Through the generous support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and in full partnership with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), UNESCO hosted the 2012 World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress last week to:

• showcase the world’s best practices in OER policies, initiatives, and experts;
• release the 2012 Paris OER Declaration calling on Governments to support the development and use of OERs; and
• celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 2002 UNESCO Forum that created the term “OER.”

I am pleased to report UNESCO member States unanimously approved the “Paris OER Declaration” (pdf).

This Declaration is the result of a yearlong process, led by UNESCO and the COL with regional and online meetings and final negotiations at the Congress. The Declaration recommends UNESCO member States:

a. Foster awareness and use of OER.

b. Facilitate enabling environments for use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT).

c. Reinforce the development of strategies and policies on OER.

d. Promote the understanding and use of open licensing frameworks.

e. Support capacity building for the sustainable development of quality learning materials.

f. Foster strategic alliances for OER.

g. Encourage the development and adaptation of OER in a variety of languages and cultural contexts.

h. Encourage research on OER.

i. Facilitate finding, retrieving and sharing of OER.

j. Encourage the open licensing of educational materials produced with public funds.

The Declaration will now be delivered to UNESCO’s Director General. She will submit the Declaration to the UNESCO Executive Board on October, 2012. After the UNESCO Board approves the Declaration, it will go to the General Conference for final approval. While it is important to note a “Declaration” is a non-binding UNESCO instrument, a UNESCO declaration does “set forth universal principles to which the community of States wished to attribute the greatest possible authority and to afford the broadest possible support.”

OER Congress resources

• UNESCO Congress site
• Paris OER Declaration (pdf) (Français pdf)
• #OERcongress (twitter feed)
• COL Congress site
• Regional meetings that refined the Declaration and educated regional States about OER and open licensing
• Congress photos
• US Mission to UNESCO article

Bravo to all who helped move the world to this moment! So many open advocates traveled to the regional meetings and to the Congress. Your contributions and work with your governments led us all to this successful outcome.

Lawrence Lessig’s Keynote (added 27 July, 2012):

1. Showcase the world’s best practices in OER policies, initiatives, and experts
2. Release a 2012 Paris OER Declaration calling on Governments to support the development and use of OERs
3. Celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 2002 UNESCO Forum that created the term OER

Participate

There are several ways you can participate in the congress. From 20-22 June, the congress will be livecast in two web streams:

1. The official congress featuring discussion on the Paris OER Declaration and governmental actions for OER (English stream, French stream)

2. A parallel stream featuring an Open Seminar & Exhibition of the world’s best OER practices, policies, and initiatives (English stream, French stream). For this stream, UNESCO will have present a digital moderator to whom you can pose questions via identi.ca or Twitter using the #oercongress hashtag.

You can also follow the congress on Twitter, join and ask questions on the OER community WSIS KC platform, and contribute to the draft Paris OER Declaration (pdf) until Thursday 21 June, 12pm Paris time by writing to oerdeclaration@unesco.org.

The complete program of sessions and speakers, and all other information, is available at the website.

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While we gear up for the CC Global Summit that is just a week away, governments around the world continue to open up their data and adopt policies for maximum transparency and citizen engagement.

Open government developments in Austria, New Zealand, and Australia

In Austria, the City of Vienna, along with the Chancellor’s Office and the Austrian cities of Linz, Salzburg and Graz, coordinated their activities to establish the Cooperation OGD (Open Government Data) Austria. In its first session, the group agreed to eight key points, the first of which was, "All public administration will be free under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), meaning it can be reused and shared for any purpose, with only attribution necessary.” Read more.

In New Zealand, the Ministers of Finance and Internal Affairs adopted a statement detailing a new Declaration on Open and Transparent Government that directs, encourages, and invites various departments, state services agencies, and state sector agencies to commit to releasing high value public data actively for re-use, in accordance with the Declaration and Principles, and in accordance with the NZGOAL Review and Release process. Read more.

In Australia, AusGOAL, the nationally endorsed Australian Governments Open Access and Licensing Framework, recommends the suite of CC licenses for copyrighted material and the CC Public Domain Mark for non-copyrighted material. Read more. CC Korea also recently translated the excellent Australia Gov 2.0 Taskforce Report to further open government in their own region.

In other news:

• $20,000 is available via the Open Textbook Challenge by the Saylor Foundation. If a textbook is submitted and accepted for use with Saylor.org's course materials, then the copyright holders receive $20,000 while the referrer receives $250.

• Our affiliates in Europe have published a new dossier on the EU sound recording copyright extension.

• We also filed brief comments for the EC consultation on scientific information in the digital age.

• In response to the Moore Foundation's call for community feedback, we developed this idea on Data Governance. We hope you participate and vote, and not just on our idea — participation in processes like this is a great way to increase their usage by foundations in making funding choices that can benefit the commons.

• The Technical Working Group is underway for the Learning Metadata Resource Initiative (LRMI). EdTechMag recently covered LRMI in this great article. To learn more, sign up for the first in a series of webinars on LRMI.

• We documented the present state of CC licensing options in a summary on CC Labs.

• And we updated our Kickstarter page with a couple new CC licensed projects seeking sustenance. Check it out, and let us know if you are using CC for a project with an upcoming deadline.

The new policy specifies that COL will “release its own materials under the most feasible open licenses including the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license.” The CC BY-SA license is currently used for more than 17 million Wikipedia articles in 270 languages, not to mention a plethora of other Wikimedia Foundation projects. Furthermore the CC BY license is compatible with CC BY-SA, and CC BY is used by OER platforms like Connexions and Curriki.org.

We are thrilled at this new development by COL, one of the leading intergovernmental organizations in education! Read the full policy here, and learn more about how IGOs benefit by adopting Creative Commons licenses for their own works.