This was the first time in six years that a CC Board meeting has been held in conjunction with an affiliate Summit event. It was a unique and immensely helpful opportunity for the Directors to make personal contacts with CC supporters and to share directly in the rich expertise and insightful perspective of the affiliate community.

For three days Warsaw, Poland, became the center of the CC world, with almost 300 people – including over 160 CC affiliates, board, and staff – examining all aspects of the movement, the licenses and community. From CC’s ongoing strategy to the latest implementations worldwide to the role of openness in the Arab Spring, the conversations, presentations and debates were diverse and exciting.

Overall, the Summit flew by without a hitch—thanks in great part to the CC Poland team who were our generous hosts, and to the myriad other affiliates and staff who contributed to organizing and running sessions on public sector information (PSI), data, creative CC projects, open education, and more. For more detail, check out the full program (pdf) and the wiki for the unconference track that ran in parallel.

Action items from this outpouring of ideas are still being developed – particularly next steps around the next version, 4.0, of the CC license suite. We’ll be blogging in greater detail on some of these soon (look for a separate 4.0 announcement in the first part of October), but for now we’d like to recap a few other highlights from the summit!

Media

Several affiliates have already covered the summit on their personal blogs; we highly recommend reading Andrés Guadamuz’s (Project Lead of CC UK Scotland) take on the Version 4.0 discussion and Brian Wesolowski’s (CC Qatar) summary post, which includes his showcase of the ways the Qatar Museum Authority is exploring the use of CC licenses to share its collections and resources.

Kristina by DTKindler Photo / CC BY

Such showcases and talks from the CC affiliates and broader community were without question the highlight of the Summit. Many of  these are now available on the CC community group on SlideShare.

Video from the livestream in the main hall is also being uploaded, with the raw footage of several sessions available at CC Poland’s Blip.tv account. An excellent set of high quality crowd-sourced photos are also available at the CC Global Summit Flickr pool. For all media from the Summit, see the Event coverage at the Global Summit wiki.

Some other highlights from community, PSI, education, and culture streams of the Summit:

Community Global Perspectives

This year’s Summit had a particular focus on community and aimed to highlight and facilitate the work of CC affiliates around the world. Central to this aim was the Global Perspectives panel, which featured prominent community members from Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, the Arab World and Africa, all of whom provided their views on the unique challenges, opportunities and goals for CC in their regions.

Chunyen Wang from CC China Mainland, representing Asia and the Pacific, focused on how CC’s message aligned with traditional Chinese notions of sharing. Naeema Zarif from CC Lebanon, representing the Arab World, focused on CC’s role as a cultural and community flash point. Claudio Ruiz from CC Chile, representing Latin America, focused on the role of the CC community as advocates for copyright balance. And finally, Dorothy K. Gordon from The Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT, representing Africa, focused on CC as a way of bringing people together across geographic boundaries. (Video)

Public Sector Information (PSI)

Several sessions focused on the role of CC licenses and tools for PSI. In our PSI “around the world session,” (video) we discussed how CC licenses and tools are adopted in some fashion within governments in over 30 affiliate jurisdictions, hearing updates from affiliates in Poland to Chile to Korea to Australia, and many others. There were other sessions, including one on examining the role of CC within the broader open government and PSI community. We discussed several key points, including:

• In general, governments and public sector bodies want to share what they create with the world, and the civil society communities and projects that support open government continues to explode. CC wants and needs to be a central participant, to make it easy for governments to make informed choices with regard to licensing and sharing, and realize the full potential of PSI; even in affiliate jurisdictions where there is little CC or open licensing uptake at the government/PSI level, the affiliates indicated that this will become an increasingly important area.
• Governments and other public sector bodies would be more willing to adopt CC if specific considerations were addressed. An obvious example of this is addressing sui generis database rights in version 4.0 of the license.
• CC could build a case studies repository of open government successes to assist governments to make informed choices with regards to the legal aspects of PSI, in addition to other educational materials. Perhaps it’s worthwhile to build upon existing frameworks and roadmaps in jurisdictions already moving ahead within the open government and open data space. Other questions that came up: should CC work with related community members on legal considerations for a set of open government data principles? What are other activities and projects that CC can and should be participating in?

