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We are thrilled to announce that the Creative Commons Global Summit will return to an in-person event in 2023, and this time we are heading to one of the most vibrant and culturally rich cities in the world — Mexico City! During 3-6 October 2023, we will be gathering at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco to unite, share ideas, and create a brighter future for open sharing. We are thrilled to be organizing the event in collaboration with CC Mexico, and hope you will be able to join in what will be an unforgettable experience.

This opportunity to gather together couldn’t come at a better time: Never before has the public interest commons been richer, larger, or more essential to solving the world’s biggest challenges and helping us all lead rewarding and meaningful lives. The theme of the Summit aligns with our 5-year strategy, Better Sharing, Brighter Future, and we’re excited to explore sharing that is contextual, inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable in one of Latin America’s major cities. The program will be filled with keynotes, panels, community sessions, workshops, networking, art, and music. The 6 Summit tracks will include:

• Science/Climate: Advocating for how open research and data play critical roles in addressing global challenges.
• Education: Highlighting the work of those creating opportunity and advocating for more equitable access to educational resources.
• Culture: Examining how preservation, access, sharing, use and reuse of culture are essential ingredients of thriving and resilient societies.
• Journalism: Addressing the critical challenges that journalists, content creators and storytellers face, and exploring how the open commons can strengthen the media ecosystem.
• Better Internet (Web3, Data, AI, Policy): Exploring how we can all work together to achieve a “better internet” and what that means in today’s world of emerging technology and a rapidly changing internet ecosystem.
• Arts & Emerging Technologies: Addressing timely issues impacting artists and creators globally, and exploring opportunities at the cross-section of creativity, Open Access, and technology.

As one of the 10 largest cities in the world, Mexico City is a vibrant, never-ending mix of cultures, where you can find a perfect balance between tradition and modernity. The Summit will be the perfect opportunity to explore the city’s vibrant streets, rich history, and delicious food, while also learning from experts in the field, network with other professionals, and contribute to the open movement.

CC recognizes that language can be a barrier to connection and communication in our global community. For the 2023 CC Global Summit, we will be publishing major communications in both English and Spanish, and we are investigating how to best support both English and Spanish in the Summit program.

Does your organization want to shape the future of digital creativity and collaboration? Join us as a sponsor at the 2023 CC Global Summit in Mexico City! We are finalizing sponsors to help make this cross-cultural event possible and support our work at Creative Commons. In addition, your sponsorship will support the Scholarship Fund, which will enable wider community representation at the Summit within open knowledge spaces. Interested? Reach out to Kat Drew at kat@creativecommons.org to explore sponsorship opportunities.

Get a taste of what to expect at the CC Global Summit by revisiting our last in-person summit in Portugal 2019. Check out the wrap-up blog post and watch all seven keynotes.

 

Mark 3–6 October in your calendars and subscribe to our mailing list, follow us on social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn & Twitter), or join CC on Slack to stay up to date on Summit registration, scholarship, program committee, and call for proposals. We can’t wait to see you in Mexico City for an unforgettable experience!

The post Mark Your Calendars: The 2023 CC Global Summit Is Coming to Mexico City appeared first on Creative Commons.

2023 is the year of the rabbit in the Chinese Lunar calendar, the year Voyager 2 is predicted to overtake Pioneer 10 as the second-farthest spacecraft from Earth, and the Year of Open Science. In an announcement by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), 2023 was declared the Year of Open Science, along with new actions to advance open and equitable research. Creative Commons (CC) congratulates everyone involved in these momentous announcements, which promise to advance open science in the US federal government and bring new investments in open access research. A list of the participating agencies, as well as updates on the initiative, can be found at the newly created open.science.gov. 

2023 will also be a memorable year for CC and the Open Climate Campaign, as we embark on working with national governments, funders and environmental organizations to create, adopt and implement open access policies to promote better sharing of climate change and biodiversity knowledge. We were thrilled to see OSTP emphasize values core to our better sharing strategy at CC: “The principle and practice of making research products and processes available to all, while respecting diverse cultures, maintaining security and privacy, and fostering collaborations, reproducibility, and equity.” CC looks forward to building on our involvement in NASA’s TOPS Community Panel, and to forge new connections and provide direct support on best practices for open licensing requirements, as US federal agencies and departments update their public open access plans per OSTP’s new guidance.

We are excited to work with additional national governments looking to emulate these leaps forward in making publicly funded knowledge openly licensed and accessible for the common good. If you are looking to join the ranks of countries like the Government of Ukraine, which recently approved its National Open Science Action Plan, France and others, please contact us. We are happy to help.

To learn more about the Open Climate Campaign or to connect, please visit the Open Climate Campaign website.

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Open Culture is a growing sector of the open movement around the world, with museums, galleries, archives and libraries increasingly making collections available and accessible online. The Open Culture VOICES series aims to shine a light on the leaders and advocates in the sector to inspire others and increase the accessibility and availability of cultural heritage globally.

As in the first season, we ask each guest only four questions about the benefits, barriers, what inspired them, and what advice they would share with others. Episodes will be released on a weekly basis from 7 February 2023 and until the end of the year. We are delighted to share that this season we have guests from Africa, South America, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and North America.

If you have a recommendation for someone we should feature in a future season, please email info@creativecommons.org with the subject “OCV Recommendation”

In the meantime, you can catch up on all 35 episodes from season one here >> 

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Creative Commons is in Davos this week for the World Economic Forum (WEF). While CC is not (yet) a formal member of the forum, there is extensive programming available to the public that touches on our work. As we strive to strengthen the voice of civil society and promote better sharing of knowledge and culture in the public interest, we feel it’s critical to ensure CC’s values of openness, access, collaboration, sustainability, creativity, equity, inclusivity, and diversity are taken into account in WEF conversations, especially those around emerging technology. It is imperative that we steer these discussions — and ultimately the development of new technology — to support better sharing.

