Reporting back on the Institute for Open Leadership 2
The Centenary Tree Canopy Walkway by Alessandro Sarretta, CC BY
Last week Creative Commons hosted the second Institute for Open Leadership. The Institute is a training and peer-to-peer learning opportunity that brings together up-and-coming leaders to develop and implement an open licensing policy in their institution, province or nation. We were thrilled to welcome a diverse group of fellows from 14 countries to Cape Town, South Africa.
- Jane-Frances Agbu – National Open University of Nigeria – Nigeria
- Rim Azib – British Council, Tunis – Tunisia
- Steve Cairns – Greenpeace International – Netherlands
- Amanda Coolidge – BCcampus – Canada
- Daniel DeMarte – Tidewater Community College – United States
- Paula Eskett – CORE Education – New Zealand
- Mostafa Azad Kamal – Bangladesh Open University – Bangladesh
Roshan Kumar Karn – Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital – Nepal - Vincent Kizza – Open Learning Exchange Uganda – Uganda
- Fiona MacAllister – University of the Witwatersrand – South Africa
- Katja Mayer – University of Vienna – Austria
- Caroline Mbogo – The World Agroforestry Centre – Kenya
- Niall McNulty – Cambridge University Press – South Africa
- Juliana Monteiro – Museu da Imigração do Estado de São Paulo – Brazil
- Alessandro Sarretta – Institute of Marine Sciences – Italy
In addition to the fellows, we invited seven mentors with open policy expertise from various open sectors. We even brought back two IOL #1 fellows (Klaudia Grabowska and David Ernst) to be mentors at this year’s Institute.
Prior to arriving in Cape Town, all of the fellows proposed an open policy project, which they then developed with their mentors and other fellows during the week. A natural focus for the week was understanding open licensing and the potential for open policies to expand public access to knowledge, data, culture, and research around the world. But licensing is not the only component to a successful open policy adoption. Much of the week involved hearing how openness is perceived within different sectors and institutions, and coming up with strategies and tactics for addressing the important social, cultural, and technological challenges to open policy adoption.
IOL2 session by Kelsey, CC BY
In addition to learning and working with the mentors and other fellows, there were several interesting speakers that came to talk with the group, including Adam Haupt and Caroline Ncube from the University of Cape Town, Mark Horner from Siyavula, Ralph Borland with Africa Robots, and Barbara Chow, TJ Bliss, and Dana Schmidt from the Hewlett Foundation.
Over the coming months, the Institute fellows will share regular updates here about their projects, including the progress they are making in implementing open licensing policies within their institutions and governments.
Thank you to Paul Stacey and Kelsey Wiens—who helped facilitate the week-long workshop—and to Kelsey in particular, who helped arrange all the logistics for the meeting in Cape Town. We also appreciate the assistance from the Open Policy Network and the ongoing support from the William and Flora Hewlett and the Open Society Foundations in making the Institute for Open Leadership possible.
IOL2 fellows and mentors by Kelsey, CC BY
Creative Commons Turkey Joins the CC Affiliate Network
Creative Commons Türkiye Lansmanı (CC BY-SA)
Last week, on March 11 2016, Creative Commons Turkey was officially launched during an event at Özyeğin University in Istanbul. Creative Commons is extremely proud and happy to have CC Turkey join the affiliate network, and we want to congratulate the whole team for their efforts over the last year to accomplish this.
We hope and expect that the CC Turkey team will play a pivotal role in the region, and we are looking forward to working with them on the translation of the licenses into Turkish and for the organisation of CC-related events!
Hoşgeldiniz CC Türkiye!
-Gwen Franck, Regional Coordinator Europe
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Reposted from Creative Commons Türkiye:
The Creative Commons Turkey launch event was held in Özyeğin University on Friday, March 11 with the theme of #shareyourcreativity. The event featured a large number of guests including legal professionals, IT experts, researchers, educators and librarians.
We are pleased to announce that Creative Commons Turkey is now a part of the global CC community.
The event offered a rich program of exciting, horizon-broadening speeches and enlightening discussions. In the spotlight of the discussions of open society, free society and copyrights reform and culture of sharing which Creative Commons represents and is therefore a natural part of it. The use of Creative Commons licenses will make great contributions to the development of these dynamics in Turkey. The launch event was a step towards identifying the points of resistance and gaps in adopting the culture of sharing in the Turkish society and building a legal infrastructure for it.
