One of the projects I knew I wanted to take on when I joined Creative Commons as CEO was a major website redesign. The CC site has always been a valuable source of information about our mission, our community, and the legal tools we offer. While there’s a lot of new things happening at CC, our website didn’t reflect that with an old design. Also, with 1.1 billion works in the commons, it’s sad not to show any of that vibrancy in our site. My goal was for Creative Commons to have a website that more clearly communicated what we do, reflected the commons back to our community, and also looked modern, clean, and beautiful.

I’m extremely happy to say that Creative Commons now has that website. Over the summer we soft-launched a brand new version of CreativeCommons.org. Today, after several weeks of fixing bugs and tidying up content, we’re celebrating with a public announcement about the redesign to our partners, friends, and followers online.

Besides a much-needed aesthetic overhaul, you’ll notice that the new site more clearly outlines our work across all fields, from arts and culture to education to science. Some other highlights include a newly designed blog and a dynamic section at the bottom of our homepage that will keep you apprised of the wide array of incredible creative projects in the growing commons.

We worked closely with the Vancouver-based web firm Affinity Bridge on the new site, and I cannot say enough what a joy it was to collaborate with such a talented and insightful group. I’m also grateful to Matt Lee and Rob Myers for their efforts to bring the new site online, and preserve over a decade’s worth of content. A huge thank you to our community and members of the Creative Commons board and advisory board for all their feedback on the new design.

We’re not finished, of course. A website is a living, breathing thing, and we’ll continue improving and building ours out over time. The next phase of our work will include improvements to our fundraising infrastructure, and also the development of a WordPress template that our affiliates can customize for their own pages. It will build on the look and feel of the main site, but will make it easy for affiliates to set up their own pages without building new sites.

I hope you’ll find a few minutes to explore the new site, if you haven’t already. As you come across any bugs or issues that you think we should take a look at, please feel free to report them to us on GitHub.

The post A long-awaited new look for our website appeared first on Creative Commons.

To recap, Great Minds created educational materials under a U.S. federal government grant that required them to be shared under a Creative Commons noncommercial license (specifically, CC BY-NC-SA). Public school districts—those that did not have the means or resources to make the tens of thousands of copies of the publicly-funded materials needed for use in the classroom—paid FedEx Office stores to make copies of some of this material. The copies were to be used by the school districts noncommercially. Great Minds claims that because FedEx Office charged its typical fee to make these copies at the direction of the school districts for use in the classroom, it violated the CC license.

We’re following up here with a few words about why we’re getting involved in this particular case, and why we believe it’s important for us to do so. Put simply, we believe that any entity—whether it’s you or me or a public school district—should be able to pay a copy shop to make copies of a work that has been published under one of CC’s noncommercial licenses, in order to use those copies noncommercially.

We feel that Great Minds’ interpretation in this instance is wrong. We also believe that this incorrect interpretation would dramatically reduce CC’s noncommercial licenses’ usability and usefulness. It would negate what Creative Commons—and more importantly, what innumerable users in our community—believes to be true about CC’s noncommercial licenses.

All around the world, people, companies, and institutions use our noncommercial copyright licenses to make their work available to the public for noncommercial use. They do so because they want to share and allow re-use of their work. There are uses that CC licensors clearly intend to allow and that licensees clearly expect to be granted through our noncommercial licenses. We strongly believe that one of those uses is the ability to have a company like FedEx Office make copies of that content so that licensees can make their own noncommercial use.

If this sort of use is not permitted by CC’s noncommercial licenses, then, in the real world, that means that anyone wanting to make copies of the content for noncommercial use must own a printing house, or a parcel delivery service if they want to send a hard copy by mail. We do not believe that this is a reasonable expectation or interpretation of the license. To keep the commons usable for all, we felt that we had to step forward on this case to help prevent a negative outcome.

For more on this case as it develops, please keep an eye on our blog and follow us on Twitter.

The post Why we’re fighting to protect noncommercial uses appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Toronto summit will be a launchpad for the next phase of work for Creative Commons and its global communities. Earlier this year, we unveiled a new Strategic Plan, which focuses on collaboration, vibrancy, gratitude, and usability as our key principles. This is our first summit since this announcement, where we expect to draw together nearly 500 participants from a variety of disciplines including policy and law, arts and culture, open education, GLAM, free culture, open science, open access, and technology. This event is for the global open community, broadly construed, and its focus all aspects of “open” work in education, free culture, open data and research, open knowledge, and more.

