Creative Commons Europe Regional Meeting in Helsinki / Kristina Alexanderson / CC BY

In September, a number of CC’s European affiliates congregated at the Open Knowledge Festival taking place in Helsinki, Finland, for a regional meeting. Held as a side event over one day of the festival, the meeting was attended by representatives of our affiliates in 17 different European countries.

Each meeting between our affiliates is an excellent opportunity to network and bridge the geographic, as well as cultural, distance between the various jurisdictions they represent. As such, it’s not surprising that one of the more significant outcomes from the meeting was a series of discussions starting between the affiliates after the actual meeting.

During the meeting itself, the affiliates got to hear about Creative Commons global strategy work from Jessica Coates, our Global Network Manager, and about policy work from Timothy Vollmer, our Manager of Policy and Data. Looking towards December, we also discussed Creative Commons’ upcoming 10th birthday and the activities and events taking place around it. One of the outcomes of the meeting was the idea to create a Creative Commons mixtape with Creative Commons licensed music from around Europe, covering the last 10 years, to be released around the 10th birthday.

In the weeks following the regional meetings, on the initiative of Alek Tarkowski (our lead for Creative Commons in Poland), the affiliates and regional coordinator put together a proposal to the European Union Education, Audiovisual & Culture Executive Agency’s (EACEA) call for proposals on support for organisations active at the European level in the field of culture. The activities of the proposal that we sent aim to encourage and support cultural institutions in their work to maximize public access to their cultural data and content. Through a series of workshops including experts of the network and participation from European museums, the European affiliates will develop guidelines and instructions on how to increase circulation of cultural data and content in the digital environment at the legal, technical, and organizational levels.

Such a cooperative approach to putting together a compelling proposal in such a short amount of time could not have happened without the ability to meet in person from time to time. While not a direct outcome of the meeting, it exemplifies the relevance of the regional and global meetings of Creative Commons, and the European group is already looking forward for when we next meet, at latest in about a year’s time for the next global summit.