The CC Asia Pacific Regional Meeting 2016 was held in Beijing, People’s Republic of China, From July 2 to July 3 which was hosted by CC China Mainland and attended by 19 representatives from 10 CC affiliates in the region with the support of CC. Liu Ping, one of the core members of the host team, shares her experience as the organizer of the event.

For all team members of CC China Mainland, to organize an international or regional meeting has been our long cherished wish. Finally in 2016, the year that marks the 10th anniversary of CC China Mainland, with the strong support of CC HQ and our Asia Pacific Coordinator SooHyun, and endeavors from all CC China Mainland volunteers, we made our dream of a Beijing gathering come true.

In early April, we got the encouraging and challenging news that the Beijing meeting would be in early July. After initial internal discussion, our small group of   a lawyer, teacher, web developer, photographer and marketing manager were willing to contribute from various aspects even though they were based in different locations – Beijing, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Wenzhou.

As the capital city and a metropolitan, Beijing is well-known for its history, culture and diversity, It’s also a bit noisy considering more than 20 million population! We hoped our first  Beijing gathering would be impressive and exciting and show the other side of the capital to all participants. Based on this goal and limited budget, we chose National Judges College Beijing Branch near Yanqi Lake.. Located in Northeastern part of Beijing, the lake is a quiet, beautiful place far from the city center, where 2014 APEC Meeting was held.

Attendees from Bangladesh, Japan, Mongolia, Philippines, Taiwan, India, Hong Kong, Indonesia and South Korea arrived in Beijing 1st of July. CC China Mainland were excited to see all our colleagues from different countries and regions.The spirit of volunteerism was strong – a university student volunteered for airport pickup – a well done job!

On July 2, the regional conference started with affiliate updates in the morning. Representatives from each region gave an update over what happened since the last regional meeting. Apparently many interesting and meaningful actions were taken to either reinforce the concept of CC or to promote understanding and adoption of CC licenses.

In the afternoon, international and regional issues such as affiliate network strategy discussion, regional website, and how to collaborate in open policy advocacy were covered. All of us agreed that being an important member of global CC family, we could and should do more in advocating CC. Also we spent some time for a license translation & translation sprint, community building, fundraising, and technology related issues.

3rd of July’s meeting was dedicated to Chinese speaking affiliates. In addition to follow up some discussion from the previous day, the group shared ideas to resolve key issues they faced during their translation while discussing how the group could move the  4.0 and CC0 collaborative translation project move forward. In order not to miss the rare chance to enjoy the beauty of suburb Beijing, afternoon’s meeting location was changed from indoor to outdoor.

Thanks for everybody’s endeavors to make our Beijing gathering happen, especially our Asia Pacific Coordinator SooHyun. With these experiences, we hope we will be able to hold a global summit in near future with existing & potential volunteers of CC China Mainland.

More details about the event, meeting notes, and photos are on the Wiki.

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Citizen science is the powerful idea that communities should be empowered to participate in the process of scientific inquiry, investigating the world around them and creating societal change in the process. One of the most prominent projects within the citizen and civic science movement is Public Lab, a community of individuals using inexpensive DIY techniques to act locally on environmental concerns. At Public Lab, participants are empowered to revolutionize the research process: What would it look like if collaboration started at the earliest stages of research? How can communities be involved with scientific research at all levels?

From perfecting do it yourself spectrometer mapping to monitoring pollution emissions, Public Lab believes that environmental science can be everyone’s responsibility, and that collaboration should begin at the earliest stages of scientific investigation in order to change the way people see the world around them socially, politically, and environmentally.

Public Lab is free and open for everyone to get involved. Find out more at their website.

Interview with Stevie Lewis (Outreach Manager), Liz Barry (Director of Community Development ), and Mathew Lippincott (Director of Production)

How does Public Lab view open science and citizen science as a pathway to participation in civic community?
Traditional science researcher-subject relationships remove people from the inquiry process. In Public Lab, local environmental questions are asked by people living nearby, and can be explored with tools that are low cost and easy to use. Practicing open source science increases not only the number of people who engage on environmental issues, but creates the space for everyone to explore, generate data, and define the outcomes they seek. Open science and citizen science put people in the center, empowering them with tools and resources to speak substantively about their environmental concerns.

