European Parliament (Brussels) / Xaf / CC BY

CC licenses and tools have been implemented by government entities and public sector bodies around the world. And over the last few years, there’s been an increasing focus in governments aligning to the principle that the public should have access to the materials that it pays for. These funding mandates, which require that grantees release content produced with grant funds under an open license, has been a increasingly commons way for governments to support openness. Legislation involving the open licensing of publicly funded educational materials has been passed in Brazil, Poland, the United States, and Canada. The UK has championed an open access policy for publicly funded research under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Governments in Australia and New Zealand have opted for comprehensive open licensing policies for all government-produced works, by default releasing public information and data under CC BY. The Dutch government has taken this one step further, opting to release government information directly into the public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.

In addition to governments, other publicly-minded institutions like philanthropic foundations and intergovermental organizations are supporting open licensing. Several foundations have already implemented or are considering requiring open licensing on the outputs of their grant funds, including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation , the Open Society Foundations, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation already require their grantees to release content they build with grant money under open licenses. And CC continues to explore how to evaluate current copyright policies within the foundation world and suggest how foundations (and their grantees) can benefit from open licensing for their grant funded materials. Intergovernmental organizations like the Commonwealth of Learning and the World Bank have adopted open licensing policies to share their publications too.

Open advocates – whether it be in support of open sharing of publicly funded educational materials, open access to scientific research articles, access to a huge trove of cultural heritage resources from libraries and museums, or open licensing for public sector information and government datasets – have been increasingly active over the last few years, particularly in working to educate policymakers about the importance and benefits of open licensing. These efforts include the development of declarations such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative, Cape Town and Paris Declarations on Open Educational Resources, the Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest, the Panton Principles, and many others. Advocates have been key in communicating the need for governments to consider open licensing, whether it be for federal agencies, governing bodies like the European Commission, or through multilateral negotiations such as WIPO. And the grassroots open community has been extremely active in raising awareness of open licensing, whether it be through the tireless work of CC Affiliates, the broad network of open data activists from the Open Knowledge Foundation, legal experts championing Open Government Data Principles, and persons participating in events from Open Access Week to Open Education Week to Public Domain Day. All of these actions have rallied around the common theme that governments and public bodies should release content they create or fund under open licenses, for the benefit of all.

Since the beginning of Creative Commons, governments and public sector bodies have leveraged CC licenses and public domain tools to share their data, publicly funded research, educational and cultural content, and other digital materials. Governments are increasingly leveraging CC licenses as part of their strategy to proactively share resources, promote effective spending, and champion innovation. A massive amount of work is ahead, and with a committed community of advocates, interested governmental departments, and open minded policymakers, we can together work toward a close integration of open licensing inside the public sector. If we do so, governments can better support their populations with the information they need, increase the effectiveness of the public’s investment, and contribute to a true global commons.

The conversation Monday revolved around the impact and potential for World Bank research — and open access in general — for development in countries around the world. For example, how will access and reuse of research under an open access policy create opportunities to solve large global challenges such as climate change and hunger?

The panelists jumped in, and stated that an immediate, baseline benefit of the open access policy is that now, World Bank research is aggregated in one place and made available for free to anyone with an internet connection. This is not the case with subscription journals, where readers have to pay to view the articles. Mike Carroll noted the importance of addressing copyright concerns in open policies. Even when research is made available for free online, if readers are unclear about the rights available to them, the articles and data will not be as valuable or impactful. This is especially important in developing nations, where republication and moving information from the Internet to an offline environment requires copyright permission. With open licenses such as CC BY chosen by the World Bank, permission to republish and translate articles into other languages is automatically granted. Carroll pointed to related success in the Open Education space. He said that many MIT Open CourseWare materials have been translated and put into use in other countries (such as Vietnam) specifically because the original resources were published under an open license that permitted translation and reuse.

Suber and Muller said that one benefit of an open access policy (especially when combined with open access to the underlying data) is that it can help validate research and work toward consensus on a particular issue, such as climate change. This in turn can help policymakers make better, research-driven decisions. Muller said that open access promotes collaboration between colleagues, even those with different skill sets and backgrounds. With this comes the increased possibility of solving complex research problems in novel ways. Muller and Wagstaff noted that the Open Access Policy would help increase the visibility, access, and reuse of World Bank documents and research. This information will help increase the audience for important Bank research and will promote cross-border transfer of information, especially in a south-south direction (as opposed to north-south).