Sharing and dissemination of intellectual, cultural and artistic outputs to wider audiences are unprecedented elements of a creative, innovative, well-educated, sophisticated and free society. In recognition of this fact, Creative Commons Turkey, under the leadership of Özyeğin University, will continue to work unflaggingly to enable and promote the use of CC licenses in collaboration with all stakeholders. You may follow up on our activities at creativecommons.org.tr and @ccturkiye.
We invite you all to share your creativity with CC licenses.
Please visit the program page for the presentations and videos of the Creative Commons Turkey launch event. [Photos from the event are available on Flickr.]
Comments Off on Creative Commons Turkey Joins the CC Affiliate NetworkNew Job Opportunities at 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.
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.
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.
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.
Comments Off on New Job Opportunities at Creative CommonsHappy Open Education Week!
Open Education Week 2016 Banner, by: Open Education Consortium, CC BY 4.0
Happy Open Education Week everyone!
Open Education Week is an annual convening of the global open education movement to share ideas, new open education projects and to raise awareness about open education and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide.
Join this weeklong celebration of the benefits of free and open sharing in education.
Creative Commons is actively participating with:
- Creative Commons for Academics, Community Stakeholders and Business Leaders
- OER mini-hackaton
- An Introduction to: Creative Commons, Open Educational Resources & Open Policies
- Exponential Teachers Hangout with Creative Commons
Be sure to share your Open Education Week activities with: #openeducationwk
What events are you planning this week?
Comments Off on Happy Open Education Week!World Without Waste? Appropedia and the Sustainability Commons
The guest post below was written by Erik Moeller of Passionate Voices, a collaborative blog that hosts interviews with interesting makers, writers, thinkers, and artists from all over the world.
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The global maker movement is known for creative hacks, as well as for getting people of all ages excited about technology and how the world works. At the intersection of maker communities and social activism, we find remarkable projects like Open Source Ecology, WikiHouse, and the topic of this article: Appropedia.
Appropedia is not a specific effort to use technology for good, but rather a global community documenting collaborative solutions for sustainability, appropriate technology, poverty reduction, and permaculture. You can think of it as a “Wikipedia for sustainability” and, indeed, it uses similar underlying mechanics: the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License and the MediaWiki software, for starters.
Appropedia co-founder Lonny Grafman (sitting, right) at the Las Malvinas photovoltaic workshops, where participants become the teachers and install solar power for a public pharmacy. License: CC BY-SA
Lonny Grafman, an an instructor at Humboldt State University in Northern California, founded Appropedia in 2006. Today it has thousands of pages on topics as diverse as solar cookers, thermal curtains, and rainwater harvesting. It is available in eight languages, including the beginnings of a Kiswahili edition.
The wiki is a tool for communities of practice that are looking to achieve real-world impact. At Humboldt State, Grafman founded a program called Practivistas. “In the Practivistas program, we bring students from the US and other countries to live and work with students in another country, in communities of little resources,” Grafman explains.
Practivistas don’t approach communities with a predetermined problem or solution. Instead, projects like a classroom constructed using locally sourced materials and alternative building methods are planned and implemented together with local communities from start to finish. In this case, plastic bottles were used as one of the primary materials for the classroom walls.
A beach bag made from plastic waste as part of the Arroyo Norte waste plastic innovation project. License: CC BY-SA
Projects are documented in Appropedia so that other communities may benefit. Beyond Practivistas, students from courses at Humboldt and other universities contribute content to the wiki through what’s called service learning. Explains Grafman: “It’s this thing that sits between and hopefully a little bit above internship, which is about student learning, and volunteerism, which is about the target community getting needs met.”
Grafman argues that engaging students in building the commons is better for the students, too: “My experience is that students learn more. Even just by motivation. When you’re doing something real, that has real impacts, there’s just a lot more motivation to do it right.”
In addition to his work on Appropedia, Grafman is interested in ways to reduce humanity’s energy use. He co-founded a company, Nexi, which makes energy monitors for the home. It’s a for-profit, and parts of the tech will remain proprietary, while Nexi may contribute to a commons of open data about energy use: “The good news is that we really don’t have to be puritanical about anything as diverse solutions will actually build more resilience.”
Appropedia, meanwhile, is hiring an Executive Director, to make the sustainability commons itself sustainable in the long run. No matter what the future holds, as a repository of creative solutions for addressing the problems all around us, Appropedia has already demonstrated that an information commons can directly improve people’s lives.
You can learn more about the project’s goals, and read the full interview I conducted with Lonny Grafman on Passionate Voices.
Erik Moeller (@xirzon), PassionateVoices.org
Comments Off on World Without Waste? Appropedia and the Sustainability Commons