Open licensing is built into all the Public Lab’s projects. In what ways have you seen open source effectively foster collaboration through open processes and licensing?
Open licenses set a basic expectation of sharing. Public Lab’s friendly community norms around sharing are backed with legal structures, so participants know that their authorship will be credited and downstream contributions will continue to grow the commons. When working with community groups, open licensing is the basis for community ownership and provides a sense of security. This transparency increases conversation and discussion, which reinforces the community’s ability to pursue long-term environmental justice outcomes.

Why is “open” important to the Public Lab? How do you use openness to support scientific and educational communities?
Science is fundamentally about replication, and truly independent replication without openness is impossible. Closed licenses and proprietary hardware limit independent evaluation and access to knowledge. Openness has many aspects, however, and we see openness as about more than just licenses. Consider the accessibility of communications and data: Translating content out of difficult expert discourses expands the number of people who can interact with the issues and concepts. Accessible data, such as photographic monitoring, and other visual data, helps people to engage with results. So being open isn’t only about the science itself, but about making the process accessible.

How does openness drive innovation within environmental science and other scientific work?
It is exciting to see science today thinking a lot about openness at the publication stage with a push towards publishing full datasets and articles in the open access movement. However, there is even more work to be done at the pre-press stage. This is not just about “open source between scientists” — but a project to use the principles of open source from problem identification to publication. This helps to break down barriers between science practitioners and the public, to the benefit of both. In many fields there’s little or no open collaboration, especially with the public in other parts of the process. This has contributed to a wide gap between science practice and the public; a gap which keeps key environmental and pollution knowledge from communities which need it.

When openness is the part of the focus, and communities are part of the entire process, we all work in the same space. This means that we can more easily share ideas, learn from each other, and collaboratively generate more knowledge.

What kinds of projects have you worked on that have been particularly inspiring? Have you seen your work remixed or built upon by your community in any surprising ways?
Balloon and Kite mapping, the project that launched Public Lab, continues to inspire. Our original case– making online photo maps of pollution sites (recent example in Picayune, MS)– has expanded to include photography and videography at protests, enhancing public discussions on the qualitative experiences of place and dislocation, and new photography rigs for panoramas and 3D scans.

The spectrometry project has been through many variations, and builds. There are over 70,000 spectra from these and over 8,800 contributors: https://spectralworkbench.org/stats. Where originally this project aimed at exploring questions such as “can I tell if this sample contains petrochemical oils?”, people have built and used spectrometers that look different and explore all kinds of other questions such as food oil fraud and the presence of organophosphate pesticides.

What environmental challenges are you solving for with your community right now? How do you initiate projects?
Examples of some of the challenges people have been working through on Public Lab recently have included things like: How can I measure the size of a landfill in my community, and can I determine when it has reached its capacity? Can I monitor emissions from polluters with any body sensing methods such as visual or odor monitoring, and if so, what types of violations can I catch with these? How do I capture a pollution runoff event from a development or a facility? These challenges come into Public Lab from people who bring them to the website, the online forums, and in-person events.

What’s coming up for the Public Lab?  How can people get involved?
There is a lot of exciting activity in Public Lab right now. We are working to bring structure and strength to the research culture of the community by creating systems for publishing assistance and tool versioning. There are also new ways to interact on Public Lab with the creation of activity grids on tool pages and a new “Question/Answer” feature that’s helping people to interact and share information. We also have a number of live spaces where people can collaborate, from our monthly OpenHour, to the upcoming Annual Barnraising in Louisiana this coming November. Everything from building the questions and the knowledge base on Public Lab, to creating the website itself is an open process that people can get involved in. Join us online or in person!

The post Collaboratively generating more knowledge: Public Lab’s approach to citizen science appeared first on Creative Commons.