To highlight the dire situation in pricing for traditional journals, the panelists discussed Harvard’s recent announcement about the unsustainable cost of scholarly journal subscriptions. Suber noted that even with a journal budget of $9 million per year, the Harvard University Library realizes it cannot afford the ongoing agreements with commercial journal publishers. And clearly, if even Harvard can’t afford the full range of research, every other university in the world is worse off. However, Suber said that seven of Harvard’s nine colleges have adopted exemplary open access policies, thus retaining access to the research from Harvard faculty even if those faculty publish in traditional and expensive subscription journals.

Carroll pointed to a more fundamental problem with the current scholarly publishing ecosystem. Scholars have always written to maximize impact; the web helps makes it easy to publish to wide audience, at near zero cost. The logical conclusion to these two assumptions is that all scientific and scholarly research should be widely available for free online. However, this is not how things have shaken out. Instead, prices to access scholarly research has gone up dramatically, as half of science literature has been published by commercial houses. These commercial publishers have enjoyed up to 36% profit margins, even amid the worldwide financial crisis. This points to a larger problem, and hints that the current publishing system overall is broken. However, Suber said that there are currently some for-profit open access journals that are indeed profitable. However, he guessed that the profit margins at those companies was probably closer to 2-5%.

A related question from the audience asked why a scholar would want to publish research as open access if given the chance to publish her work in a “shiny” established journal. Panelists pointed out that the World Bank Open Access policy allows authors to do both. The policy requires that authors deposit a copy of their final paper in the Open Knowledge Repository, and doesn’t preclude researchers from publishing in traditional journals. Of course, while this framework is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t solve the underlying problem because big publishers continue to enjoy huge profit margins on their access-controlled subscription journals because university libraries continue to pay for the access that their faculty require.

Suber pointed out that there are other benefits to publishing work as open access. He said that publishing in open access journals allows authors to attach open licenses (such as CC BY) to their work. When they do so, they make the work more useful to readers and users. So, the smallest open access journal has a potentially larger audience than even the most popular paywalled journal because the work can reach anyone in the world with access to the Internet. When you couple this massive potential audience with the permission to republish and reuse via an open license, authors can maximize the impact of their work beyond the reach of any closed journal.

Mike Carroll also brought up the importance of new technologies and methods such as text mining as another tool to help solve complex problems. Challenges such as climate change are huge, and can’t be tackled by researchers individually. At the same time, there is now a huge body of research articles on the subject, and scholars are facing an information overload problem. That’s where text mining comes in, and allows researchers to conduct intensive computational analyses on huge sets of scientific texts in order to identify correlations, patterns, and unforeseen connections that would be impossible to understand by reading the articles by themselves. While the traditional publishing models typically block such text mining efforts, open access gives permission in advance, helping researchers solve problems faster and promote scientific innovation. Questions around the legal implications of text mining in relation to copyright are currently being discussed in the UK.

The key takeaway from the study: “the direct and measurable benefits of making PSI available free and unrestrictedly typically outweigh the costs. When one adds the longer-term benefits that we cannot fully measure, cannot even foresee, the case for open access appears to be strong.”

The report offers an interesting and instructive analysis about the overarching cost-saving potential of making PSI available online for free and under open licenses (we assume the figures to represent Australian dollars):

[W]e find that the net cost to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) of making publications and statistics freely available online and adopting Creative Commons licensing was likely to have been around $3.5 million per annum at 2005-06 prices and levels of activity, but the immediate cost savings for users were likely to have been around $5 million per annum. The wider impacts in terms of additional use and uses bring substantial additional returns, with our estimates suggesting overall costs associated with free online access to ABS publications and data online and unrestrictive standard licensing of around $4.6 million per annum and measurable annualised benefits of perhaps $25 million (i.e. more than five times the costs).

The Houghton study suggests that open licensing is a key component to reducing friction in the downstream use of PSI:

It is not simply about access prices, but also about the transaction costs involved. Standardised and unrestrictive licensing, such as Creative Commons, and data standards are crucial in enabling access that is truly open (i.e. free, immediate and unrestricted) … The efficient economic solution for the dissemination of PSI is likely to be free libre and free gratis (i.e. making it freely available online and using unrestrictive licensing such as Creative Commons).

