What if every time you opened up a new tab you could spice up your day with an artwork selected from the collection of Europeana? Thanks to a new chrome browser plugin developed by Creative Commons Netherlands affiliate Kennisland you can.
Art up your tab is a simple browser plugin that will display a full page artwork from the collection of Europeana when you open a new tab in any browser. All artworks that are displayed by Art up your tab are either in the public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution or Attribution Share alike license. The Images are presented in full screen without any text – clicking on the image allows the user to discover additional information about the artwork on display.
Europeana.eu is a platform that brings together digitized heritage of more than 3,700 cultural and academic institutions across Europe including gems like “Night Watch” by Rembrandt to a 18th-century corset, from photos of paintings by Michelangelo. At this time, the database of Europeana contains approximately 30 million images 7,5 million of which are either in the Public Domain or available under free CC licenses.
The initial version of Art Up Your Tab, which has been realised with a contribution from the Dutch Network for Digital Heritage, showcases works provided by Dutch heritage institutions. The images displayed by the plugin are constantly updated and over time the plugin will display images from cultural heritage institution from other European countries as well.
In January we urged the new Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, to make sure that whoever she appoints as the next Register of Copyrights should put the public at the center of the work of the Copyright Office. Currently the Register leads the Copyright Office, an institution that sits within the Library of Congress. The Register is a key position responsible for—you guessed it—copyright registrations, and also influences copyright policy in the United States.
But now, a bill has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would alter the role of the Register, and possibly the future of the Copyright Office itself. Last week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Ranking Member John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) introduced H.R. 1695, the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017. The bill would give the President—not the Librarian of Congress—the power to appoint the Register of Copyrights. The position would be subject to Senate confirmation and would last for a term of 10 years (with the possibility of renewal).
There is a lot of work to be done in upgrading and modernizing the important processes around the Office’s strategic priority “to make copyright records easily searchable and widely available to authors, entrepreneurs, and all who need them”. It’s unclear how changing the confirmation and reporting structure of the Register would serve that priority. But it is clear that the shift could further politicize the role, and thus embolden the political agendas of several of the largest publishing associations and entertainment industry businesses that are currently cheering this legislation.
The mission of the Library of Congress is “to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.” The Register of Copyrights should continue to report to the Librarian of Congress. Moving this position out from underneath the public interest mission of the Library will only continue to nudge the balance of copyright toward serving the interests of the incumbent players, and will ignore new creators and users.
Publicly tracking how a government spends its money is more than just posting documents online – making sense of budgets is crucial to providing oversight and interpretation of government spending. Working to demystify this process is at the root of the Open Budgets India project, which is fighting for a more free and open approach to budgets in India.
A beta project with 5,300 datasets from 333 sources, the portal provides access to budgets at every level of government in India, providing APIs and visualizations for previously obscure data. The project also created a useful FAQ to help people understand how government budget data works, how it differs from other kinds of data, and why it matters. Funded by a number of institutional partners, the portal has served more than 3,000 users looking for visualizations and information on open budgets at local and federal levels.
Why open budgets? Why are open budgets important to open government?
Government budgets are a comprehensive statement of government finances for a financial year, translating government’s promises and priorities as expenditures and its receipts to meet such demand. Open Budgets Data is government budget data that is publicly accessible (uploaded online on a timely basis) in a machine-readable and reusable format covering all data points (not just analysis), freely available and legally open to use for everyone without any restriction. Over the years, open budgets data has become vital to build trust in government’s financial activities and sustaining transparency in its policy decisions. It also enables citizens, policy makers, civil societies, journalists, and other key players to engage in budgetary processes and strengthen participation and insight into budgetary policies in the country.
