ccLearn recently spoke with Lisa Brooks from IssueLab. Instead of crossing telephone lines (who does that anymore anyway?), I caught up with her via that archaic method of correspondence known as electronic mail…*

*Similarly archaic, but not outdated in coolness factor, are comics. The first comic issue of Inside OER is this same interview in comic form. Instead of the same-old and streamlined text with interspersed pictures, we decided to experiment. Let us know what you think! For those of you on hand-held devices (or a preference for just text), read on here.

Who are you and what do you do at IssueLab?

I’m Lisa Brooks, co-founder and co-director of IssueLab - a nonprofit organization based in Chicago that can’t get enough of nonprofit-produced research.

Photo by Gabi Fitz | CC BY-NC-SA

The biggest chunk of my IssueLab to-do list centers on technology and programming. Essentially, I handle anything tech on- and offline. I have no background in computer science, information systems, etc. — I have a degree in sociology and a year’s worth of public policy graduate school under my belt. In my experience, a liberal arts/jack-of-all-trades background is a typical pedigree for a nonprofit IT professional. I owned and operated a website/web application design company that worked exclusively with and for nonprofits for about nine years before doing IssueLab full-time. In that time, rarely did I meet an IT or IS staffer who had formal training in tech.

Along with all the techie work, I handle bookkeeping and accounting, client support (we have a couple of newly launched services — “SubDomains” service and our Custom Dissemination service — with a client base that increases monthly). It’s fair to say I am an office manager of a sort — I’m the one who gets Cheetos for staff meetings, chooses our VoIP provider, grabs the mail, deals with a virus invading a computer, makes sure that we don’t run out of water for the office water cooler…. I love my job(s)!

What is IssueLab? (And why is it called that, anyway?) How did it come about?

IssueLab is an open source archive of research produced by nonprofit organizations, university-based research centers, and foundations. We track research across thirty-four social issue areas. Research contributors categorize their works in up to three issue areas and further sub-categorize as needed.

Archiving is part one; part two is dissemination. Daily we get in touch with people (nonprofit professionals, researchers, policy professionals, academics, etc.) who have expressed interest in the work we collect. As well, we start new relationships with people interested in social policy, or the sector, or research, or all of the above. We maintain a number of communication channels including our website, RSS news feeds (one per issue area plus a comprehensive give-me-everything-you’ve got feed), e-newsletters, we Twitter, we have a Facebook fan page, we run a LinkedIn policy discussion group. We also have an Open Archives Initiative-compliant data provider set up at http://harvest.issuelab.org for data sharing. And we have data partners that carry titles from our archive that fit with their mission.

About our name, here’s a fun fact: while she’s grown to love it, co-director and co-founder Gabriela Fitz hated the name “IssueLab”at first. I take full blame for the name. I read the New York Sunday Times and the magazine often has a section called “IdeaLab” which I just find catchy. We deal in social policy issues….so….”IssueLab”. I’ve noticed that has hit a stride online in recent years; for once we were surfing on top of the wave! Anyway, regardless of her feelings at the start, Gabi created a killer logo and designed the rest of the site to suit. It has all hung together rather nicely I think. People really like the name — and the buttons we hand out at conferences that say “I’ve got issues!”

IssueLab was inspired by exasperation! Gabriela and I spent many years putting together websites and online communications plans where the knowledge created by a nonprofit in the form of case studies, white papers, issue briefs, etc., was just not high on the site redesign list of priorities if it was on that list at all. We would run into these great collections of research and have to fight to get it valued as worthwhile content and included in a site. We started to think about better ways to handle this body of knowledge. Centralizing it was a given, relating it across issue areas was a priority, defining and cultivating audience — taking the works to people who would find it of interest and useful rather than hoping folks stop their busy lives to come to it — has always underpinned everything we do.

We launched a prototype website in late 2005 and maintained it in our spare time on week nights and weekends. The concept started to catch on and we started to be overwhelmed. Luckily we were able to secure funding through the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in 2007 and that allowed us to pursue IssueLab full-time. As of today IssueLab has four full-timers, a couple of part-timers, and (when lucky) a few interns. Oh - and our office pooch, Twyla.

Photo by Gabi Fitz | CC BY-NC-SA

On your About– “But IssueLab is not simply an online archive.” That’s cool. So your “efforts are evenly split between aggregating research on social issues and pushing that research back out to other online communities and end-users.” Based on this, I have a three-part clump of questions:

a) Are aggregating research and pushing that research back out IssueLab’s main goals? What other goals, or vision, does IssueLab work towards?

Aggregating and disseminating — mainstreaming — research are primary goals, but they aren’t our only goals.

IssueLab is very interested in the open sharing of information, ideas, and technologies. Collaboration is high on our list and we would like to be a conduit for the creation of original data and research. We are currently involved in a project that will hopefully result in new analyses of an extensive data set on hunger and poverty. The analysts hail from academia; the data set comes from a national hunger relief organization. We are the “middle-ware”, cultivating the partnership and facilitating the data share. In the end we’ll handle dissemination of the results. We’re very excited about this type of partnership and hope to do much more of this type of work in the future.

We also have a front-burner goal of fostering debate on the issues. We are working hard to get perspectives on social issues from across the political spectrum. We have plans to do more original content that showcases the diversity of opinion and approach that can be found in the missions and work of the organizations that contribute research to IssueLab.

Another goal is to archive the research of defunct nonprofits. What a shame it would be if the work of these organizations were just to disappear. We currently house the work of several defunct organizations — Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform, Center for Impact Research, Girl’s Best Friend Foundation — and keep our eyes and ears open for news of other organizations that produced research and are going out of business.

b) How do you go about aggregating research? For instance, how do you decide the kinds of organizations you will work with? Example: Your home page feature is currently “Teaching About the Birds and the Bees”, which I guess demonstrates the range of research out there…

There is an enormous range of research produced by the third sector. Enormous! While we do take work from any nonprofit, we focus a bit on smaller, lesser known nonprofit organizations that don’t typically get the spotlight. These are groups that do direct service and have a hands-on perspective on an issue. Or groups that find meaning and relevance in the qualitative aspects of social issue research and create insightful case studies and ethnographies.

I listen to public radio all of the time and I hear the same nonprofit players over and again — Urban Institute, RAND Corporation, Human Rights Watch, American Enterprise Institute. We actually have work from all of those groups archived at IssueLab and we are happy to have them as participants. But these groups don’t — can’t — tell the whole story about an issue. That’s the wonder of the nonprofit sector — it’s as diverse as the people and communities that are served by it.

We do have a bit of a soft spot for the “little guy”, the “underdog” if you will. But truly, when you read the work these organizations produce you will come away with more ways to think about an issue, and maybe — hopefully — get closer to what is really going on.

c) What do you mean by “pushing” research back out to other communities? Do you, for instance, circulate research publications somehow? Or do you simply host the research and let the cross-pollination occur organically?

We do host the research and provide tools that let folks browse, search, and learn about the archive. But we didn’t start out with a “build it and they will come” notion. We’ve been doing online communication for years and know that you have to get the message to the people rather than wait or rely on the people to stumble upon you.

Here’s what “pushing research back out to other communities” means at IssueLab. For our last CloseUp on adolescents and reproductive health (http://birdsandbees.issuelab.org), we reached out to legislators who had sponsored or co-sponsored legislation about sex education, hundreds of practitioners of health and sex education at state level boards of education, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google groups where individuals are discussing sex ed and abstinence, bloggers covering the topic, and nonprofits who are working on this issue but don’t necessarily do research themselves. In addition, we commented on articles and blog posts about the issue, linking readers back to the special collection on IssueLab. Depending on the collection and the issue covered we sometimes also do outreach directly to educators and students. We are now set to go back to many of these same audiences with a special podcast we produced about the collection. This is typical of the kind of outreach we do around nonprofit research and is what we mean by “pushing it out”.

“In fact, we are fans of Creative Commons and have decided that all IssueLab-generated content is subject to a Creative Commons license.” Thank you! All your content is licensed CC BY-SA; any thoughts on why CC and, more specifically, why BY-SA in particular? (Also, what kind of content does IssueLab generate?)

IssueLab generates a couple of e-newsletters that go out to our research contributor community and subscribers. We create a bi-monthly “CloseUp” feature where we reach out to organizations that work on a particular issue and build a special collection around the research we collect. We create companion podcasts for our CloseUps as well (and we use a remix by a CCMixter contributor as our podcast background music!). And we just launched our IssueLab blog, called FootNotes.

IssueLab is an open access archive; it would be ludicrous of us to create content and make it difficult or impossible for people to access and share it. We use a Creative Commons license because we want to share what we do. We follow Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) in our data collection practices for the same reason. We chose BY-SA because it makes it crystal clear what people can do with our content — share and/or remix — and we want people to do just that.

Call us naive nerds but we do think the world would be a better place if everyone adopted an attribution standard that has sharing, not commerce, as its first concern.

As the education program of CC, we love that you have specifically set up an OER Research collection (http://oer.issuelab.org/research). Is most of the OER research in this collection licensed openly? (Ironically, not all research on openness is licensed openly.) Why do you think this is? Is IssueLab taking any steps towards greater openness of all the resources it hosts?

We partnered with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to make that particular project happen. It’s a great project and we are happy to host it. And no! - most of the research in that collection is not licensed openly. I just did a quick advanced search on the entire IssueLab archive and, of the 2,128 available research listings, only 252 carry a CC license. Ironic and a bummer.

I think that a lot of individuals and groups simply do not know what to do when it comes to licensing, copyright, rights, whatever you want to call it. Much of what we archive has totally restrictive “All Rights Reserved” rights information (and it many times comes to us with that capitalization which makes me wonder if people simply look at a work by a group they consider legitimate and copy the language).

We do push our contributors to at least consider using a CC license. We’d love to implement CC’s license chooser so that people can select a CC license as they create a listing but that gets tricky. When a group creates a research listing with us they fill out a form to describe the object they are archiving. They must fill in rights information for the work they are sharing. I’d guesstimate that 98% of what we archive are PDF files that incorporate copyright info in the text of the file. When our users create a research listing they can put whatever they want into our system, but the file that gets downloaded will show the copyright info that was embedded in the PDF. Switching to a CC license on the IssueLab site doesn’t revise the text in the downloadable PDF file and so a conflict is created should they enter rights data that appears on an IssueLab listing page that differs from the rights info you see in the PDF. Even if we were able to change the metadata in the PDF file on upload, there would still be a need to change what people reading the text of the PDF file see.

I think for most folks copyright is about pursuing or protecting capital and they do not know that alternatives to stringent copyright notification are available. This is so unfortunate because, in the end, I believe people really do want to share their work. No one wants to spend all of their time researching and writing a whitepaper only to make it impossible to share, access, use, reuse. Truly maddening.

Copyright law is such a pain in the brain. Agree or disagree?

AGREE.

By setting up this separate collection for OER Research, it appears that IssueLab recognizes the importance of openness in education especially. What are your thoughts on open education and OER generally? Do you think OER will solve a lot of problems in education? Come to think of it, what do you think are the problems facing (formal) education today?

I live in a big city — Chicago. Education and education reform is on the news nightly. We have a lot of public schools that are suffering from a lack of funds, a lack of human capital, just lack. We also have a lot of experimental education projects going on such as small schools, charter schools, and the like. Some are getting a great education, many are not.

