This is part of a series of posts introducing the projects built by open source contributors mentored by Creative Commons during Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2020 and Outreachy. This post was written by Dhruvi Butti, a 2020 Outreachy intern and a 3rd-year undergrad at IIIT Surat. 

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“Celebrate endings—for they precede new beginnings.” – Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Around the last week of August, we bid goodbye to our old CC Open Source website and welcomed a new version that is classy, contemporary, and consistent. The months-long process involved redesigning and reimplementing styles for the website, including integrating Vocabulary—a cohesive design library that makes it easier to develop Creative Commons (CC) applications while ensuring a consistently familiar experience.

Design library! Ah, why?

We aim to have consistency in design and development to create a cohesive brand identity for CC, which will both improve user experience and drive more awareness of CC’s work to donors. In order to do that, we need a common set of design styles and elements to use across all of the websites that make up CC’s online presence (e.g. CC Open Source, CC Global Summit, CC Certificate, etc.). Therefore, we created Vocabulary, which delivers:

• Efficiency: Instead of repeatedly building similar components from scratch, design systems (like Vocabulary) enable designers and developers to reuse components and thereby increase efficiency.
• Consistency: Design systems introduce a shared set of principles and rules to build web components, making it easier to create consistent experiences across different platforms.
• Scale: The increased efficiency and consistency from these systems allow an organization (like Creative Commons) to build faster products at scale.

Vocabulary at your service 

Credit for the new user interface of the CC Open Source website goes to Vocabulary. Our design library is an incredibly useful asset that we have been building for quite some time. All of the design elements are imported from the design library. It is flexible, scalable, and most importantly, well structured and documented so anyone can easily comprehend and make good use out of the available components.

Key differences 

The level of user experience has been significantly elevated due to the use of Vocabulary. For example, a primary component of the website is guidelines—we have guidelines for contributing, guidelines for how to join a community, guidelines for how to write a blog, and many more. The new website has cleaner and readable guidelines with proper hierarchies. In addition, every piece of information is made accessible using secondary navigation.

Below are screenshots of two of the guidelines pages from the new website.

Below are screenshots of two guidelines pages from the old website. The differences are evident.

Help us perfect it. 

We believe in the saying ‘The more the merrier.’ You can contribute to the new website by fixing code issues, as well as finding and reporting bugs. All development of the CC Open Source website is documented in this GitHub repository. Please remember to read the contributing section in the repo’s README. Issues marked with the green “help wanted” tag is open to contributors. We look forward to working with you and hearing your feedback! 

We are extremely proud and grateful for the work done by Dhruvi Butti throughout her 2020 Outreachy internship. We look forward to her continued contributions to CC Open Source as a project core committer in the CC Open Source Community! 

Please consider supporting Creative Commons’ open source work on GitHub Sponsors.

The post Say Hello to Our New CC Open Source Website! appeared first on Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is now accepting sponsorship via GitHub Sponsors!

CC’s small engineering team builds essential open-source infrastructure for CC-licensed and public domain content. Our tools make it easier for anyone to:

• release original content under an open license.
• find and responsibly reuse openly licensed and public domain content.
• connect to the larger ecosystem of openly licensed content on the internet.

Our projects include:

• Our CC Search set of tools
  • CC Search: our search engine for openly licensed content.
  • CC Catalog API: a free API that allows anyone to integrate CC Search data into their own applications.
  • CC Catalog: our index of 500 million+ openly licensed works that power CC Search.
  • The CC Search browser extension: which makes CC Catalog searchable on Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Edge.
• The new CC license chooser: an educational tool that allows users to pick the right license for their needs.
• The CC WordPress plugin: which allows WordPress users to easily release their content under a CC license or tool.
• The (soon to be launched) CC legal database: which lists legal precedents and articles related to CC licenses.
• The Linked Commons: graph analysis of the impact of CC licenses on the internet.
• Our new CC license infrastructure: which will serve legal code, human-readable deeds, and machine-readable RDFs for all 630+ unique Creative Commons licenses (across all jurisdictions), plus translations.
• CC Vocabulary: our open web design system.
  