In order to have open and effective governance, governments need to invest and commit on complete budget transparency, i.e. full disclosure of open budgets data on revenues, allocations and expenditures across the public sector. Unfortunately, in India public access to budgets diminishes as we go deeper from the level of the Union Government (Central Government) to the subnational level. As a result, the use and analysis of budget data has been restricted, and the scope for citizen’s engagement with government budgets has been limited. In such a backdrop, Open Budgets India (OBI), a comprehensive and user-friendly open data portal, facilitates free, easy and timely access to relevant data on government budgets in India.
What are the greatest successes and obstacles you’ve faced with this project? How have you seen it used so far?
From the very inception of the project, we have collaborated with a diverse team of researchers, technologists, data scientists, policy hackers and groups of volunteers to co-create this portal. We have embraced open-source technology, design, visualizations and documentation to go several steps ahead and become an open-source initiative, facilitating transparent and accessible co-development. We have automated conversion of budget PDFs into clean CSVs, created time-series data and developed scalable visualizations. This has helped us to scale our data mining techniques across various tiers of governments. Also, we forked CKAN, an open-source data portal platform and customized it as per our needs. Use of open-source softwares has reduced our development time manifolds thus we have kept all our work in open too, so that other organizations can freely reuse it and may help us to make better systems. Also, with the help of our automated data pipeline, we were able to publish machine readable budget data from Union Budget 2017-18 in less than 24 hours, enabling timely and informed budget analysis.
One of the major obstacles towards budget transparency in India is a lack of consistency and standardization in budget data formats across years and government bodies. Few states still avoid publishing their budget documents online and other have fonts and character encoding issues, making it difficult for us to parse those. When it comes to disaggregated detailed data for State Expenditure and Receipts, format varies drastically as no two states follow a similar format for publishing their documents. Some of the budget documents are available only in local languages, thus requiring efforts in translation for interoperability. These issues make it difficult for us to produce crucial machine readable data for state budgets. However, we have developed a technique to generate CSVs for Karnataka and Sikkim, which we plan to scale up for other states in near future.
Unavailability of budget documents online and heterogeneity of the formats further increases as we move down to districts and municipalities. We even need to file RTIs (Right to Information) to several government bodies to acquire these important budget documents. Publishing of such information in a timely and accessible manner can strengthen monitoring of public expenditure as well as engagement of people with budgetary processes. That, in turn, can lead to significant improvements in the manner in which such allocations are spent.
In last two months, more than 3K unique users have visited the portal, with highest traffic on data visualizations followed by state and union budget documents. Users are finding CSVs and time-series datasets useful for doing their own budget analysis. It is also encouraging for us to know that other data portals and communities are using Open Budgets India as a source for budget data. For example, the urban data portal, OpenCity.in has credited OBI as a data source for couple of municipal corporation budgets.
Data sectors on Open Budgets India
How have governments reacted to having their budgets online and open? What kinds of responses how you seen from various departments?
On 27th January 2017, we conducted a public consultation on ‘Opening Up Access to Budget Data in India’ in New Delhi. The consultation included a panel discussion with experts on what should government authorities and civil society organisations pursue, in the coming years, so as to ensure that people get free, easy and timely access to relevant budget data at various levels of government. Sumit Bose, member, Expenditure Management Commission and former Finance Secretary, advised the project, saying, “A lot of hard work must have gone into developing this project, as budget preparation itself is a humongous exercise. Besides, experts, the volunteers need to be recognized, as they must have contributed in a big way in developing this excellent portal. I’m optimistic about this project… However, I feel that there’s no deliberate attempt by state governments, barring exceptions, not to put machine readable documents online. Probably, they never felt the need or it simply didn’t occur. In the next stage, the CBGA needs to tell state governments about their requirement.”
Deputy Comptroller and Auditor General, K Ganga suggested a few guidelines to strengthen the demand for making budget data available in public domain as well. She said, “Transparency can only be achieved once the common man outside of academics and governance understands budget data and use it. Things are done by keeping only the experts in mind. Besides, communication channels with every stakeholder be kept open even through vernacular medium, ensure that people can access data in various kinds of devices, create an environment by encouraging people to provide data, and pester the government to share data and information.”
