Ryan / CC BY-SA

Lumen Learning, a company founded to help institutions adopt open educational resources (OER) more effectively, just launched its first set of course frameworks for educators to use as-is or to adapt to their own needs. The six course frameworks cover general education topics spanning English composition, reading, writing, algebra, and college success, and are openly licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY).

The course frameworks were developed by the Lumen Learning team in concert with faculty members at nine institutions who worked to align the content with defined learning objectives and quality standards. By providing openly licensed course frameworks developed and vetted by experts, Lumen Learning hopes to make it easier for educators and institutions to use OER. From the press release,

“Our ultimate goal is to provide sustainable open textbook alternatives for an entire general education curriculum and even entire OER-based degree programs,” said Kim Thanos, CEO and co-founder of Lumen Learning. “We are thrilled with the interest and momentum we are seeing around OER today. It is definitely a rising tide, benefitting students, instructors and institutions alike.”

You can browse the CC BY-licensed course frameworks at http://www.lumenlearning.com/courses. Lumen Learning will also offer additional course frameworks in business management, psychology, chemistry, biology, and geography in the coming months.

About 400 map makers, coders, cartographers, designers, business services providers and data mungers of chiefly spatial persuasion gathered in San Francisco to “talk OpenStreetMap, learn from each other, and move the project forward.” These conference attendees are a tip of an iceberg composed of 1.1 million registered users who have collectively gathered 3.2 billion GPS points around the world since OpenStreetMap was launched in 2004 as a free, editable map of the whole world. Unlike proprietary datasets, OpenStreetMap allows free access to the full map dataset. About 28 GB of data representing the entire planet can be downloaded in full, but also is available in immediately-useful forms like maps and commercial services. OpenStreetMap is open data licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) with the cartography in its tiles and its documentation licensed under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

The program ranged from building and nurturing OSM communities, to technical wizardry, to improving infrastructure. Martijn van Exel provided an insight into the OSM community in the United States (see table below). Big countries and large areas pose challenges already in the queue to be tackled.

population	310 million
land area	3.7 million sq miles
mappers	27,000
casual (< 100 edits)	71.0%
active (>100 edits, active in last 3M)	6.8%
power (>1000 edits, active in last 3M, active for >1Y	2.6%
total edits, all time	723,000,000
edits by top 10 mappers (incl bots and import accounts)	69.8%
edits by power mappers (excl most bots and import accounts)	57.3%

As a spatial data munger and environmental scientist, I am proud to be a part of this community. As a believer in the power of open, collaborative science and geospatial, I am inspired by it.

Scientific authoring workflow is a beast. You keep notes on paper (hopefully, a notebook, and not just loose pages), in word-processing documents unhelpfully named “notes” followed by “notes1,” “notes2″ or worse, “notes_old,” “notes_old1.” You manage your bibliography on your desktop or on the web, you have a directory folder full of images, charts, photos and other media, and you collaborate with your co-authors by emailing attachments back and forth.

Sooner or later you start doubting your sanity but you soldier on. Finally you publish your paper, heave a sigh of relief, and move on, thereby ensuring your data can’t be reused and your work can’t be reproduced easily.

Several coders, designers, scientists, and publishers met at PLOS to brainstorm toward a better, more modern way. The Markdown for Science workshop was organized by Martin Fenner and Stian Håklev and supported by a 1K Challenge Grant from FORCE11.

Photos by Puneet Kishor, CC0 PD Dedication

While a lot of good ideas were generated, we have a long way to go. Keep an eye on this project, and better yet, pitch in with your ideas and code. Together we can tame this beast.

On Saturday, April 27, the Creative Commons Board of Directors met at the Safra Center at Harvard. We discussed the accomplishments of the past 12 months, both in the organization and in the broader open movement, and the new opportunities on the horizon, including creating an Advisory Council to complement the Board itself.

