Report from the first Creative Commons board meeting of 2011
On January 8, 2011, Creative Commons held a board meeting in the San Francisco headquarters.
We discussed the CEO transition plan. I reiterated my commitment to continue working with Creative Commons in my new role as Chair of the Board focusing on international and in particular, the Middle East.
Our current plan is for the transition work to begin immediately, but for Cathy to come on board starting March 1. While the timing and the exact location are to be determined, we will be moving the headquarters from San Francisco to Silicon Valley to be closer to some of our funders and many of our core adopters coinciding with Cathy joining full time.
We reviewed and discussed the strategic plan and the board was supportive of the new structure and the objectives and metrics driven format. There was a discussion about the importance of developing the science and education sections of the vision and strategy more. We discussed the importance of involving the stakeholders and community in the conversation as well and looked to other successful models such as Wikimedia.
The board approved the budget which linked to the strategic plan and its objectives with the understanding that Cathy and I will be working on fund raising over the next few months and that certain costs such as the move and the global meeting were still only estimates. We agreed to return to the board with additional updates as they became available.
We discussed the commitment of the board to add additional board members from the international community and committed to publish the criteria within weeks. The board found no reason why board members couldn’t be added as soon as qualified board members were identified through this process. We hope to add two new non-US board members as soon as possible.
We discussed the global meeting and the board reiterated its support for the meeting.
The board discussed the website redesign. “Phase 0” the initial redesign was viewed as an improvement to the old design. (Data about the performance metrics support this.) The board supported the continuation of the website redesign, but asked staff to be prudent about the budget, interview stakeholders for feedback and input, and use internal resource where this made sense and were available.
1 Comment »CC Website Changes
If you watch our website carefully, you’ll notice a few changes today. Some of those changes are small, and some are fairly significant, and we’ll be making more changes later in 2011.
We’re making these changes because we’ve received feedback — from our community of users, friends, supporters, and more — that the current set of web properties we have here at Creative Commons isn’t working as well as it could. Our websites have always emphasized using Creative Commons tools, or finding Creative Commons-licensed works. But we haven’t always made it easy to understand exactly how we are making possible the full potential of the internet via open licensing.
Today’s changes mark the first step towards fixing that problem.
The first change you’ll notice is that we’re putting learning about CC into a featured spot on the home page, right next to where you can choose a license for your works.
Another change is that we are making it easy to see that we work across culture, education, and science, instead of putting those as links in a sidebar or even onto different domains, as we have done in the past with education and science. On each of those pages, we put in a “carousel” of users and implementations that draw on our growing repository of CC case studies. All of our work is global across all three domains, so we’ve also updated and prominently feature our international affiliates network page.
Regarding science, we’re redirecting the old Science Commons front page to http://creativecommons.org/science. This is part of our comprehensive integration of science into the core of Creative Commons — on a par with culture and education. We’re still figuring out exactly how to migrate all of the content inside the sciencecommons.org domain, so for now we’re leaving that content up and linking to it from the new page.
We made it easier to find and learn about the licenses themselves, and we made our vision and mission explicit on the About Creative Commons page.
Last, we put a “fat footer” into place at the bottom, so that visitors and experienced CC users could rapidly access key parts of the site without having to dig around and click around in a site map.
This is just the beginning of the process. We’re working on a much more complete site redesign as part of our strategic plan for 2011, but we wanted to get these fixes implemented immediately. For those of you following CC’s progress over the long term, note that our previous significant website refresh came nearly two years ago. We will be tracking the impact of the changes through our website analytics, and we welcome feedback on how you use the site, what you’d like to see, and how you think we can make our website more effective throughout the course of the year.
3 Comments »Improving Access to the Public Domain: the Public Domain Mark
Today, Creative Commons announces the release of its Public Domain Mark, a tool that enables works free of known copyright restrictions to be labeled in a way that allows them to be easily discovered over the Internet. The Public Domain Mark, to be used for marking works already free of copyright, complements Creative Commons’ CC0 public domain dedication, which enables authors to relinquish their rights prior to the expiration of copyright.
“The Public Domain Mark is a further step on the path towards making the promise of a digital public domain a reality,” said Michael Carroll, a founding board member of Creative Commons and a law professor at American University.
