Our new book was released to Kickstarter backers today and will be available at the CC Global Summit and in wide release May 5.

For the last year and a half, Creative Commons staff Sarah Hinchliff Pearson and Paul Stacey have been writing a Kickstarter backed book about sharing and open business models called Made With Creative Commons.

Here’s a short excerpt:

“When we began this project in August 2015, we set out to write a book about business models that involve Creative Commons licenses in some significant way — what we call being Made with Creative Commons. With the help of our Kickstarter backers, we chose twenty-four endeavors from all around the world that are Made with Creative Commons. The mix is diverse, from an individual musician to a university-textbook publisher to an electronics manufacturer. Some make their own content and share under Creative Commons licensing. Others are platforms for CC-licensed creative work made by others. Many sit somewhere in between, both using and contributing creative work that’s shared with the public. Like all who use the licenses, these endeavors share their work — whether it’s open data or furniture designs — in a way that enables the public not only to access it but also to make use of it.

We analyzed the revenue models, customer segments, and value propositions of each endeavor. We searched for ways that putting their content under Creative Commons licenses helped boost sales or increase reach. Using traditional measures of economic success, we tried to map these business models in a way that meaningfully incorporated the impact of Creative Commons. In our interviews, we dug into the motivations, the role of CC licenses, modes of revenue generation, definitions of success.

In fairly short order, we realized the book we set out to write was quite different from the one that was revealing itself in our interviews and research.

It isn’t that we were wrong to think you can make money while using Creative Commons licenses. In many instances, CC can help make you more money. Nor were we wrong that there are business models out there that others who want to use CC licensing as part of their livelihood or business could replicate. What we didn’t realize was just how misguided it would be to write a book about being Made with Creative Commons using only a business lens.”

The book we ended up writing is so much more than what we set out to do. Made With Creative Commons started as a book about business models, but it ultimately became a book about sharing. Part analysis, part handbook, part collection of case studies, we see Made With Creative Commons as a guide to sharing your knowledge and creativity with the world, and sustaining your operation while you do. It makes the case that sharing is good for business, especially for companies, organizations, and creators who care about more than just the bottom line. Full of practical advice and inspiring stories, Made with Creative Commons is a book that will show you what it really means to share.

We’re thrilled to announce Made With Creative Commons is now ready for release. It will first be released to our Kickstarter backers April 21, 2017 and print copies will be distributed April 28, 2017 to all attendees of the Creative Commons Global Summit. The book will be officially made available to the public on May 5, 2017 at madewith.cc. You can pre-order copies on Amazon now.

We can’t thank our backers, case study interviewees, and Creative Commons colleagues enough for their support and encouragement. Writing Made With Creative Commons transformed and inspired us. We hope it inspires you too.

The post Made with Creative Commons: Available at the CC Summit appeared first on Creative Commons.

In the fall of 2016, a small Toronto-based civic tech group convened around a question: What if we could use technology to connect municipal campaigners and enable them to share knowledge and tools in an open resource kit across traditional geographic and partisan divides?

We were motivated by the significant advantage incumbents enjoy as well as an appreciation of the potential impact thousands more well-run, digitally-savvy campaigns could have on our democracy.

At their best, local campaigns are ideal learning environments for skills to drive community change. They can be:

• Relevant – Issues often directly affect all community members.
• Independent – In jurisdictions with no political parties, individual candidates must make a direct appeal to voters based on their own track record and ideas.
• Diverse – Campaigns draw teams of volunteers across professional, class, ethnic and partisan lines.
• Entrepreneurial – They’re low-resource pressure-cooker environments that form meaningful bonds between community volunteers.
• Risky – Campaigns are time-limited and election day provides a built-in failure mechanism.
• Important! Campaign volunteers make our system of representative government possible by helping civic leaders find their public voice and run for office.

Despite the significant role election campaigns play in our democratic system, the process of planning and managing a successful ground campaign remains a mystery to the average citizen.

DemocracyKit

In October 2016, we founded the Open Democracy Project and launched an Indiegogo campaign that raised $31K – enough to develop the first version of DemocracyKit. Upon release April 25, 2017, DemocracyKit will have a searchable campaign resource library, community directory and campaign orientation with five modules: Explore, Build Your Team, Create a Plan, Choose Technology and Run a Campaign. Documents are stored in Google Drive to facilitate editing by a distributed team of contributors and editors and made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) licence.

Your Input

Open Democracy Project is a distributed team and we use the same technology and tactics as the municipal campaigns we’re preparing to serve. Currently, we meet weekly in Toronto and Ottawa, Ontario and have volunteers organizing to launch this summer in Alberta.

We’re in the process of drafting a 2-year strategic plan and are keen for input on how best to structure the organization to allow for growth and partnerships across Canada and abroad.

