Nearly a quarter of the participants coming to the Creative Commons Global Summit in Toronto, CA from April 28–30 are scholarship recipients. They are representatives from a variety of communities and issues, including free and open culture, copyright reform, GLAM, open education, and global information systems. They represent every CC world region, with the majority coming from Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.

Of the 95 scholarship recipients, 23% are from Africa, 18% are from Latin America, 29% are from Europe, 18% are from Asia-Pacific and 6% are from the Arab World. In addition, we’ve nearly doubled our scholarship numbers this year both in terms of community participation and organizational funding. This is a big investment for CC, and we’re proud to support our community members to help them join the conversation.

Through our scholarship program, we are creating a healthy community by recognizing and engaging with gender, cultural, and geographical diversity in order to fulfill our organizational mission of a vibrant commons and community. As you’ll see, the diversity of the scholarship recipients extends beyond geography in order to provide opportunities to summit first timers as well as CC veterans and moves the community conversations beyond licenses toward advocacy, art, law, education, usability, and growth of the commons.

Creative Commons believes that providing pathways to participation is crucial to our goal of lighting up the commons and we’re proud to support so many participants from our Global Community. Below, read about some of the ways our community is looking forward to engaging during the summit and beyond.

Lia Hernandez, CC Panama Legal City Leader

I am almost ready to attend the CC Global Summit in cold Toronto. I am so excited because its my first global summit and I am looking forward to meeting all of you in real life.

Christian Villum, CC Denmark

As always, I look forward to the summit in order to reconnect with the global community and have important discussions that help drive forward the expansion of the global knowledge commons. Specifically I am excited to be part of a few of the sessions around new open business models because I believe this to be a cornerstone in building the future that we want.

Cherubim Mawuli Amenyedor, CC Ghana

I’m excited about the summit because I will get to meet, share and learn from equally passionate and knowledgeable community members working tirelessly to explore the future of the Commons and sharing for users, creators and activists.I’m grateful to CC for providing the needed platform to free-up the results of creative work for re-use, sharing and collaboration. I believe this will help me unlock Africa’s creative potential in the digital economy.

Leslie Chan, University of Toronto Scarborough

Usually I have to travel to attend conferences of this scale, and it is a nice change to welcome the world to Toronto instead. I am committed to ensuring that the Web will continue to be inclusive and open to diverse knowledge making and sharing, and I am looking forward to meeting so many like minded folks and to share experience. I will be speaking on Lessons from Failures in Open Advocacy and how I would do things differently on Sunday morning April 30.

Dimitar Dimitrov, Wikimedia Brussels

I have always believed that instead of several parallel movements we are one big free and open movement. I am particularly excited to meet the great girls and guys who are actively working on freeing up creativity and knowledge in Africa.

Paula Eskett, CC New Zealand

I’m most excited about the amazing speaker lineup and connecting and learning from the other Summit participants, but can’t deny the obvious excitement of traveling to the other side of the world too!

Last year I was so lucky to be part of IOL2 — a life changing learning experience, and I’ve recently joined the CC Aotearoa New Zealand Advisory Panel as an education representative.

As a professional librarian I see CC and Open as integral to the sustainability and future focused thinking of all libraries regardless of sector, and strongly believe in libraries providing equitable access to information and spaces to create and share new knowledge.

I’ll be delivering a session Friday 4pm : Preloading not backfilling : Preparing our children for a life of Open.

Mohamed Rahmo, CC Morocco

I’m excited about the summit because I will meet my open counterparts from all over the world. I’m from Morocco and I have an idea for all the people of the CC community in the world — I would like to launch a global content creation day, and I will advocate about the copyright policy back home so I want to learn from the other people. Back home we will also start a series of workshops to educate people about CC.

John Weitzmann, CC Germany

I’m excited about the CC Global Summit because it is most important and inspiring to meet many of the fantastic people in the network in person. My connection with the CC idea is based on the fact that such legal tools are simply necessary as long as the defaults of the law continue to hinder exchange and sharing.

Bastian Greshake, Germany

I’m super excited to finally meet all of the commoners again, as we’re not getting the chance to meet in person that often. I’m involved as I’m running a website that uses Creative Commons to enable research by putting genomes into the public domain. While I’m a strong believer in all things open*, my professional background makes me especially interested in the Academic Commons, that’s why I’ll be facilitating a session on “Towards the Scholarly Commons” on Saturday from 2:30–3:30PM.

Kayode Yussuf, CC Nigeria Tech Lead

I am a member of the CC Africa . School of Open team, I was a member of the CCSummit program committee and I plan and execute CC Nigeria’s projects.

