In January 2009, Al Jazeera launched a pioneering initiative: the first news repository licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. At the time, restrictions imposed by the Israeli military in Gaza prevented international news outlets from reaching the Strip and reporting from within. Al Jazeera, which had the advantage of being the only news outlet with a correspondent on the ground, came up with a creative solution by making its exclusive footage available to be used, remixed, translated and re-broadcasted by everybody, including competitors.

Three years later, a similar situation is happening with Syria. Shortage of news is dramatic and reports from within the country are rare and often require that journalists’ lives are put at risk in order to gather information. This is why it is key to have initiatives such as Syria Deeply, a news aggregator launched two weeks ago by a team of journalists and technologists headed by seasoned reporter Lara Setrakian.

Syria Deeply is a news platform that aims to redesign the user experience of the Syria story, for greater understanding and engagement around a complex global issue.‬ The platform is part news aggregator, part interactive backgrounder, part original reporting and feature stories. And the great news is that the content on the site is entirely CC BY–licensed, in order to encourage sharing and viral distribution.

This is a major step in crisis reporting and will allow a wider audience to become more aware of the dramatic situation in Syria, fostering a better understanding of a complex issue by adding context and historical information to the headlines.

“I believe technology is the key to getting more and better news to a broader audience,” says Setrakian. Open licensing can support this process and spread more and better understanding on Syria-related issues.

In November, representatives from CC projects in Asia Pacific nations came together in Jakarta, Indonesia. Every second year we gather in person to combine powers and plan for the future – and this time affiliates in South Korea, China Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand were hosted by CC Indonesia.

From legal matters to community building and sustainability, we dedicated a whole day to discussions on a range of key issues and challenges for us as individual affiliates and as part of the regional and global CC community. Some fantastic work has been going on in each jurisdiction, and 2013 could be a year of projects across borders. Strategic areas include breaking down language barriers through translation work, developing messaging for government and education sectors, and creating mentoring relationships among teams. The massive diversity in our region is actually a strength, especially for all the CC volunteers out there who might want to work on projects from another country – and all of this will inform our 2013 roadmap (to be posted online).

The second day was a public program for CC representatives and local speakers to run sessions on open government, open data, OER, the creative arts and general tips for beginners. CC Indonesia had a special reason to celebrate since they had recently translated the license chooser and deeds into Bahasa Indonesian, and could present on them for the first time. A translation of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture (PDF) had also been launched in February by friends from KUNCI Cultural Studies Center in Yogyakarta. Followers around the country submitted reviews of the Indonesian text in the hope of snapping up one of the 15 travel scholarships to Jakarta. The CC Indonesia project is run out of Wikimedia Foundation’s Indonesian arm, and so the keynote speaker Kat Walsh expertly intersected both communities as the Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation and a CC Legal Council. The best moments included stand up comedian Pandji Pragiwaksono, #SKUBYB boys and girls rapping, a dance performance by CC Malaysia, Adhitia Sofyan on acoustic guitar and the giant dancing Ondel-ondel puppets.

For more, see the the program and presentations, public session notes, Flickr photos, and roundup video.

Last year we wrote about the introduction of an OER bill in Brazil. Yesterday, the State of São Paulo approved PL 989/2011, which establishes a policy whereby educational resources developed or purchased with government funds must be made freely available to the public under an open copyright license. The Governor must sign the bill for it to become law. You can view the bill text (Portuguese) linked from the State Assembly website.

State-funded educational materials must be made available on the web or on a government portal. They must be licensed for free use, including copying, distribution, download and creation of derivative works, provided that the author retains attribution, the materials are used non-commercially, and the materials are licensed under the same license as the original. Essentially, the legislation language suggests a CC BY-NC-SA license, even if not specifically stated.

Congratulations to the State of São Paulo for passing this law. We’ve seen similar policies enacted in Poland, Canada, and the United States. PL 989/2011 will set a powerful positive precedent for other countries to follow, and São Paulo will be contributing to the worldwide movement to create a shared commons of high-quality Open Educational Resources.

For more information on these developments see the Recursos Educacionais Abertos site.

Class of 2012 by P2PU / CC BY-SA
(See all Class of 2012 workshop participants)

It’s been an exciting year for School of Open, from the P2PU residency in Berlin, to the curriculum building meeting in Palo Alto, to the various course building workshops we ran in Helsinki, London, Mexico City, Berlin, and more. Our community, which started off with two active volunteers at the beginning of July, has since grown into a diverse group of voices and interests. However, we all share the common goal of furthering openness in our respective fields, and helping others to take advantage of open resources to further their own goals — whether they are teachers, artists, researchers, or students.

Below are highlights from the “Class of 2012,” and below that is what you can expect from the School of Open community in 2013 — because the world didn’t end after all.

2012 highlights

Note: The “we” pronoun used below refers to the School of Open community collectively, which consists of volunteers from the CC and P2PU communities – and beyond!

• During the P2PU residency in Berlin, we put our heads together and figured out the what, how, and who of the School — including basic governance structure and logistics, philosophy, guidelines, and an initial set of short courses for independent learning.
• These courses are Teach Someone Something with Open Content (part one and two); Get Creative Commons Savvy; and the Open Access Wikipedia Challenge. Lots of people have taken these courses already, and you can, too.
• We planned the curriculum for more courses with a fantastic group of open advocates and experts at a two-day Convening on an Open Policy Institute and School of Open in Palo Alto.