We would appreciate your input. Please join our Creative Commons Global Summit workshop on April 29, 5 – 6pm.

Workshop Agenda

1. Introduction to the Open Democracy Project
2. DemocracyKit walkthrough
3. Workshop & feedback:

• Feedback on Mission, Vision, Values
• Preparing to expand in Canada
• Preparing to partner internationally

Hope to see you there!

The post Driving community change through campaigning: Open Democracy Project at the CC Summit appeared first on Creative Commons.

CC Search beta has added 470,000 images from the millions of materials contained in Europeana’s collection of Creative Commons images. Europeana is Europe’s digital platform for cultural heritage, collecting and providing online access to over 54 million of digitised items ranging from books, photos, and paintings to television broadcasts and 3D objects. As an important cultural partner to CC, Europeana’s platform strengthens the commons through its large, searchable collection of digital records from nearly 4,000 European libraries, archives, museums and audiovisual galleries. As CC Search continues to grow, we’ll be adding more material from this rich repository of cultural heritage images, data, and records.

The new CC Search provides tools to make lists, attribute work with one click, and serves up a massive collection of images by utilizing open media APIs. This new addition from Europeana brings the number of searchable objects up to 10,022,832 making Europeana the second main image provider. Previous repositories include February’s landmark release from Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as large collections of freely licensed images from 500 px, Flickr, Rijksmuseum, and New York Public Library. While the beta project focuses on images, the tool aims to provide a ‘front door to the commons,’ bringing together a multitude of collections to inspire creativity and collaboration on the web.

Among the images now available in CC Search are major works by masters of European art as well as photographs, prints, drawings, and more. Explore the entire collection at the CC Search page.

The post Announcing 470,000 images from Europeana, now in CC Search appeared first on Creative Commons.

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Food brings people together. Sharing favourite recipes and talking about interesting spices can open conversations. But it’s not the recipe or the spice that leaves a lasting impression. It’s the people that come together to share the meal. It’s going to be a global smorgasbord when the Creative Commons Global Summit comes to Toronto, April 28 to 30th. I’m looking forward to swapping some recipes and experiencing new spices while sharing about Virtually Connecting (VC).

At the CC Global Summit there will be many opportunities to share the magic that happens within Virtually Connecting sessions in both physical and digital spaces. It’s an opportunity to bring people together in small groups to share ideas, experiences, feelings, connections between and among the formal conference sessions. These common ingredients often become remixed and cook up unexpected results. VC sessions range in format from hallway hangouts to conversations about conversations. However these sessions happen, it’s about the people at the table that makes the meal a memorable one. A list of the many VC sessions shared is found on the VC site.

Since I’m a relative newcomer to the Creative Commons (CC) neighbourhood, I’m looking forward to meeting new people and actively sharing my VC experiences. I’ll also be connecting with the VC community through conversations with people who are attending the summit. Since this is now a sold-out event, there’s an opportunity for those who can’t physically be present to engage in the conversations. VC sets the table and anyone can join the meal.

What will happen when Virtually Connecting meets CC?

Will new topics simmer while recipes are remixed? Will exciting flavours be exchanged? There’s a wealth of creativity in the common ground that food and cooking can bring. A meal together breaks down barriers and builds community – no telling where this can lead. Toronto and the CC Global Summit will have much to offer when VConnecting meets CC.

VC is centered on people, conversations, and topics that are open and invitational. These global campfire conversations are “motivated by a desire to improve the virtual conference experience for those who cannot be present at conferences for financial, logistical, social or health reasons.” (Virtually connecting web site). These video collaborations use Google hangout to connect people from the physical conference space to virtual participants who engage in live conversations. Check the VC website to see how it all started over two years ago and how it’s grown over time.

The aim of VC is to welcome and include while recognizing that these conference conversation experiences are bounded by time, space, access, technology, and by the availability of volunteers who can engage in these synchronous physical-with-virtual gatherings. Technology issues with hardware and software are often uncontrollable ingredients. Speakers, microphones, laptops, tablets, mobile technologies, and environmental locations become controlling factors in the quality and novelty of the conversational context.

The recipe for VC sessions is an ever-changing blend of ingredients. As master chefs are aware, it’s not the recipe that rules the outcome, but the serendipity of quality, quantity, diversity and novelty of ingredients that create the best dishes. While adding spices to the combinations, it’s the magic of the moment that determines the outcome. As it is with VC conversations, not all seasoning combinations work out well and the resulting flavours aren’t necessarily to everyone’s liking, but the lessons learned in the explorations are worth the efforts. When VConnecting meets CC at the Global Summit it’ll be less about reduction or intensifying discourse, and more about adding zest to the open dialogues.

