Back in 2010, we had the great pleasure of working with world famous artist/graphic designer Shepard Fairey on a project to re-envision the Creative Commons logo in his signature style.
At the time, we released a t-shirt with Fairey’s remix as part of a fundraising campaign and later put it on a CC tote bag (there are still a few available).
“Creative Commons” by Shepard Fairey (CC BY) // Download the source file by clicking the image
As we prepare for CC’s 20th anniversary in 2021, we’re doing a lot of thinking about all of the fun and meaningful collaborations we’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of over the past two decades. And it occurred to me that we’d never released the source file for Fairey’s design online. So, here it is!
It’s licensed under CC BY and is available for you to use, share, remix, and all that other good stuff. Let us know by email or on Twitter if you make anything cool with it.
The CC Open Education Platform is a vibrant, international network of over 1120 open education advocates, educators, librarians, lawmakers, graduate students, and more, spanning 79 countries. This year, CC launched an activities fund to support Platform members’ good work to further open education in their countries. The activities fund offered up to $5,000 USD to community members who proposed efforts that: 1) Build and sustain community; 2) Increase educational access and equity; and/or 3) Use policy to open education opportunities for all. Accepted proposals focus on work supporting these goals in Brazil, Chile, Francophone Africa, India, Ireland, and globally.
While we would have liked to fund nearly all of the projects, we are delighted to announce the following proposal winners:
“Teaching materials introducing copyright to 9 to 15-year-olds in French-speaking Africa.”
Proposed by Isla Haddow-Flood and Florence Devouard (at Wiki In Africa), this project will create and pilot introductory materials and assignment models to support teachers instructing 9-15-year-old students in French-speaking Africa about CC licenses and their use. Across Africa, teachers do not have access to online materials to explain Copyright or CC licenses to their students, and especially not in French. The materials created will begin to fill the gap. The materials will be initially piloted in Benin as part of the WikiChallenge Bénin competition. The project will integrate feedback initial testing before distributing teaching materials among the Wikimedia and CC communities across Francophone Africa.
“Inventory and evaluation of existing social-emotional learning resources for the transition to open digital learning.”
Shivi Chandra proposed this project recognizing that a global mandate for “twenty-first century skills” has pushed social-emotional learning (SEL) materials–those which promote “well-being, connectedness, and success” (OECD)–to the forefront of many national educational strategies working to help students make sense of recent global crises, social movements, and COVID-19. These materials could be anything from public health guidance to conversation starters on domestic violence to current events news articles for kids.This project from Learning Equality will develop and share a gap analysis and preliminary audit of existing SEL resources either open or accessible on the internet. This work supports any organization looking to improve their general understanding of SEL resources, understand those available, advocate for openness in the SEL community, and develop such resources during and post COVID-19.
“Oficinas Wikimedia & Educação: a educação livre no Brasil e as plataformas Wikimedia (EN: Wikimedia & Education Workshops: free education in Brazil and the Wikimedia platforms).
Giovanna Fontenelle proposed this project to help Brazilian educators and institutions searching for new formats and teaching alternatives. The Wiki Movimento Brasil User Group will organize a series of online workshops and develop accompanying resources such as an audio description for an educational brochure, open-licensed videos of the workshops, reference materials for educators, participant lists for networking, and Outreach Dashboard metrics.
“Open Reading Lists @UCD: Phase One.”
Proposed by Susan Reilly, this project will offer a training and mobilisation workshop for librarians supporting a shift to OER, an awareness-raising campaign targeted at faculty and course coordinators, and a video tutorial on finding and assessing OER. The rapid shift to online and blended learning necessitated by COVID-19 demonstrated the need for more open and participatory engagement online and more sustainable access to diverse learning materials. This project aims to increase OER as a percentage of material on reading lists in University College Dublin, Ireland.
“Offline OER to enhance K-12 math in Chile.”
Werner Westermann proposed this project to help deliver customized OER content, responsive and aligned to the official Chilean “prioritized” curriculum, a core group of learning outcomes for math, highlighted during school disruption during COVID-19. Ideally, this curriculum will be used to support learners using Kolibri, meeting the needs of learners with limited or no Internet connectivity during COVID-19 and beyond.
“Open Pathology Education Project.”
Netha Hussain proposed this project focused on curating and annotating pathology images from Wikimedia Commons. Drawing from India’s Calicut Medical College and Dr. Yale Rosen’s collections, this project will use Wikidata as a tool to organize and categorize images for medical students to use as educational resources. As Wikidata doesn’t yet have robust pathology related information, images and descriptions from Wikimedia Commons will be first linked with Wikidata, and then used for the Open Pathology Project. The final resource will serve medical students from around the world.
We are delighted to fund projects that range from work with off-line open math and developing OER for medical education to fueling additional work with sister communities such as Wikimedia.