Communities around the world are at the heart of our work. Without activists, advocates, professionals, and supporters around the world, Creative Commons would not be the globally recognized standard it is today. Our summits have historically kickstarted actions to help creators make connections and celebrate the commons, and the 2017 summit is poised to be our most successful yet.

We wholeheartedly invite you to join us in Toronto next April. For information about how to participate, please sign up for our special summit email list below. Thank you for your support.

The post Announcing the 2017 Creative Commons Global Summit appeared first on Creative Commons.

Photo: Cancer Immunotherapy by National Institutes of Health, CC BY 2.0

Under the direction of Vice President Joe Biden, the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative seeks to make ten years of progress on cancer research in half that time, with a goal to end cancer in our lifetime.

Today, Creative Commons will participate in Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Summit in Washington, D.C. I will join the Summit, which is aimed at creating action and fostering collaborations around the goals of the Cancer Moonshot. The event will bring together a wide spectrum of stakeholders, including researchers, oncologists, nurses and other care providers, data and technology experts, philanthropists, advocates, patients, and survivors.

Changing Policy to Improve Access to Cancer Research

We need a new approach that will give cancer researchers broad, unencumbered access to scientific literature and data. Even with significant investments in cancer research, the scientific publishing environment hampers innovation and discoveries. In 2016 alone, $5.21 billion of public money was allocated to the National Cancer Institute for cancer related research. Other major agencies such as the National Institutes of Health fund billions more. Despite this massive public investment, research articles remain hidden behind paywalls, delayed from release by long, unnecessary embargo periods. Research data remain unavailable, or are restricted from being machine-readable, an essential element needed to allow deep analysis by new technologies. If all publicly-funded cancer research was required to be shared, and researchers had unfettered access to the underlying data, it would allow everyone to cooperate and lead to new discoveries, analysis, cancer treatments, and ultimately a cure.

Recently, Creative Commons made recommendations on how the federal government can accelerate the speed and probability of discovery for new cancer treatments and cures:

1. Make open access the default for cancer research articles and data.
2. Take embargo periods on research articles and data to zero.
3. Build and reward a culture of sharing and collaboration.
4. Share cancer education and training materials as open educational resources.

We also asked our community to share their personal stories about the need for open access in cancer research. There stories are powerful and important, and they make a compelling case for immediate open access. Read some of their stories on Medium.

Our Commitments to the Cancer Moonshot Initiative

In response to the Vice President’s call for open access to cancer research publications, Creative Commons is committing to provide open educational resources and tools that will support researchers, funders, medical professionals, professors, and patients as they build open and collaborative communities for cancer research. These materials will include guides for adopting and implementing open licensing policies, training materials regarding working openly and using licensed materials, and technical tools for applying licenses to shared works.

As with all of Creative Commons’ programs, these materials and tools will be freely available and openly licensed for all who need them, and can also be remixed and repurposed by anyone to serve each community’s needs. Sharing resources ensures that the best materials are available to everyone to increase the effectiveness and impact of the cancer community as a whole.

In addition to providing educational resources and open licensing assistance to researchers, CC will engage, educate, and support federal departments and agencies, cancer research centers, universities, nonprofits, and foundations that fund cancer research to adopt and implement open policies that require knowledge to be openly licensed and freely-available without restrictions or embargoes.

We applaud the bold goals of the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative. Its success will depend both on breaking down barriers of access to research by promoting information sharing and scientific collaboration. One way to do this is to require full, immediate open access to government-funded cancer research, data, and educational resources. Creative Commons is committed to aiding federal agencies in the development and implementation of policies that meet these requirements. We are thrilled to participate in today’s Cancer Moonshot Summit. We look forward to providing leadership, training, and educational materials that will help open up research, enable collaboration, and put an end to cancer.

The post Supporting Open Collaboration to Achieve Cancer Cures appeared first on Creative Commons.

I’m very excited to share three new job postings with Creative Commons today, supporting three essential areas of our work: technology, communications, and fundraising. It’s a very exciting time for CC: we have new revenues, a new strategy, and a growing Commons and an energetic movement around the world. There is new energy, a great staff, and so much potential, but we need add to our team to be successful. Below is a summary of the new positions with links to the postings.