As someone who has been into the Internet and its potential for a pretty long time (remember Pine Mail? Amber letters on black screens - no graphics?), I have hope for OER, in particular as a field leveller post-high school. I don’t think it is a magic bullet, but I do think that OER can fill a need and a niche.

The current global economy is making higher education impossible for a lot of people to pursue. This reality may very well be the opportunity that OER needs to get over the obscurencia hump (at least outside of some academic circles) and become something that is more commonplace. I know that OER is being deployed more and more in community colleges which I think is great. I’ve often thought that where OER’s real opportunities lie is in wide deployment in non-traditional learning spaces — incorporated into adult literacy training, deployed as community based learning groups akin to book clubs but structured around learning and discussing concepts rather than reading and discussing books. The nonprofit sector will play a vital role in the take-up of OER, and I hope that academia and foundations, in partnership with nonprofits, start to dream about and propagate experimental OER learning projects.

How about in IssueLab’s own future? Any exciting developments in the pipeline, such as a snazzy tool that maps all content contributors in neon colors?

If only we had time to do “snazzy”! We have to focus on the nuts and bolts almost all of the time. But a girl can dream!

I’d like to get an API assembled that will plug into common open source content management systems and allow organizations to manage their IssueLab accounts alongside their other CMS-based online initiatives. I can imagine some of your readers do not find that to be sexy; but around here, we think it’s burnin’ up HOT.

Finally, do you have any last thoughts? Any questions or concerns for us? (What should ccLearn be doing?)

Only that I see a number of documents on the ccLearn Productions page that are not included in our OER Research Repository. Happy to help get those into IssueLab and out to our many audiences! And also, it would be terrific to get an IssueLab feed of OER titles onto ccLearn’s Resources page. I’ll e-mail you!

We recently had the opportunity to talk with Paley about the film - we touched on the film’s aesthetics and plot points, but perhaps most interesting to those in the CC community is Paley’s decision to utilize our copyleft license, Attribution-ShareAlike, and her thoughts on free licensing and the open source movement in general. Read on to learn more about the licensing trials and tribulations associated with the film’s release, how CC has played a role, and Paley’s opinions on the Free Culture movement as a whole.

RamSitaGods, Nina Paley | CC BY-SA

One of the major stories surrounding Sita Sings The Blues been your use of songs by musician Annette Hanshaw and the back-and-forth dialogue you have had with the copyright owners as a result. Can you explain why you used these songs?

The songs themselves inspired the film. There would be no film without those songs. Until I heard them, the Ramayana was just another ancient Indian epic to me. I was feebly connecting this ancient epic to my own experiences in 2002. But the Hanshaw songs were a revelation: Sita’s story has been told a million times not just in India, not just through the Ramayana, but also through American Blues. Hers is a story so primal, so basic to human experience, it has been told by people who never heard of the Ramayana. The Hanshaw songs deal with exactly the same themes as the epic; but they emerged completely independent of it. Their sound is distinctively 1920’s American, and therein lies their power: the listener/viewer knows I didn’t make them up. They are authentic. They are historical evidence supporting the film’s central point: the story of the Ramayana transcends time, place and culture.

What is this story? Sita is a goddess/princess/woman utterly devoted to her husband Rama, the god/prince/man. Sita’s story moves from total enmeshment and romantic joy (Here We Are, What Wouldn’t I Do For That Man) to hopeful longing separation (Daddy Won’t You Please Come Home) to reunion (Who’s That Knockin’ At My Door) to romantic rejection (Mean to Me) to reconciliation (If You Want the Rainbow) to further rejection (Moanin’ Low, Am I Blue) to hopeless longing (Lover Come Back to Me,) back to love - this time self-love (I’ve Got a Feelin’ I’m Fallin’).

Sita’s role is to suffer, especially through loving a man who rejects her. Women especially connect emotionally to her story and these emotions are clearly expressed in songs. As Nabaneeta Dev Sen writes in “Lady sings the Blues: When Women retell the Ramayana”:

But there are always alternative ways of using a myth. If patriarchy has used the Sita myth to silence women, the village women have picked up the Sita myth to give themselves a voice. They have found a suitable mask in the myth of Sita, a persona through which they can express themselves, speak of their day-to-day problems, and critique patriarchy in their own fashion.

Sen is talking about the songs of Indian village women, but she could just as easily been talking about American Blues. That is the point of Sita Sings the Blues: we all struggle with this story, which connects humans through time, space and culture, whether we’re aware of it or not. Just as the Ramayana has mostly been written down and controlled by men, the songs in Sita Sings the Blues were mostly written by men; but sung by a woman - Hanshaw - they pack an emotional wallop and express a woman’s voice.

The synchronicity of the Hanshaw songs and Sita’s story is uncanny. This impresses audiences and allows the film’s point to be made: the story of the Ramayana transcends time, place and culture. Because the songs feature an authentic voice from the 1920’s, they demonstrate that this story emerged organically in history. New songs composed by the director, while they could be entertaining, could not make that point. They would be a mere contrivance, whereas the authentic, historical songs give weight to the film’s thesis. They are in fact the basis of the film’s thesis, irrefutable evidence that certain stories - like the story of Sita and Rama - are inherent to human experience.

Upon reading the above, Karl Fogel added:

Using something that already exists demonstrates that the universality of your theme is external to yourself. Whereas causing something new to exist wouldn’t achieve the same effect. Instead, it would be circular: it would demonstrate that the artist has the ability to make more of what she’s already making. So rather than being connective or expanding, it would be narcissistic (just in a descriptive sense, not necessarily a pejorative one).

There has to be a reason so many composers, even non-Catholic ones like Bach, set the Latin Mass to music instead of making up their own words. (Hmm, now imagine if those words had been monopoly-restricted… :-) ).

What has your experience been in trying to get permission it use Hanshaw’s music in the film, and the current state of affairs?

Because distributors were going bankrupt right and left in 2008, it was no longer possible to sell an indie film to a distributor for big money and then “have them take care of” the licenses. Since in February of 2008, when the film premiered in Berlin, I was not yet a Free Culture convert, I thought I needed a conventional distributor. So it fell on me to clear the rights. I had to pay intermediaries to contact the license holders, since they don’t speak to mere riff raff like me; they’re too busy, and under no obligation to do so. Even before that, I needed legal help to research who owned the rights in the first place, since there’s no central copyright registry any more, and rights are traded like baseball cards between corporations. Luckily, I was aided by the student attorneys of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic of American University.

Anyway, in 2008 a lawyer charged me $7,000 to get this response from the licensors: an estimate of $15,000 to $26,000 per song, AFTER I’d paid a $500 per song Festival License. (Festival Licenses last one whole year and require a promise to not make any money showing the film. So a festival license isn’t enough to get the “week-long commercial run” required for Academy Award qualification. Now that “Sita”’s been broadcast, she will never qualify for an Academy nomination; if I’d really wanted one, I would have had to delayed the release of the film for another year. But I digress.).

Even though we made it explicitly clear the entire budget for the film was under $200,000, the licensors came back with the “bargain” estimate of about $220,000. It was simply not possible for me to acquire that kind of money. So legally, my only option was to not show the film or commit civil disobedience.

I hired another intermediary, a “rights clearance house” which is less expensive than a lawyer, and they negotiated the “step deal” I eventually signed. This brought the price tag of the licenses down to $50,000, but with many restrictions. If more than 5,000 DVDs (or downloads) are sold, I must pay the licensors more. I wrote about this at length on my website.

I borrowed $50,000 to pay these licenses for several reasons. First, to reduce my liability. I may still be sued for releasing the film freely online - after all, the licensors may interpret free sharing as “selling” for zero dollars - but I’ll only be sued for breach of contract, not copyright infringement. Copyright infringement carries much harsher penalties, including possible jail time. I also wanted to make free sharing of “Sita” as legal, and therefore legitimate, as possible. Sharing shouldn’t be the exclusive purview of lawbreakers. Sharing should - and can - be wholesome fun for the whole family. I paid up to indemnify the audience, because the audience is Sita’s main distributor.

So it’s now legal to copy and share Sita Sings the Blues. The files went up on Archive.org in early March 2009 and have spread far and wide since. Having paid off the licensors, I could have chosen conventional distribution. But I chose a CC BY-SA license to allow the film to reach a much wider audience; to prohibit the copyrighting - “locking up” - of my art; to give back to the greater culture which gave to me; to exploit the power of the audience to promote and distribute more efficiently than a conventional distributor; and to educate about the dangers of copy restrictions, and the beauty and benefits of sharing.

As a result of the trouble you’ve had in regards to Annete Hanshaw’s music, you have turned into a self-proclaimed Free Culture activist. Was this shift gradual? What has that experience in particular informed your views on copyright, fair use, and the public domain?

Annette Hanshaw was immensely popular in the late 1920’s. Now almost no one’s heard of her. Why? Because of copy-restrictions.

I met many talented filmmakers on my “festival circuit.” Most had conventional distribution deals, but it’s very hard to see any of their films, which had small, brief theatrical runs, and then were never heard from again. Why? Copy-restrictions.

I’m an artist. I need money to live, but even more importantly I need my art to reach people. A $10,000 advance in return for having my work locked up for 10 years is a devil’s bargain. More than anything, I wanted people to see my film - now and in years to come.

My turning point in choosing a CC license happened in October of 2008. “Sita” had just opened the San Francisco Animation Festival, and I’d disclosed to the audience we’d all just done something illegal. It’s always great to share the film on a big screen in a theater with an audience, and this one was particularly enthusiastic. The next morning I woke up realizing that a free release online wouldn’t in any way prevent theatrical screenings. Why had I never considered that before? Because the film industry insists people won’t go to theaters if they can see a film online. But that’s not true of me, nor many cinephiles. When I lived in San Francisco my favorite movie outings were to classic films at the Catsro: 2001, Nights of Cabiria, Modern Times, Mommy Dearest. These are all available on home video, but I went to the Castro for the big screen and the dark room and the shared experience. If enough people watched and liked “Sita” online, there’d be demand for it in cinemas. And so far that’s proving true.

In particular, how have you viewed CC licenses in this whole process? What was your motivation to release Sita Sings the Blues under a CC BY-SA license? Why did you choose that license and not another CC license? What are the obstacles and benefits you’ve seen in using CC licenses?

I want my film to reach the widest audience. It costs money to run a theater; it costs money to manufacture DVDs; it costs money to make and distribute 35mm film prints. It’s essential I allow people to make money distributing Sita these ways and others; otherwise, no one will do it. So I eschewed the “non commercial” license. Share Alike would “protect” the work from ever being locked up. It’s better than Public Domain; works are routinely removed from the Public Domain via privatized derivatives (just try making your own Pinocchio). I didn’t want some corporation locking up a play or TV show based on Sita. They are certainly welcome to make derivative works, and make money from them; in fact I encourage this. But they may not sue or punish anyone for sharing those works.

I looked to the Free Software movement as a model. The CC BY-SA license most closely resembles the GNU GPL, which is the foundation of Free Software. People make plenty of money in Free Software; there’s no reason they can’t do the same in Free Culture, except for those pernicious “non commercial” licenses. A Share Alike license eliminates the corporate abuse everyone’s so afraid of, while it encourages entrepreneurship and innovation. Everyone wins, especially the artist!

What else would you like our reader’s to know? Any plans for the future?

I’d love you all to read my essay Understanding Free Content and of course watch the film!