We also want to recognize our decision committee (listed alphabetically), members of the CC Open Education Platform who dedicated hours to application review—difficult job considering they read, scored, and deliberated over 20 amazing proposals from platform members.
Cindy Domaika
Geoff Cain
John Okewole
Jonathan Poritz
Mohammed Galib Hasan
Neil Butcher
Paola Corti
Paul West
Rachel Wexelbaum
Shanna Hollich
To our decision committee, platform colleagues who submitted inspiring proposals, and the fantastic CC Open Education Platform community—thank you! We look forward to seeing project results in December 2020, and we expect these projects to fuel more open education advancements in 2021 and beyond.
We’re pleased to announce today that Creative Commons is taking on leadership and stewardship of the Open COVID Pledge.
Earlier this year, CC joined forces with an international group of researchers, scientists, academics, and lawyers seeking to accelerate the development of diagnostics, vaccines, therapeutics, medical equipment, and software solutions that might be used to assist in the fight against COVID-19. The result was the Open COVID Pledge, a project that offers a simple way for universities, companies, and others to make their patents and copyrights available to the public to be utilized in the current public health crisis.
Users of Creative Commons licenses will be familiar with the Open COVID Pledge’s approach. Like CC licenses, the Open COVID Pledge offers free, standard, public licenses that anyone can use to remove unnecessary obstacles to the dissemination of knowledge.
Amazon, Facebook, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NASA JPL, Sandia National Laboratories, and Uber are among the dozens of companies and institutions that have used the Open COVID Pledge to make their patents and copyrights open to the public in support of solving the COVID-19 pandemic. As Creative Commons takes on this new leadership role in the project, we’re energized by the potential to expand its international scope, reach, and impact.
We’ll continue working with large companies to unlock their intellectual property (IP) rights in the pursuit of saving lives. But we also aim to team up with smaller startups, universities, and even individual innovators—especially in parts of the world that aren’t well-represented by the project’s current list of pledgors and supporters and that hold patents and other IP critical to the fight against COVID-19. We’ll achieve this goal by collaborating with members of our worldwide community, including leading organizations in the international arena working on copyright and IP policy, such as the WHO and other UN bodies. We will also leverage the expertise and our deep relationships with the Creative Commons Global Network. Stay tuned for more information on these internationalization efforts, including ways to get involved in expanding the project in your country and region.
We believe this initiative will have a profound impact beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. The common set of values, tools, and principles for the responsible use of IP in the public’s interest formed during this particular crisis can and should be used as a necessary model for addressing other crises, such as climate change. We hope to carry this conversation and model forward.
As CC takes on leadership and stewardship of the Open COVID Pledge, we are mindful of the many who contributed to its beginnings. In particular, we thank our co-collaborators for their expertise and collaboration in forging this project and helping it come to life. They have provided and will continue to provide critical strategic input into the future of this project and its growth.
You can support the 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.
At Creative Commons, we value sharing, openness, and gratitude. Over the last few months, we’ve had the privilege of working with a group of global volunteers who embody these values. In order to make the CC Global Summit a reality each year, we enlist the help of dozens of volunteers, many of whom are members of the CC Global Network (CCGN).
This year, we’re pleased to work with an amazing group of volunteers who make up our 2020 CC Global Summit Program Committee. This committee is the backbone of the CC Summit; curating the program, identifying speakers, fielding questions, and exemplifying the open culture. The theme of this year’s CC Summit is “Designing the Commons of the Future: Reflecting on the values that shape the Commons.” This event will be the perfect space for the open community to begin an exercise of internal reflection on how to build a more equitable, inclusive, and accessible world.
As you can imagine, it’s been a particularly challenging year, as we pivot from an in-person event to a virtual event. Therefore, we are so grateful for the hard work, expertise, and vision shown by our Program Committee members this year.
Meet the 2020 CC Global Summit Program Committee members below!
First, we’d like to introduce our Program Committee Chairs, Susanna Ånäs, and Claudio Ruiz.
Susanna Ånäs—As the CC Global Network Council representative for Finland, Board member of Open Knowledge Finland, and the GLAM coordinator at Wikimedia Finland, Susanna has worked on Open GLAM initiatives for several years. With Wikimedia Finland, she focuses on serving Saami languages and exploring ways for Indigenous communities to manage their online representations. She also manages other open culture projects like hackathons and tools development for open platforms.
Claudio Ruiz—As the Director of Ecosystem Strategy, Claudio works to shift Creative Commons to a more open, global, and inclusive organization led by its community. He has experience in free software licensing, as well as advocating for fundamental digital rights and freedom of expression. He is on the board of Derechos Digitales, a nonprofit organization that works to promote, defend, and develop digital rights and civil liberties in Latin America.
