We are particularly interested in and helped to shape the Open Research and Education topic stream, where we are leading an “Open Peer Learning” workshop on Wednesday (Sept 19) from 11:30am to 3:30pm. For the workshop the School of Open (co-led by Creative Commons and P2PU) is combining forces with the OKFN’s School of Data to explore, test and develop learning challenges around open tools and practices in data, research, and education. Participation in the workshop is free (you don’t even have to buy a festival ticket), but space is limited, so RSVP at: http://peerlearningworkshop.eventbrite.com/

The workshop will be held in this awesome space, reserved for four HACK workshops:

hack-2 / juhuu / CC BY-NC-SA

For those of you able to come to Helsinki, look out for our CC staff reps, Jessica Coates and Timothy Vollmer, along with many of our European affiliates who will be holding a regional meeting on Day four of the fest.

For the rest of you, you can still participate in helping to build initiatives like the School of Open from wherever you are by visiting http://schoolofopen.org/ and signing up for the mailing lists there.

Earlier this year, we announced that Creative Commons is an official sponsor of the 7th annual WikiSym, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. WikiSym is taking place right near Creative Commons headquarters in Mountain View, CA on October 3-5 at Microsoft Research Campus in Silicon Valley.

WikiSym is the premier conference on open collaboration and related technologies for researchers, industry, entrepreneurs and practitioners worldwide. It is supported by relevant organizations and companies such as Microsoft, Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, the National Science Foundation, and CosmoCode. As an Associate Partner and like-minded organization concerned about the instrumental role of open content and open licenses in today’s society, Creative Commons supports WikiSym to further disseminate the goals of this forum among their audience around the world.

Key topics in WikiSym include open collaboration and related technologies, open content, open licenses and their connections and implications for different areas of interest (education, e-democracy, data transparency and industry). A CC Salon on Open Educational Resources organized in San Francisco in June already served as a preview of some interesting discussions in this field that will be developed at the conference.

The conference program is packed with presentations, workshops, panels, demos and keynotes. Alongside is the Open Space, an unconference track in which attendees can self-organize their own agenda with discussions, presentations and informal gatherings.

This year, WikiSym is proud to host 3 outstanding keynotes by world-renowned figures in their fields.

• Cathy Casserly (CEO @ Creative Commons) will talk about the forthcoming challenges for open content and open licenses, with special emphasis in their implications for the critical field of educational content.
• Jeff Heer (Assistant Professor @ Stanford) will present a tour around the most compelling and innovative advances in information visualization (InfoViz), a field that is evolving rapidly, along with the emergence of open data sources, public transparency and data analysis.
• Bernardo Huberman (Senior HP Fellow and Director of the Social Computing Lab @ Hewlett-Packard Laboratories) will emphasize the implication of the latest advances in the study of virtual communities, distributed systems and dynamics of information in large networks to understand the way open collaboration will likely evolve in the future.

WikiSym 2011 registration is still open. Don’t miss this unparalleled opportunity to tap into the latest trends and ground-breaking advances in open collaboration–the force that is reshaping the way we work, live and interact with each other everyday.

For updates, follow the WikiSym blog and Twitter feed. We look forward to seeing you this October in Mountain View!

Volunteer at WikiSym 2011!

You can also volunteer to help run WikiSym if you are a student (undergrad, grad, PhD). Volunteers will receive free access to the conference (including meals, reception and dinner) for the entire 3 days. Apply to be a volunteer by September 24!

We are thrilled to announce the 2011 Creative Commons Global Summit, now open for registration!

The Creative Commons Global Summit will take place over three full days from September 16-18 in Warsaw, Poland, and is generously hosted by our affiliates at CC Poland.

The theme of this year’s Summit is “Powering an Open Future.” As Creative Commons enters its second decade, prominent thinkers from the commons movement worldwide, including Sir John Daniels from the Commonwealth of Learning, Melissa Hagemann from the Open Society Foundations, CC board member Lawrence Lessig, and CC CEO Cathy Casserly, will come together with experts from our global Affiliate Network, CC staff, and key stakeholders to consider “what next”?

Central to the Summit will be a day-long CC Festival on Saturday, September 17th. This public day will feature a variety of panels, workshops, plenary speakers and a CC visual arts exhibition, showcasing the best of the commons now and in the future. It will include sessions focused on key areas of interest to the commons community worldwide, including education, science, government, data, business and the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector. Most excitingly, it will be followed in the evening by a CC Salon, a musical celebration of creativity, remix, and openness.

The Global Summit will also serve as a major meeting and planning forum for the CC community itself, with regional meetings, legal debates, community planning, training workshops, and general discussion and strategizing on the big issues for the next ten years of CC, including the new version 4.0 licenses and supporting and enhancing the Affiliate Network worldwide. The CC Board of Directors will be joining us at the Summit, specifically to meet with the community and engage in these broader discussions.

The Creative Commons Global Summit will be a chance for the whole commons community to communicate, celebrate and connect. We hope you can join us.

For more information, and to register, head on over to the Global Summit wiki. The 2011 Creative Commons Global Summit is a free event, but registration is required.

Open Government Data Venn Diagram by justgrimes / CC BY-SA

You are invited to attend a workshop titled Open Government: Open Data, Open Source and Open Standards, organized jointly by Dr. Hanif Rahemtulla, Horizon Digital Economy Research and Puneet Kishor, Creative Commons. The workshop will be held in conjunction with the annual Open Source GIS (OSGIS) Conference on June 21, 2011 in Nottingham, United Kingdom, and will take place at the School of Geography/Centre for Geospatial Science at the University of Nottingham.

This workshop builds on the Law and the GeoWeb workshop held recently at Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, and will bring together speakers from across industry, research and academia to contribute toward some of the fundamental theoretical and technical questions emerging in the Open Data space (i.e., how to mark up and release open data; licensing models for governments and how to interface them to other open source and commercial licensing regimes; conflicts between data protection and transparency and structuring access to data by different groups).

The following speakers and topics have been confirmed:

• Dr. Peter Mooney, Geotechnologies Research Group, Department of Computer Science, NUI Maynooth (NUIM), Co. Kildare. Ireland. Producing and consuming open data
• Professor David Martin, School of Geography, University of Southampton, Southampton. Mapping the UK population over time: a universe of new possibilities
  
• Zach Beauvais, Talis. Linked data
• Dr. Chris Parker (GeoVation and Community Propositions) and Ian Holt (Web Services), Ordnance Survey, Southampton. Tackling global challenges through open innovation and geographic information
• Dr. Catherine Souch, Royal Geographical Society. The Open Data revolution and data literacy in higher education
• Dr. Katleen Janssen, Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT (ICRI), Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium. Privacy and legal implications of open data
• Professor Derek McAuley, Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute, University of Nottingham. Exercising our rights over information about us

Proceedings
Proceedings of the Redmond and Nottingham workshops along with selected longer papers will be published in a special issue of the open access International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructure Research published by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.

Contact
Please register for the workshop at the main OSGIS web site.
For further information please contact either Dr. Hanif Rahemtulla or Puneet Kishor.

For more on Creative Commons and open data, see our wiki.

February 10, 2010
Doors open at 8 pm, VIP event at 7 pm
$30 donation (no one turned away)
DNA Lounge
375 Eleventh Street
San Francisco, CA

Special VIP donors are invited to a pre-party event with Adam Savage, John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, Mitch Kapor, Mark Klein, and others.

They’ve also created a commemorative poster, which is available in hi-res under CC BY:

Image: EFF-mecha-POSTER by Hugh D’Andrade / CC BY.