Europeana—Europe’s digital library, museum and archive—is the first major adopter of the Public Domain Mark. Europeana estimates that by mid-2011, the Public Domain Mark will be used in connection with millions of out-of-copyright works made available through its portal.
“An important part of our mandate is to ensure that digitized works made available through Europeana are properly labeled with rights information, including when a work is free of known copyright restrictions so that teachers, students and others can freely use it in their work, changing it and remixing it as they wish,” noted Jill Cousins, Executive Director of Europeana.
The Public Domain Mark in its current form is intended for use with works that are free of known copyright around the world, primarily old works that are beyond the reach of copyright in all jurisdictions. We have already started mapping the next phases of our public domain work, which will look at ways to identify and mark works that are in the public domain in a limited number of countries.
A final note about design. We took this opportunity to revise the CC0 deed, to align it more closely with the Public Domain Mark deed. We think the design changes will help everyone recognize the difference between our licenses, which apply to works restricted by copyright, and our public domain tools.
For more information, read the full press release.
10 Comments »Esther Wojcicki becomes CC’s Vice Chair, focused on learning and education
We’re excited to announce that Esther Wojcicki, current Chair of the Creative Commons board, esteemed and award-winning teacher, and leader at the nexus of education and technology, will become CC’s Vice Chair focused on learning and education. CC’s current CEO, Joi Ito, will step into the role of both Chair and CEO.
“Creative Commons continues to make tremendous strides in enabling openness and innovation in learning,” Wojcicki said. “I’m very happy to focus my experience and expertise on ensuring that high-quality educational materials are made easily and freely available to everyone in the world.”
Creative Commons benefits from a diverse board comprised of thought leaders, education experts, technologists, legal scholars, investors, entrepreneurs and philanthropists, all sharing a keen interest in improving quality and access in the learning sector. As a result, we anticipate that CC will be able to assist innovators, educators and policy makers in sharing the yet untapped potential of this revolution.
No Comments »The Revamped CC Case Studies Project
Last year, we kicked off our global case studies effort, inviting you to share your stories—individuals, projects, and companies who use Creative Commons for different reasons and to solve different problems. Through the CC wiki, we attempted to capture the diversity of CC creators and content by building a resource that inspires new works and informs free culture.
Thanks to your contributions, the Case Studies project has grown into an incredibly valuable resource. But like all wikis, the Case Studies wiki is evolving. Everyday, more people and projects are using CC, and existing projects are continuously making themselves over.
To keep up, we’ve made the Case Studies project easier to navigate and ultimately more useful and participatory for the community by revamping the portal and building a new rating system, implementing lessons we’ve learned from other successful wiki communities such as Wikipedia. What’s new:
- We used Semantic MediaWiki (an extension of MediaWiki) to organize quantifiable elements into a few common properties. Take a look at the case study for Cory Doctorow and you’ll see a new box on the right that provides an at-a-glance view of some of the project’s main properties. These properties are common to all case studies and their values can now be easily browsed.
- The ability to evaluate each case study by Page Importance and Page Quality. We drafted an Evaluation Guide with some basic criteria for what determines whether a case study is of high, medium, or low importance and quality. These criteria are meant to serve as starting points; we want you to edit and improve them as more case studies are evaluated and added. Each criteria that is not met comes with suggested edits to improve existing case studies.
What you can do now:
- Visit the revamped Case Studies wiki!
- Evaluate a Case Study
- Improve a Case Study by adding relevant data, updating old information, or editing the prose so that it sparkles
- Translate the new instructions. See the Portuguese translation of the evaluations page as an example.
- And as always, add your CC story or one you’re familiar with
The goal of the new features is to encourage better quality and contribution. Please use and help us improve them!
No Comments »2010 Catalyst Grant Recipients Announced!
It’s with great pleasure that we announce the recipients of the first CC Catalyst Grants Program. Out of a grant pool consisting of more than 130 applications, seven projects have been selected for awards up to $10,000 each, to catalyze projects that contribute to the commons.
Thanks to your generous support during the Catalyst Grants campaign, we raised almost $50,000, 100% of which will directly fuel the grant awards.