In a separate internal document noted in the report, the Australian Bureau of Statistics described the impact of adopting CC licensing. It says that CC licensing “meets public expectations with regard to open government, facilitates data sharing (including across government), allows for more timely reuse of statistics, facilitates innovation, [and] makes sense to a growing percentage of people who recognise and understand CC licence symbols and conditions.”

The study urges us to try to understand and foster the unpredictable yet potentially powerful innovation that can be unleashed when PSI is made freely available online and released using unrestrictive licenses:

In the longer term, there may also be unforeseen uses and re-uses that simply cannot be accounted for, and again this may mean that the costs and benefits experienced in the early years of implementation tend to understate the longer-term advantages. Use and re-use can also have wider impacts, in terms of innovation and the development and introduction of new products, services and processes that, in turn, generate new economic economic activity, new business opportunities, better informed and potentially better government and business decisions.

The full report is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced a $20M investment in the Next Generation Learning Challenges, an initiative to improve college readiness and completion through technology. The first request for proposals (RFP) was released today (PDF). The RFP specifically solicits proposals that address the following challenges:

• Increasing the use of blended learning models, which combine face-to-face instruction with online learning activities.
• Deepening students’ learning and engagement through use of interactive applications, such as digital games, interactive video, immersive simulations, and social media.
• Supporting the availability of high-quality open courseware, particularly for high-enrollment introductory classes like math, science, and English, which often have low rates of student success.
• Helping institutions, instructors, and students benefit from learning analytics which can monitor student progress in real-time and customize proven supports and interventions.

The RFP lays out the grant guidelines with regard to open licensing, and requires the use of CC BY:

So that the knowledge gained during NGLC-funded projects is promptly and broadly disseminated, all documents, written materials, and other content submitted to EDUCAUSE during the period of Grantee’s NGLC grant application and grant (e.g., website postings, pre-proposals, proposals, findings, and information generated by Grantee) will be made available to the community under a Creative Commons Attribution license. In addition, all open educational resources and related work product (manuals, integration formats, hosting environments, faculty development guides, or curricula, etc.) created in connection with the Open Interactive Core Courseware challenge must be made available under this license.

Adopting CC BY is precisely aligned with the overarching goals of foundation funding and initiatives such as the Next Generation Learning Challenges. Last year, the Berkman Center’s study on foundation copyright licensing policies said that open licensing “ensures[s] the broadest and fastest dissemination of the valuable ideas, practices, works, software code and other materials the foundation’s funding helps to create.” That report went on to suggest that the impact of funding is even greater when permissive licenses (such as CC BY) are applied, allowing the resources “to be freely tested, translated, combined, remixed, repurposed or otherwise built upon, potentially by many subsequent researchers, authors, artists or other creators anywhere in the world, as the basis for new innovation, discovery or creation.”

Proposals for the first RFP are due November 17, 2010. The Next Generation Learning Challenges are a collaboration between several organizations, including the Gates Foundation, EDUCAUSE, iNACOL, CCSSO, The Hewlett Foundation, and The League for Innovation in the Community College. Congratulations to the Gates Foundation and partnering organizations on this fantastic effort.

All digital software, educational resources and knowledge produced through competitive grants, offered through and/or managed by the SBCTC, will carry a Creative Commons Attribution License … [and] applies to all funding sources (state, federal, foundation and/or other fund sources) …

The brief (PDF), prepared by Cable Green (who we interviewed in March about the Open Course Library Project), explains how the policy is aligned with SBCTC’s strategic technology plan. The policy draws inspiration from related initiatives working to support the sharing of research and OER, such as the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), the Southern Regional Education Board’s openness recommendations via “An Expectation of Sharing: Guidelines for Effective Policies to Respect, Protect and Increase the Use of Digital Educational Resources”, and the open licensing requirements for foundation grantees explored in the Berkman Center’s “An Evaluation of Private Foundation Copyright Licensing Policies, Practices and Opportunities.”

Congratulations to SBCTC for this great step forward!