Education

DTKindler Photo / CC BY

We ran several sessions on open education, all of which helped to focus our education strategy and next steps for specific projects.

In the “School of IP, Copyright & CC,” panelists discussed their work on and the potential for shared curricular materials (video, lesson plans, sample projects, talking points) around Copyright, IP & Creative Commons designed to encourage students and teachers to practice the 4 R’s (reuse, revise, remix, redistribute) as part of their learning and teaching. It was evident that there is widespread need for such materials. Outcomes from this panel fed into the CC Education Strategy Workshop where groups met and prioritized the following CC Education projects:

1. School of Open with P2PU
2. Open Policy / Legislation exchange
3. Improving OER search and discovery. The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI).
4. Ability to track use and reuse of CC-licensed works.

The “School of Open,” which would aim to collaboratively develop and run curriculum and courses on copyright and CC license training for educators, librarians, and others, was the most popular, gaining lots of buy-in from affiliates and external partners. “Open Policy / Legislation exchange” was seen as being able to be incorporated in the “School of Open,” with some policy-strategic conversations remaining offline and private to the CC community. The LRMI is already funded and running, and the session gained lots of preliminary support for adopting, tagging, and educating around the metadata schema when it is published. #4 — the “Ability to track use and reuse of CC-licensed works” — was the most technically and legally focused project discussed. In general, the education field wants and needs this, and CC will continue to push to keep it on the agenda for education and other domains. The education domain in particular can help describe some use cases and needed features.

Culture

In addition to the cultural evening events, the culture sessions resulted in some excellent showcases around CC license use in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums sector (GLAM) and CC use in other creative projects from around the world.

In the GLAM session, Chiaki (CC Asia Regional Project Manager) presented a wonderful showcase from Japan where, as Brian notes, “visitors were encouraged to take photos of art in the museum and share the photos under [CC licenses].” Paul Keller (CC Netherlands) and Brian Wesolowski (CC Qatar) also talked about GLAM projects in their regions, which included a Wiki Loves Art project that took place in the Netherlands and as previously mentioned, ways the Qatar Museum Authority, including the Museum of Islamic Art, Mathaf and the Qatar National Museum, are exploring the use of CC licenses to share their collections and resources.

In the CC Project Showcase session, organized by Renata Avila (CC Guatemala), a diverse array of projects were presented in quick ten-minute slideshows, including Herkko Hietanen’s (CC Finland) PowerPoint plugin for finding and attributing CC-licensed images (screencast), Dadae Choi’s presentation of CC Korea’s own search engine for CC-licensed works, plus Jennifer Kang’s overview of open culture in Korea, Claudio Ruiz’s (CC Chile) talk on Derechos Digitales’ work to open academic journals in Latin America, Bilal Randeree’s talk on CC use in Al Jazeera, and more project showcases by CC Mainland China and CC Guatemala.

Where are we?

Since CC was founded in 2001, our network of affiliates has come a long way. CC VP Mike Linksvayer gave an excellent overview of what’s happened in CC and the open community over the last three years. CC CEO Cathy Casserly, CC Chair Joi Ito, and Affiliate Network Coordinator Jessica Coates led a discussion on the CC Vision, how it has changed, and how it might be refined going forward.

Today, with our new regional managers on board, in addition to our existing managers, Chiaki (Asia), Donatella (Middle East), and Aurelia (Africa), we are excited to renew progress and make even greater strides. We’ve already noted improvements we can make in communications, and will work closely with the affiliates to form taskforce groups on this and other matters.

The Summit has been a key step in each of these goals, and will be a catalyst to CC’s ongoing growth as we move into our second decade.