The applicant pool offered an impressive array of project ideas from around the world. We couldn’t be happier with the turnout and fantastic proposals from a variety of fields. Although we unable to fund more proposals this time around, we hope to run the program again next year and leverage our experience to raise a larger pool of funds so we can do still more. We also learned a lot about what makes a strong proposal and will share these guidelines with the community.
We encourage you to take a look at the remaining grant pool, and if a project catches your eye, you can leave the team a note on the wiki discussion page. Many projects are seeking specific expertise or support and would welcome the opportunity to work with others to make their idea a reality.
An enormous thank-you goes to the Catalyst Grants Review Committee, comprised of regional representatives nominated by CC Project Leads. Thank you, Hiram Meléndez Juarbe (Puerto Rico), Bassel Safadi (Syria), Paul Keller (Netherlands), Paul Kiwehlo (Tanzania), Jane Hornibrook (New Zealand), as well as Chiaki Hayashi (Asia Projects Coordinator) and the CC staff members for your thoughtful review. This process benefitted from your generous input.
Thank you as well to all the applicants for your efforts and great ideas, and thank you to those who supported the fundraising campaign that made this all possible.
With no further ado, here are the recipients of this year’s CC Catalyst Grants Program funds:
- #8: Arabic Open Educational Resources (OER) Platform
o To build a fully functional online educational system that provides free sharing of educational resources.
o Applicant: Jordan Open Source Association (Jordan) - #9: Assessing the effect of license choice on the use of lexical resources
o To measure the correlation of the openness of the license with the use of a WordNet (semantic net works similar to enhanced thesauruses) and create a server that will offer a unified, online interface to all open WordNets.
o Applicant: Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies; Nanyang Technological University (Japan) - #17: CC Commentary
o To establish a collaborative, database-driven online commentary of worldwide scope for the six CC core licenses
o Applicant: European Academy of Law and Computing (EEAR) and newthinking communications (Germany) - #36 Creative Commons Latam Conference 2010
o To host a two day regional conference where Latin American free culture communities and Creative Commons Latin America chapters will gather together to share experiences and discuss common projects (output to include publications)
o Applicant: Bienes Comunes Asociación Civil (Argentina) - #40: Developing a methodology to run Creative Commons license-based architectural competitions.
o To build a methodology for running alternative, open license-based two-phase architectural competitions
o Applicant: KÉK – Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre (Hungary) - #57: Implementing a web site that will provide technical and legal support for Latin-American publishers of academic journals to satisfy open journal standards
o To design, develop, and implement a website that will provide technical and legal support for Latin American publishers of academic journals to satisfy open journal standards
o Applicant: Derechos Digitales (Chile) and Fundacion Karisma (Colombia) - #127: etcc: remixing the visual arts
o To organize a remixable art exhibition that seeks to explore ideas of creation and appropriation in the visual arts sector.
o Applicant: Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (Australia)
Marking and Tagging the Public Domain: An Invitation to Comment
Almost 1½ years have passed since we launched CC0 v1.0, our public domain waiver that allows rights holders to place a work as nearly as possible into the public domain, worldwide, prior to the expiration of copyright. CC0 has proven a valuable tool for governments, scientists, data providers, providers of bibliographic data, and many others throughout world. At the time we published CC0, we made note of a second public domain tool under development — a tool that would make it easy for people to tag and find content already in the public domain.
We are publishing today for comment our new Public Domain Mark, a tool that allows works already in the public domain to be marked and tagged in a way that clearly communicates the work’s PD status, and allows it to be easily discoverable. The PDM is not a legal instrument like CC0 or our licenses — it can only be used to label a work with information about its public domain copyright status, not change a work’s current status under copyright. However, just like CC0 and our licenses, PDM has a metadata-supported deed and is machine readable, allowing works tagged with PDM to be findable on the Internet. (Please note that the example used on the sample deed is purely hypothetical at the moment.)
We are also releasing for public comment general purpose norms — voluntary guidelines or “pleases” that providers and curators of PD materials may request be followed when a PD work they have marked is thereafter used by others. Our PDM deed as well as an upcoming enhanced CC0 deed will support norms in addition to citation metadata, which will allow a user to easily cite the author or provider of the work through copy-paste HTML.