For those of you who don’t know Karien Bezuidenhout, she is the Chief Operating Officer at the Shuttleworth Foundation, one of the few foundations that fund open education projects and who have an open licensing policy for their grantees. A couple months ago, I had the chance to meet Karien despite a six hour time difference—she was in Capetown, South Africa—I was in Brooklyn, New York. Via Skype, I asked her about Shuttleworth’s evolving default license (CC BY-SA to CC BY), her personal stake in OER, and how she envisions us (CC Learn and Shuttleworth) working together. She also gave me some insights into three innovative open education projects they have a hand in: Siyavula, M4Lit, and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU).

The conversation below is more or less transcribed and edited for clarity. It makes for great holiday or airplane reading, and if you’re pressed for time, you can skip to the topics or projects that interest you. This is CC Learn’s last Inside OER feature of 2009—so enjoy, and happy whatever-it-is-that-you-are-doing-in-your-part-of-the-world!

How did you arrive at your current position and its relation to open education and open educational resources?

I did an undergraduate degree in accounting and taxation, but I very quickly realized I don’t ever want to be in a purely finance job. I wanted to be in social development, but when I went to university I didn’t actually think of this as a viable option. After I finished my degree, I started looking around and I was fortunate enough to find a job in social development, helping to establish an organization and its programs. Next the work of the Shuttleworth Foundation looked interesting so I joined them as a Project Manager in their free and open source software unit. It wasn’t software development; it was basically advocacy programs around free and open source software, engaging government, education, the private sector and the public on the use and underlying philosophies of free and open source software. From there, I moved into the education unit at the Foundation, it was actually a very natural progression. We believe in the principles of free and open source software, and the Foundation became interested in saying, well, it’s not just about software, but also about an intersect between the ideas behind free and open source software and education. We became interested in this idea of open education or open educational resources, and it went from there. My position grew with the organization’s interest in this area. So I started as a Project Manager specifically around this area, grew to a Program Manager, and from there I became the Chief Operating Officer.

Were you interested in open source and openness in general before you joined Shuttleworth?

Not really; I didn’t really know about it before I joined. Once I joined I thought, wow, everyone should actually know about this—why don’t people know? That was in 2004. Now I actually find more and more people have at least heard about something in this general area, whereas at that stage it really was just in the realm of geeks. I joined based on the fact that I could project manage, but I don’t know anything about this stuff. I told them I’d like to learn and it’s actually been a very interesting journey.

What were you doing before that?

I was in program work as the Project Coordinator at the Trade Law Center for Southern Africa.

How has that work influenced what you do at Shuttleworth?

It’s very interesting because we were working on trade law and trade regulations and one of the things that was being investigated at the time that I was there was the TRIPS provision on Intellectual Property rights. A lot of the work we did was in preparation of and in conclusion from the Doha Declaration on protecting African interests in the trade negotiations and implementation around it. So I had the formal exposure to, “we should protect and we should lock down!” Coming here (to the Foundation) it was really interesting because you see the other side of it. What it did help me do was think about the other side of the issue, what the arguments are that people use when they’re talking about lock-down and increasing rights for owners and decreasing rights for users… So when I started working in this area, it was easier to understand the contrast and to be able to present the case to people in a way that counters their arguments.

So then, as an overarching mission statement, what would you say the Shuttleworth Foundation stance on OER is if you could sum it up in a few words?

The underlying philosophy of the Foundation is around methods of openness, you know the values that underly the free and open source software movement. Transparency, building communities, collaborating, sharing, building on what others have done, making available what we’ve done. These, for us, are the values of what we’re trying to do in open education as well. And then of course the Cape Town Declaration which Ahrash (Bissell, from CC Learn) was a part of developing. So there are three things from the Cape Town Declaration that is important for us: People should participate. (Open education is about more than open licenses.) People should make their works available under open licenses. And people should make policies to allow for and encourage these things to happen.

What would you say is the role of Creative Commons in facilitating that process or that mission?

It’s an interesting question because the Creative Commons license for me is actually the key part, and enabler. I mean we wouldn’t be able to do it without the Creative Commons licenses, simply because trying to explain and make clear to people what it is they can and can’t do in each instance would be almost impossible. You’d have different lenient licensing statements on each and every site which would result in things that are almost as difficult to navigate as the uncertainties in the prevailing copyright system. So basically licenses set the rules of the game for everyone who wants to play. And they’re absolutely essential in that.