I’m currently busy making “containers” like DVDs and T shirts available now at our e-store. QuestionCopyright is my main partner in releasing Sita; we’re trying to prove a model in which freedom and revenue work together. We know other filmmakers are watching what happens to Sita, and we’d like to show that yes, you can make money without impinging on everyone else’s freedom.

I’m also negotiating with theatrical distributors in France and Switzerland, as well as a couple book publishers. I’m negotiating not “rights” to the film, which belong to everyone already, but rather my Endorsement and assistance. To understand how this works, please read about the Creator Endorsed Mark.

Once I have the Sita Sings the Blues Merchandise Empire started, I hope to work on short musical cartoons about free speech - you can hear one of the songs here. There’s more where that came from. Really, I have more ideas than I have time to implement them - a happy yet vexing problem.

I also hope to have all my old Nina’s Adventures and Fluff syndicated comic strips scanned and uploaded at high resolution onto archive.org under a CC BY-SA license. The University of Illinois Library is currently seeking funding to move ahead on this project - interested individuals should contact Betsy Kruger.

Lastly, I’m still looking for money, although the Sita Sings the Blues Merchandise Empire should be generating some in a few months. Still, I plan to apply for grants and fellowships. Any foundations with too much money burning a hole in your accounts, please get in touch.

Nina Paley, anonymous | CC BY-SA

The contest is in full swing, with winners receiving inclusion in Imaginashun - Power to the people, an album filled “with remixes from pro’s and bedroom producers from around the world” slated for release this autumn. We caught up with DJ Vadim to learn a bit more about his creative process and how he views the changing nature of interaction and communication in music. Read on to see what he had to say.

DJ Vadim supporting Mos Def at The Islington Academy, James Bradley

Can you give our readers some background on yourself as an artist? You’ve worked with a wide variety of musicians, from The Pharcyde to Kraftwerk, and released countless albums, singles, and remixes. Your career is long in scope and prolific in production but perhaps you are able to distill it all into a manageable chunk.

I started my music journey in the late 80’s, first with DJing, and in 1992 I started getting involved with production. It was very simple back then, just an Atari and a sampler. There weren’t the possibilities people have now. In ‘94 , I set up my own label and the rest is history.

In that journey i met and have worked and performed with lots of people, although rocking Glastonbury in 1999 and performing at Sonar in 2006 with DJ Krush and DJ Shadow stand out as highlights.

Have technological shifts changed how you approach music production? What kind of production tools do you do use?

Yes. I have so many more possibilities now that didn’t exist 15 years ago. I have so much more equipment, software, and toys for creating music now that didn’t exist or was not affordable. It is a bit like riding a push bike and going on a top of the range Yamaha super bike - they both get you to where your going but you have so much more options with the super bike, right?

I use Cubase, an MPC, my Apple computer and Ableton Live.

The environment leading up to your new album U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun was one of personal turmoil and growth. What was the process you went through on the way to releasing this album? How did the aesthetic of the album come into fruition as a result?

Well, when you go through turmoil and tragedy you can come out of it either being overwhelmed, pensive, and quite depressed or come out fighting and positive. I did the later. I felt that if cancer couldn’t hold me back, nothing would. It was hard - personal turmoil with my family, personal relationships and my own health. It was like being stripped back to nothing. But now I feel good about life and that is the most important.

What is your motivation behind the U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun remix contest? You’ve already done one successful contest on ccMixter - what was your experience like previously?

Well I think one of the most important things with releasing music is communication. Nowadays, that means participation and that is what ccMixter offers. It is a combination of the two, letting fans and music people participate and communicate together, with you, with me and create new music and ideas. This sort of interaction wasn’t possible 10 years ago.

Music is about communication. Without it you either have a huge MTV campaign or you get lucky - the music that people like is one that communicates with them, music that they (the fans) feel part of.

Both remix contests are using CC-licenses as their mechanism to enable this kind of reuse. As an artist who uses sampling as one of their core techniques, how do you view this sort of licensing? What are the major differences to you between working with live musicians and sampling material?

I think its a great marketing and promotional tool plus it is fun for the fans and producers. In regards to sampling and live musicians, you have more opportunities with live musicians because you can break any piece of music down to its basic elements - bass keys, drums etc. and hence be able to manipulate and control what you do much more

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know? Any plans for the future?

Well touring, releasing more music and making new music. I am up to so much its hard to remember it all. Best thing is to keep up with it via my homepage and MySpace profile!

U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun Artwork, SMALL Studio

To re-boot our efforts we have a reached out to a number of individuals working on great projects and have a number interviews waiting in the wings for the coming weeks. Our first is with MCM, an author, TV producer, and creative mind who recently began work on his new project, TorrentBoy, a CC-licensed experiment in fan fiction. MCM has been utilizing CC licenses almost as long as we’ve been around, so it is fitting to re-launch this series with someone whose perspective has evolved as much as we have in our short history. Read on to learn more about MCM’s work and his thoughts on how CC licenses can be used to help promote sharing and unintended reuse.

Can you give our readers a bit of background on yourself and the TorrentBoy project? What is your own personal history leading you to this point in your career? How did TorrentBoy begin and what is it’s current status? More importantly, what is the book about?

My history is a long and complicated subject that can make grown men cry, so I’ll skip it and get right to the fun part. In 2001, I created a web-based animated show called Dustrunners, which, when it died, became the first Creative Commons-licensed series (it used CC SA before the licenses had reached 1.0). I’d always had a passion for the open sharing of ideas and culture, and when I heard the goals that Creative Commons had set out, I was hooked. Since Dustrunners, I have made sure that every single product I’ve made (and own the rights to) has been CC-licensed, and I irritate random people on the street with my evangelism. Investment bankers are generally hostile to the idea, but everyone else at least smiles at me.

Since then, I’ve written a bunch of other “free culture” books, most (in)famously The Pig and the Box, which teaches kids about the evils of Digital Rights Management. The fact that the book was translated into 15 languages and downloaded and shared well over 1.5 million times (that I could count) really cemented in my mind the fact that Creative Commons enables creators to do fantastic things.

Four years ago, I created this idea for a show called RollBots, which now airs on YTV in Canada and will be launching on the CW4Kids in the US, with toys by Mattel. Not to sound ungrateful, but there’s just something about the “closed” nature of major TV productions that irked me. The show is great, and the people that work on it are excellent, but it always felt like there was some potential that had been left untapped. Something we couldn’t see from inside out little castle that would have made it better.

TorrentBoy is my answer to that nagging doubt. It’s an entirely “open source” franchise, where anybody can come in and build upon the first book I wrote and make it their own. There are no boundaries to it, no limits to what can be done… TorrentBoy can go on adventures I could never dream of, in languages I will never speak, and take on an entirely new life that traditional media like RollBots can never achieve (at least not until I’ve been dead for a few decades). It’s parallel, but different. Probably the best thing I’ve ever done.

The first book in the series, Zombie World! is cheekily about a kid named Wesley who has a talking watch that turns him into the super-powered TorrentBoy, so he can fight enemies like proton leeches and an army of zombies, and save the world. He’s got a teddy bear named Crash, and Crash has a “waser bwaster”, and the two of them get into all kinds of trouble as they battle the evil Lord Thorax. There are certainly a lot of bittorrent analogies to it, but at its heart, it’s just a good, fun adventure book for kids. In its first month of publication, it sold 463 copies (physical and eBooks), and was downloaded another 120,000 times. A good start, but that’s just the start.

TorrentBoy is released under CC BY-NC-SA license and is designed to be shared, remixed, and expanded upon. Why did you choose to go this route? What obstacles and benefits have you encountered by using a CC license?

The logistics of the license were a big concern for me. I wanted to ensure that people could feel free to do what they wanted to do, but I was also concerned that as a franchise, the collective work could suffer if sub-standard works could be sold alongside the really great stuff. So while everyone is free to participate, only select participants can actually “cash in” on their work. It’s an imperfect system, but it’s as close as I think we can get.

The biggest obstacle with the CC license thus far is, interestingly, my unintended role as the “benevolent dictator” (not my term). Despite the fact that, really, anyone can do anything they like, I am still asked for insights into various issues on a regular basis. There’s one really nice guy who sends me daily emails for feedback on ideas he has about a book he’s writing. I love answering his questions, but in my mind it’s more like brainstorming than informing… but I know the freedom of CC licenses is sometimes hard for people to understand. I still get emails from people asking of they can print a copy of “The Pig and the Box” for their friend, no matter how hard I work to explain the significance of the license.

On the other hand, the benefits are evident already. Just the fact that there IS someone writing a book about TorrentBoy is amazing. Another amazingly supportive contributor has made a bunch of t-shirts and designs for the project, and others are working on a comic book. With RollBots, I had a select few people taking my ideas and making them live… but with CC, I’ve got the same effect on a massive scale, with ideas you just can’t get without the genius of the commons.

You state that it is a conscious experiment in Fan Fiction - how does the CC license enable that?

Fanfic is a tricky thing, isn’t it? You have an established concept that people love so much they want to expand upon it… but even if they do the most amazing things, it’s still second-class to the world. There are some really great fanfic writers out there; artists as well. What TorrentBoy hopes to demonstrate is that legitimizing those fans is an excellent way to grow your universe and make it richer. You can either do that by blessing “unauthorized” derivative works, or you can give blanket permission to the world to do as they please, and see what happens. I hate the idea of people creating things they love under the shadow of illegality.

What kind of derivative works have begun appearing? As a creator, how do you feel about these derivative works? How are you aggregating them and keeping track of what is created?

There’s at least one book being written that I know of, as well as a comic (or two, I’m not sure). There are some posters in the works, and I have heard there’s a video game of some kind too. Someone is apparently planning a kind of Alternate Reality Game, and I myself am working on both a standard novel and a collaborative one, where we map out the structure and tag-team our way through a first draft. I keep track of the derivative works as much as I can, but I know that, to a certain extent, people will be creating in isolation for the first while, so I probably don’t know about half of the stuff that’s going on.

One of the great ideas I saw floated a few weeks ago was to branch the main TorrentBoy story off into a steampunk variant, set in the late 1800s, with one of TorrentBoy’s predecessors and his battles to save the world. I don’t know if anyone is running with that idea, but I think it’s an amazing concept, and I’d love to see it happen.

I think creating a show for TV somewhat prepared me for this role, in a lot of ways. When you make something on that scale, you have to give up fine control of how things unfold… great ideas come from unexpected places, and you need to be confident enough in the idea to let it go where it wants. TorrentBoy is the same way, but on a larger scale. It’s not hard for me to fall in love with crazy new ideas spawned from my initial effort… the hard part is waiting to see how they all unfold!

Lastly, how can our readers participate in the TorrentBoy project? Any last words you’d like them to know?

There are lots of ways to participate, and the possibilities are evolving constantly. There’s an effort to document the world of TorrentBoy via our wiki, where you can go and theorize about everything from the finer functions of the Tracker Watch to the motives behind the Rhino-rilla villains. That’s one of my favourite aspects, because anyone can try it out, whether or not they feel they can write long-form prose.

Also on the site are discussion forums where you can suggest ideas or actually deliver new creations based on TorrentBoy… t-shirt designs or doodles or ideas for stories (that maybe you can’t write, but would like to see written). The atmosphere is really friendly and collaborative, which is great for everyone involved.