Stay tuned for more on Version 4.0, regional community updates, CC in science, and a report on the Board meeting at the summit.

Masala is a music fusion collective whose genre can only be determined as ethno-electro-ragga-punk-hip-hop, which is famous for combining Asian music with electronics. Masala wants you to remix Rewolucja w nas at ccMixter.

AXMusique is an unusual producer duo who earned the affection of fans and publishers with powerful concerts mixing electronic and rock-and-roll music. AXMusique wants you to remix Hardline at ccMixter.

Both musical groups will choose their favorite remixes, which will be played at the CC Salon with names of the remixers projected by VJs. For more info on the CC Salon and other cultural events at the Global Summit, see the Global Summit Cultural Events program.

Internationalization

The upgrade is significant for several reasons, one being that Version 3.0 encompasses our long-held vision of establishing a compatibility structure to allow interoperability between different flexible content copyright licenses. This structure has opened doors for important adopters, such as the Wikipedia community and Wikimedia Foundation, who recently approved the adoption the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-SA) license as the main content license for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites.

The Polish upgrade to Version 3.0 was led by Alek Tarkowski, Justyna Hofmokl, and Krzysztof Siewicz and hosted at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling at Warsaw University (ICM UW) and the Grynhoff, Woźny and Maliński Law Firm. Through these efforts and more, CC Poland continues to build the local Creative Commons community and promote free culture.

An enormous thank you to CC Poland, to Alek, Justyna, and Krzysztof, for their invaluable efforts to support Polish creators and to improve Creative Commons’ ever-growing international pool of free legal tools.

“Two practical workshops on open education were organized by the Coalition for Open Education (KOED) in coincidence with two conferences taking place in Warsaw in April and May 2009: the conference on open education on 23rd of April 2009 and the conference on open science on 6th of May 2009. The first workshop, conducted by Susan d’Antoni from UNESCO and Richard Baraniuk from the Connexions project at Rice University, provided an overview of practical issues tied to open education, such as community building, IT tools and development strategies. The second workshop, led by Ahrash Bissell from ccLearn, focused on open licensing issues.

The two workshops were attended by a dozen representatives of NGOs active in the field of education and culture, as well as representatives from the Ministry of Education. Most important, they provided an opportunity for people working with open educational projects or considering starting such a project to meet and network.

As a result of the project, the Coalition for Open Education hopes to increase its number of member institutions, as well as enable the growth of open educational projects in Poland.”

For information on the conferences themselves, check out Alek’s detailed reports for both.

Open Educational Resources in Poland

The conference, “Open Educational Resources in Poland”, was organized on the 23rd of April, 2009 in the Column Hall of the Parliament of the Republic of Poland by the Coalition for Open Education (KOED). The conference was held under the honorary patronage of Bronisław Komorowski – the Marshal of the Parliament of the Republic of Poland.

The aim of the conference was to present the open education movement and the model of open educational materials for all levels of the educational process, to argue for the importance of open education in Poland, and to increase broad interest and involvement. This first-in-its-kind event, organized as a parliamentary conference, drew the attention of both government members and Parliament members to the issue of open education.

The conference was attended by 250 participants, including government officials, educators and scientists, librarians and NGO representatives. Among honorary participants were: Bronisław Komorowski, the Marshal of the Parliament; Katarzyna Hall, the Minister of Education, and several members of the Parliament: Krzysztof Tyszkiewicz, Andrzej Celiński, Marcin Zawiła, Renata Butryn, Tadeusz Ross and Tadeusz Borowski.

Opening the conference, Bronisław Komorowski said: “I hope that the conference will result in a great advance regarding these issues, so that we will be closer to the world we dream of, in which knowledge is easily accessible”.

Speaking after him, Katarzyna Hall, Minister of Education declared Ministry’s interest in open educational models as means of creating modern and effective education. “Especially in small towns and villages [...] internet makes education more democratic, more accessible, so that important resources are available at any time”, said Hall.