The question about what Creative Commons as an organization’s role is, is a completely different one. And that’s one to which the answer isn’t entirely clear to me. I think, especially in the early days, there was a lot of pressure on Creative Commons, and I think the same for CC Learn when it started, to be the community leaders. And it didn’t appear to me that that was what the organization wanted to do. It mostly tried to focus on the licenses. Now, looking back at it, I think that was appropriate, making sure that the licenses are clear and understandable and usable and are used—I think that was the most important part that they had to play. Of course connecting people is equally important. It seems the role is evolving, including more networking and connecting the people in this space, in the way that you now do the interviews and showcasing of projects, saying these are the people who use these licenses, you guys should know about each other.

Going back to what you said about the licenses and how they’re a key part of open educational resources, I found that really interesting because there is sort of this trend going towards people arguing how Creative Commons is part of the infrastructure of open education. So I was wondering if you had any analogies or real world analogies that you would use for the licensing aspect of open educational resources.

Hmm, I started thinking of them as the rules of the game, but a colleague suggested they are actually more like the rules of the road. Because the roads are part of the commons (like knowledge) and everyone uses them, nobody thinks this is my road, I’m here now, and nobody else can be here. It’s about there being something for everyone to use that’s valuable, that everyone contributes to in terms of development and upkeep, and that people need rules to be able to use safely and happily and get where it is they need to be going in their educational journey.

I guess getting more specific, talking about the actual OER initiatives that are funded by Shuttleworth, including the M4Lit project, Siyavula, and the P2PU, could you tell us a little bit about all of them?

Sure. Siyavula is an initiative to provide access to open educational resources that specifically match the South African school curriculum for grades 1-12. The making available of the resources is a key element of it, but it’s not the only one. It’s more like a grain of sand when you’re trying to make a pearl, because what we’re actually interested in are the processes around that—how teachers collaborate, how teachers form communities of practice around the materials, how they adapt the materials for their own uses and share that back with the greater community. And we believe teachers have a lot to offer in that regard, but that it’s under utilized by the teachers themselves. They just don’t have the time or they’re not mobilized around it. By making the resources available, we give them a head start, but then we’re interested in how those communities form and how to help teachers with professional development and curriculum delivery in the classroom.

M4Lit is a practical exploration of the use of mobile phones specifically in education. In South Africa there’s still, and I think it’s the same for around the world, there’s still a great deal of  suspicion from schools and teachers around mobile phones, most considering it a distraction. But it’s a pervasive technology in the hands of teens and learners anywhere, so we’re interested in finding ways of actually using them for education. It’s a way that kids communicate; they do more writing on mobile phones than they would have ever done in essays and/or letters in school, so is there a way that we could harness that in South Africa? So we made available this serial story specifically for mobile phones to see—do kids read more, do they interact, do they write back, do they comment, those kinds of questions. It’s a small project in the sense that we started with one story and a small focus group, wanting to engage with learners directly, and we’ve had some pretty good responses so far—pretty good comments from kids and the focus groups have been really positive about it. That’s actually been really great.

So have you gotten a lot of participation from the students?

We didn’t publish it that widely, we wanted to make it a small pilot, because there are so many mobile phones around and so many potential uses, it’s easy to get lost in trying to meet too many needs and requirements, when actually there are specific solutions we’re exploring for specific groupings, and so we tried to keep it small. Initially we had a couple of hundred teens participate, which is pretty good, but eventually we reached a couple of thousand teens, exceeding readership numbers for accepted “best seller” figures for teen literature.

What would be the next step for the project after this initial phase?

Once we have all the findings back, I think there will be two ways of taking this forward. One is to go into schools and try to create direct links to the curriculum and involve teachers. We could show that we have interest from learners in terms of engaging in this way with long form writing and mobile phones, so instead of just chatting and responding via text message, [it would be] reading things that are a bit more substantial. It would be interesting to see how teachers respond, how they could use it for language teaching as it happens in the classroom. Or as a matter of fact, beyond the classroom. The other path is, of course, that we’ll make the platform and the story available under open licenses, if anyone else wants to try it in their local area, then they’re open to do so. We’d love to see more applications of the approach, and some variations on it.