And finally, there’s a lot to be said for expanding the pool of contributors to the project, which is easily done by pointing people to the first book, Zombie World!, available here. It’s free (or you can pay for it, your choice), and it gives a crash course in the TorrentBoy world. If you know any kids in the 7-11 range that might like a good action novel, it’s a great place to start the adventure.

CC BY-SA by the CK12 Foundation

Below, we get to the bottom of the origins of CK-12, Neeru’s own personal tie to the cause, and some insights into what may lie ahead for both the foundation and ccLearn.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? You are widely known as the founder of CK-12; what is your official role and how did you come to found this nonprofit?

First of all, I just want to set the record straight, I am one of the co-founders along with Murugan Pal, who is the other co-founder of CK-12.  I serve as the Executive Director and Murugan as the President.

I am the mother of four children; I have a master’s degree in molecular biology and a degree in education.   After my degree I worked for a year and a half at Stanford at the Children’s Hospital working on Insulin-like Growth Factors that were being implicated in cancer.  It was at that point that I got pregnant with my first child and decided not to be around radioactive elements.   As I continued raising my children I asked myself the question – other than a safe and loving home, what can I give my children that will be of value to them and society for the rest of their lives? Perhaps all the sacrifices that my parents made so that their kids could have a good education had definitely proved that point.

When I found the school, The Nueva School, I knew that they were on the right track – focusing on learning, critical thinking, emotional intelligence as well as learning to learn in this day of information.  I soon became involved with the organization through my involvement with their board and becoming the Head of the Education Committee.  When my children started going to high school and college I knew I had to find something for myself to do and decided to go back to school and did another masters at Stanford in Education.  It was here that I realized that most children did not have the same experience as I thought they should have.  This is the United States of America!  I knew that I had to bring access to information at the same level for all students in K-12 in the USA.  The idea came out when my husband asked me to look at the “Textbook issues”.

What about open education appeals to you? Can you say a few words about what you think truly open education is, or should be?

I see open education as education that is supported by open educational resources.  These resources make it possible to have content that is not just the voice of an individual but is the result of the community involvement, i.e. wisdom of many.  In fact, open resources are not driven by any artificial or self-serving motives such as profits, sales, marketing, etc.   Fundamentally, education cannot be “open” in the same sense as open software.  In fact, if you look at history we used to pass our collective knowledge as stories.  With the advancement of technologies, paper, print media, digital media and personal computing, that passage of stories has taken on other formats – primarily textbooks for education.   Unfortunately, these books have become the ownership of a select few rather than the effort of many.  We have lost the dialogue that can enhance the quality. Additionally, K-12 education is more controlled and contextualized, particularly public education.  The following three tenets have to have the following characteristics:

1. Content
   a. Content is free to all to use
   b. Content is created by many people – voice of many over ownership of a few
2. Access is provided to all equally
   a. Providing the ability to access, hence multiple ways to providing education – text,
online, multimedia, and other media for all students
   b. Cost of access is covered for all students
3. Commitment to quality even though it is free

I believe that education should be free to all students, particularly in the USA.  How can we even try to educate students if they don’t have access to information?  Younger students particularly need material from which they can take off for learning.  They have to be provided scaffolding for learning – a Vygotskian Concept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky).  There is a focus on the wrong notion that only higher education needs to be free and open hence more effort is being put into that area.  However, the problem becomes crucial to elementary students as lack of content availability erodes these young students’ ability to learn, as they are not able to have a strong base of knowledge to rely on.

Open education is one way that we can provide access – the “rip, mix, and burn” metaphor allows for the ability to customize content as needed by each student.  At this point schools are provided with information that is delivered in a very old format – a textbook.  Textbooks, especially their physical nature, are hard for students at that age – weight, monolithic nature, arising from 50 states having different requirements, hard to change the content of the book, etc.

CK-12’s mission is very clear on its site—”to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide, but also to empower teacher practitioners by generating or adapting content relevant to their local context.” How is CK-12 currently carrying out this mission?

We are carrying out this mission by providing textbooks, particularly for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) books.  These books have been produced the way that publishers produce their books.  There is no charge from CK-12 for using these books online through our online reader, downloading, or customizing them to your own needs.  As we like to say, “Rip, mix and burn”.  The cost of the printing is the only cost that users have to carry.  This cost will go to your own choice of printing company or for better you can print them using  your home printer.

CK-12 and the Commonwealth of Virginia just released the beta version of the first Physics FlexBook to be aligned with state standards. Can you say a few words about this project and how it came to fruition?

The Commonwealth of Virginia did a study with NASA. This two-year study pointed out that the curriculum as well as the textbook that the Commonwealth was using was outdated and did not have any of the contemporary topics in physics such as LCD, LED, Nanotechnology, Biomedical Imaging, String Theory etc.  Their textbooks stopped at Cathode ray tubes.  That technology was really outdated resulting in no time left for the schools to teach other concepts if they continued to teach these outdated concepts.  The report also pointed out that the Commonwealth should look into open educational resources.

When the Commonwealth talked to the publishers the answer was not satisfactory both from financial and time to market perspectives.  At the same time the CTO of the Governor found out about CK-12 from the web and approached us.  The rest is history!  Governor Tim Kaine sent out a RFP (Request for Proposal) and we had 13 people comprised of scientists, teachers, and professors – volunteering to write the book with CK-12 supporting them.  In addition, CK-12 redrew all the diagrams to make them higher resolution.  We also provide all our diagrams in a repository so that others can use these diagrams, keeping in line with the philosophy of open content. We wrote that book in 2½ months with another two weeks for quality assurance.

Do you see CK-12’s goals evolving as more and more institutions and persons use CK-12’s open textbook technologies (specifically the Flexbook)? For instance, could you see expanding the scope of your mission to encompass more than open textbooks?

At this point we do not see our mission moving from OER books.  The overall goals of the project have not changed.  We are constantly being asked whether we are going to be catering other domains.  Wherever I am going, people ask what about history, economics, or…..  I think, that at some point we will have to answer that question.  Perhaps that will be the only thing we will have to add to our goals.  We are also asked by higher ed people if they can use our tools.  The good thing about that is we don’t have to tell people what they can do or cannot do.  The power of the system is that it is useable under any condition.  All you have to do is use it.

We are finding that we have to focus on more feature sets.  As my cofounder Murugan said to me, that software is a bottomless pit.

What do you see as the future of the textbook? Does the current economy affect this vision at all?

If we are to move to Textbook 2.0 or even 3.0, we have to think about the textbook aligning with other capabilities that are provided by eLearning such as multimedia and other kinds of interactive abilities.  Textbooks have to move from a static format to an interactive format.  This is where our tools will really be useful.  I think this is going to be a very exciting development in general in education.

Sure the current economy will affect the vision mostly positively.  Districts are now going to have to think more creatively about how to provide good content to their students yet at the same time be able to operate with same budgets.  No matter how you look at it, $600 MM is a lot of money to spend for California alone, especially if you can avail better options and cut the spending down.  If we provide quality content we should be able to attract users.

Your Flexbooks are licensed BY-SA. What is the importance of open licensing in the textbook’s future? Why did CK-12 choose the BY-SA license, specifically?

Content has been a closed entity forever.  All the scientific and mathematical advancements were built upon improving an already existing work (standing upon the giant’s shoulders) thus leading to better achievements in an open fashion.  It is now time to provide educational materials under a different model.  A model where people can use it the way they want and need to use it.  We have seen that one-size-does-not-fit-all in education.  Once we move to that model we will see progress.  Even though we have protective clauses such as the Williams Act for providing textbooks for all students we still are not able to provide content that every student has access to.  Even though students have books you can see the difference in rich districts vs. poorer districts.  Charter Schools or Home schooled students have problems with accessing good content.  It costs too much.

When we started this project we went to India and told them about saving cost – their laughter was kind of piercing because their books only cost pennies compared to ours and the Government owns their national curriculum.  The textbook industry needs course correction.  One of the biggest problems is lack of rigorous universal standards for 50 states.  So, if we can provide FlexBooks such that states can adapt the content to their own requirements, that will help a lot with course correction.

The reason we chose to go with CC-BY-SA was because we wanted to make a statement about openness.  We believe that the Creative Commons spirit is about openness.  However, we are also thinking about donations from teachers and writers who have done a tremendous amount of work in producing or writing lesson plans or textbooks.  When we approached these teachers or writers their concern was, how would they protect their work if a publisher takes their work with only attribution?  They wanted to see the improvements made to their original contribution “back in the commons”.  This is when we realized that we had to respect this genuine perspective and make them feel comfortable.  Hence the choice of license!  One thing we have continued to advise and educate our Author Donors is to stay out of the Non-Commercial clause.  This is in the spirit that the non-commercial clause makes the content stale and obsolete over a period of time.

CK-12 and ccLearn have been in informal contact for some time. How do you see us working together in the future?

ccLearn can help organizations such as CK-12 to work together in a “federated” fashion.  It is high time we need mutual understanding and agreements for licensing policies, canonical representation format, and interchangeable metadata across OER organizations.  We have been partnering with ccLearn and Creative Commons in general in promoting these common agendas.

Is there a specific issue you would like us to tackle? Or another organization you would love to see us partnering with?

It will be good for ccLearn to host a summit for all OER sites to understand the importance of common standards to federate our contents across.  For example, my co-founder Murugan Pal has been working with Wikipedia, WikiEducator, OLPC etc. to forge these common standards.

Finally, what is in CK-12’s own future? What other partnerships or plans do you have in the pipeline? What are you most excited about?

We are very excited about the opportunity that the OER community has in this financially stressed out time.  To quote Paul Romer, “Crisis is a terrible thing to waste”; this is the time for us to bring OER into the main stream.  We typically don’t talk about our future plans; as we believe in getting it done, rather than talk about it.Our Virginia FlexBook project is the first stepping-stone, and we are working with various governmental agencies both in Federal and different State levels to make our mission successful.

Read on for an explanation of how Bollier became interested in digital commons movement, how he sees the its long term impact shaping up, and much in between.

You’ve been involved in efforts to understand and evangelize the broad concept of “the commons” for a long time, including as an editor of onthecommons.org. What first got you interested in the commons, and when was that?

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I worked for Ralph Nader and a number of Washington public-interest advocacy groups. Far from being the reviled figure that he became following the 2000 election, Nader was revered among progressives for his sophistication in politicizing and developing dozens of issues. These were generally taboo or “boring” topics that were utterly off the national agenda – topics that had not even crystallized as “issues,” such as auto safety, clean air and clean water, open government and congressional reform, not to mention countless niche issues like mobile home safety, nutritional labeling and whistleblower protection. (For more, see the DVD, “An Unreasonable Man.”)

I attended a 1980 conference that Nader convened that affected me a great deal. It was entitled, “Controlling What We Own,” and it dealt with the many resources that the American people nominally or even legally own, but which we do not control or reap benefits from. Nader groups were involved in most of these issues.

For example, commercial broadcasters use the publicly owned airwaves for free, but give virtually nothing in return for their use. (Some token public-interest obligations like the Fairness Doctrine were de-regulated into oblivion in the 1990s, and the government requires no payments for use of the public spectrum.) Mineral extraction from public lands is still governed by a law passed during the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, in 1872, which grants access rights for $5 an acre or less. Grazing and logging on public lands are usually allowed under leases with below-market fees. Federally financed drug research is usually given away to drug companies for a pittance. Pharmaceutical companies then charge us exorbitant prices for drugs that we, as taxpayers, financed in the first place.