In March we hosted the second Institute for Open Leadership. In our summary of the event we mentioned that the Institute fellows would be taking turns to write about their open policy projects. This week’s post is from Fiona MacAlister, OER Specialist at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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I was privileged to attend the second Institute for Open Leadership (IOL2), held in Cape Town, in March of this year. It was an amazing experience, during which I worked with various mentors and a small group of fellow open colleagues from around the world. One of the plusses of the Institute was hearing about the challenges that everyone faced and how they had gone about, or were going about overcoming them albeit, in some cases, with what many would consider relatively small wins. That, however, is the nature of the OER world. Lots of small wins are what ultimately lead to the big wins.

IOL Fellows atop Table Mountain, by bella_velo, CC BY 2.0

One issue that emerged is that there are no quick fixes when it comes to promoting the concept of open educational resources (OER). Tertiary institutions are a particularly difficult nut to crack, as the concept of knowledge sharing is not a popular one in what is, more often than not, an environment in which research ideas are cultivated and jealously guarded in the safe spaces of minds and offices. Not surprisingly, this does not make for fertile ground in which to plant the idea of knowledge sharing, but we persevere.

The fact that the OER movement has not quite taken off has been a cause of frustration for many of us for some time now. To those of us involved in the movement, the benefits of sharing would appear be a ‘no brainer’. However, over the course of my time as an OER Specialist at my current institution, I have had time to reflect on why the concept of OER is such a difficult one to communicate, even on a basic level.

To put things into perspective: We are on the brink of finalizing a joint Open Access/Open Educational Resources policy. We have been working on an internal online OER course and a booklet on Creative Commons licensing and OER, both of which will soon be released. We are also currently in the process of developing a range of courses together with the Office of Student Support in the Faculty of Health Sciences, which are intended to support the first year experience and will be released with an open license. I should be elated by these wins but, in my opinion, the impetus created by them will be difficult to maintain without a larger mindset change—that goes well beyond the reach of our current two-year project.

Many people become rather uncomfortable when you start to talk about openness in this somewhat esoteric vein, which is why I suspect so many OER projects are expected to produce facts, stats, quantity and research. What I think mitigates against the full success of projects which use this sort of approach, and structure, is that the concept of openness is not, at its heart, a purely quantitative or researchable one. True openness, and a willingness to share, will not flourish in an environment that is dominated, primarily, by a production line or microscopic analysis. It seems to me that we have become too cautious about addressing the real face of openness which is, in essence, an altruistic project which should ultimately benefit the world at large. In my opinion, it is the main reason why so many open initiatives disappear into the ether once the funding dries up. We have lost sight of the real spirit of the open movement because we are reluctant to admit that it doesn’t lend itself readily to the commercial, quantitative structures of our world.

We have been conditioned to believe that by being truly open to the world and people around us that we will lose something of ourselves and gain nothing in return. In some circumstances this may be true but, in reality, the world will gain something from us and something of our unique perspective on the world. All of us have knowledge to share, openly and freely, that will be of benefit to others and that can be repurposed in a way that will communicate that benefit across a range of cultures.

Openness and trust go hand-in-glove. Trust can only come from a willingness to share which, in the final analysis, stems from a concern for the common good. It really is as simple as that. That, in my opinion, is the foundation upon which the future of the open movement lies. If we don’t come from that starting point, we will remain trapped in theoretical frameworks, and the initial impetus of the movement will eventually be relegated to the world of academic research. Is that something we really want, or do we still believe that the open movement will ultimately be of benefit to the world at large?

The post Cultivating a Culture of Knowledge Sharing appeared first on Creative Commons.

The shiny glass and metal world of the average technology stock photo too often displays a homogenous representation of tech workers. When the Women of Color in Tech chat (#wocintechchat) began last year, its founders, the NYC-based technologists Stephanie Morillo and Christina Morillo (no relation) knew that they needed to widen that lens.

In the last year, #wocintechchat has provided Twitter chats, community dialogue, scholarships, and partnerships to provide more opportunities for women of color working in technology. The nearly 500 CC licensed photos have been used in a variety of media, providing positive representations of women of color working in tech.

The widespread acclaim and adoption of the photos has been exciting, though not entirely surprising to Morillo and Morillo, who credit the CC license as one of the reasons for its success. The photos can be found on Flickr, and the #wocintechchat organization welcomes women and non-binary people of color to join their community.