Your project aims for accessibility and ease of use within government data. How are you working to make that data accessible despite a variety of file types and standards across organizations?
One of the major additions is a comprehensive metadata for budget datasets, which drastically increases searchability of documents. We have also classified datasets by tiers of government, developmental sectors(like Agriculture and Allied Activities, Health, Education, etc.) and data formats. Apart from adding machine readable files(CSVs), we have also created a number of time-series datasets enabling users to comprehend various trends in budgetary allocations across fiscal years. For Municipal Corporations, we have developed an unified format called as Budget Summary Statement to produce aggregated figures comparable across the municipalities. For each dataset, we have clubbed all the available file formats i.e. CSV, XLS and PDF as multiple resources in a single package so that users can preview and download the format of their choice. We also provide an API to programmatically access all 5.1K+ datasets from our portal, this enables developers to automate their search and download processes.
Are you accepting contributors? If so, how could people get involved?
Thus, the spirit of commons is at the core of our initiative, we are happy to seek more support from various diverse communities. Budget researchers, policy makers, civil societies, journalists and data contributors can reach out to us at info@openbudgetsindia.org. While technologists, data scientists, visualizations experts and designers can directly collaborate with us in our design and development cycle via Github. Together we aim to continue our efforts in making India’s budgets open, usable and easy to comprehend.
Last week the open education community convened in Cape Town South Africa for OEGlobal 17. Convening in Cape Town had historical significance as it commemorated the tenth anniversary of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, which is a statement of principle, strategy, and commitment put forward in 2007 to help the open education movement grow. OEGlobal 17 provided a forum to celebrate and reflect on open education advancements over the past 10 years and consider new ways to broaden and deepen open education efforts going forward.
One of the best things about OEGlobal is the diversity of its international participants providing an incredible range of perspectives from open education initiatives around the world. I enjoyed hearing about open credentials and radical openness in the Czech Republic, Norway’s digital learning arena and sustainable large-scale model for Open Educational Resources (OER), and the pragmatism and insights from South Africa’s own Siyavula initiative. Europe, Asia, Latin America, the global south, North America, open education is truly a global movement.
Creative Commons was very active at OEGlobal 17. Ryan Merkley, Kelsey Wiens, Cable Green, Paul Stacey, Alek Tarkowski, and Delia Browne collectively demonstrated CC’s commitment to open education through a range of sessions including:
The Cape Town Open Education Declaration +10 Panel and Celebration
While the early days of open education were largely about OER, things have evolved a lot over the last 10 years. Now we’re talking about open educational practices, open pedagogy, open education policy, MOOC’s, entire OER degrees, and open education research. Despite this clear evolution, open education is still not considered mainstream. In the closing session a panel and the audience engaged in putting forward ideas for advancing the movement further – the new Cape Town Open Education Declaration +10 ideas will be forthcoming in the weeks ahead. My own personal contribution was to suggest that the various open education movements, including OER, Open Access research publishing, open data, and open science are all currently operating as independent silos and may be more impactful if efforts were put into unifying them into a more synergistic whole.
The vision of the 2007 Cape Town Open Education Declaration is alive and well. From the statement:
“We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.” I’m proud that Creative Commons helps make this possible. Congrats to open educators everywhere.
Chad Crouch AKA Podington Bear via the Free Music Archive
In 2007, the artist Chad Crouch began releasing three instrumental songs per week under the pseudonym Podington Bear. Crouch revealed his identity in July 2008 upon the release of a box set of his work, ending a speculative mystery covered in NPR, KEXP, Wired, and the Globe and Mail. According to his bio on Free Music Archive, “The experiment inspired countless new works of art, and translated into commercial success.”
An early podcast innovator, the Podington Bear project was licensed completely under CC before being posted to the Free Music Archive, where Crouch has featured many of his subsequent releases as well.