Director of Engineering

Responsible for all aspects of CC’s technology infrastructure and product and service development, the Director of Engineering will lead our existing dev team to build a more vibrant, usable global commons, powered by collaboration and gratitude. We want to light up the Commons — make it more discoverable, usable, and connected. This is the opportunity: to build products and services — both standalone and within our partner platforms — that will bring the commons to life with greater use, re-use, and contribution.

Communications Manager

Focused on the production and distribution of communication materials that expand CC’s reach and increase the size of our community, the Communications Manager will create innovative, compelling communications that grow and connect communities of creators who want to share. You’ll help us put the best of the Commons front and centre, and show the benefits of sharing and collaboration in all the communities in which we work.

Development Manager

This position is focused on fundraising from foundation and government sources to meet our annual revenue goals. The job includes research, data management, reporting, and copy writing. Our new strategy is ambitious, and your opportunity is to support our team with the resources they need to achieve these goals. Your contribution will be vital to the success of the organization and our global community.

There are a few more hires in the queue this year: one in UX and one in event planning, which will likely go up in the summer. It’s a really exciting time to join CC, and an important time for the free culture and open knowledge movements around the world. Please share the posts, and help us find great people to join our team.

One final note: As today is International Women’s Day, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out how much I believe that our organizations are better when they have women’s voices and leadership featured prominently. Our CC staff today is 42 percent women, and 60 percent of our team at director level and above are women. But we can do better, and when we do, our work and our movement will be better as a result — all the data says so.

When drafting these postings, we did a final round of revisions in response to insights about how different genders approach a call for applications. Research suggests that women often choose not to apply for a position based on the requirements they don’t have, while men tend to apply regardless. Some have suggested this is a problem women should fix, which to me is about as backwards as saying women get paid systemically less for the same work because they don’t ask the right way. I think it’s a challenge for Creative Commons to address, and for me personally — ensuring we ask for everything we do need, and nothing we don’t. If we can’t hire talented, qualified women, that’s our fault, not the fault of talented, qualified women.

You can help: have a look at these postings and if you know a bright, creative woman who wants to change the world with us, encourage her to apply. If that person is you, we can’t wait to hear from you.

Stock photo from the excellent Women of Color in Tech, that shares CC-licensed stock images, perfect for just this kind of post. We love them.

The post New Job Opportunities at Creative Commons appeared first on Creative Commons.

Jane Park

Jane has eight years of organizational experience in open education, communications, fundraising, and community building. Most recently, she established CC’s first internal platform team to support adoption on content platforms, and drove data collection and analysis for the 2015 State of the Commons report. As Director of Platform and Partnerships, she will be focused on engaging CC’s partners in creating and sharing content to make the commons more usable, collaborative, and full of gratitude.

Prior to this new role, Jane founded CC’s School of Open, recruiting 60 volunteers across 6 continents, and launching 100 open education courses and workshops. She has programmed workshops and resources to support grantees of the $2 billion U.S. Dept of Labor career training program requiring CC BY for all grant outputs, has led numerous public campaigns and events for CC, including a website redesign, fundraising drive, and open education salons. And she has driven adoption of CC licenses for platforms such as Blackboard, Boundless, and edX, in addition to co-authoring reports and surveys on the state of open licensing policies and copyright barriers in education. Jane’s appointment was effective January 1.

Eric Steuer

As Director of Content and Community, Eric will focus on activating creators and collaborators around open content, knowledge, and data. He will lead CC’s communications team, bringing the best of the commons to the forefront, and celebrating communities that share and create together.

Most recently, Eric was a Senior Director at WIRED, running its Audience Development group. In this role, he built readership and oversaw community engagement across all of WIRED’s properties. Under Eric’s direction, WIRED’s social media audience more than tripled and its newsletter traffic grew by 2,500%. Additionally, Eric built a syndication network made up of more than two dozen partners. Eric remains a contributing editor at WIRED, and has authored well over 100 features, essays, and articles—including two cover stories for the magazine.

Eric’s history with Creative Commons goes back over a decade. He was CC’s Creative Director from 2005-2011, and led the organization’s work with artists, media, technology companies, and cultural institutions. Eric was a key member of the team responsible for the adoption of CC’s tools by users including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Vimeo, SoundCloud, YouTube, Warner Bros, Al Jazeera, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Nine Inch Nails, Random House, WhiteHouse.gov, and many others.