I’m fortunate to be able to attend this week of public programming, alongside Brigitte Vézina, CC’s Director of Policy and Open Culture. We recognize the privilege of representing CC, and look forward to a week of learning, listening, and partnership. While we are in Davos, CC’s CEO Catherine Stihler is participating in this year’s launch event of the Morgridge Acceleration Program, for which she is one of twelve selected mentors.

While we are here we are for critical listening and making new connections, we’ve also got the opportunity to speak about open culture, the importance of strengthening the public domain, and better sharing. Our work is guided by how we see better sharing:

• Sharing that is inclusive, just and equitable — where everyone has a wide opportunity to access content, contribute their own creativity, and receive recognition and rewards for their contributions.
• Sharing that is reciprocal — where we rebalance the skewed world we live in now, in which a few produce and profit from works that the many consume.
• Sharing that is sustainable — where open participation in the public commons is the default, rather than the exception.

Open Culture: From Web2 to a Better Internet

Today (Monday 16 January) Brigitte will be joining a panel of experts to discuss the evolution of the web. On Thursday 19 January, Brigitte will take the stage for a Lightning Keynote on Open Culture to discuss the challenges of the current digital space for open culture and concrete actions to shape a better internet, based on CC’s new global open culture call to action.

If we want to address the world’s most pressing problems, enable people to lead richer lives, and build a sustainable future for all, we need to unlock the possibilities of the digital age to preserve, share, and reuse cultural heritage free from undue restrictions. CC’s five key open culture policy actions are:

1. Protect the public domain from erosion
2. Reduce the term of copyright protection
3. Legally allow necessary activities of cultural heritage institutions
4. Shield cultural heritage institutions from liability
5. Ensure respect, equity, and inclusivity

Generative AI & Other Emerging Technologies

In addition to formal speaking engagements, we have a purposeful learning agenda during our time in Davos. There are formal sessions and ad hoc meetings taking place around open and decentralized science, open standards in the metaverse, and the explosion of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Whether chat, image, or video, new AI systems are turning heads and raising thorny questions around creators, users, copyright, and remuneration.

As we build on the AI policy and advocacy work we emphasized last year, we’ll work to lead conversations on how we can protect creators and users from harms, while harnessing a new technology to enhance our global digital commons and work in the public interest. Our guiding questions continue to be: How does the proliferation of AI connect to better sharing? And how does AI connect to a public interest vision for a better internet?

If you’d like to catch up while we’re in Davos please get in touch!

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Ever wondered how it must have been for some of the first cultural heritage institutions to embark on their open access journey? Michael Weinberg, Executive Director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law, talked to three major institutions that helped shape the early open GLAM / open culture movement to find out. Here’s what he found. 

The list of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) with open access programs gets longer every day. However, those programs don’t just happen. They are the result of work from teams inside and outside of the institution.

Like the commons they create, the open access programs build on one another.  Each open access program launched today uses lessons learned from programs that came before.

“Pioneers of Open Culture” contains three case studies of open GLAM early adopters.  It examines some of the institutions that created open access programs in the early days of the movement.  

The National Gallery of Art (United States), Statens Museum for Kunst, and New York Public Library are different institutions. They have different funding models, different relationships to government, and different styles of public engagement.  In the years since they started, their open access programs have taken different directions.  However, all three pioneered their own versions of successful open access programs.

None of these institutions would claim to have built their programs alone.  They were part of communities, discussions, and practices that evolved along with them.  At the same time, these institutions navigated their environment with many fewer models than are available today.  That forced them to learn lessons that today’s institutions can take for granted.  These case studies help shed light on that process.   

Pioneers of Open Culture is not a comprehensive analysis of each institution’s open access program.  It also does not explore all of the institutions that contributed to the early days of the open culture movement.  Instead, it is an exploration of how some of the people who created and operated these programs understood their work.  The goal is to provide a window into the process. This window might help those who want to follow similar paths.

While each case study has conclusions specific to the institution, a few points of commonality do begin to emerge:

Digital Infrastructure Matters. 

Successful open access programs are built on digital foundations that directly incorporate rights and rights awareness.  Digital systems redesigns were opportunities to build the possibility of open into an institution’s DNA.  Well designed digital backends also made it easier to experiment with smaller projects that were not true one-offs, but rather closely integrated into the institution’s technology infrastructure.

Experimentation is Important.

Collections are diverse, as are the users who are interested in them. Open access programs succeed when there is space to try new things, and create multiple points of entry into an institution’s collections. This is true for members of the public who want to explore the collection.  It is also true of internal stakeholders who want to understand how open access can help them achieve their own goals.  Space takes the form of financial support from within and without the institution.  It also takes the space of an institutional environment that is welcoming to experimentation.

Make the Easy Things Easy.

Open access programs can be challenging to construct and sustain.  Technology must be built.  Collections must be designed.  Rights statuses must be documented.  That makes it important to use tools that make things easier whenever they exist.  Those tools include legal tools, such as the CC0 public domain dedication, and technical tools, such as open source software.  The reliability of these tools allows teams to focus on the hard parts of creating open access collections.

“Pioneers of Open Culture” brings color and context to the history of open access.  Hopefully, understanding that history can help accelerate open access programs yet to be created, and encourage people to embark on better sharing of cultural heritage worldwide.

What to know more or get involved in CC’s open culture program? Reach out: info@creativecommons.org 

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