In 2000, I was inspired to write a book about these “enclosures of the commons” because they were generally not recognized as a broader phenomenon. The result was Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth, which was published in 2002.

Besides describing the many common assets that are being stolen from us, the book developed an analysis of the commons. It drew somewhat upon the scholarship of pioneers such as Elinor Ostrom, Yochai Benkler, Larry Lessig and others in the nascent free culture movement. I was excited about applying the commons framework more broadly than academics did, and in more accessible, popular ways. That’s because I see the commons paradigm as having an enormous intellectual and political potential.

It is especially useful in confronting the limitations of conventional economics and its parochial notions of “value,” which focuses almost exclusively on prices in market transactions. The commons encompasses a far wider, qualitatively different universe of “value.” It validates a more humanistic and socially grounded matrix of value. Yet it does so in an intellectually coherent framework that has its own logic and principles; the commons is not simply a moralistic rhetoric for “the common good.”

The commons is about specific types of social management and policy mechanisms. And because the commons has the capacity to manage shared resources effectively, it implicitly challenges the conventional legal and economic premises of copyright and other property-rights regimes. It provokes a new dialogue that has the potential to transform the existing policy consensus. That’s exciting.

How do you contextualize the movement to create, curate, and protect an intellectual commons (of which Creative Commons is a part) within the broad concept and history of the commons?

Unfortunately, Garrett Hardin’s famous 1968 essay in Science on the “tragedy of the commons” has cast a long shadow on the commons. Mainstream economists and conservative political groups seized upon the “tragedy” paradigm. They saw it as a way to promote the idea that only private property rights can truly solve the problem of over-exploitation of a shared resource. They helped turn the “tragedy of the commons into an economic truism that simply isn’t really true. (As he later admitted, Hardin was discussing an open access regime, in which there is no community and no rules, which of course is not a commons.)

With her 1990 book, Governing the Commons, however, Indiana University political scientist Elinor Ostrom marshaled many empirical examples of natural resources that have been managed as commons for decades or even hundreds of years. She identified some recurrent principles that seem to make a commons work – things like clearly defined boundaries around a resource; group monitoring of usage of the resource; and graduated sanctions against free riders or those who might abuse a resource.

Ostrom went on to found the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis, the Digital Library on the Commons, and the International Association for the Study of the Commons (originally the term “Common Property” was used). There are now hundreds of academics around the world who study “common pool resources,” mostly in the context of natural resources in developing countries.

Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, an entirely different group of academics – mostly law scholars – helped develop the idea of the intellectual commons. Peter Jaszi, David Lange, Pamela Samuelson, Jessica Litman, James Boyle, Yochai Benkler, Larry Lessig and others took the public domain seriously. A number of notable activists such Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow, Fred von Lohmann and Gigi Sohn also helped bring the problems of copyright law to public attention.

As the Internet took off in the 1990s, and the film and record industries began to win major expansions of copyright protection, these law scholars and activists helped re-conceptualize the public domain. They re-cast it as something worth protecting. People started to realize that the public domain is necessary for new types of creativity. This challenged the orthodoxies of mainstream copyright law and economics. A major landmark in the evolution of this idea was a November 2001 conference on the public domain organized by Jamie Boyle at Duke Law School.

Over the past decade, “the commons” has come to take on larger valences of meaning that the term, the “public domain,” cannot convey. The public domain, after all, is a specialized legal term with its own history. The commons helps emphasize that public-domain information is not simply “the opposite of property” – as copyright scholars long presumed – but a different sort of value than conventional property. The commons is a means by which a social community generates value; it is not something that derives solely from the” originality” of an individual acting alone.

Copyright law has trouble accepting the idea of the commons as a vehicle of socially created value. That’s why the Creative Commons licenses are such a brilliant innovation. They understand this idea and cleverly use copyright law to legally recognize socially created value: an enormous conceptual improvement in copyright law achieved through an ingenious “hack.”

How did you come to write a history of Creative Commons? And how is that history a “viral spiral”?

After traveling in the worlds of free software, copyright activism and the commons for nearly ten years – mostly as a policy activist – I became acutely aware of how much of this history was invisible to mainstream political culture.

Sure, many people had heard about Linux and open source software, and perhaps even the Creative Commons licenses. But few laypeople really understood the enormous political or cultural implications of these developments or how they arose. Even many people within free software or open-access publishing, for example, do not appreciate the full breadth of the free culture movement or the significance of the commons paradigm. There are few accessible, big-picture histories of the movement as a whole.

Yet here’s the irony: At a time when the Bush Administration in effect achieved a “lockdown” of the political culture from 2001 to 2008 – policy innovation was brought to an utter standstill – free culture was one of the few spaces where idealism and innovation could run free. People with creative, brilliant ideas could actually produce serious, effective mechanisms for change. It has been one of the few bright spots in an otherwise moribund political culture.

Free culture has built its own alternative democratic polity – a parallel universe that honors such radical ideas as participation, transparency and accountability. Free culture has acted as a kind of counterpoint and rebuke to our corrupted constitutional polity.

So I wanted to tell this story. I wanted to explain “how the commoners built a digital republic of their own.” This idea seemed like a perfect complement to my previous books. Silent Theft explored the idea of the commons and its many enclosures, and Brand Name Bullies, in 2005, told dozens of stories about how copyright and trademark law are being used to privatize culture. Viral Spiral pulls together the eclectic threads of activism, scholarship, technology and social innovation that have produced free culture over the past generation.

I hit upon the term “viral spiral” as a way to explain the evolution of free culture. Viral refers to the almost-magical ways in which new ideas and innovations proliferate spontaneously on the Internet. People without credentials or money – commoners – can create their own citadels of shared culture and information. Spiral refers to the way in which the innovations of one Internet cohort rapidly becomes the platform used by later cohorts to build follow-on innovations. It’s a messy, non-linear, unpredictable, upward spiral of progress.

Richard Stallman and free software began the viral spiral by pioneering the use of a copyright license – the General Public License — to protect the commons. Free software demonstrated how a viral community could coalesce and generate useful stuff (code), and a license could protect against private enclosure.

Creative Commons licenses built on the example and experiences of free software, but with their own new twists, such as individual choice in how a work may be shared. The CC licenses now serve as a platform for countless new species innovations on the content layer. Some of the most notable examples are open educational resources (OER), open science innovations, and open business models.

For me, “viral spiral” helps point to the historical interconnectedness of this evolution of commons-based innovation. It’s a great story about how a motley assemblage of self-selected activists, thinkers and volunteers built the technological infrastructure, legal rules and social ethic for a new movement. The movement is more than a bid for “controlling what we own,” however. It’s a movement about democratic transformation and renewal – a story that is still unfolding.

What parts of the book did you find most fun and most frustrating to write?

It was great fun interviewing key figures in the free culture movement – Larry Lessig, Richard Stallman, Joi Ito, Ronaldo Lemos, Jamie Boyle and many others — to ask questions that had always perplexed me, and to figure out how the movement evolved fitfully over time.

Learning more about the international expansion of the CC licenses and free culture was really exciting. It was exciting to learn that this movement is not just about law scholars tweaking boring copyright licenses – but about the rise of a new type of international political culture. The licenses have attracted passionate musicians from Brazil, resourceful hackers from Amsterdam, talented remix artists from Japan, educators from South Africa concerned with open education and open access publishing, and so many other people. Each of the iCommons conferences – in Rio, Dubrovnik and Sapporo were fantastic experiences that showed the deep global appeal – and yet the diverse manifestations – of free culture.

The most difficult challenge in writing Viral Spiral was identifying the overarching narrative. There was such a dense, confusing mass of material, participants and historical developments to sort through. I had to immerse myself in vast quantities of information, interviews, Web content and personal experiences – and somehow tease out an intelligible storyline. If my book achieves anything, I hope it confirms that the rise of the digital commons is truly one of the great stories of our time.

The book’s subtitle “How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own” is in past tense, though your concluding chapter, which really covers this, “The Digital Republic and The Future of Democratic Culture”, is visionary and (obviously) looking to the future. To what extent have we already built something that could be called a “digital republic”?

Well, my preceding answers make this clear: a large and impressive “digital republic” is already flourishing. There are shared Internet protocols; thousands of free software and open source software programs; Creative Commons licenses that enable sharing and new creativity; countless varieties of online commons from wikis to the blogosphere to social networking; new creative genres like music remixes, video mashups and podcasting; and on and on.

What’s so great about this messy viral spiral is that it is still evolving! Yesterday’s innovations are the platform for new ones tomorrow. And while the new commons sector is invigorating the commercial marketplace with new creativity, this sector cannot be captured and taken private by the marketplace. That’s a significant political achievement.

Again in your concluding chapter, you write of the commons as the backdrop for enabling “history-making citizenship.” Is this a more approachable form of Benkler’s lengthy “freedom to do more for oneself, by oneself, and with others” and brief “autonomy” (http://yupnet.org/benkler/archives/15#2), or do you see this as a significantly different take on what the commons enables?

My sense of the commons as an enabler of “history-making citizenship” is entirely compatible with Benkler’s vision in Chapter 5 of The Wealth of Networks. Indeed, I can’t begin to calculate how influential Yochai has been in my thinking, and he certainly explores this idea with great philosophical precision.

That said, I have a different emphasis than Yochai does. He discusses the freedoms that a commons enables as a contrast to those of the marketplace – which is certainly true and significant. But I am fascinated with the ways in which the commons constitutes a whole new layer of governance and offers new types of collective-action possibilities in civil life. Perhaps this is what Benkler is saying as well, but I tried to place this theme front-and-center, and place it in the history of citizenship itself.

Unlike previous eras of citizenship that were constrained by one’s economic station or access to political parties or the media, ordinary citizens now have some incredibly powerful tools for “making history.” They can directly influence politics, governance and civic life, and do not necessarily have to work through surrogates like political parties or the press. Citizens can realistically instigate direct action themselves and have an impact on politics, culture and the marketplace. Any self-organized group has the capacity to speak to a global audience, organize functionally powerful collectives and influence official governance.

History-making citizenship is still in a rudimentary stage. But it’s clear that citizen-led collectives are calling into question the moral and social legitimacy of existing institutions. It is forcing new voices to be heard and represented.

So long as the Internet remains an open-access infrastructure, new commons will keep arising, and growing stronger. As they do, they will empower like-minded citizens to challenge unresponsive institutions and remake the political culture in their own image. This is huge. Developing a new rapprochement between centralized institutions and decentralized commons will take time, and be politically contentious and messy. But I remain optimistic that the viral spiral will be a potent force for improving democratic culture in the years ahead.

Thanks David!

Anyone who found this interesting, please check out (or buy or download) Viral Spiral, available under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial license.

Book, Suzanne Chapman | CC BY-NC-SA

What is your role at the University of Michigan Library? How does the University Library interact with the rest of the University?