The #wocintechchat and stock photos grew out of a need for better representation of women of color working in tech. How do you feel that CC-licensed stock photos can help meet that need?
Our main goal was to get these photos disseminated and used as widely as possible. Accessibility was our number one priority, and we knew by making these photos available under a CC license, people would be more inclined to use them. We felt that a CC license helped accomplish our goal to make these photos free while ensuring that our organization would be acknowledged as the creators of these photos.

Have you seen any particularly cool or creative uses of the photos? Have you been surprised to see them pop up in any unexpected places?
We’ve seen them in more places than we can count! The company InVision uses them frequently in newsletters, and we recently worked with Buffer to make the photos available in their new social image tool, Pablo. Colleagues and friends will usually ping us whenever this image pops up because both of us (Christina and Stephanie) are in the photo and we’re both the founders of the initiative. Our photos have also ended up in places like TechCrunch, in social media images for tech firms, and recently to promote tech scholarships.

Were you expecting the photos to have such wide acclaim and adoption? Do you think that the use of the CC license contributes to this?
We knew this had the potential to be big because the concept was both novel and obvious: of course we need more images of women of color technologists, but no one has done it before. And the use of the CC license was certainly key. It’s not every day that people make stock images free to use and we know that sometimes people don’t use images because they’d have to pay for them.

We wanted the images to be used in creative ways, and having them available with a CC license has meant they’ve been used by large companies, small companies, college professors, conference speakers, bloggers, and journalists.

Why did you choose to use CC for these photos? Did you consider sharing the photos in any other manner?
We were certain that we wanted to use CC for these photos and didn’t consider any other manner. We knew that Flickr was the best platform for both ease of use and searchability, and we also liked that the platform displays the CC license with the photos. So it was a no-brainer for us.

What’s next for #WOCinTechChat? What kinds of future projects are you looking forward to accomplishing?
We have lots of ideas floating around and we’re both still active in the tech scene and frequently use the #WOCinTechChat Twitter handle to share industry opportunities and news. We’re taking things as they come and are just as excited as everyone else to see where we head to next!

The post “This had the potential to be big”: an interview with #wocintechchat appeared first on Creative Commons.

Diane Peters and Michael Carroll
August 30, 2016

Creative Commons has requested permission to file an amicus brief in litigation between Great Minds and FedEx Office and Print Services, Inc.  At the center of the litigation is the proper interpretation of the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license, known as BY-NC-SA. The case is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York before Judge Hurley. While we rarely file amicus briefs, we feel strongly that the correct interpretation of the legal code here is essential to the utility of the NC licenses for both licensors and licensees, including those using any of the more than 370 million works that are licensed under one of CC’s NC licenses.

In this case, Great Minds claims that FedEx Office violated the terms of the BY-NC-SA license Great Minds applied to educational materials when FedEx Office copied material at the direction of school districts for non commercial use in classrooms. While it is undisputed that the use of these materials by public school districts is non commercial (as defined in the CC license), the claim against FedEx Office is that it cannot make copies for the school districts—even if it does so at the direction of the school districts and solely in service of that permitted NC use. CC disagrees with this interpretation and has requested permission to explain to the court why the license clearly allows this activity under these circumstances.

Entities using CC-licensed works must be free to act as entities do—including through employees and the contractors they engage in their service. To preclude an entity from using contractors to carry out otherwise-authorized work is not supported by the law, and is not prohibited by the terms and conditions of the NC license. A contrary understanding would mean that in many cases, a bona fide noncommercial licensee could not engage any service that charged a standard fee in the course of the non commercial user’s exercise of its legitimate rights under the license. Instead, only those with the means and resources to own all points in the reproduction and distribution chain could use NC-licensed material.  If that were so, the value of the license would be significantly diminished.

As a result, we believe this litigation is important to the usability of the NC licenses, which feature prominently in the OER ecosystem at present. Moreover, we pledged to our community during the 4.0 versioning process we would do more to clarify how the NC limitation works in the practical world. We will continue to work closely in collaboration with CC United States as this litigation unfolds. Watch here for updates as this case progresses.

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