Africa
Kamel Belhamel—A professor of chemistry at the University of Bejaia in Algeria, Kamel is the author/co-author of several scientific papers in international scientific journals focused on open access and open science. Kamel is also the chapter lead of CC Algeria and was a member of the 2018 and 2019 CC Global Summit Program Committee.
Mary Job—A Philosopher and Open Source Enthusiast. Mary currently works remotely with Paid Memberships Pro and runs How Do You Tech on the side. She teaches digital skills through their village Uwani Hub to women and teenagers in underserved communities and she is passionate about tech for empowerment, jobs, entrepreneurship, and community building. She believes we have a lot to learn from each others’ stories, she runs a personal blog and believes everyone should do too! She is an active member of the WordPress Communities in Nigeria, & Africa, and the global team rep for 2020. She also volunteers for the Netsquared communities in her free time.
Asia-Pacific
Amber Osman—With over ten years of experience in research and scholarly publishing, Amber is a passionate expert in open science, an award-winning journal editor for advancing the publishing process by adopting innovative research and publishing solutions. She is also serving as a member of renowned scholarly publishing committees, Amber advocates for best practices in open access scholarly content. She currently works for the Law Offices of Osman & Co. in Pakistan.
Prodip Roy—Prodip Roy is currently a library officer (Monograph and Digital Collections) at RMIT University, Melbourne. He has been serving as Co-Chair (Elect) of the Special Interest Group for International Information Issues (SIG/III) of Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) for 2019-2021. Mr. Roy is a member of the Creative Commons Australia Chapter and the Creative Commons Global Network and leads responsible for Open Ed (Tertiary).
Teresa Cardoso—As a member of scientific/editorial committees, a teacher, author, and assistant professor, Teresa focuses on open education, mobile learning, and ICT in educational contexts. By working at Universidade Aberta, an “open university,” they’ve had the opportunity to teach about open licensing to a wide audience including students, fellow professors, and administration officials.
Louise Hisayasu—Louise M. Hisayasu is an independent researcher based between Sāo Paulo and Berlin. Her master’s research focused on Indigenous protagonism in Brazil, studying the movement through the lens of technology and culture production. Through her work, she is primarily interested in understanding memory, as being both individual and collective, intangible and immortalised in things, as intergenerational and the implications in its institutionalisation, within archives. She currently works at Tactical Tech and was previously a guest researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Douglas McCarthy—As an active member of the Open GLAM community, Douglas researches, writes about, and promotes open access to digital cultural heritage. He leads a global survey of Open GLAM with Dr. Andrea Wallace and co-edits the Open GLAM Medium publication with Scann. Douglas is the Collections Engagement Manager at Europeana and lives in the Netherlands.
Diogo Morais Oliveira—An attorney-at-law based in Poro, Portugal, Diogo works in intellectual property (IP) law for the cultural and creative sector. Currently, he’s the legal advisor of DÍNAMO10, a creative hub based in Viana do Castelo, Portugal, and the legal co-coordinator of CC Portugal Chapter. He is coordinating the project “CC Local Point” that aims to create contact points at creative hubs in order to support the use of CC licensing and the adoption of open business models.
André Rocha—Starting their career in 2003 designing products with a group of artisans in southern Portugal, André became interested in the parallel environments of tech, education, and design. Today they are an adjunct professor at ESELx – IPL and Fab Manager / Scientific Coordinator at Fab Lab Benfica (ESELX-IPL); open design lead for Open Product Design; and maker community lead at Creative Commons Portugal.
Mahmoud Max Wardeh—With a background in technology and media, Mahmoud founded the Open Connective, a platform that helps open projects build diverse communities of contributors. As an adjunct lecturer at Loughborough University London, he has developed OER for online education platforms. He is the founding member of the CC UK Chapter and was a member of the 2017 and 2018 CC Global Summit Program Committee.
Brigitte Vézina—As the Open Policy Manager at Creative Commons, Brigitte gets a kick out of tackling the fuzzy legal and policy issues that stand in the way of access, use, re-use and remix of culture, information and knowledge. She worked for a decade as a legal officer at WIPO and then ran her own consultancy, advising Europeana, SPARC Europe, and others on copyright matters.
Latin America
Marcela Basch—Born and raised in Argentina, Marcela is a journalist, teacher, and activist. Since 2013, she’s focused on collaborative, free, and open systems—and founded El Plan C, the first website in Spanish focused on these issues. She’s also the co-founder of Encuentro Comunes (Commons Conference) with the goal of spreading awareness about those initiatives.
Scann—Accidentally living in Uruguay, Scann is a longtime contributor to CC. Her main work has been around digital cultural heritage, the public domain, and copyright. Fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab (2018) and International Visiting Scholar at the American University (2019). Currently is working on the Open GLAM initiative for CC.