I’m the University Library’s copyright specialist. I provide copyright and publishing assistance for faculty, students, researchers, staff, and librarians throughout the University of Michigan, and occasionally to the community at large. I handle questions on both sides of the copyright universe: people come to me as users of copyrighted works and also as creators with concerns about their own rights. At a university just about everybody is both a user and a creator, so I think it’s important to promote a balanced perspective on copyright. A big part of my job is teaching workshops and providing one-on-one consultations about copyright and scholarly publishing basics. I work with librarians all over campus to raise awareness about topics like fair use, Open Access, and author rights. I also support a number of the Library’s activities, including our institutional repository Deep Blue, the Scholarly Publishing Office, and Special Collections exhibits. People always ask if I’m an attorney… I’m not. I’m a librarian by training, and have a background in publishing. A law degree is useful when dealing with copyright, and it’s certainly necessary when you’re providing legal advice, but in many other situations it’s not essential. Copyright is messy and confusing and it makes a lot of people nervous and scared. Approaching these issues as a librarian allows me to explain things in “human readable” language instead of legalese. My goal is to demystify the law and empower students and faculty to advocate for their rights as both users and creators.

As for the role of the Library in the University, I think it remains true, if a bit cliche, that the library is the heart of the university, both physically and intellectually. At the University of Michigan we have a flagship building at the middle of the central campus in Ann Arbor and many smaller libraries located in the hearts of the departments and campuses throughout the University, and we’re also at the heart of scholarly activity and information on campus. The difference now is that so much of the information to which we provide access is online. We still have millions of print books, and our physical spaces remain tremendously important, but more and more our buildings are gathering places for group work, studying, and instruction. This means our interactions with the rest of the University are increasingly distributed. Many scholars use the Library every day without ever entering one of our buildings, and at the same time the information services that the Library offers are expanding. We continue to answer reference questions, but in addition to staffing the reference desk we answer questions via phone, email, and instant message. Librarians teach classic bibliographic instruction and also classes on Google searching, citation management software, PowerPoint, and Photoshop. We have three locations on campus where people can get assistance scanning documents, building websites, and creating posters, and we have facilities dedicated to supporting patrons who use spatial data, numeric data, and statistics. And for the last two and a half years my office has made copyright and publishing support services available. The role of the library in universities has grown as human access to information has grown. We do much more than just keep track of a bunch of old books.

Can you explain the Espresso Book Machines? What kind of impact has on demand printing had in the UM libraries? All the books printed in the machines are public domain - would this sort of system been possible if the works had been All Rights Reserved?

The Espresso Book Machine can produce a perfect-bound paperback book in less than ten minutes. The U-M Library got one last fall. The technology is still very new and there aren’t very many of them, but the premise is that you could distribute book production to point of need, which in many contexts would be cheaper and more convenient than the current system. All you would need is a network connection and a few terabytes of storage somewhere to hold all the digital files. For now, the machine is still a sort of proof of concept. It’s wonderful for the long tail of books, the rare or obscure books that are long out of print and hard to find. The Espresso Book Machine can give these books new life, and give the two or three people to whom these books might actually be important a copy of their very own. The fact that it’s networked is key, because it allows us to print much more than just books digitized from our Library; it means that someone a thousand miles away can print copies of books held by the University of Michigan. We currently print books digitized by the Open Content Alliance, and in the future we imagine printing CC-licensed books as well, provided the license permits it. My understanding is that On Demand Books, the company that produces the Espresso Book Machine, is working out a royalty-payment system so that it will be possible to print books that are still under copyright, but so far at U-M we’re only printing public domain books. Eventually we’d like to partner with people from the University community to experiment with printing new works, things like poetry collections from a writing class, or textbooks.

You can see a video about MLibrary’s Espresso Book Machine here.

You wrote up a great piece on how to on how to use CC licenses and CC licensed works - how important is proper attribution in your line of work? For culture at large?

Attribution is tremendously important in academic research. Without properly cited sources, it is impossible for future scholars to follow the line of thinking that led to a given conclusion. Attribution is the trail of breadcrumbs that gets us back to the beginning. There is something of a plagiarism panic on college campuses, and while I think some of it is overblown, citation and attribution remain some of the first skills we teach undergraduates.

Attribution is also important from the perspective of scholars who are trying to build their careers. Young scholars want credit for their work so they can get tenure-track jobs and eventually tenure. Tenured faculty want credit so they can get more research funding. I see this as one of the selling points for Creative Commons in academic settings. U.S. law doesn’t have the framework of moral rights that exist in the U.K. and elsewhere requiring that an author always be given proper credit for a work even if she has signed away all the other rights. The attribution requirement that is the baseline in all CC licenses provides some reassurance to academic authors who may not expect to profit financially from their work but for whom credit is very important.

How can CC licenses and CC-licensed material help instructional librarians?

CC-licensed material is an incredibly valuable resource for all kinds of instructors. Creative Commons has supported the creation of a wealth of new works that are available for use without permissions or fees, which means that instructors, librarians, and students don’t have to rely on the public domain for materials that they can repurpose without fear or risk of copyright infringement. This is a huge thing. I have a hard time not using superlatives when I talk about what a wonderful resource it is. We can even use the tool we’ve always used - Google - to find Creative Commons-licensed photographs, illustrations, music, video, and educational resources.

I know instructional librarians who use CC-licensed works in a number of ways: many use CC-licensed images to spice up their workshop slideshows, one colleague uses music from ccMixter for instructional videos he posts on YouTube, and a handful use CC-licensed teaching materials as the basis for creating their own classes.

For librarians who write and teach, Creative Commons-licensed resources are a windfall, but there is much more to our work than just our own writing and instruction. Though it’s not usually framed this way, academic librarians spend a lot of time assisting people with the production of scholarship. Everyone knows that librarians help people do the research, but we may also help them with the writing and the teaching, and guide them through the publishing process, too. In those roles, Creative Commons-licensed material is a gift we can give our users. One of the most common copyright questions librarians get is, “Is it okay for me to use this copyrighted thing in this way?” With Creative Commons, we can say, “Well, it might be really hard to clear the rights on that random picture you found on the internet, but look, here are hundreds of pictures of the same thing that you are free to use without asking!” I’ve had consultations with faculty that ended abruptly when I showed them how to search Flickr for licensed images. The faculty member was so thrilled by the realization that she wouldn’t have to spend the next six months tracking down permissions, and so distracted by the discovery of this treasure trove of usable photographs, that all she wanted to do was be left alone to browse.

Most of the people reading this blog already know about the benefits of licensing their work so I won’t go into it too much, but needless to say those benefits apply to librarians as well. Many of the works that librarians create, like bibliographies or technology guides, are useful across many institutions, so CC licenses make a lot of sense for us. Licensing our work is also a great way to connect with colleagues at other institutions and to get our names out there.

How do librarians balance CC licensing with fair use rights?

I’d like to say that librarians as a profession are all staunch defenders of fair use and that we all promote a balanced view of copyright that takes full advantage of all the exceptions and limitations available to us. But unfortunately many librarians have been as terrified by the content industry’s scare tactics as everyone else, and they interpret fair use and other exceptions narrowly and with great caution. As a result, some librarians don’t make all the uses they could of copyrighted material, and the guidance they provide to their patrons is similarly limited. One of the things I love about CC is that it provides content that people can copy and build upon without relying on fair use. If you already have permission, you don’t need to worry about four factor analyses or risk assessments. CC-licensed content is such a valuable resource because people can use it without fear. Still, I always make it a point to explain that CC licenses are permissions that have been granted above and beyond the fair use rights that everyone already has, and that those fair use rights are broader than most people realize.

None of this is to say that fair use isn’t tremendously important to librarians and academics; it is. When patrons come to me with a specific work that they’d like to use, I help them through the process of making a best-guess fair use determination, and I always encourage people to take advantage of their rights as users. If we don’t fight for a robust fair use exception we will lose it.

In October of 2008, the University Library decided to release all their own content under a CC BY-NC license. What was the motivation behind this decision? What kind of outcomes have there been? Have you seen any interesting cases of reuse?

There were few motivating factors behind the decision to use Creative Commons licenses for Library-created content. The biggest was that it aligned well with our overall commitment to openness and access. Part of the Library’s mission is “to contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.” We promote open access publishing models, we have a strong history of digitizing public domain works and making them available online, and we partnered with Google to scan all of the books in our collection, even the works under copyright. Adopting a Creative Commons license for our own content - things like study guides, bibliographies, and technology tutorials - seemed like a logical next step. In part we were inspired by the story of Otago Polytechnic University, which was a Featured Commoner a while ago for making all of its open educational resources available under the CC-BY license. We don’t produce as much content, but what we do produce we wanted to make freely available for reuse.

There was also a more practical consideration: we receive permission requests to use Library-produced content with some regularity, and those requests often go to people who have no idea what to do with them. They get bounced around until someone finally just says yes, and these requests can take a lot of time to handle. Creative Commons licenses were made to help reduce transaction costs, and we saw that as a potential benefit for the Library. It turns out that we still sometimes receive permission requests, but now it’s very easy to point the requester to the CC license. It can even be a teaching moment, a chance to introduce a person to Creative Commons for the first time.

We have only had the licenses up for a few months, but I am aware of a couple of instances of reuse so far. There is a liberal arts college that is building a website of copyright and publishing resources based on the U-M Library’s copyright website. I also heard recently about a scholar who is publishing a paper on digital libraries and plans to use screenshots of our digital collections. That’s the kind of use that would probably be considered fair, but publishers sometimes ask authors to clear the permissions anyway. Now she can just point to the CC license instead.

Can you explain the mission of the HathiTrust? What is UM’s invovlement?

HathiTrust is a collaborative trusted repository for digital book and journal content. It was launched by the 12 university libraries that are a part of the Committee for Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the 11 University of California libraries. At the moment it’s composed primarily of books that were scanned by Google as a part of the Google Digitization Project, but it will also include works digitized by the partner libraries. Even though much of the content in HathiTrust is duplicated in Google Book Search, the models are very different. Google emphasizes access and search, while HathiTrust is dedicated to long-term preservation, stewarding the files through changes in format and hardware. HathiTrust also has an interest in serving scholarly research needs, and developed a system to serve users with print disabilities that provides access to screen-reader-optimized versions of the OCR files, even for works that are still under copyright.

U-M has been the primary developer of the software platform for the repository, much of which was based on existing open source projects. The U-M Library also recently received a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to create a Copyright Review Management System, the result of which will partly support HathiTrust. HathiTrust only provides access to books in the public domain. The Copyright Review Management System is dedicated to reliably identifying books that are in the public domain that were published in the United States from 1923 to 1963. Those works may be in the public domain if certain requirements weren’t met, but it each book has to be researched individually. This grant will help us set up a reliable and collaborative system for identifying books in the public domain so that we can make those books available to the world through the HathiTrust, and share that information with other organizations that are dedicated to improving access.

Is there anything else our readers should know about the University Library? What are your plans for the future?

We have an event coming up that might of interest to your readers in or near Ann Arbor. From March 23rd - 27th we’re having Open Access Week, a series of events promoting and investigating the Open Access movement and its impact on scholarship. Creative Commons licenses play an important part in open access publishing, and I expect we’ll be talking about CC a lot that week. It’s primarily for a local audience, but all events are free and open to the public. A full schedule of events is here.

Molly, Libby Hemphill | CC BY

Give us a bit of background on the Global Lives project. How did you begin? What is your mission?

Global Lives’ mission is to reshape how people around the world perceive cultures, nations and people outside their communities by collaboratively building a video library of human life experience. The content of our video library “lives” online and is regularly presented to the public in unique open-source video installations and screenings. Our shoots so far have taken place in Malawi, Brazil, Japan, China, Indonesia and the US, and we’ve shown our work publicly in most of those countries and a few others.

