Banner by Open Education Consortium / CC BY

Open Education Week is an annual convening of the global open education movement to share ideas, new open education projects and to raise awareness about open education and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. Open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve education access, affordability and effectiveness. Participation in all events and use of all resources are free and open to everyone.

There are many ways to participate:

• Connect with fellow Open Education Week participants on social media with:
  • #openeducationwk
  • YouTube/openeducationweek
  • FaceBook/openeducationwk
• Check out and participate in events throughout the week (most are online, some are in-person)
• Review shared open education resources and projects
• Teach someone at your university, college, school, government or company about open education and CC licenses

While all of the events are worthy of your attendance, here is a quick preview of events to be hosted by Creative Commons affiliates and staff:

• OER and Creative Commons in Brno (CC Czech Republic)
• OER Student Conference and video on the importance of OER organized by Alliance for OER in Macedonia (CC Macedonia)
• OER in the Arab World (CC Arab World)
• Creative Commons Road Trip (including open education) (CC Aotearoa New Zealand)
• Education Innovations with Creative Commons – from OER, to Pedagogy, to Policy (CC staff)
• Open Policy Network: Launched! (CC staff)
• Institute for Open Leadership (CC staff)
• Sustainability Strategies For Open Educational Resources (CC staff)
• K12 OER Collaborative (CC staff)
• 24-hour twitter event: #AllAboutOpen on Wednesday, 11 March (CC staff)

We look forward to seeing you online!

Creative Commons has long celebrated everyone who uses our licenses. TeamOpen profiles give a good sense of the diversity of use and purpose. The creative ways individuals, not-for-profits, governments, and businesses use our licenses is inspiring.

For every TeamOpen example there are many others who want to move in that direction but don’t know how. The question we frequently hear is, “How do I earn a living, pay the bills, and keep the lights on if I openly license my work and give it away for free?” This question is asked not just by entrepreneurs but by people in non-profits and government too.

We are pleased to announce, through gracious funding from the Hewlett Foundation, that we’re launching a Creative Commons open business models initiative aiming squarely at showing how our licenses can, and are, used by businesses, non-profits, and governments.

Building an open source business by Libby Levi licensed CC BY-SA

We aim to help businesses see how to use and contribute to the commons in a way that aligns with the norms and values of the commons, while at the same time operating as a business. We want to show what sustainability models look like. We’re planning to generate designs for how to move from closed to open. We want to provide models for businesses whose aim is to provide products and services that have both economic and social value. We aim to make visible how open business models work and provide tools and strategies for designing and developing your own.

We want to do this work in a community-based way with all of you. So this blog post is an open call for participation.

The Creative Commons open business models initiative provides you with a set of interactive tools which you can use to design your own open business models. You can use the tools to model anything from a new startup open business to an existing open business, or something in between.

The Creative Commons open business models initiative asks you to share the models you come up with including your analysis of your own models and provide suggestions for improvement of the open business model tools themselves.

Creative Commons invites you to participate in these open business model activities:

1. Join us in designing, developing, and iterating a set of interactive Creative Commons open business model tools that anyone can use to design an open business model.
2. Use these open business model tools yourself to generate your own open business model(s).
3. Share the results of your participation including the open business models you generate.
4. Provide feedback and recommendations for improving the Creative Commons open business model tools and process.
5. Partner directly with Creative Commons on developing an open business model for your specific initiative.
6. Participate in a Creative Commons workshop on generating open business models.
7. Contribute to a Creative Commons open business models report.

See our Creative Commons Open Business Models Participation Activities document for further details on each of these activities, including specifics for participation, and links to the tools.

We’re excited about doing this work with all of you and growing the commons through open business models.

Bassel / Joi Ito / CC BY

Bassel Khartabil (also known as Bassel Safadi) is a computer engineer who, through his innovations in social media, digital education, and open-source web software, played a huge role in opening the Internet in Syria and bringing online access and knowledge to the Syrian people. Many people reading this blog know Bassel through his work as lead for CC Syria.

Sunday, March 15, 2015 marks the third anniversary of Bassel’s arrest and imprisonment in Syria, as well as the fourth anniversary of the Syrian uprising.

In San Francisco, #FreeBassel supporters, artists, and members of the open community are gathering at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for a community-building event organized around a Wikipedia edit-a-thon in Bassel’s honor. We’ll be working to improve and add articles and media content related to Bassel and articles of interest to him. We’ll also be discussing his case and brainstorming about new projects and ideas to help bring awareness to his case. Here are the details:

March 15, 2015
2:00pm — 6:00pm
EFF HQ: 815 Eddy St., San Francisco

No prior Wikipedia editing experience is necessary, we’ll have experienced editors present to help you get set up and make your first edit. Artists and activists interested in freedom of expression are encouraged to come contribute to the discussion. Experienced Wikipedians also welcome to come learn more about Bassel, contribute to Wikipedia, and help others to become involved.