The State of CC: 2012-13 in review

CC CEO Cathy Casserly gave an upbeat review of CC’s past 12 months. Some key takeaways:

• CC’s international network of affiliates and champions continues to grow and strengthen. Affiliates and other volunteers organized over 30 celebrations around the world for Creative Commons’ tenth anniversary as well as events, salons, and conferences year-round. Regional CC networks are becoming more energized, with regional gatherings taking place around the globe.
• Creative Commons continues to serve as a voice for open. Through new initiatives like the School of Open and the Open Policy Network, CC is helping to teach everyone from world governments to individuals about the value of open licensing.
• The open education movement is stronger than it’s ever been. In the past year, the governments of British Columbia, South Africa, the United States, and California have made major investments in OER (open educational resources). UNESCO member states unanimously approved a resolution calling for the development of quality OER.

Opportunities and Challenges Ahead: The next 12 months

The discussion then turned to the next 12 months at Creative Commons.

CC’s expanded global team will create new opportunities for collaboration and development in the CC Affiliate Network. Cathy outlined a plan to engage with the CC Affiliate Network in developing instructional resources for license users, and announced a new grant that will provide critical support for affiliate collaborations.

CC General Counsel Diane Peters led a discussion about the forthcoming version 4.0 of the license suite, explaining how the new licenses will address several important issues in interoperability and internationalization.

CC Director of Product Strategy Dan Mills laid out his plan to develop a new set of products that will make it easier for users to mark and attribute CC-licensed content, while letting licensors interact with people who reuse their works. Glenn Brown and Lawrence Lessig agreed to serve as advisors to the project development pipeline.

New Directions for CC’s Board

Finally, we discussed the future of CC’s Board of Directors. As the program areas in which CC works have grown and shifted, the demands on the Board have changed too. We agreed on a plan to establish an Advisory Council that would advise and critique the overall CC strategy, complementing and expanding the Board. We will conduct a search for new Board and Advisory Council nominees with key expertise and skill sets. Part of the search process will include an upcoming open call for nominations for our Board of Directors and for our new-to-be-formed, Advisory Council. We hope you’ll actively put forward candidates.

This was my second in-person Creative Commons Board meeting, and it reaffirmed my pride in being chair for an organization that is shaping the future. I speak for everyone on the Board when I see we’re excited about the changes and challenges to come in the next few years.

John Weitzmann / DTKindler / CC BY

Gwen Franck / Gwen Franck / All Rights Reserved

I am very happy to introduce our two new European Regional Coordinators – John Weitzmann and Gwen Franck.

Creative Commons has volunteer teams in over 70 countries, including 35 in Europe, all of whom work to support and promote the adoption of CC in their local jurisdictions and advise CC’s work globally. The role of the Regional Coordinators is to support and foster these communities in their regions. We’ve had a Regional Coordinator in Europe for a few years, but this will be the first time we have two for the region, significantly increasing their capacity.

John is not new to the CC community, and in fact has been a leader in Europe for many years as the Legal Lead of CC Germany. Based in Berlin, he is also a Partner of iRights.Law, an IP and media law firm, and is a well known writer and speaker on open issues as part of iRights.Lab.

Gwen is newer to Creative Commons, but is still known to our community through her work with the OpenAIRE project, providing access to research across Europe. She has also worked on Open Access Belgium and TEDxGhent. Her background is in community management, international relations and research.

Jonas Oberg / Mathias Klang / CC BY ND

With this announcement, I also bid a sad farewell to Jonas Oberg, who has been our European Regional Coordinator for almost two years now. Jonas has done a great job of supporting our European community, organizing multiple regional meetings, working with individual teams and taking a lead in everything from grant applications to collaborative activities. We are extremely grateful for Jonas’ time with us, and very glad that he will continue to be part of our broader community in his new Shuttleworth Fellowship looking at automated attribution for open objects.

Join me in farewelling Jonas, and welcoming John and Gwen to their new roles.