of the world, some of who I have been communicating with online in real life!! & some of which are new to me but hoping to hook up and network. I am thankful to CC for the support especially the establishment of the countries’ affiliate teams where we network. I’ll participate in most interesting sessions and use CC communication tools to support the Global Movement in my country.

Maxwell, economics student and open textbook advocate at University of Victoria

I got truly involved with CC while working with a professor to develop an open textbook for microeconomics. I’m excited about the summit because I’ll get a chance to immerse myself in the CC environment and learn about the many aspects it has beyond just open education! I’m involved with CC because I see the potential it has to make education more innovative and more accessible.

Marcela Basch, Buenos Aires

I can’t wait to get to Toronto and meet the amazing global CC community. I run El plan C, a digital magazine on collaborative economy, free culture and commons, with special focus on Latin America. The future of the commons and collaboration is one of my main areas of interest, so I’m eager to participate on that track and be able to discuss with people who’s been thinking about that from other points of view, geographically and culturally speaking. Almost at the end of the meeting I’ll be hosting a session on this topics, “What is exactly a commons oriented initiative and how could it be sustainable?”, on Sunday 4pm. Spoiler: I don’t really have answers yet, but I hope we could think it through together.

Shahadu Sadik, Wikipedia Ghana

I am an editor on Wikpedia, a blogger and a technology enthusiast. I love open education.

I am super excited to be a part of this year’s Creative Commons Global Summit in Toronto Canada. I just can’t wait to meet people from across the globe to share and discuss issues relating to Creative Commons and its sister projects.

Megan Beckett, CC South Africa Public Lead

I’m passionate about advancing access to education and life changing learning experiences in my country. CC tools and licenses have been an integral part in enabling the far reaching impact of the work we’ve done at Siyavula Education in OER collaborative development and communities of practice. I’ve also recently joined CC South Africa as the Public Lead. I’m really looking forward to the Summit to be inspired, to learn and to engage with CC and openness more broadly in the international community, whilst finding out what works for others locally.

Elizabeth Oyange, Copyright Associate for Aga Khan University (global), based in Nairobi, Kenya

I look forward to attending the CC Summit for a broader perspective on the various program areas, the keynote speeches and meeting like-minded CC’ers from all corners of the world. This community involvement and networking will allow us to disseminate current views and CC information and hopefully contribute our institutional insight.

Calú (Carlos) Raul Correa Loyola, CC Ecuador

I don’t believe in copyright lottery, obstacles to science and knowledge access, and old-fashioned ways to create. I’m very excited to attend CC Summit because we can push forward all Internet potential, driving a new era of development, growth and productivity. I would like promote this potential in my country, sharing and applying this ideas on widespread arenas with my partners and colleagues.

Guido Gamba, CC Argentina

I’m looking forward to the summit and to meet fellow colleagues from the commons all around the world. I’ve been involved with the network for quite some time already–in fact, this is not my first global summit! Regardless, I’m excited and anxious as if it was my first one. I believe that CC is a vivid example that things can be done otherwise, in a more just and fair way, and it’s always thrilling to meet with so many people people who feel the same way. I’ll be participating in two sessions: “Faces of the Commons: How Can the People of Creative Commons Change the World?” (Friday 13:30h) and “Building a Culture of Appreciation for the New Global Network” (Saturday 16:00h). I hope to see you there!

Hilman Fathoni, Creative Commons Indonesia (CCID), Legal Lead

Aleck Ncube, CC Zimbabwe

Freyja van den Boom, Researcher and Project Manager Future TDM

Hildah Nyakawa, Executive Director at Jamlab, CC Kenya

I’m excited about the summit because I’ll be able to meet and interact with fellow Open Education contributors and enthusiasts.

I have been hosting School of Open sessions here in Kenya and at the summit I’ll be co-hosting a session with P2PU on Learning Circles on Saturday from 11:30 am to 12 noon.

The post Meet CC: Voices from our Global Summit Scholarship Recipients appeared first on Creative Commons.

CC’s community grew up around the licenses, but over the past decade it has evolved into a powerful and diverse movement of interests and areas of work including open policy, open education, access to research and data, and cultural sharing. While those communities grew naturally, CC has never had a model for collaboration, shared goal-setting, and mobilizing action. The new network strategy, for the first time, creates a simple structure to enable global collaboration and action.

The Global Network will identify and collaborate on a series of shared interests and priorities, which we have called Platforms. A Platform is an area of work, a space for individuals and institutions to organize and coordinate themselves across the broad network. It’s open to anyone inside and outside the Creative Commons Global Network to support, share experience and collaborate on its goals and objectives. Through Platforms, we want to initiate strategic collaboration between network members that will have worldwide impact.

We are using the opportunity of this Global Summit to open the conversation about designing Platforms in several ways. On Friday, just after the opening, we will host a session called Programs for the New CC Global Network: How Can We Work Together? (Friday 13:30 – 15:00), where we expect to talk about the future work our community would like to be engaged to work in the future and have a big picture conversation about it. On Sunday (13:30 – 15:30), there will be a session called A Platform for Big Thinking about CC, a follow up session to the first, where we expect to think really big about the Future of the Commons, both in terms of challenges surrounding CC but also the Digital Commons.

Then, we will have specific sessions on Platforms related to the Open Education Platform (Friday 15:00 – 16:50), Copyright Reform (Saturday 15:30 – 18:00) and Open GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) (Sunday 13:30 – 15:30). And, strongly connected with this community-driven effort, we also scheduled a specific session on Building a culture of appreciation for the new Global Network (Saturday, 16:00 – 17:30) where we expect to open a conversation about requirements, needs and tools we would like to see to make our community strengthen and grow healthy and diverse.

While participating in the Summit, and especially leading sessions, please keep in mind the possibility of establishing a platform around a shared issue of interest. We have prepared guidelines for people interested in proposing a platform.

The CC Summit is an exciting opportunity for global collaboration and action. Summit participants will begin to share their goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics and lead a global conversation towards a stronger commons and community through an open invitation that starts at Summit, but will continue through the year, and beyond.

The Summit is the beginning of this conversation as well as the beginning of a big experiment in working together. By proposing a platform early on, you can join this early phase of testing how platforms will function. If you have ideas about CC platforms, please share them on social media using #ccplatforms hashtag and in our Slack. We would be very happy to see a broad range of platforms being discussed. Join us.

The post Platforms: A commons-based approach to global collaboration appeared first on Creative Commons.