Eric is the board chair of CASH Music, a member of KQED’s audience development advisory group, and a recording artist. He will begin his new role at CC on February 1.

Follow Jane and Eric on Twitter (@janedaily and @ericsteuer) or reach them directly via https://creativecommons.org/contact.

The post New CC directors to focus on platforms and content creation appeared first on Creative Commons.

Over the past week, we’ve talked about sharing, and its fundamental role in societies, and I’ve shared our goal of a vibrant, usable commons, powered by collaboration and gratitude (Read our previous posts: “We need to talk about sharing”, and “Towards a vibrant, usable commons.”). What follows next is our plan for bringing the strategy to life.

Yesterday, we announced an incredible gift from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation: a $10 million unrestricted grant, which will have a transformational impact on our work. For many years, CC has struggled with sustainability, and has lacked a strong fundraising program. Over the past 18 months, with support from many of you, we’ve set that right. We’ve tripled the number of donors, doubled individual fundraising, cut our expenses, and focused our work on the areas where we will have the most impact. That’s been difficult, but also essential to building the kind of support required for a gift of this magnitude.

I’m personally very grateful to Hewlett for their support for CC — they’ve been there from the very beginning, and it’s clear they’ll be there well into the future. Their donation doesn’t mean we’re free and clear: we’ll need these new resources to make some important investments, but we’ll also need others to join us if we’re going to be successful. But more on that another day. For now, let’s focus on the plan.

To articulate our strategy, we developed an intended outcome statement — a brief statement that expresses clearly our goal:

“Creative Commons will, within 3-5 years, foster a vibrant, usable, and collaborative global commons, powered by an engaged community of creators, curators, and users of content, knowledge, and data. We will do so by focusing in three intermediate outcomes: discovery,  collaboration, and advocacy.”

That could mean a lot of things, and the hardest part of any strategy is deciding which things you’re not going to do. Saying no is much harder than saying yes. CC will focus our strategy in three specific areas: Discovery, collaboration, and advocacy.

Discovery is about creating a more vibrant and usable commons, both on the platforms where open content is hosted, and also for those works that are individually hosted on creators’ websites. It is also about telling a compelling story of open collaboration, and demonstrating its value to the world so that others will join the movement. Search, curation, meta-tagging, content analytics, one-click attribution are all examples of areas where improved discovery would support creators that use the commons.

To do this work, CC will need to establish a small developer team. We work in the open, and can draw on the open source community, but to do that we need the capacity to develop our own prototypes and tools, maintain our services to licensors, and work with contributors. We’ll also strengthen our communications team to tell the story of the commons, our partners, and our community — watch for an announcement on that soon.

Collaboration is about helping creators across sectors, disciplines, and geographies, to work together to share open content and create new works. CC’s role is to facilitate greater cooperation and engagement in the commons, realizing the unique benefits of open across many of the communities that rely on open content.

To do this work, CC will play an active role in developing and facilitating solutions for cooperation and engagement in communities like OER or open access. Solutions which will often then scale up to other communities — imagine helping to build more effective search for open educational resources, or The List, a mobile app that allows users to request images and others to submit them with a CC BY license to a public archive, as simple ways to facilitate collaboration that can scale up across multiple communities. CC will assign staff to develop partnerships with platforms and creative communities that create and remix content, and help improve the experience of sharing and working in a public commons.

Advocacy is about CC’s vital role in advocacy and policymaking. Creative Commons has a powerful and respected role in pushing for positive reforms. We are frequently called upon to lend our voice to important open policy debates, and to explain the impacts for the public good of particular policies, while identifying areas where new or existing policy impacts the ability of users to apply or rely upon CC licenses. However, the fight for copyright reform is a global one, and will only be won if we activate the power of many interconnected global communities.

To do this work, CC will focus on strengthening and supporting the global affiliate network — chapters in over 85 countries comprised of some of the world’s leading experts and advocates in open content and knowledge. At our most recent summit in Seoul, South Korea, the energy and excitement from the network was inspiring — but we have to ensure that energy turns into action, and there’s an urgent need to create a global network strategy to connect it all together. CC may not have the capacity or expertise to manage dozens of copyright reform campaigns globally, but the CC affiliate network does, if properly supported and engaged. With a strong team in place, micro-grants for local projects, and better infrastructure, CC will put collaboration at the centre of our approach, as we have been successful at supporting and collaborating with connected communities that advocate for policies that strengthen the commons, like the Open Policy Network and Communia.