And then of course you know about Peer 2 Peer University… Given that there is so much open courseware out there now, how do we support self-learners who want to use some of those materials.

Which direction do you see P2PU going in? Because I’ve heard it described more as a study group for peers to get together and the role of the course organizers is less of a teacher or an instructor but more as an organizer or facilitator. And then other people might view it more as these volunteer instructors [that’s] more akin to distance learning but with open educational resources. And I was wondering what your stance or view on that was.

I have my personal preference but I think it should be open to both options. I think it should be the kind of platform where you can have, as we have now, courses run in different ways. My personal vision, if I were to put it in that way, for the Peer 2 Peer University, would be more peer study group—less distance education.  But I think the really important part is that there should still be a course coordinator, who puts together the curriculum and reading list, because I think for self-learners, what’s sometimes difficult is that you can find fifty different articles on a specific topic. How do you know you’ve got the balanced view? How do you know you’ve got all the information you need? I think the course outline done by a tutor or coordinator is important and I think that peer learning is the way to go.

On the specific course that I was on, we had peer assessment and it was really challenging! You read other people’s work and it’s difficult to assess while you’re still learning yourself. But it was also very valuable, because we made sure that we read all the other answers to the weekly questions, and we thought well, do we agree, don’t we, is it similar to ours and if it isn’t, why isn’t it. The subject matter (copyright for educators) also meant that the answers would be jurisdiction specific. I’m in South Africa, so I focused on the South African situation, but then I also had the opportunity to learn what’s happening in Australia, the U.S. or India and that was great.

So all these initiatives that the Shuttleworth Foundation is supporting, they’re all licensed pretty openly, either under CC BY or BY-SA, and I was wondering why the foundation decided to support these initiatives that allow for commercial adaptation of its content when a lot people are pushing the Noncommercial term in other open educational projects.

Well, I think, to begin with, we were open to the commercial angle because in the greater Shuttleworth group we’re the only nonprofit entity. We’ve got venture capitalists that’s part of the group, so commercial pursuit was normal to us, I think that kind of predisposed us to be open to that. I just don’t think that you can separate out education and commercial use so easily. If you look at a private school, for instance, is that commercial use or isn’t it? If you take schools in South Africa, they can’t survive with only the government subsidies so they charge school fees. In some instances they charge for the printed educational resources; is that commercial use or isn’t it? I don’t think that commercial use is clearly enough defined, and I also don’t think that you can entirely separate it out of education and say, education is always not-for-profit or noncommercial and therefore, it’s only those people out there who are trying to make money off it.

Secondly, I think commercial enterprises are key participants and an important part of social development. Otherwise you will always have nonprofit entities or donor entities pushing money into certain sectors, and at some point you don’t want to only transform the nonprofit sector, you also want to transform societies, and you want people to be social entrepreneurs and you want society to take up the ideas. The only way I believe you can sustainably do that in the long run is by involving commercial entities and allowing them to be part of the process. It’s not to say that every single thing should have a commercial leg or anything like that; I just think that we should also allow them to be part of it. If you brought a big enough community around open educational resources and you say, we’re going to make available these resources for free; we’re going to put them on our websites, we’re going to publicize that they’re there for use—that will actually prevent those who are trying to profit unjustly off other people’s work by making it widely known that there’s a free version available. People who do use it for commercial purposes are going to have to add value to be able to sell it as a commercial product. And therefore I think that’s okay to allow that in.

So then even within those projects I mentioned, you have distinctions between the kinds of licenses that they use, and I was wondering what was driving those distinctions, and how it affects those projects. For instance, M4Lit is BY-SA and P2PU is CC BY.

Part of it is an evolution in our own thinking, and part of it is specifically project driven. The evolution in our thinking happened as the open educational resources community matured. Initially we picked CC BY-SA, because there were very few open educational resources out there, and we believed it was the only way that you could grow the community and provide some comfort and security to early adopters. We were essentially saying, don’t worry, everybody else has to do the same. Everyone else who uses your material is going to have to contribute back into the pool.