The Global Lives Project all got started in 2002, during my third year in college, when I was lucky enough to spend eight months living and studying international development in Tanzania, India, the Philippines and the UK as part of the International Honors Program. For the majority of these eight months, I lived with host families. I stayed in a bamboo house in the Philippines, a squatter settlement in Mexico City, and a rural village in northern India, among other places. While I learned a ton during the year about the politics, economics, history and ecology of these countries, the part of the experience that stuck with me the most was sharing the experience of daily life with the families and individuals from these countries.

Today, I can’t read a newspaper article about rice without thinking of my host mother Violeta in Barangay Daja and her rice paddy and water buffalo. The experience forever changed the way I understand people from other cultures and nations and my own role in the world. And I wanted to bring that experience to people who didn’t have the same opportunities to travel abroad as I did. So I came up with the idea of Global Lives. What I didn’t expect was that so many other people would find the idea to be so interesting, and that it would resonate so well with people from all over the planet.

The project really started to get off the ground in 2004, when Daniel Jones decided that he liked the idea enough to fly out to California from Kalamazoo, Michigan and do our first shoot, with cable car driver, James Bullock. Shortly thereafter, I moved to São Paulo, Brazil, and met José Santos and Ana Nassar at the Museum of the Person, which became one of our most important collaborators. Soon word spread and in 2007, it really took off. That year both Jason J. Price and Irene Herrera each contacted me about wanting to organize shoots, Jason in Malawi and Irene in Japan. At the time, both were Ph.D. students and both were interested in joining the project as a way of engaging with both the aesthetic and intellectual questions that they were thinking about in their own work. Their universities – New York University and Temple University Japan (TUJ) – supported their shoots by giving them access to equipment. Ron Carr, Chair of TUJ’s Communications Department, became a key supporter, helping us to execute both the shoot in Tokyo as well as the China shoot in 2008, which was led by Ya-Hsuan Huang, a Taiwanese-American documentary filmmaker and MFA student at the New School University. Andreina Lairet of the United Nations University’s (UNU) Media Studio in Tokyo was a lead photographer on the Japan shoot, which then paved the way for our first major urban installation at UNU this past September.

While these university professors and students were key to Global Lives’ success, a large number of commercial video producers and photographers were also instrumental in many of our shoots. Helio Ishii and Maria Laura Cesar in São Paulo each came from the advertising industry to Global Lives, as did Nobuhiro Awata and Chieko Kato, who each took part in the Japan and China shoots. Khairani Barokka, producer of the Indonesia shoot, came from yet another background as a journalist, working at BBC’s Jakarta Bureau.

All of which is to say that GLP comes from a massive snowballing of volunteer efforts from around the world, and made up of people coming a variety of backgrounds, who all coalesced around the project and surrounding community.

All of the footage shot for the Global Lives project is released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. Why did you decide to use CC licenses for the project, and why BY-NC-SA in particular?

The use of CC licenses in the first place was a no-brainer. Having grown up in the Silicon Valley, I was exposed to the ideas of the open source movement from very early on. Though not a coder myself, I admired the open source ethic and started contributing to Wikipedia as soon as I first found out about it.

As the Global Lives Project grew from a concept into a community, choosing a CC license was the clearest and most obvious way to demonstrate to all the members of the community that their hard work producing and shooting video around the planet would be preserved as an enduring public document of human experience, free and accessible to the public indefinitely.

By using CC licenses and establishing ourselves as a nonprofit organization, we aim to clearly position our work as situated within the same gift economy of commons-based peer production that projects like GNU/Linux and Wikipedia emerged from.

The choice to use the BY-NC-SA license has not been easy and took some serious debate between our collaborators (all volunteers) from around the globe. I was one of the earliest advocates of the license, something I came to support as I started participating more and more in the CC community – attending the iCommons iSummits in Dubrovnik (’07) and Sapporo (’08).

But most of the producers of the GLP shoots were hesitant and, I came to see, for good reason. As one core volunteer who co-directed our shoots in China and Japan, put it at first:

“My understanding is that once we agree to place GLP works under this license [CC BY-SA], basically we have no recourse, no matter how the subject is disrespected… This license should be applied to design, fine arts or something very abstract.”

This attitude was reflected as well by the Director of the Malawi shoot, who was particularly upset by misuse of his 24 hours of footage of a 13-year-old Malawian junior high school student, Edith Kapuka. Concerned that certain types of mashups or remixes of Edith’s day could present her in a negative or possibly even in a sexually suggestive light, he balked at even the idea of noncommercial remixes. But he consented to using the CC license under the assumption that for a harmful remix of the shoot to reach large audiences, it would likely need to be distributed via commercial channels, and as such we would have some legal recourse in the case that we decided to issue a take-down notice.

As I learned more and more about both the copyright and non-copyright intellectual property regulations that applied in the dozens of legal jurisdictions where GLP work was being shot and displayed, I began to see that were it not for a few small holes in the implications of the CC-BY-SA license itself that we could potentially consider the license for GLP use. It’s important to note here that none of the major objections from GLP collaborators centered around substitution arguments – given our public mission, generally speaking GLP collaborators have been open to the idea of freely allowing public displays of our work in modified and unmodified forms.

While we would like to find ways to monetize our work beyond just grant-writing and physical installation commissions, as a group I think it’s safe to say that we recognize the value of taking a liberal attitude towards the re-use of our footage, provided that it does not disrespect or damage the identities of our subjects. Basically, the problem boiled down to the issue of moral rights, and the distinct lack of moral rights legislation in many of the key jurisdictions in which we work. A recent vandalizing of one of our Japan videos posted on DotSub.com, subtitling one of our subjects’ lives with vulgar mistranslations in Spanish, drives home the point that the fear that many GLP collaborators have for their subjects’ integrity is not simply paranoia. While many CC advocates might argue that such transgressions can and should be simply corrected and disregarded, this argument does not necessarily hold water with documentary filmmakers or photographers who take very seriously a professional commitment to preserve their subjects’ dignity.

Given both the negative feedback from GLP collaborators and from our attorneys on the proposition of a switch from CC BY-NC-SA to CC BY-SA, I haven’t been pushing too hard on the issue in recent months. That said, if our group of collaborators were to reach consensus on the issue, it is fully within the rights that we hold to the material produced to date for us to switch to a different license at any point in the near future. In particular, if a future version of the CC BY-SA license were to include a clause that afforded subjects in photos or video the same moral rights that are given in certain legal jurisdictions which prevent the abuse of individuals’ images, I could definitely see our organization making the switch.

Your subject selection process is fascinating. Can you describe it for our readers?

When Global Lives got started, our core objective was to record the daily lives of ten people who were “roughly representative of the world’s population.” Roughly is probably the most important word to remember there – GLP is not a scientific endeavor to classify and present the human species under a microscope, but rather an artistic and educational undertaking, seeking to transform people’s understanding of the world by doing a pretty good job of showing them what it’s like to live a day in a human body.

As such, the early collaborators on the project enlisted the support of an economist and a geographer and we did our best to come up with six selection criteria that would help us create a process of elimination method for choosing the ten people whose lives we would film. The criteria are 1) world region, 2) population density, 3) gender, 4) age, 5) religion and 6) income. Each time we do a shoot, we cross off one box and the following shoot has to adapt to fill in the remaining open slots. With six complete and four to go, we’re well on our way to making the whole thing work out pretty well.

Inevitably the process won’t be perfect, but one possible way to make it get better and better that we’re currently exploring is developing an algorithm that helps us select even more subjects that make the group overall a progressively better representation of humanity. Since starting the project, we’ve had inquiries from filmmakers interested in collaborating in more than 30 countries, and right now a major focus of our world is building the institutional capacity to receive and host a rapidly growing number of terabytes of footage. We’re in the process right now of developing a partnership with the Internet Archive to host all of our footage for us but also to have it accessible through our own website with much more metadata and interactivity features. All our web development to date has been done by brilliant volunteers, led primarily by Newber Machado, Arthur Hebert and Hunter Blanks. These folks are really dedicated and they could really use a lot of help, so interested folk should definitely get in touch.

The GLP subject selection process

A mockup of a page in our video library of human life experience

Global Lives is established online but also maintains a number of real-world screenings and exhibitions. The physical space constructed by Architects Roberto Corrêa, Gaurang Khemka and Daniel Markiewicz is particularly stunning. Why did you choose to do this? Can you explain what the exhibition allows for that the website does not?

Great question. The project began with the physical installation and that was a choice really based on my own and many of my collaborators’ feelings that a large-scale video installation with floor-to-ceiling projections really can be a much more immersive and ultimately transformative experience than something watched on a computer or TV screen.

My inspiration for this comes from the work of artists like Nam June Paik, Bill Viola and Barbara Kruger, each of whose interactive media works I experienced in high school and college. These works influenced me deeply, drawing me out of my own daily experience and into an altered physical reality. I feel strongly that video installations offer a much more bodily and visceral experience than what you can get with a computer screen.

Ultimately, Global Lives installations are intended to create both social and meditative experiences for viewers. As people walk through the exhibits, we want them to really leave their own bodies and be transplanted into the lives of other individuals on the other side of the planet. For the same reason that some movies are better seen in theaters than on laptops, I really got excited very early on about building something physical and specific for the video that I wanted to create in this project.

From a much more practical perspective, I think that it’s important to consider the state of mind that the average web surfer is in versus the average museum-goer. While someone might spend a few minutes on our website and then get distracted by an IM or another tab in their browser, we’ve seen in our pilot installations that people frequently stay for 30 minutes or more, discussing the footage with a friend as they watch or just sitting alone, engrossed in the lives of our subjects.

These pilot installations, each featuring four screens with footage from our first four shoots, were hosted by the United Nations University in Tokyo, iCommons in Sapporo, and the Institute for the Future in San Francisco, and they really gave us a chance to see how audiences interact with our work, and it’s looking really good.

Lucky for us, we recently found a guardian angel at Sony who has been generously loaning us really incredible projectors and sound systems for these pilot installations. Without his support, I’m not quite sure where our ragtag bunch of young filmmakers would be getting the equipment we need to do this work. It seems though that with persistence and dedication, lots of little miracles just keep happening.

Global Lives is actively seeking help involvement from video makers, exhibition hosts, translators, programmers, educators and funders. How can people get involved with Global Lives?

The best way to get involved is to shoot an email to info at globallives dot org, telling us exactly what skills you have to offer (resumes are great!) and we’ll then put you in touch with the volunteers working on whatever area you’re interested in.

What is up next for the Global Lives Project?

Right now we’re working hard to finish the last four of our first cycle of ten shoots in preparation for installation launches in Brazil, Japan and the US in 2009 and 2010. In the US, we have a commitment from the Long Now Foundation to partially fund our US exhibit launch, and we’re currently looking for venues. In Tokyo and São Paulo, we’ve been asked to submit proposals for some major venues, and we’re currently waiting to hear back from those. The locations for our next three shoots are India, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. We’re still working to nail down a sub-region in Asia for our tenth shoot.

At the same time as we work on executing these shoots and preparing for the installation launch, we’re working hard on building the institutional capacity to grow the project into a true video library of human life experience. Our installations are conceived of as a gateway into our collection of footage, which we hope to expand greatly in the coming years.

We’re also currently working with educators to test out our content in classrooms for a variety of age levels. We’ve already shown video shorts of our shoots from Malawi, Japan, Brazil and the US in classrooms around the world, and the responses that we are getting are stellar. We are looking to release some curriculum materials at the same time as our installation launch later this year, but we really need some help from additional educators to get that in gear.