This is where you come in

What’s next? We’re now developing program implementation plans, including consultation with the CC global affiliate network and key partners. We expect that work to be complete by the end of February.

We want to hear from you about how we can truly light up the global commons. This will be a transformative change for Creative Commons — a new direction that is more focused and will have even greater impact. We don’t have all the answers, and we can’t do it alone. I hope you’ll join us as we shape the projects and programs that will bring this strategy to life.

So tell us: What’s your idea to help CC make the commons more vibrant and usable, and to foster communities of collaboration and gratitude?

The post Let’s light up the global commons appeared first on Creative Commons.

On behalf of the Creative Commons staff, Board, Affiliate Network, and global community, we are thrilled to announce that the Board of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has unanimously approved an unrestricted multi-year grant in the amount of $10 million to Creative Commons.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been a proud founding partner and longstanding supporter of Creative Commons; In particular, CC and Hewlett have worked closely together to innovate in education — CC licenses are at the heart of Open Educational Resources, and CC is an active and engaged leader in the OER movement. Hewlett is also an adopter of CC — the Foundation has implemented an open policy for many grantees, requiring open licenses on grantee outputs to ensure maximum use and re-use.

The grant comes at pivotal time as a major investment in CC’s new strategy. “Creative Commons is the chief steward of a large and growing movement for openness, a movement to make knowledge more freely available, to foster sharing and collaboration, and to spur advances and improvements that make the world a better place for everyone,” said Hewlett Foundation President Larry Kramer, in announcing the grant.

With this critical lead support and tremendous vote of confidence in our work, Creative Commons is now able to invest in its next organization phase, a renewed vision for not just the licenses but for the broader commons movement. “Our renewed strategy will be aimed at building a more vibrant, usable commons powered by collaboration and gratitude,” said Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley. “This is how we light up the commons: Creators need to be able to easily find the very best content in the commons, share feedback, give gratitude, get analytics, and work together to build networks around their interests and passions.”

This effort to build a more connected global commons is nothing short of transformational. It’s a strategic shift for Creative Commons that will require us to develop new infrastructure, new tools, and new resources; and it will require a new level of investment. Lead support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation provides key momentum and will be critical in catalyzing this new level of investment, part of a much broader effort to ensure long term organizational sustainability and a thriving global commons for decades to come.

Our deepest thanks to The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and to all of you who have supported CC over the years. And for those of you who are new to CC, we welcome you to our community and look forward to sharing all our big wins with you. We are humbled by the generous show of support and feel privileged to be able to take on the important work ahead.

The post Creative Commons awarded $10M grant from Hewlett Foundation to support renewed strategy appeared first on Creative Commons.

The challenge we face

While we may all be hard-wired for sharing, legislators in every country in the world have taken copyright well beyond its original role as “an incentive for creation” to a carefully-guarded and nearly never-ending right to private profit.

Copyright was originally designed to inspire more creativity from creators — to guarantee them some limited benefit to incentivize their creation. Today’s copyright practically ignores the fact that the Web and technological innovation made us all creators and publishers, often dozens of times a day. This modern reality has implications for creativity, innovation, privacy, business models, and more, yet most of these issues remain unaddressed in antiquated copyright structures. As a result of its refusal to acknowledge the present, today’s copyright rules restrict sharing, slow and prevent collaboration, and leave millions of works locked away regardless of the author’s desire (or lack of desire) to use them.

As a society, we are failing to limit the past — this was Lawrence Lessig’s warning and refrain from “Free Culture.” In fact, we have capitulated to the past, protecting traditional structures and business models, often at the expense of innovation and creativity. We put private good before cooperation. We will never know exactly what we’ve lost as a result. It’s impossible to quantify fully the inventions not made, discoveries not revealed, and creativity restrained.

The benefits that should be afforded to the public as part of an effective system of copyright are sadly lacking today, and it’s reasonable to expect that without a dramatic shift we may never realize these benefits. Secret deals, negotiated by governments and corporations hand-in-hand, without public review or consideration, are the new normal. Most copyright negotiations and consultations are focused on making minor changes, rather than addressing the major failures of laws that were written for another century. The fight for copyright reform can’t be won without rethinking our approach, and harnessing the power of many interconnected global communities.