…and many more!

You can find more information about our projects and community at CC Open Source.

CC’s open source products are a public good and provide critical infrastructure for the open internet. They are offered for free to the public and used by millions.

Without CC’s open source products, the ecosystem for openly licensed content would suffer considerably. For example:

• Discoverability of CC-licensed content would be limited and locked into proprietary platforms.
• There would be no APIs that enable open access repositories to easily use CC licenses.

All of CC’s open source projects are maintained by a small staff on a limited budget and we need your help to keep our projects running.

Please consider sponsoring our work on GitHub Sponsors.

The post You Can Now Sponsor CC’s Open Source Work on GitHub! appeared first on Creative Commons.

This post is written by Ethan Senack, a member of Creative Commons USA and the Global Network Council Executive Committee.

Just over a year ago, the Executive Committee of the CC Global Network Council (GNC) launched an open process to collect feedback from all members on the network structure, with the purpose of understanding what was working and what was not, and to offer recommendations on how to make the structure work better for those on the ground and in local communities. 

We were committed to making the process deeply open and transparent— not just in the procedure, but in the discussion and decision-making as well. That often conflicted with our desire to move forward and significantly extended the timeline, but we believed it was necessary to build trust, to encourage compromise, and to ensure that a variety of voices and perspectives were heard. 

It wasn’t an easy process, but the result is a series of recommendations grounded in the input from our network, repeatedly reviewed and refined by members and chapter leads, and ultimately voted on by the Global Network Council. 

That’s why I am proud to say, as of this week, the GNC has voted overwhelmingly to accept these recommendations. 

From here, we can move forward as a stronger, more community-owned network. The full sets of recommendations are linked below, but here are just a few of the pieces we think will have a big impact: 

• Local chapters will now have real input into membership decisions that affect their jurisdiction. 
• Guidelines on chapter fundraising for CC efforts have been streamlined to make it easier for chapters to grow. 
• We removed barriers and addressed issues around chapter structure that have caused confusion in practice. 
• There are now clearer, more transparent processes for the Community Activities Fund and Certificate Scholarship program, supporting the disbursement of $30,000 (so far) to local organizing efforts and members. 

I’m grateful to the Executive Committee (Lisette Kalshoven – CC Netherlands; Franco Giandana – CC Argentina; Alek Tarkowski – CC Poland; Liz Oyange – CC Kenya; Jorge Gemetto – CC Uruguay; as well as Claudio Ruiz, Delia Brown, and Cable Green from CC HQ), and to Julia Brungs, CC Network Manager, who all put in significant effort to get this process across the finish line. I also want to express appreciation for all the network members, chapter leads, and GNC representatives who spent time to submit comments, give feedback, and push for changes to make the Network better. Over the next few months, the ExCom, the GNC, and CC staff will have to work together to implement these changes. 

You can see the entire process from start to finish in the following links:

Initial Documents: 

1. Launching a Review of the Network Structure: Call for Feedback
2. Transcript of Submitted Comments
3. Analysis of Submitted Comments

Resulting Recommendations:

1. Area 1: Membership
2. Area 2: Funding and Volunteerism
3. Area 3: Chapter and Network Structure
4. Area 4: Miscellaneous

The post Making the CC Global Network Work Better for You appeared first on Creative Commons.

Let’s take a moment and step out of the heavy fog that is 2020 and try to look back at the last few months with a new perspective. Through the challenges and uncertainties, we believe there have been opportunities for personal reflection, social solidarity, and care. Of course, we recognize this is not true for everyone, but we certainly hope it’s true for most. 

One of the unique challenges for this year’s CC Global Summit was to connect events of the past year with our work—and find a path forward in hope and optimism. We asked: How can we best celebrate “open” and continue to foster the culture of gratitude and collaboration that our work and our community brings? How can we link the challenges we’re facing as a planet (e.g. health, human rights, democracy, etc.) with the opportunities for solutions found in creating a more open and free world?