Emilio Velis—An industrial engineer based in San Salvador, Emilio explores how sharing knowledge and technology can impact communities. He was recently appointed as the executive director of the Appropedia Foundation, which shares open content to build sustainability.
North America
Andrew Lih—As one of the world’s foremost experts on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement, as well as the author of the book, The Wikipedia Revolution (2009), he has worked with multiple cultural and governmental institutions to advance Wikipedia multimedia content and structured metadata in Wikidata. He currently serves as the Wikimedia Strategist at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Jonathan Poritz—As a mathematician, Jonathan has worked in various IT firms, from start-ups to multinationals, doing things like AI, cryptography, and consulting on public policy towards technology. He is currently an associate professor of mathematics and OER coordinator at Colorado State University-Pueblo. He’s also written two OER math textbooks and serves on the state OER Council.
Again, we’d like to thank each and every one of our 2020 CC Global Summit Program Committee members for their hard work. We can’t wait for October!
The CC Global Summit will be held online from 19-24 October 2020. See the latest updates, including when to register, at summit.creativecommons.org!
Interested in becoming a sponsor for the 2020 CC Global Summit? Learn more about our sponsorship opportunities by contacting CC’s Director of Development Jami Vass at jami@creativecommons.org.
Code is just one part of open source; good documentation is essential for both users and contributors in order for open source projects to succeed. We’re excited to announce that Creative Commons is participating for the first time in Google Season of Docs, a program that pairs experienced technical writers with open source projects in need of better documentation.
I’m Ariessa Norramli, a freelance writer who happens to be a 3rd-year Software Engineering student from Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. I have about 5 years of freelance writing experience in different areas, such as content writing, technical writing, and copywriting. I’ve been a self-taught programmer, first teaching myself programming at 15. I love to read, code, and play the piano during my free time. I was also a Google Season of Docs 2019 participant under GNU Mailman.
Ariessa will work on improving the documentation for the CC Catalog API for both developers and contributors. She will be improving the automatically generated documentation as well as writing some narrative sections to add more context. Ariessa will be mentored by CC’s Software Engineer Alden Page. You can follow the progress of this project through the GitHub repo and the #cc-search channel on ourSlack community.
Jacqueline Binya
Photo Credit: Jacqueline Binya
I am a technical writer and front-end developer from Zimbabwe, a country in Southern Africa. I am passionate about the web and fascinated about how it can be harnessed to effectively solve problems within communities and in businesses. I transitioned into tech in 2019 after years of being a full-time carer to my son with special needs. I am an Andela FullStack BootCamp (Kigali, Rwanda Cycle 11) graduate and I have a background in Electrical Power Engineering. I am also an avid blogger, and in my personal blog I write tech-related articles documenting my learning, occasionally I write about life in general or the odd new JavaScript framework.
Jacqueline will work on documenting usage of our new WordPress base theme, which forms the basis of our upcoming redesigns to creativecommons.org, CC Certificates, CC Global Summit, and more. Her work will allow the open source community to contribute to those projects more effectively. Jacqueline will be mentored by CC’s Web Developer Hugo Solar. You can follow the progress of this project through the GitHub repo and the #cc-dev-wordpress channel on ourSlack community.
Nimish Nikhil Bongale
Photo Credit: Nimish Nikhil Bongale
Hello! I am Nimish Bongale, a final year Information Science Engineering student, pursuing my bachelor’s degree at Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore, India. I possess a well-cultivated knowledge of Front End Web Development (ReactJS, VueJS), App Development(React-Native, Native Android), and Data Structures & Algorithms. I finished writing a research paper on “Spider Monkey Optimization” and completed a group project on streamlining the interactive medical diagnosis flows. During the past few years, I learned the importance of utilizing my skill sets for the betterment of society. This led me to take part in many technical events promoting social good. My main hobbies are playing chess (which you could most definitely call an addiction), badminton, and my guitar. I’m also particularly interested in blogging, communicating, and speaking to the masses!
Nimish will work on developing a comprehensive usage guide for CC Vocabulary, our web design system that has just begun to be deployed across CC websites. His work will improve the experience for both CC Vocabulary contributors and CC staff. Nimish will be mentored by CC Vocabulary maintainer Dhruv Bhanushali with assistance from CC’s Web Developer Hugo Solar and Front End Engineer Zack Krida. You can follow the progress of this project through the GitHub repo and the #cc-dev-vocabulary channel on ourSlack community.
We’re very excited to be working with these talented writers and can’t wait to get started!
Want more technical updates? Including the latest updates on these projects? Follow the Creative Commons Open Source blog and @cc_opensource on Twitter! You can also join #cc-developers on our community Slack.
We’re pleased to announce today that Creative Commons is taking on leadership and stewardship of the 