Hacking copyright and driving reform

Creative Commons didn’t change copyright. The terms of copyright are still so long that a new work published today will be locked down until long after we are all dead. But a Creative Commons license offers an elegant solution for someone who wants to share right now. The licenses are not, and never will be, an alternative to meaningful copyright reform, but they are a powerful tool that creators can employ now without waiting, and without asking permission. CC created a release valve to the constraints of copyright — a doorway to an alternate reality of free and open content, powered by creators who share a set of important values. And while CC has been successful, our work will not be complete until we light up that universe of content and creators to establish what we might describe as an open distributed social network.

Now well into our second decade, the CC licenses are ubiquitous, and accepted as the global standard for sharing of content under permissive legal terms. They are embedded in major content platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and Medium, public archives like the DPLA, Internet Archive, and Wikimedia Commons, and have been adopted by governments and foundations, including the White House and major US foundations including Hewlett, Gates, and Ford. The CC licenses enable open access to academic research and data, open textbooks, and are increasingly used for government open data (via CC0). The license suite functions globally, and is brought to life around the world by CC affiliate chapters in 85 countries. The commons is massive and growing. The 2015 State of the Commons report showed that between 2010 and 2015, the commons nearly tripled in size.

Creative Commons represents just one part of the global commons. Today’s commons: one with the potential for infinite abundance rather than the tragedy of mismanaged scarcity, is made up of many overlapping communities: open source, open government data, open science, open educational resources (OER), Wikipedians, Mozillians, free software creators, etc. While we don’t agree on everything, our common thread is a desire to foster the benefits of openness: access, opportunity, equity, innovation, transparency.

Taken together, the commons is a platform for cooperation. Each person joins the network when they share, which invites a collaboration with others — sometimes direct, and often indirect. Today, there are over 1.1 billion Creative Commons licensed works, shared by millions of people around the world. What’s most powerful about this number is that each creator chose to cooperate, to collaborate, and to share. Despite this profound gift, their works too often sit disconnected from each other, without context, gratitude, or mechanisms for collaboration.

A renewed focus

CC’s focus should no longer be to achieve scale. The key challenge facing the commons today is usability, vibrancy, and collaboration.

CC has helped to foster a global movement that has reimagined the idea of the commons as a digital environment of infinite abundance inspired by collaboration, rather than mismanaged scarcity plagued by self-interest. The size of the commons is not as important as how (and if) the works it contains are used to achieve our vision and mission. This is most likely to come to fruition if the materials contained within the commons are easy to discover and curate, to use and remix, and if those who create feel valued for their contributions. To date, this has not been the case. In every part of the commons, users struggle to realize these benefits. The opportunity for CC is to focus and do more to offer tools, education, advocacy, and community-building.

The Web has obviously changed significantly since 2002 when CC launched, but the way the CC licenses work hasn’t. While most web services and apps are data-driven and accessible via API, CC’s licenses are largely static, devoid of data, and rooted in markup. There are no services to enhance the user experience, or provide additional value and create connections. Users still have to manually provide attribution. There are no analytics about use or re-mix. Adding a work to the commons is a huge gift, but contributors get very little in exchange — no feedback, no analytics, not even a “like” or a “thank you.” While CC is integral to many kinds of creativity and sharing on the web, it has yet to capitalize on this influence to connect and light up the commons.

CC must recognize its various roles in a variety of diverse and active communities. We provide essential infrastructure for the Web, and are vital contributors and leaders in these global movements. The opportunity to realize the benefits of openness will come from showing how “open” is uniquely able to solve the challenges of our time. Our role is not just as providers of tools, but also as strategic partners, advocates, influencers, and supporters to quantify, evangelize, and demonstrate the benefits of open.

We also acknowledge that Creative Commons is both an organization and a movement, and that there will be many actors — especially CC’s global affiliate network — who will take on their own projects and initiatives that extend the scope of these activities. That is not only acceptable, it must be encouraged and supported to the greatest extent possible. A powerful movement is one of common values with many independent actors seeking a shared outcome, not uniform application of programs and tools. If we are successful, our initiatives will support these communities in various ways as we all seek to strengthen the commons.