The first session of the conference was devoted to highlighting the state of the global movement for open education and presenting achievements in the field of open educational resources development. Speeches were given by Susan D’Antoni from UNESCO and Richard Baraniuk from the Connexions project at Rice University. The second part of the conference concerned open education in Poland. Presentations were given by Marek Niezgódka from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling at the University of Warsaw, who spoke about the challenges of building open higher education and science in Poland; Krzysztof Stanowski from the Ministry of National Education and Grażyna Czetweryńska from the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research at University of Warsaw, who discussed the use of open models in the “Polish school” project, which coordinates Polish-language education for Polish students living abroad; Alek Tarkowski from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling at the University of Warsaw and Creative Commons Poland who presented legal and regulatory aspects of open education; and Tomasz Ganicz from the Wikimedia Poland Association, who spoke about open access to public information and data, treated as potential educational resources.

The conference ended with a debate, during which Members of the Parliament presented their viewpoints.

Krzysztof Tyszkiewicz focused on the issue of open school textbooks, as a means to revolutionize education in Poland, and an issue that concerns both students and their parents. “School textbooks currently cost several hundred złotys a year. Textbooks built in the open access model will provide a free alternative”, said Tyszkiewicz.

Andrzej Celiński spoke about the obligation of the government to provide open access to educational resources, especially in the light of long-term challenges that Poland will face.

“Taking into account that social and intellectual capital, capital that has intellectual property as its source, is today a key form of capital, government – with its regulatory tools – cannot ignore its responsibilities in this field”, said Celiński. He also furthermore stressed the importance of quality control for educational materials and of cooperation between governmental bodies and third sector actors.

Marcin Zawiła stressed the importance of legal reform in support of open education, as well as openness of other types of public content, such as audiovisual heritage. “Public mandate, an obligation for publicly funded works to constitute open resources, is the right direction for changes”, said Zawiła and declared support for introducing such a mandate in Poland.

The conference proved the importance of further introducing open models into the Polish educational system, at all its levels. More importantly, it proved the interest of government officials, members of the Parliament and educators in building together open education in Poland. As an outcome of the conference, KOED coalition will continue talks with relevant Ministries regarding open access to educational and scientific materials, as well as introducing an open mandate for publicly funded content.

The Coalition for Open Education (Koalicja Otwartej Edukacji – KOED, http://koed.org.pl) is a partnership of organizations founded at the end of 2008 to promote open education and science in Poland. Coalitions’ founding institutions include the Modern Poland Foundation, the Polish Librarians Association, Wikimedia Poland Association and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling at the University of Warsaw.

Open Science in Poland

The conference, “Open Science in Poland”, was organized on the 5th of May, 2009 at the University of Warsaw by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling at the University of Warsaw, partner institution of Creative Commons Poland and founding member of Coalition for Open Education. The conference was organized as part of the “Open the Book” project in order to highlight the importance of introducing in Poland open models of scientific collaboration and communication.

The conference was organized under the honorary patronage of Professor Barbara Kudrycka, the Minister of Science and Higher Education, Professor Katarzyna Chałasińska-Macukow, Chairman of the Conference of Rectors of Academic Schools in Poland (KRASP) and Professor Michał Kleiber, Chairman of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

The first session provided an overview of three key elements of open science: open access to scientific content, open education and new models of scientific communication described as “Science 2.0”. Presentations were given by Ahrash Bissell (Creative Commons ccLearn), Ignasi Labastida i Juan (University of Barcelona, Creative Commons Catalunya) and Paweł Szczęsny (Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Department of Biology, University of Warsaw).