But as the content pools have grown and as the community has grown, opportunities for partnerships came up and we started running into interoperability challenges more and more. Because of this, [interoperability] started becoming more important to us. The ShareAlike provision was a safe condition for people who were worried about adopting open licenses and saying, won’t someone else use my work and benefit without giving back. But actually there are bigger questions than that. It’s about saying, do you want to participate? Do you want to contribute and collaborate? And do you really believe in the principles behind this? Then you should contribute and collaborate; you should participate. And it should be as free and open for people to use as possible. We don’t want unintended restrictions. We don’t want to end up with people who can’t translate our work, or who can’t include our work in their collections, thereby limiting their reach. If OER Commons wants to use it, or Curriki, or CK12, or anybody else, they should be able to, and they shouldn’t be stuck with a licensing restriction that prevents them from reusing and remixing the work in ways that we want to support.

Siyavula for instance [is a project where it] became most apparent and important to shift. Even though we were philosophically thinking in that way already, we hadn’t yet made the shift in the license we applied throughout all of our projects. Then we started working with Connexions on Siyavula and we realized that Connexions used CC BY and we used CC BY-SA, and essentially those weren’t compatible and we could lose a partner because of the more restrictive license we used. That was the final point at which we decided that CC BY was the license for us.

We still allow projects and initiatives to debate the licensing issue for themselves and motivate for an alternative license for their specific situation if they’d like, but CC BY is now the default position.

So judging by a lot of your answers, CC Learn and Shuttleworth—we seem to be on the same page about a lot of these things. And I know you mentioned before how you envisioned Creative Commons or CC Learn’s role in sort of developing the community a bit and serving as community leaders. Do you picture us working together in the future? And what do you see CC Learn’s role becoming in the future?

Yeah, so we would love to work together in the future. I think one of the things we’ve been doing over the past couple of years is staying in touch and sharing information which has been really valuable. This links to the role CC can play, putting people in touch and saying, this is what other people are doing, take note, how does it impact on what you might want to do. It has changed some of my own thinking over the years and that’s been really, really valuable.

Also the Shuttleworth Foundation has a fellowship program, which I’m sure you know a little about given that you know quite a few of our current fellows. The fellowship program is really about freeing up the time of individuals who have a vision for their part in bringing about positive change in the world, to do just that—go and change the world in the way that they see it. There is also the possibility of matching project funding – if the fellow wants to implement a project idea within the scope of their fellowship, the Foundation will match every unit they invest themselves by at least ten-fold to help them get their projects off the ground. I think that it would be great if CC Learn could share ideas with us on individuals that they think are valuable to support in this way.

And then obviously I think networking and connecting the community around the licenses are really important, especially in [the] education sector, and CC Learn can (and does) help to drive discussion and establish a base around issues like, what does commercial and noncommercial really mean? What is the best license for my situation? CC Learn just recently released a paper on Why CC BY. Those kinds of activities are very important because the community really looks to Creative Commons and CC Learn to see what the right thing is to do. CC Learn are the ones who should drive making the rules of the road and supporting others in using them.

Do you have anything else to add, any last words?

I think that [open licensing] is really important for foundations and funders to do. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Berkman report on open licenses and private foundations. It mentions the Foundation, among others, and our approach to open licensing. It is important for funders and foundations to actively use open licenses. Because if anyone can say, I don’t have to earn my keep by commoditizing this content, I really do believe that our funding should go as far as possible and that the investments that I make should reach as many people as possible, it’s funders and foundation—using open licenses is the way to do it. It’s a policy within the Foundation to release everything under an open license. We’ve had a couple of potential partners who’ve said, no we don’t want to do that, and then we walked away and said that, well maybe they’re not a good match for us anyway. We have also found people are more and more open to this idea, and if anyone can afford to do this it’s funders and foundations. I really do think that they should prioritize that.

We have a recommendation sheet just on this, on encouraging funders. It’s called, Increase Funding Impact. It’s on learn.creativecommons.org/productions. And we have a bunch of documents on there—Why CC BY? Stuff like that. So I would encourage you to check it out.

I will, definitely, thank you very much. That is one of the challenges, starting from scratch on every discussion. Advocacy documents are so valuable. It helps convey the message that the ideas we present aren’t coming from a lone ranger, but are well established and backed by sound arguments from a growing global community.