Alongside the 100+ sessions hosted at this year’s CC Global Summit, we believe the three keynotes will help answer those questions, as well as reshape our perspectives, conversations, and attitudes as we near the end of 2020 and look forward to 2021. 

The 2020 CC Global Summit keynotes are: 

• A Culture of Peace: the first keynote, held on Tuesday (12:00 UTC), will foster a necessary discussion on the role “open” plays in advancing peace. Speakers Bushra Ebadi (Canadian Commission for UNESCO), Deepak Ramola (Project FUEL), Leonardo Párraga (Juventudes Por La Paz), and Asha Siad (Memories of Mogadishu) will challenge the audience to critically examine preconceived notions of open access, open culture, and open knowledge, and to understand the role decolonized and democratized conceptions of these terms will serve in building the future we want. 
• Hacer Feminista Lo Abierto: Poniendo Nuevos Engranes a La Cultura Libre (Making Open Feminist: Putting New Gears in Free Culture): the second keynote, held on Wednesday (15:00 UTC), will give Irene Soria (CC Mexico) the stage for exploring new definitions of “open.” Using intersectionality as a framing, Irene will help us navigate the relationships between race, gender, and social class as new ways of seeing the open movement. The session will be in Spanish, but the question and answer period will be in English. 
• Democracy for Sale: the final keynote, on Thursday (15:00 UTC), will have CC’s CEO Catherine Stihler and Board Member Alek Tarkowski speaking with author Peter Geoghegan about his upcoming book, Democracy for Sale. In particular, the panel will discuss how rightwing ideology, money, and social media have been used to hollow out modern democracies, particularly in North America and Europe. The links between fighting for our democracies and fighting for “open” and the public interest will be discussed during this conversation. 

In one way or another, these keynotes touch on the most compelling questions and challenges we’re facing today and serve as the perfect framing for the entire 2020 CC Global Summit—and for our work as a community moving forward. 

The post Facing 2020 at the CC Global Summit: A Look at This Year’s Keynotes appeared first on Creative Commons.

“United Nations Headquarters” by United Nations Photo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

As an important part of our stewardship of the Open COVID Pledge, we are pleased to announce that the Pledge is now available in all six of the official languages of the United Nations: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. This increases accessibility and usefulness of the Pledge to more than 3.7 billion persons in their first or second languages. We are also excited to be launching a simple translation process through which any member of our community can contribute translations of the Pledge in other languages at our upcoming 2020 CC Global Summit.

Understanding and communicating the value of the Pledge is a critical part of encouraging companies, universities, research teams, and others to contribute their valuable IP to help solve COVID-19 quickly. As we begin working with the CC Global Network to increase the Pledge’s reach and secure additional Pledges, we’ll also be working with our community to translate information and adoption guides as they become increasingly important.

These are the first internationalization efforts that CC is undertaking since we announced our leadership of the OCP work in August—but they’re certainly not the last. In addition to launching the simplified translation process, we’ll also be discussing advocacy and outreach techniques at next week’s CC Global Summit, where we’ll be gathering our community’s ideas for how they can contribute to this effort. We’ll also be identifying tools that will assist with outreach both to those who hold valuable intellectual property as well as those seeking to use the IP that is pledged at that workshop on Wednesday, October 21. In addition, founders of the OCP will provide an informational overview of the OCP project for newbies on Tuesday, October 20, where companies that have adopted the pledge will share their reasons for joining. Finally, watch for us to announce an expansion of the CC OCP Advisory Council early next year to ensure better international expertise and diversity.

In combination and alongside other collaborations, we expect these efforts will scale the OCP internationally to create critical mass and impact. You can support our international efforts by joining us at the CC Summit and sharing your ideas for effort by encouraging your company, university, or research team to make the Open COVID Pledge. Visit opencovidpledge.org or contact us at ocpinfo@creativecommons.org for more information.

The post Internationalizing the Open COVID Pledge: Translations and Outreach appeared first on Creative Commons.