The second part of the conference concerned open science in the Polish context. Marek Niezgódka, director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling at the University of Warsaw gave an overview of the open projects currently undertaken in Poland, and of the challenges they face. Jan Kozłowski from the Center for Science Policy and Higher Education Studies at University of Warsaw spoke about alternatives to classical peer review. Alek Tarkowski from Creative Commons Poland spoke about legal issues related to open science, and in particular about open licensing methods.

The conference ended with a panel debate among conference speakers, chaired by Edwin Bendyk from the “Polityka” weekly and attended as well by Krzysztof Gulda, Director of the Department of Strategy and Development of Science at the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Mr Gulda declared the interest of the Ministry in introducing open science models in Poland, as part of the current reform of the scientific system. In particular, he declared that the Ministry is considering introducing an open mandate for publicly funded scientific content.

The conference took place to a full attendance, with over 100 participants attending. These included representatives of the scientific community, librarians and archivists, scientific publishers and governmental officials.

The conference presented an opportunity to present the project “Open the Book” (http://otworzksiazke.pl), which will become public on the 20th of May. “Open the Book” is a collection of scientific books made available under Creative Commons licenses by their authors and made available online. The project serves to highlight the importance of open access to scientific content and to promote open scientific models among Polish scientists. The project is organized under the patronage of Michał Kleiber, the chairman of the Polish Academy of Science and with the support of the Polish National Library. The project is funded by EEA and Norway Grants, through the Scholarship and Training Fund.

The conference was organized with the support of the Open Society Institute.

The source files have been seeded for Valkaama, a fresh collaborative “open source movie”, filmed in Krakow, Poland.  Director Tim Baumann intends to complete the post-production of the full feature movie publicly, with the help of volunteers both amateur and professional:

Here all available media sources are published in order to give you the chance to build upon them. If you want to participate in this project, by helping finishing the movie, creating remixes, making a new trailer or if you want to publish anything else here which is related to Valkaama, please get in touch with us.

Valkaama (trailer) is a drama set in Sweden and Finland and produced by drama school students and amateurs in and around Krakow. It tells the story of two disparate young men, each seeking his fortune, thrown together by fate to travel to “Valkaama”. As their paths cross, they do not realize how much of their journey has already been determined by their pasts.

Open Source and Open Content movies are still a rarity. Valkaama is one of the first movies not only to be distributed freely, but also to guarantee free access to all source data used and created during the production process. The project uses CC BY-SA 3.0 licenses to guarantee very flexible use and reuse of the produced material. Almost every text, picture and video, as well as all downloadable media, is tagged with a respective license. In some cases the licenses are included in the media files themselves.

Happy remixing!

Poland’s Coalition for Open Education (KOED – Koalicja Otwartej Edukacji) has celebrated the Public Domain Day 2009 with a range of web-based actions and a press conference.

The Polish National Library, with the support of its director, dr. Tomasz Makowski, hosted talks about the public domain and related Polish projects at a press conference on Dec. 30. Bożena Michalska from the Nicolaus Copernicus University Library presented a list of over 500 authors whose works entered the public domain in Poland on 1st January 2009, based on the National Union Catalog NUKAT. Afterwards, Marek Siudym, a renowned Polish actor, recited a poem by Brunon Jasieński – a Polish futurist, who died in 1938 and who’s work is now in the public domain.

As a result of the well-attended conference, news of the Public Domain Day 2009 was published in a range of major media, including Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita dailies, Polish Public Radio, and the online portal Onet.

To coincide with the Public Domain Day 2009, Polish libraries have made available over a dozen works in their digital collections that are, as of January 1st 2009, in the public domain in Poland. A list of Polish works now in the public domain is maintained on the Coalition’s webpage.

The newly forged partnership, KOED, is striving to build and promote open educational resources in Poland. Bringing together common supporters of the Capetown Declaration principles, the Coalition is formed by one of CC Poland’s affiliate institutions, the Interdisciplinary Center for Modelling at University of Warsaw, and colleagues Wikimedia Polska Association, Foundation Modern Poland, and the Polish Librarians Association.