Helsinki Class Group Shot / Timothy Vollmer / CC BY

• We also held smaller course building workshops and discussion sessions at the Open Knowledge Festival, the Mozilla Festival, the Open Ed Conference, the Summit on Open Strategies, and the CC- Africa, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America regional meetings. You can see all events on our roadmap.
• We held our first real world course sprint at the Open Video Forum, resulting in the draft course, A Look at Open Video. (A course sprint is like a book sprint, but the end result is a course instead of a book.)
• We also held our first real world class in Ann Arbor, Michigan, based on Get CC Savvy.
• We discussed and settled on a course review process for all School of Open courses…

…in the spirit of open governance, because we strive to work as openly and transparently as our name makes us out to be!

What to expect in 2013

The Library of Congress / No known copyright restrictions

In 2013:

• We will officially launch our first set of courses during Open Education Week! (March 11-15). We have 16 courses in development: the bulk of these will be designed for independent learning, such as Get CC Savvy, but a few, such as Copyright 4 Educators, will be facilitated for a set period of time beginning in March. You can check out the full list of draft courses at http://schoolofopen.org.
• We will run more offline workshops around the world. In fact, we are developing a course to prepare people for the delivery of workshops on open culture and related topics in informal spaces.
• We will run additional course sprints. We have one in mind around open science data (watch out Bay Area) and another on open video (Berlin or London).

With the development of 16 courses; the running of offline workshops in cool spaces; and the emergence of the course sprint — we have a very full year ahead of us! If you would like to help shape any of the courses or activities above, join us at https://groups.google.com/group/school-of-open and introduce yourself and your area of interest. Additional ways to get involved and more info at http://schoolofopen.org.

That’s all folks! We wish you a wonderful holiday and a happy new year.

A few days ago, Ryan Singel wrote a thought-provoking piece for Wired, suggesting that users pressure Facebook — and, by extension, its recent acquisition Instagram — to adopt Creative Commons licensing options.

Creative Commons embodied an ethos of sharing that went beyond just show-and-tell. It’s been a vital part of sharing on the net, which has given all of us access to no-cost printing presses in the form of blogs; cheap ways to create, edit, and share videos and photos; and democratized distribution channels such as YouTube and Reddit.

[…] Facebook is about Facebook. Sharing to them means sharing … on Facebook. Connecting with other people means connecting with other people … on Facebook. Like the old joke about fortune cookies, you have to append “on Facebook” to get the real meaning.

Instagram is still young, so perhaps it can buck its corporate master. But it’s yet to show a commitment to doing right by users and the public, and the recent decision to prevent Twitter users from seeing Instagram photos inside Twitter makes it highly unlikely the company considers being part of a larger sharing culture a priority.

The column — along with a controversial update to Instagram’s privacy policy — has triggered a wave of discussion online. From Kurt Opsahl at EFF:

Some of these problems are less pressing if the photo is intended to be public, and some users may actually want the opportunity for their photos to get wide spread fame and fortune. For those users, the better way forward is enabling users to easily license their photos with Creative Commons.

Other photo services offer revenue sharing with their users. For example, Yahoo’s Flickr not only offers the ability to mark photos with a Creative Commons license, but also has an opt-in program with Getty Images for users who want to commercialize the photos. While imperfect (Getty requires exclusive rights, and is incompatible with CC licenses), there is something to the notion of sharing the revenue with the user.

Alyson Shontell at Business Insider takes the debate a step further, with the provocative suggestion that Instagram should require its users to license their photos under CC by default:

Of course, this will enrage a lot of people. Facebook has been reprimanded for pushing privacy boundaries too far, and not all Instagram users may feel comfortable sharing their photos with the world.

But really, they already are. This just puts a legal framework around that sharing.

In all the flurry of attention, there’s one important point to keep in mind: Creative Commons licenses don’t cancel out user agreements. That is, when you upload media to Flickr or YouTube, it’s subject to the terms you agreed to when you signed up for those services, regardless of whether you license it under CC.

To put it a different way, when I upload a video to YouTube and license it CC BY, I’m entering two different agreements at once: one with YouTube (see 6. Your Content and Conduct) and one with any potential user via the CC license. It’s a good idea to be conscious about the agreements you’re making when you use any online service. There have even been various projects over the years to make terms of service and privacy policies as easy to read and understand as CC license deeds.

Of course, that’s not to say that there’s no value in media platforms adopting CC licensing natively. Indeed, platforms are where we’ve seen the most rapid uptake in CC adoption and the most potential for reuse. Have you ever uploaded a photo to Flickr and seen it show up on a blog post days or years later? That quick, painless reuse is only possible because Flickr makes it easy to search and sort photos by CC license. Users on other sites — including both Facebook and Instagram — sometimes add CC license info to their profiles manually. That’s better than nothing, but without a consistent, platform-wide implementation, finding those CC-licensed uploads can be very difficult.

And if the discussions over the past few days have shown anything, it’s that the demand exists for native CC implementation in Instagram. i-am-cc.org, the third-party archive of CC-licensed Instagram shots, has grown to nearly 5000 users in just a few months. A search for CC-licensed Instagram photos published on Flickr yields 167,000 results. The popularity of these solutions demonstrates that many Instagram users are willing to jump through a few hoops to share their photos under CC.

For our recent tenth anniversary celebrations, we profiled several media platforms that support CC licensing. Nearly all of the people we talked to said that user demand was a major factor in their decisions to use CC. We would be thrilled if Facebook and Instagram decided to start supporting CC licensing, but ultimately, your voice matters more than ours does.