The public comment period will close on Wednesday, August 18th. Why so short? For starters, PDM is not a legal tool in the same sense our licenses and CC0 are legally operative — no legal rights are being surrendered or affected, and there is no accompanying legal code to finesse. Just as importantly, however, we believe that having the mark used soon rather than later will allow early adopters to provide us with invaluable feedback on actual implementations, which will allow us to improve the marking tool in the future.
The primary venue for submitting comments and discussing the tool is the cc-licenses mailing list. We look forward to hearing from you!
8 Comments »U.S. Department of Education includes OER in notice of proposed priorities for grant programs
Today the U.S. Department of Education took another big step in supporting open educational resources (OER). In the Federal Register, the Department released a notice of proposed priorities (NPP):
The Secretary of Education proposes priorities that the Department of Education (Department) may use for any appropriate discretionary grant program in fiscal year (FY) 2011 and future years … This action will permit all offices in the Department to use, as appropriate for particular discretionary grant programs, one or more of these priorities in any discretionary grant competition.
The set of proposed priorities specifically mentions OER. Essentially, if the priorities are adopted, it could mean that grant seekers who include open educational resources as a component of an application for funding from the Department of Education could receive priority. OER is included in Proposed Priority 13–Improving Productivity:
Projects that are designed to significantly increase efficiency in the use of time, staff, money, or other resources. Such projects may include innovative and sustainable uses of technology, modification of school schedules, use of open educational resources (as defined in this notice), or other strategies that improve results and increase productivity.
As mentioned, the NPP includes a definition of open educational resources:
Open educational resources (OER) means teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or repurposing by others.
Interested parties may submit comments to the notice of proposed priorities until September 7, 2010. Information about how to submit a comment is described in the notice.
No Comments »CERN supports Creative Commons
Creative Commons is deeply honored to announce CERN corporate support at the “creator level”. CERN is one of the world’s premier scientific institutions–home of the Large Hadron Collider and birthplace of the web. This donation comes on the occasion of the publication under Creative Commons licenses of the first results of LHC experiments.
Dr. Salvatore Mele, CERN Head of Open Access, provided the following statement:
The High-Energy Physics community in general, and the frontier experiments it runs at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN aim to unravel the mysteries of the universe. This major ambition can only be reached on foundations of technology and innovation, collaboration and partnership, and perhaps above all, on shared information, which is why this community has strived at Open Access to its scientific results since decades already.
The evolution of scholarly communication in the field, recently embodied by the SCOAP3 initiative, has reached an important milestone with the publication of the first results of the LHC experiments under a Creative Common license. These have appeared in the European Physical Journal (Springer) doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-009-1227-4 (CC BY-NC); Journal of High Energy Physics (SISSA), doi:10.1007/JHEP02(2010)041 (CC BY-NC); Physics Letters (Elsevier), doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2010.03.064 (CC BY); and Physical Review Letters (APS), doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.022002 (CC BY).
CERN has become a supporter of Creative Commons to acknowledge the contribution that its licenses make to accelerating scientific communication and simplifying the way researchers share their work. The Creative Commons Attribution license is an important tool for the publication of CERN’s experimental results.
Please join CERN in using and supporting Creative Commons!
3 Comments »Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges Adopts CC BY for All Competitive Grants
The Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges (SBCTC) recently adopted an open licensing policy for the competitive grants they administer:
All digital software, educational resources and knowledge produced through competitive grants, offered through and/or managed by the SBCTC, will carry a Creative Commons Attribution License … [and] applies to all funding sources (state, federal, foundation and/or other fund sources) …
The brief (PDF), prepared by Cable Green (who we interviewed in March about the Open Course Library Project), explains how the policy is aligned with SBCTC’s strategic technology plan. The policy draws inspiration from related initiatives working to support the sharing of research and OER, such as the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), the Southern Regional Education Board’s openness recommendations via “An Expectation of Sharing: Guidelines for Effective Policies to Respect, Protect and Increase the Use of Digital Educational Resources”, and the open licensing requirements for foundation grantees explored in the Berkman Center’s “An Evaluation of Private Foundation Copyright Licensing Policies, Practices and Opportunities.”
Congratulations to SBCTC for this great step forward!
No Comments »