Next: Our strategy and plan

The post Towards a vibrant, usable commons appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Creative Commons 2016-2020 Organizational Strategy reflects over a year of intensive consultation, discussion, brainstorming, analysis, and testing throughout CC’s global community, including staff, board, affiliates, partners, supporters, and donors. The insights and approaches contained within it have been influenced by hundreds of valuable discussions with creators, non-profits, foundations, government officials, advocacy organizations, content platforms, lawyers, librarians, museums, archivists, industry advocates, and open community leaders.

These essential discussions have taken place on mailing lists, in chat rooms, in boardrooms and coffee shops, in large groups and in one-on-one discussions. Prompted and unprompted, time and time again, the need for a more vibrant, usable, collaborative commons has been an issue of concern. This is a critical moment for the commons, for the open Web, and for Creative Commons. I am incredibly enthusiastic about this new direction for the organization, and we are all deeply motivated to bring it to life. I’m grateful to everyone who has given their time and energy to help shape this strategy.

We need to talk about sharing

Collaboration, sharing, and co-operation are in our nature — building community, co-operating towards common goods, and creating shared benefits are at the heart of who we are. In fact, these values live even closer to us than our beating hearts, operating at the level of our DNA. Martin Nowak, a Harvard professor who studies the underpinnings of evolution, argued in Scientific American that humanity’s story is one of both competition and cooperation. According to Nowak, it is not just a struggle for survival, but also an essential “snuggle for survival.”

An extreme take on Darwin’s theory of evolution might suggest we should never help our fellow humans. We are expected to exploit our creative works to the greatest extent possible, to extract the maximum benefit, to the exclusion of all others. To accept anything less is foolish. And yet the leading thinkers, and the data, suggest the exact opposite.

Nowak’s research shows that co-operators — even those who share at their own expense — often win out over time. Elinor Ostrom’s research on the power of shared economies and the collaborative management of common resources won her the Nobel Prize in Economics. In Adam Grant’s book, “Give and Take”, he goes beyond the idea that givers are purely altruistic, and argues that those who “give first are often best positioned for success later.” And giving doesn’t just help the giver, it also begets more giving. According to Grant, when researchers studied giving across social networks, they found that when one person gave at their own personal cost over a series of rounds, others were more likely to contribute in subsequent rounds, even with people who were not in the original group. “The presence of a single giver was enough to establish a norm of giving,” wrote Grant.

Sharing is not a purely selfless act — while thinking beyond one’s own personal benefit is at the core of why we share, it also pays itself forward in reputation, and rewards us with good feelings and personal gratification. Sharing contributes to our individual identity — how we want to see ourselves, and be seen, in the world. Nowak calls this kind of earned reputation “indirect reciprocity” — common in large, complex communities, where direct reciprocity is nearly impossible. Complex communities like the ones we created together with the Web. Individuals who share in these communities establish and accumulate reputation. To be known, and to be valued — that’s reputation — and it is essential to vibrant, open communities, from Wikipedia, to open science, to open source software. We accumulate benefits from others who give freely because of the norms created in those groups. These acts are not entirely altruistic, and the motivations behind them are real and powerful.

This is the real power of sharing: concurrent and lasting benefits, multiplied for the giver, the receiver, and society. If Grant’s research is right, then a global movement built around sharing and collaboration will be infectious — converting not only those who give and receive, but establishing and reinforcing new norms in online communities. Every share can inspire others — eventually, over the long run — to “share alike”.

The Internet is real life

The line between these online communities and real life is blurring, or in many cases, altogether irrelevant. The Internet is real life. It’s where we go to work. It’s how we connect to the people we love. It’s where we tell our stories. This is the society we’re building together. If it is going to be fair, equal, diverse, vibrant, serendipitous, and safe for everyone, it will only be because we choose to make it that way. If it is going to be accessible, equitable, and full of innovation and opportunity, it will require our leadership to build the foundations that support these ideals.

This is how Creative Commons can be successful: by ensuring that the legal, technical, and policy infrastructure we create is designed to foster cooperation and sharing. The tools and services we create are important, but equally or perhaps even more important is how we create them: by supporting and fostering open, collaborative communities and driving engagement across the spectrum of open knowledge and free culture. Our open values are at the heart of what we do, but also how we do it. If we are successful in this endeavour, we will be much closer to realizing our vision: unlocking the full potential of the Internet to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity.

Next: Towards a vibrant, usable commons.

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