In addition to his work as Podington Bear, Crouch runs the influential Portland, OR based label HUSH Records and posts his new work on the Sound of Picture Library, a large collection of his instrumental music for creators. By running his own platform, Crouch is able to share his music on his own terms, providing makers the licenses that they need for specific projects.
You can hear Crouch’s music on a large variety of podcasts, documentaries, advertisements, and more. Much of his oeuvre can be found at Sound of Picture Library or at his website.
Why did you decide to stay anonymous for so long despite your prolific output? Why did you just ultimately disclose your identity?
Anonymity at that time was attractive because I was just wanting to try something new and at that time when I started making music, I was releasing it as a podcast, so each podcast was just a song. That’s when podcasting was whatever you wanted it to be. Today it’s either scripted or unscripted, there’s people talking, or there’s music or not, but generally speaking it’s more a story-driven podcasting than simply just the music. At any rate, it was something new that I wanted to try and I wanted to not have any baggage related to any prior output. It was attractive to me for that reason. Plus, I run a record label, and have done so for the last almost 20 years now. Podcasting, giving away music in those days, in 2007, it was still … the verdict wasn’t in. Is it good business to be giving away your music? I don’t know if people even know now, but given that I was essentially giving away downloads of music, and that’s how I was releasing it, I didn’t want it attached to me and my record label, just as an experiment.
I think the second part of your question was why did I reveal my identity? It started with a mistake, and so the mistake was, with every mp3, you have a metadata tag which has the song name and the album name, so forth and so on, just some added data. Well, the program I was using also put my real name in there somehow, and so I figured, well if anyone found that, that would be obvious. Plus I thought it was about time. That’s why. No big. It’s not like hundreds of thousands of people wanted to know, it’s just that I was ready to not keep it a secret anymore, is all.
At a recent event I attended, a number of public radio producers were saying that they felt like your work was kind of like the gold standard for free music online. How have you used your music to maximize for impact as an artist?
Wow, that’s a nice compliment. The gold standard for free music online. Well, given that I started creating music and it has always been instrumental, that alone makes it more useful for storytelling because it doesn’t get in the way of the story with words that say something else that the story isn’t saying. If I was a singer, or I wanted to make vocal music, it wouldn’t work very well for other people’s means. I realize more, as the years pass, that people have an interest in using my music. Initially, my involvement with the Free Music Archive in particular was minimal. I only had a few tracks available. Then I realized, this is what … A lot of these people are using this music. I should just open the flood gates and let it all pour out and see what happens. That’s what I did.
How did opening the floodgates up maximize for impact? Did you find that you found that your music was more widely used or more widely discoverable? What did you find when you did that?
Like anything that’s word of mouth, if it’s good, it helps get the word out. Certainly, as far as internet presence, you really can’t compete with the Free Music Archive. It’s a hub with so much traffic. I could get praise from all kinds of bloggers, and they could post my songs, but still not as many people would hear it as just naturally do through coming to the Free Music Archive. Almost solely, based on their search engine optimization, they just rise to the top of just so many Google searches. They built it, and people came. Being a part of that project, I would say is the single biggest driver.
Then, as part of the NPR set. I think a few years ago, a lot of my repertoire was being played on This American Life in some of their shows that have a lot of influence. Usually they originally heard about me on there and other types of podcasters, and which podcasts are influential.
Why did you decide to use Creative Commons in particular to license your first project?
That’s a good question. I think I embraced it in the same way I embraced experimenting with the vehicle of the podcast. I forget the exact origin of Creative Commons, but I do remember picking up … I think it was a copy of Wired Magazine, and it came with a CD and it had Beastie Boys on the cover or something like that, and there was a big, huge, center article about this new thing called Creative Commons. The CD contained songs from artists that so many people have heard of, like Beastie Boys, and it encouraged you to remix material that was on this CD, or do things with it that were less copyright, or less copyright restricted.