CC BY by the Digital Open

I blogged about the Digital Open in April, a new online community and competition that was accepting free and open technology projects from anyone 17 or younger through August. The competition was aimed at fostering an online and open community of youth by encouraging them to see the benefits of open source and open licensing.

Since then the jury has come in to announce eight grand prize winners. The first video profile is the Centralized Student Website from Fremont, California, by Raymond Zhong and Aatash Parikh. They’ve gone ahead and built a student portal for their high school, where virtually any school activity, especially student clubs, are accessed. Other winners include a Casa Ecologica in Spain and a Hybrid Airship. Be sure to check back for more videos.

Except where otherwise noted, all content on the Digital Open is available via CC BY. The Digital Open is the result of a joint partnership between the Institute for the Future, BoingBoing, and Sun Microsystems.

“This project… undertook to examine the copyright licensing policies and practices of a group of private foundations. In particular, it looked at the extent to which charitable foundations are aware of and have begun to use open licenses such as Creative Commons or the GPL for the works they create and that they support with their funding. We surveyed foundation staff and leaders and examined a number of examples where foundations have begun to take advantage of new licensing models. Based on the survey results, foundation experiences and additional research, we identified a variety of significant benefits that the use of open licenses can bring to foundations and their charitable goals. In particular, open licenses permit knowledge and learning to be widely shared and more readily adapted, improved or built upon, and allow those later improvements to be readily distributed. The result can be dramatically faster and greater access to research, information, technologies and other resources in ways that directly benefit foundations’ core missions and the public good.

The study sought to develop an analytical framework and set of factors that foundations can use to begin considering when and where the use of open licenses would further their mission and day-to-day work and where such licenses might not be useful or appropriate. It provides a great starting point for informed consideration of open licenses and the new opportunities they create for foundations and related organizations.”

This report creates an amazing opportunity for foundations to propel themselves into the future via open licensing and open technologies. Please read and share far and wide, as the entire study is open via CC BY.

“This six week course is targeted at educators who will gain basic skills in open licensing, open technology, and open pedagogy; work on prototypes of innovative open education projects; and get input from some of the world leading innovators along the way.

The course will kick-off with a web-seminar on Thursday 2 April 2009 and run for 6 weeks.

Weekly web seminars introduce new topics ranging from content licensing to the latest open technologies and peer assessment practices. Participants will share project ideas with a community of peers, work on individual projects, and get feedback from experienced mentors. We will also take a close look at some of the most innovative examples of open education projects, and speak to the people who designed them, including:

The course is targeted at educators who want to help shape the open education future. Participants should have some knowledge of web technologies, or open content licensing, or open pedagogy (or all three), but don’t need to be experts.

Interested in participating? Head over to the course wiki, and submit your project idea!

Course outline: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/EduCourse

Sign-up page: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/EduCourse/SignUp

For questions about the course or the sign-up process, contact:

Philipp Schmidt
Peer 2 Peer University
philipp AT peer2peeruniversity.org”

Spaces will fill up fast, but that doesn’t prevent non-registered learners from having open and complete access to the course as it plays out. And since all Mozilla Education materials are available for reuse, redistribution, and remixing under CC BY, nothing stops users from creating a mirror wiki and developing their own projects!

ccLearn’s own Executive Director, Ahrash Bissell, submitted a paper last fall entitled, “Permission granted: open licensing for educational resources.” In it, he argues that “open licenses are critical for defining Open Educational Resources” and “explain[s] the logic of open licensing” in terms familiar “to teachers, funders, and educational policy-makers.”

Ahrash’s isn’t the only interesting read in the mix; there is also David Wiley and Seth Gurrell’s paper spanning “A decade of development…” which presents a “history of the idea of Open Educational Resources, overview[s] the current state of the Open Educational Resources movement, report[s] on critical issues facing the field in the immediate future, and present[s] two new projects to watch in 2009.”

Actually, all of them sound pretty fascinating, especially one “personal and institutional journey” at the University of the Western Cape (this one involves the struggle for political freedom) by Derek Keats. All papers illuminate different aspects of the open educational resources movement, a movement that has grown steadily since inception. You can view them online, or download the PDFs. We will also be hosting Ahrash’s paper on ccLearn’s resources page shortly.