We also just put out our first real DVD – it’s an hour long and features shorts from our shoots in Malawi, Japan, Brazil and the US. These should be available on our website soon. A group of our volunteer photographers as well as our stellar print designers, Corrie Harper and Renato Hofer, are also working on a photo book hopefully to be released later this year as well.

As you can see, things are busy busy busy over here at Global Lives. Probably the most important thing for us to do right now is to bring in some additional major funding. Though there are more than 250 volunteers involved, we still have not been able to hire a single full-time staff member. I’m at the center of this whirlwind working part-time for minimum wage and we only just recently hired our second employee to work ten hours a week doing development and general project coordination. Though we’ve made it extraordinarily far with very little cash to date (USD 60k in 4 years), we are really getting to the stage where without full-time employees it’s becoming quite difficult to manage the onslaught of production volunteers and exhibit opportunities that’s coming at us.

That said, 2008 was our best year for fundraising and for production to date, and 2009 is already shaping splendidly. Now if only I could catch up on all those emails…

Can you give our readers some background on Deproduction? How did you get started, who is involved, and what do you do?

The early history is summarized in a great Apogee Magazine Article from 2004, back when we were still a 2-person organization. In the 5 years since, the organization grew from collaborations with a handful of local nonprofits, including Free Speech TV, Little Voice Productions, Just Media, and the Pan African Arts Society. We had been producing videos for nonprofit partners, and began expanding our media education programs through work with local schools and an office in the PS1 Charter School. In 2005, Denver’s City Council shut down the City’s Public Access TV Station and issued an RFP from organizations who had a plan for making Public Access TV work with no operating support from the city or Comcast.

We responded, borrowing from the models of Wikipedia, Current TV, and others to develop online systems that could enable our community members to manage the station. Where most Public Access TV stations have staff devoted to content ingest, metadata entry, quality-control, equipment reservations, class registrations, broadcast scheduling and so-on, our tools enable the community to complete all those tasks with minimal staff involvement. Furthermore, our approach to studio productions, editing and even training work to reduce the workload on our staff and maximize the cooperation and support of our members.

Today we operate 4 different departments, all aimed at our mission of “putting the power of media and technology into the hands of the people”.

• Denver Open Media operates three Public Access TV channels and is working to bring noncommercial community media organizations together using the open-source systems we’ve created to make D.O.M. work.
• Civic Pixel is the web development department, focused on Open Source web development for the nonprofit sector and socially-oriented small businesses.
• Deproduction still manages our video production efforts, serving dozens of nonprofits each year with affordable, professional video production services and training.
• Lastly, our education program teaches community members everything from Studio Production to Drupal development.

What is Deproduction’s relationship to Denver Open Media?

Officially, Denver Open Media is a “project” of Deproduction, the 501(c)(3). When we launched the Public Access TV station, it was important to us to give that station its own identity that the community could really own and represent. We wanted to give the community more control over that project and structure it in a new way.

Why is Public Access TV important?

A recent Nielsen study showed that online video viewership represents less than 2% of all TV viewing. In other words, people watch TV and video on the internet less than 1/50th of the time they watch it on TV. Cable is still the #1 most popular delivery system for watching TV.

Cable is where the audience is, and Public Access is the only conduit that allows anyone to reach those audiences. More importantly, it’s a fairly privileged subset of the population who has access to the tools required to make video. In poor communities, high-speed internet penetration is still under 30%, and access to video equipment is surely lower. Public Access stations provide training and equipment that would not otherwise be accessible to large subsets of the population: the ones most underrepresented in mainstream media.

There’s no question that the internet is making the situation more accessible, but the ability to communicate with society on a large scale is still out of reach for most disadvantaged communities.

You require that all productions made using your membership be released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. Why is that? What benefits have you seen from this choice? Have there been any obstacles?

We require Creative Commons because it’s a perfect solution for the kind of content we exist to support: noncommercial content aimed at exposing alternative points of view to as wide an audience as possible. Also, we have a vision for transforming the Public Access TV community into a true media network, making hundreds of thousands of hours of user-generated content available to the masses, and that could not be possible with a traditional copyright approach.

You recently received a Knight NewsChallenge Grant aimed at replicating the operating model at DOM at Public Access TV stations across the US. What is the end-goal for this project? Are CC licenses involved?

Our goal is to cooperate as a network of stations, sharing content, sharing open-source development efforts, sharing best-practices and more. At this phase, we are requiring that the partners in the beta effort pick a point in time where all content submitted from that point onwards is licensed Creative Commons.

CC BY (Barbara Illowsky and Susan Dean)

One of the most exciting sub-movements within open education is the current revolution regarding the evolution of textbooks. Old-fashioned publishers would often (and still do) rack up prices to hundreds of dollars per textbook, but this business model is rapidly changing to favor vastly cheaper educational resources based on more open licensing policies. One driver is that the information in textbooks becomes outdated the minute it comes out in print, to the point that what is being taught in schools is often inaccurate. Open textbooks better represent the dynamic nature of information because they are themselves dynamic. They can be manufactured collaboratively over the internet, are digital and thereby easily editable, and are openly licensed so that anyone can update the information in the future. The premise is that you should never have to throw out old content — only improve upon it. 

At the COSL Open Education Conference this year, Susan Dean, along with others, presented on Sustainability Models for Community College Open Textbooks. Her presentation was based on her own path towards open textbook publishing. She and Dr. Barbara Illowsky developed, over a number of years, the textbook Collaborative Statistics. Today, it is freely available for access and derivation via CC BY on the Connexions platform, but for Susan and Barbara, obtaining the rights to the book and cementing a publisher and platform were far from easy. 

Below are Susan’s and Barbara’s take on the path they chose. I was lucky enough to catch up to them via email and ask a few questions — about themselves, Collaborative Statistics, and open textbooks in general.

Can you say a few words about yourselves and your background in education?  What drew you to academia in the first place?  As an academic, how have your conceptions of education evolved?

Susan
I earned a secondary teaching credential to teach high school math and art and taught high school for the next four years.  I went back to school in computer science and worked for Honeywell and Hewlett-Packard and then was hired by De Anza College to teach math at the same time as I was working on a master’s degree in applied math at Santa Clara University.

I grew up poor but always did well in school and received a lot of attention from teachers, several of whom were outstanding.  I have always found math along with marine biology highly interesting and would tutor other students in both subjects in high school and found it fun.  I also tutored students, including blind and deaf students, in college. These factors combined to make me want to teach.

I have become a “hands-on” teacher in math.  Students, especially developmental students, learn best by “doing” and by working in groups.  I believe in having students use technology to help them learn.

Barbara
I tutored in college and really enjoyed it. I did not plan on becoming an instructor, though. In graduate school, I had a teaching scholarship and found that I loved teaching. I loved helping students; I loved when they were successful, especially after a hard struggle to learn.

About 15 years ago, I became interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning. I researched pedagogy and andragogy (the theory of adult learning).  Since completing my PhD, I have continued to study the learning process.

I now understand education to be much more of a life time process, than I had previously thought, as well as effective instruction to be much more constructivist than how most educators teach.

In your opinion, what are the important ways in which community and four year colleges differ — in terms of degrees granted, student populations, educational needs and challenges…?

Community colleges are for students who want a particular certificate (usually for a job), who want an AA or AS, who want to transfer to a four year school or who are interested in particular subjects.  Four year colleges, for the most part, are for students who want a four year degree.  Four year colleges typically have “academic” majors.   Many students would not go to college if there were no community colleges. Among a myriad of services, community colleges provide developmental help in English and math if students need it (and about 80% who come to the community colleges do), provide transfer programs, offer counseling that not only gives students advisory help for classes and programs but provides personal guidance as well, offer excellent financial advice for those students who need financial help and are cheaper than four year colleges.

Community colleges enroll almost half of all undergraduate students in the U.S.  As a result, a good many community colleges are extremely diverse in student populations (De Anza College is a very good example) and the preparedness of the students is wider than at a UC or CSU or private college or university.

How do you envision Collaborative Statistics being used in the classroom?

Collaborative Statistics has been used in the classroom for about 15 years.  The book is intended to complement an elementary course in statistics that is collaborative and practical.  Students work in groups to apply what they have learned to complete data driven labs and projects. The book was written to accommodate this mode of classroom activity.  It was also written with English as a second language (ESL) students in mind and has been used successfully over the years with many ESL students.

From what I understood from your presentation (Susan) at  COSL OpenEd ‘08, writing Collaborative Statistics was far from the hardest part. The book was originally published with a commercial publisher under all rights reserved copyright.  What triggered the need to open up these rights?

We acquired the rights back from the publisher so that we could lower the cost of the book.  We had found that too many of our students struggled to pay for their books especially as the price of books went up (the cost increase has been dramatic over the years).  So, when we had the chance to open up the rights to the book and make it free online, we were ready to do it.

Can you tell us a bit about the process you had to go through to convert to an open license? What were the steps you took? What were the roughest bumps in the road?

Martha Kanter, Chancellor of the Foofthill-De Anza Community College District, is very interested in open educational resources.  She is acquainted with Bob Maxfield of the non-profit Maxfield Foundation (associated with Rice University).  She recommended our book to Bob Maxfield who in turn made the book available to the Connexions Project of Rice University.   Since we had control of the book (we published it), it was our decision to acquire an open license.  The roughest bumps involved the amount of time it took to find the right organization for our book.

If you could give a piece of advice to other textbook authors and/or teachers who wish to publish their work openly, what would it be?

Do it!  Think of the many students and faculty who could benefit from your work.

Why did you choose CC BY, as opposed to one of the more restrictive licenses?

We chose the license that Connexions requested for the least restrictions.  Plus, the least restrictive license allows for the most freedom of improvement of a product.

What would you say to someone who was worried about commercial uses of their work?

Choose an organization like Connexions to publish on the Web.   Connexions allows and encourages users to collaboratively develop, freely share and quickly publish content on the Web.  Anyone who uses any part of someone else’s content can modify the content but must give attribution to the authors of the content.

Open textbooks are certainly taking off in a big way these days, what with Connexions, Flatworld Knowledge, CK12 Foundation’s Flexbooks, and the recent bill signed into law enabling California Community Colleges to establish OER pilot programs. What do you think specifically about this bill — AB 2261?  Will you be involved with the execution of this bill, considering your ties with De Anza Community College?  If not, how do you see the program working?

We are highly in favor of AB 2261.  We are not involved with the execution of the bill.  Article 2 of AB 2261 lays out a plan for the program including a possible lead community college to coordinate the planning and development of the pilot program.  Especially important is Article 2 part (c) (3) which deals with developing “a community college professional development course that introduces faculty, staff, and college course developers to the concept, creation, content, and production methodologies that enable OER to be offered to students in community college classes.”

Lastly, what is the future of open textbooks? What would you say we have to change in order for open education to be maximally effective?

Open textbooks are here to stay!  Connexions has much improved our book with what they have done on the cnx.org site.  They have broken down the content into modules that can be linked together and arranged in different ways.  We are sure that the other organizations that are involved in open educational resources have done something similar.  There has to be some kind of massive ad campaign (similar to what California did with the big propositions in the recent November 2008 election but keep it honest) that shows the great benefits of open educational resources.  The ad must target everyone but especially faculty to show them the great educational possibilities that exist, the fact that the resources are easy to use and the fact that the resources are free.