Almanaque Azul is a group of Panamanian environmentalists, artists, and explorers that began the process of creating a travel guide for the beaches of the Republic of Panama in 2005 through a blog that chronicled the amazing cultural and natural diversity of various small towns and deserted beaches.

Over the years, dozens of volunteers reported from along the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean coasts of this thin Central American isthmus, otherwise known for the Canal that goes through it (though more recently for the “Panama Papers” leak of documents related to corporate tax-avoidance!)

The images and reports from volunteers were carefully edited into the Almanaque Azul website, which quickly became a popular point of reference for local travellers. The website was published under the Spanish port of the CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 licence. The scope of Almanaque Azul gradually became more activist, as large-scale tourism development and a booming real estate market for coastal land drove people off the land and caused environmental destruction throughout the country. We started promoting a more sustainable community and nature based tourism, which was being largely ignored by the market and regulatory agencies.

In 2009 the Almanaque Azul team began work on compiling the research done by the volunteers over the years into a book. We decided to go beyond the coasts and to cover the entire country, including rivers, mountains and inland towns. The result was the first edition of the Almanaque Azul Panama Travel Guide, a 432-page book published in Spanish in 2013 under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 unported license, with a print run of 2500 copies. We did our own, very limited distribution but even then we sold out in less than two years and the book became somewhat of a cult object.

By then we were already working on the second edition, which we just published last March. This time, we collected $20,000 from a crowdfunding campaign, which we used to print 6000 copies. The book grew to 560 pages and the license used was a 4.0 international license. More than 100 people contributed research, text, photographs, and illustrations for this edition. We have learned a lot about distribution, marketing and inventory control as well, so we expect to do much better on the economic side of publishing this edition.

We also published an e-book version of the first edition, which we sold on Amazon, under the same license and with no copy-protection.

We used almost entirely free software tools for both editions. The first one was laid out using Scribus, for the second edition we used LaTeX, which turned out to be the perfect choice for a book this large and complex. We had to invest some money in developing a LaTeX class with the book specs, which we plan to release but still haven’t decided whether to use a BY NC-SA, a BY-SA, or just an attribution license.

Using Creative Commons licenses is a natural choice for us, especially since it is a collaborative project where we want the information to spread as far and wide as possible, where everyone should be able to use, remix and republish the content. We felt it would be only fair to restrict commercial reuse, which also made it easier for some people to agree to contribute material.

We did publish some of the pictures from our volunteers and contributors on a different project, La Mochila, intended to support science education in Panama. Since we added all of those images to Wikimedia Commons, we used a CC Attribution-Share Alike License, which required us to do a bit of convincing of the institutions that contributed images, and the Creative Commons Panama Chapter team helped us.

You can check our original website (which is offline at the moment) on the Internet Archive. The book’s promotional website is here.

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In a couple of weeks in Toronto, we will welcome a global community of advocates working to improve education and access to information and culture through copyright reform and open policy. The summit’s Policy and Advocacy track will focus on increasing the effectiveness of our community in the current and future hotbeds of law and policy change. We hope you join us in sharing your experiences, learning about what others have been doing, and collaborating with us on education and advocacy activities.

Check out the full programme, and view some of the highlights from the Policy and Advocacy track below.

Fixing copyright for Education

This session on Friday afternoon, led by CC Portugal’s Teresa Nobre focuses on sharing research and campaign experience on influencing the current copyright reform underway in Europe. If you want a sneak peek of what they have been doing, take a look at the campaign.

Campaigning for Copyright Reform: New Perspectives and Lessons Learned

Here’s a session that will be led by Vladimir Garay from Derechos Digitales. It will build on the perspectives and lessons learned from advocating for copyright reform from Uruguay to Europe to elsewhere, and explore new ideas and approaches for law reform and open policy adoption worldwide.

Index, Map, Registry: How can we Track Open Policies Around the World?

Alek Tarkowski of Creative Commons Poland leads this session, building on the “State of Open Policy” report, which provides an overview of open policies in the spheres of education, heritage, science, and data. This session showcases the outcomes and tries to figure out with your help how can the 2017 report be an even better resource.

We look forward to seeing everyone at the summit!

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At the end of April, I’ll be joining hundreds of open culture advocates at the Creative Commons Summit in Toronto. The program is looking amazing and I’m looking forward to meeting up with friends and colleagues, both old and new.

I’ll be wearing several hats at the Summit, and I invite everyone to come and chat with me about any of them!

Greenpeace

To begin with, I can’t wait to be in a place where people believe that “sharing is at the core of successful societies”. I want to talk about how we’re all sharing this critical asset: Our Planet. All of us need to collaborate on ecological issues – it’s the only way we’re going to solve some of the global problems we’re facing.

At Greenpeace, we’re redesigning our global web presence to engage with people and to help them act on behalf of our planet. The project, code named Planet 4, is the first openly run project of its size at Greenpeace International. In the workshop “Negotiating for Open”, we’ll use Planet 4 as a case study and explore open decision and design frameworks to help you and your organization establish relationships that can achieve global impacts.

User-driven and community-based design projects are impactful and fulfilling. In the redesign of Greenpeace.org a remix of the Open Decision Framework, the Open Design Kit and community collaboration is of highest importance. In this interactive session, I’d like to share my experiences in a hands-on way. Participants can bring their ideas, their businesses, their strategic directions, and together we’ll help each other set up structures and processes that invite people in. We’ll give advice, talk through issues and create a working atmosphere that helps people solve real world problems.