The CC Global Summit will provide space and place for people from diverse neighbourhoods within the CC movement to engage openly in conversations of importance to the community. With there may be separate tracks for engagement at the summit, there’s potential for a rich diversity of flavours to add into the mix. VC will bring a metaphoric campfire to augment and spice up the conversations. With this shared collaboration in physical and digital spaces, VC and CC can create a savoury exchange of ideas, people and experiences. With the upcoming VC and CC interactions, I hope that some VC spice will leave a lasting, positive impression in the CC cooking pot. In return, I’m certain that CC experiences will flavour the meal for VC participants. The possibilities that can come from the CC Global Summit with a VC presence are potentially catalytic which hopefully will continue the remixing of recipes for both movements.

You are welcome to join in these conversations and add your unique ingredients. The schedule of VC sessions happening at the CC Global Summit is posted on the Virtually Connecting site. If you are on-site at the summit, you are welcome to watch a session in action. When you’re ready, join into an event. If you can’t get to the CC Global Summit you can participate in a session virtually or watch live while it’s happening. Sessions will be recorded and can be viewed after the event. Send us a tweet @VConnecting or add a comment on the blog post to let us know you’re open to the opportunity. Please let us know how and when you’d like to join in.

So let’s get together in the kitchen and stir the pot a little! New spicy combinations will emerge.

The post Remixing Recipes and Sharing Spices when Virtually Connecting meets CC appeared first on Creative Commons.

 

CC Summits have always been an opportunity for the Creative Commons global movement to take stock of our work and plan next steps. This year, we decided to make this theme even more prominent, and defined “Future of the Commons” as one of the five tracks of the Global Summit.

This track was formed due to the influential research from the internal “Faces of the Commons” study conducted by a team led by Anna Mazgal. One of the recommendations in her report was that Creative Commons create a platform for engaging people in generating big ideas and insights related to the future of the commons and the potential for Creative Commons to be an agent of exponential social change.

Why should we care about the future of the commons?

This interest is due in part to the ongoing strategic process, which will conclude at the Summit with the adoption of a new model for the CC network. As we re-design our global community, we need to ask ourselves: what are our long-term goals, what is the role that CC can play in shaping our societies, and how do we address new challenges?

Creative Commons builds its activism on the belief that the way in which we manage a variety of resources matters, particularly when it comes to copyright. When properly shared, our intellectual resources will foster collaboration, equity, innovation and engagement. This fundamental assumption is valid as much today, as it was when CC was formed in 2001.

The “Future of the Commons” track is an opportunity to reflect together on our mission and goals, on the relevance of CC tools, and ways in which we can adapt to better address current challenges. We also want to talk about how we can work collaboratively with others, to build a broader open movement and a shared vision of the commons.

The three strands of the track

The Future of the Commons track was shaped around three strands, each with their own set of questions.

Strand One: What is the commons, in particular the digital commons? How has CC contributed to the digital commons in the last 15 years? What part does CC currently play in helping it flourish and what more could CC do? Who else is working on this and how might CC collaborate with them?

Strand Two: What is the role of the commons in the future economy? How do we develop open business models? What is CC’s role in sharing cities, platform cooperatives, and the sharing economy? How do we apply the concept of sharing to other crucial resources and technologies (like data or the internet of things)?

Strand Three: What is CC’s role in going beyond licenses? How do we engage in and advance the social community practice of commoning? How is a commons managed? What are social norms for helping a digital commons thrive?

You can learn more about the track sessions in our Summit schedule.

If you care about the future of the commons – get in touch!

We invite Summit participants who are particularly interested in these issues to meet during lunch on Friday for an informal chance to meet peers. Look for the track logo in the lunch area.

We will also be organizing a Virtually Connecting session on Sunday during the 10.00 am break, to bring together summit participants with online peers, in order to share more broadly the track experience.

To make the Future of the Commons track interactive we are inviting participants attending each session to write down one big idea or action from the session they think CC should pursue to ensure a flourishing future commons. All ideas will be posted to a Future of the Commons wall poster in the Summit venue hallway. Over the course of the summit, the Future of the Commons wall will gradually have more big ideas on it. to encourage idea browsing and conversation.

All the ideas from the Future of the Commons wall poster will feed into a culminating session on the last day of the Summit called “A Platform for Big Thinking About the Future of the Commons”. All participants in this final session will be engaged in an activity that selects and prioritizes ideas from the wall poster into a Future of the Commons action plan.

The “Future of the Commons” track has been shaped by an organizing team including: Alek Tarkowski (Poland), Claudia Cristiani (El Salvador), Alexandros Nousias (Greece), Anna Mazgal (Poland), SooHyun Pae (South Korea), and Paul Stacey (Canada).

The post Imagining together the future of the commons appeared first on Creative Commons.