That appealed to me, and then I kind of kept that in the back of my head. It probably was eight years … I don’t know how many years later, but that I decided to embrace that fully with my music, because I was putting it out there anyway. Putting it out with Creative Commons seemed like a good fit for me.
Have you found that putting the license on has changed things for you, changed things in terms of how it’s recognized, how it’s found, how it’s distributed across the web?
It’s a prerequisite of involvement with the Free Music Archive, but I had adopted it before the Free Music Archive. It’s changed the way it’s distributed, most definitely. Yes, completely. To be honest, the way I compose, too. Originally, I was much more concerned with my musical output, with creating a song that had a beginning, middle, and end. Now as long as the piece of music has a mood, and I usually include the beginning and end, just because I’m a completist, but it doesn’t have to be a first chorus, first song type of construction. A lot of my music is quite short, now. CC has informed both the way I distribute my music and the way I make my music, honestly. I make things that have musical voices in them. Like just solo piano, for example, because I know that that’s something that people find useful for their storytelling in either video, podcast, whatever. It’s completely changed my output over these years.
Speaking of your output, you’re a pretty prolific songwriter and artist. What’s your process? How do you write so much music so quickly?
Well it started ten years ago, and there were years where I did very little. A benefit of having done it for so long and having so much material is that there is an income stream of people who find the music, but they also need it for commercial use and they’re perfectly happy to pay me some money to use it. As far as my process, it’s pretty simple. I use the MIDI controller. I use a piece of software, and there honestly aren’t a lot of acoustic instruments that I’m using to do my recordings, and so now I can kind of just make it all on a desktop and making it digitally is pretty easy to do. I think there are people who are far more prolific than I am.
Your project, Sound of Picture Library, is an extensive library of your music with a variety of licenses for different types of media. Can you tell me more about that? What’s worked, and what have you had to tweak, and how does it feel to be an independent artist who’s in control of your media output?
I’m not a programmer, so that part of it is difficult. Having a database of songs that people can search and that is fairly responsive so people don’t say, “This is taking too long” that’s useful enough that they can find their way to something hopefully that will work for them. That has been difficult and a learning process – there’s no site template for exactly that kind of thing. I have enough facility with computers and stuff that I’ve kind of felt my way along. As far as keeping control of my music, I was just used to that already with running a label, so I kind of know how the sausage is made with regard to the leasing music.
As far as selling licenses online, I’m certainly not the only one who has a library of music solely created by them who sells licenses, but it seemed a good fit for me, just because I was doing it anyway, but it was taking a lot of my time to deal with emails and negotiate a price and that kind of thing. I would say one of the hardest things about it is coming up with pricing that works for everyone, because there’s so many different needs that people have for different projects. It’s amazing. I wanted to meet people at the very low end while not leaving too much on the table for people who have huge budgets to complete advertisements or something online. I try to keep it competitive and fair and just trust people that use them.
Ultimately, sometimes it works out that their project is complicated or it doesn’t fit with the prescribed licenses that I do offer, so I still am dealing with people through email and doing some negotiation. All in all, it’s been a really interesting development for me as a musician and entrepreneur. It’s been growing every year to the point where I’m quitting other jobs, recently, to give more of my energy and time to making the library and administrating it.
What advice would you give to an independent artist who wants to do a similar project and license their own music?
The advice I would give is try not to be too precious with it. Don’t try and control. Don’t be worried about people stealing things. I feel like a lot of musicians try and limit, but I think limiting access to music in a way where you’re trying to always sell it and get the most money out of it is detrimental to exposure. I would say, have fun. Make music that interests you. Make music that sounds good to you, and share it. In the beginning, do not try and make money. Just share it. Share it as much as possible, and if the Free Music Archive feels like a fit, great. If Creative Commons feels like a fit, great. This will help you along with people discovering you.
Last week the open education community convened in Cape Town South Africa for 