For more details on the #FreeBassel Day event, click here.

This entry is remixed from Wikipedia:Meetup/San Francisco/FreeBassel Day 2015, available under CC BY-SA.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announced today its acquisition* of the Creative Commons logo and license icons into its permanent collection, currently featured as part of a new exhibit called, “This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good.” The Creative Commons logo (double C in a circle) and license icons for Attribution, ShareAlike, Noncommercial, and NoDerivatives are featured alongside universal designs such as the @ symbol and the International Symbol for Recycling.

From the MoMA blog,

“The exhibition takes its title from British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, who lit up the stadium at the 2012 London Summer Olympics opening ceremony with a simple tweet: “This Is for Everyone.” His buoyant message highlighted how the Internet—perhaps the most radical social design experiment of the last quarter century—has created seemingly limitless possibilities for discovering, sharing, and expanding knowledge and information.

The Creative Commons logos, and the organization and movement for the commons they represent, fit solidly within this narrative of imagining a better world through design — and Creative Commons is honored to be featured in this new exhibit and acquired as part of MoMA’s permanent collection. We’d especially like to highlight the designers: Ryan Junell of the original and now standardized CC logos, Alex Roberts of the re-conceived Attribution icon.

Read more about the acquisition at the MoMA blog and Wired’s coverage of the exhibit. Also stay tuned for a more detailed post on the origin story of the CC logos.

* Different museums have different criteria for acquiring objects into their collection. Here’s MoMA’s criteria in context of its @ symbol acquisition. To acquire doesn’t mean to own, but to obtain permission for reproducing the work as a matter of copyright. Our logos are still our trademarks!

CC Malaysia Mixtape 2015 by Muid Latif under CC BY NC ND

A guest post by CC Malaysia Lead, Muid Latif.

In the recent years, Malaysia has been more active in adopting open culture. Local mainstream media has provided a continuous platform for Creative Commons Malaysia to reach out to Malaysians in promoting CC, and both government and the community have been proactive in spearheading interesting online projects for everyone’s benefit.

For example, last December I had the chance to approach several local musicians and producers who are familiar with Creative Commons licenses on SoundCloud to find out if they were keen to have their music under a CC license. It was great to see that local musicians are very supportive of CC and how it empowers their works. This resulted in the release of CC Malaysia’s very own Creative Commons Malaysia Mixtape 2015. Inspired by this year’s World CC Mixtape, the Malaysia collection features 12 tracks from eight artists: the notable DJ Rezabudculture, Space Gambus Experiment, Metahingaq, NERO ONE, Z-1, Zam Nayan, Ugendran and Mohammad Yazid. The tracks are mostly uptempo or experimental. Listen to it here.

Our community also wants to play a greater role in open data. One of the biggest outcomes from this is Sinar Project, a mainly volunteer-run organisation which uses open technology and applications to make government information–such as budget expenditure and assets of those holding political office and parliamentary bills–public and more accessible to the Malaysian people. The Sinar project won a 2014 Information Society Innovation Fund (ISIF Asia) Award, under the “Rights” category (see more here). The Malaysian government has also taken the initiative to progress open data by setting up www.data.gov.my as well as adopting Big Data Analytics (BDA) mandates to the Ministry of Communication, the Multimedia, Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) and Multimedia Development Corporate (MDeC).

In this context, I have recently had the chance to contact the founder of the Big Data Malaysia network, Tirath Ramdas, about his view on open data here in Malaysia and concerns about citizen engagement. He thinks that open data is not a one way street. Any investment into open data from government will be a waste of taxpayer funds if the Malaysians do not make productive use of the data released. Raising general awareness of open data is therefore be highly important at this point in time. With this in mind, MDeC and Tentspark, an IT solutions provider, recently launched the National Big App Challenge to stress the importance of big data analytics in solving Malaysia’s challenges related to national issues and societal well-being.

In the near future, we would love to see Malaysia join the Open Government Partnership (OGP), following the Big Data Analytics Framework goal to have the framework ready by the end of this year and in line with the Digital Malaysia 354 Roadmap (DM354 Roadmap). With increased focus on sharing by both the government and private citizens, there seems to be a good chance for this to happen.