The open community is full of people with the skills and attitudes that could truly affect global change. I’m hopeful that wearing my Greenpeace hat will help open advocates see the value in sharing with activists and contributing to the environmental movement.

We Are Open Co-op

Not only do we all need to understand how our planet fits into the idea of the Commons, we need to talk about openness outside of what we call Open Source or Open Culture communities. Building bridges is the future of the commons. I want to help find and illuminate connections between different communities.

I’ve spent my career working at the crossroads between technology and a variety of different industries, leading to the combinations of: Technology + Media, Technology + Education, Technology + Activism. Spreading the beliefs, processes and culture of open from the tech community and into other sectors is part of the reason I am a founding member of the We Are Open Coop. Open principles and practices have gone mainstream in the past few years – from open government to open data, open science to open education, we’re working to connect people to the ideals of open.

Over the last year it’s also become more and more clear to me how much open and co-ops have in common. Reading Hal Plokin’s excellent post and attending the Open: 2017 Platform Cooperatives conference are just two recent things that have me thinking about finding ways to translate between open communities and co-op communities. Along with Doug Belshaw, a fellow co-founder of the We Are Open Co-op, I’ll be running a session called “Help us forge links between co-ops and the commons”.

By the end of this session, we hope to have some sort of an artefact that visualizes or structures the commonalities between the Open Movement and the Co-op Movement. We’ll build off the International Principles of Co-operation to create amap or framework (or comic strip!) to help people from both movements understand how they can work together to build a most just and equitable world.

More things to talk to me about

I’m looking forward to digging in deep and having meaningful discussions about sharing, community, and collaboration. I’m bound to get into a discussion about the work we’re doing at Opensource.com, and I always have plenty of thoughts on open education, remix, diversity and inclusion…Basically, just come find me and let’s see what we have to talk about. You can also reach out on twitter in advance of the Summit.

Let’s see how our sharing helps light up the commons.

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This week a coalition of scholarly publishers, researchers, and nonprofit organizations launched the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a project to promote the unrestricted open access to scholarly citation data. From the website:

Citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an explanation for how we know facts. They allow us to attribute and credit scientific contributions, and they enable the evaluation of research and its impacts. In sum, citations are the most important vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge.

There’s now open citation data from 14 million scholarly papers. Both open access and subscription-based scholarly publishers are contributing to the project. These publishers include the Association for Computing Machinery, PLOS, Wiley, SAGE Publishing, Springer Nature, eLife, Taylor & Francis, and many others.

The goals of project is to promote the availability of data on citations that are “structured, separable, and open.” According to the I4OC website:

Structured means the data representing each publication and each citation instance are expressed in common, machine-readable formats, and that these data can be accessed programmatically. Separable means the citation instances can be accessed and analyzed without the need to access the source bibliographic products (such as journal articles and books) in which the citations are created. Open means the data are freely accessible and reusable.

In order to ensure that the data are freely accessible and reusable, the structured citation metadata will be published using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, which means that the data may be used without restriction. CC0 enables creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.

Congratulations to I4OC on the launch of this important initiative. We hope that the open sharing of citation data can aid in the discoverability of all types of research, and generate new and interesting connections in our understanding of scientific and scholarly works.

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It’s been a big year for community at Creative Commons. At summit we’ll move ahead on the Global Network Strategy. We have identified platforms for people to start analysing and have network discussions for deeper conversations. The Global Network Strategy began at the last Global Summit in Seoul in 2015. No doubt you’ve either read the document, participated in a webinar or in person meeting or joined the Slack channel. This is the first time CC has spent time seriously looking at the affiliate network and the broader community. We heard you, we’re ready to jump in.

With all this energy, the Community & Movement track is filled with new voices as well as established members. If you want to learn how CC licenses work in the wild, be sure to visit the session with projects like Book Dash, African Storybook Initiative and Pratham in their session Addressing the Scarcity of Multilingual Reading Resources for Children.

Look out also for a discussion on CC in the South Seas: Lessons Learned in Aotearoa New Zealand from CC New Zealand Public Lead Elizabeth Heritage. CC New Zealand has always been a strong team, with effective newsletters and content, and this talk is sure to be inspiring to community members of all types.

Open Science nerds don’t worry! We’ve got you covered in Community & Movement. Brian Bot from SAGE Bionetworks will be there to share insights on their project in decentralized biomedical research ecosystems. Interested in hadron colliders? The ATLAS experiment at CERN is will be in Toronto to talk about Outreach and Education by large Scientific (or just Physics) collaborations.

Ready to get your hands dirty and dig in? Open educational resources (OER), Galleries, libraries and Museums (we call them ‘GLAM’), and copyright reform they will have their own space to discuss in depth regarding their actual challenges and how our movement will actively contribute to those spaces. No matter what your level of experience, join the conversation!

In addition, at summit we have three great discussions: one on Building a Culture of Gratitude and another called How Can we Work Together? Another exciting session is called Thinking BIG for the Commons.

Come find your people at the Community & Movement track! In the meantime, you can find me on Slack in the #cc-summit channel. Looking forward to seeing you in Toronto.

With Gratitude.

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