I am excited to attend the Global Summit because I’d get the opportunity to meet with community members in real life. I am also looking forward to seeing the CCSummit program play out. The committee did a lot of work, making calls, sharing documents across several times zones to put the program together. As one of the committee members put it — this will be the best summit ever.

Carlos Guerrero, Hiperderecho, Peru

I’m really excited about the summit because it’s a big opportunity to share experiences and to enhance the ecosystem of CC. I’m especially enthusiastic about the work on my region; Latin America. Nos vemos ahí!

Clint Lalonde, CC Canada

I have been involved with the CC community for a number of years through my work with Open Educational Resources, and believe that the work of CC is vitally important in empowering people to fully maximize the affordances of new and emerging digital technologies. This will be my first CC Global Summit and, while I am looking forward to connecting with others working in the OER space, I am very excited at the opportunity to connect and learn more about the burgeoning Platform Co-operative movement and am happy to see the connections being made between the CC community and this exciting new movement.

Yi-hsuan Lin, CC Taiwan

I am mainly in charge of the license translation/localization issues. I’m excited to participate in the summit and I’m looking forward to networking with others who have reconciled 4.0 license issues.

Thanks for CC HQ for providing me this great opportunity to participate 2017 CC global summit!

Aristarik Maro, Public Lead CC Tanzania

I’m so excited about the 2017 summit because I’ll get to meet community members from different parties of the world, some of who I have been communicating with online in real life!! & some of which are new to me but hoping to hook up and network. I am thankful to CC for the support especially the establishment of the countries’ affiliate teams where we network. I’ll participate in most interesting sessions and use CC communication tools to support the Global Movement in my country.

Maxwell, economics student and open textbook advocate at University of Victoria

I got truly involved with CC while working with a professor to develop an open textbook for microeconomics. I’m excited about the summit because I’ll get a chance to immerse myself in the CC environment and learn about the many aspects it has beyond just open education! I’m involved with CC because I see the potential it has to make education more innovative and more accessible.

Marcela Basch, Buenos Aires

I can’t wait to get to Toronto and meet the amazing global CC community. I run El plan C, a digital magazine on collaborative economy, free culture and commons, with special focus on Latin America. The future of the commons and collaboration is one of my main areas of interest, so I’m eager to participate on that track and be able to discuss with people who’s been thinking about that from other points of view, geographically and culturally speaking. Almost at the end of the meeting I’ll be hosting a session on this topics, “What is exactly a commons oriented initiative and how could it be sustainable?”, on Sunday 4pm. Spoiler: I don’t really have answers yet, but I hope we could think it through together.

Shahadu Sadik, Wikipedia Ghana

I am an editor on Wikpedia, a blogger and a technology enthusiast. I love open education.

I am super excited to be a part of this year’s Creative Commons Global Summit in Toronto Canada. I just can’t wait to meet people from across the globe to share and discuss issues relating to Creative Commons and its sister projects.

Megan Beckett, CC South Africa Public Lead

I’m passionate about advancing access to education and life changing learning experiences in my country. CC tools and licenses have been an integral part in enabling the far reaching impact of the work we’ve done at Siyavula Education in OER collaborative development and communities of practice. I’ve also recently joined CC South Africa as the Public Lead. I’m really looking forward to the Summit to be inspired, to learn and to engage with CC and openness more broadly in the international community, whilst finding out what works for others locally.

Elizabeth Oyange, Copyright Associate for Aga Khan University (global), based in Nairobi, Kenya

I look forward to attending the CC Summit for a broader perspective on the various program areas, the keynote speeches and meeting like-minded CC’ers from all corners of the world. This community involvement and networking will allow us to disseminate current views and CC information and hopefully contribute our institutional insight.

Calú (Carlos) Raul Correa Loyola, CC Ecuador

I don’t believe in copyright lottery, obstacles to science and knowledge access, and old-fashioned ways to create. I’m very excited to attend CC Summit because we can push forward all Internet potential, driving a new era of development, growth and productivity. I would like promote this potential in my country, sharing and applying this ideas on widespread arenas with my partners and colleagues.

Guido Gamba, CC Argentina

I’m looking forward to the summit and to meet fellow colleagues from the commons all around the world. I’ve been involved with the network for quite some time already–in fact, this is not my first global summit! Regardless, I’m excited and anxious as if it was my first one. I believe that CC is a vivid example that things can be done otherwise, in a more just and fair way, and it’s always thrilling to meet with so many people people who feel the same way. I’ll be participating in two sessions: “Faces of the Commons: How Can the People of Creative Commons Change the World?” (Friday 13:30h) and “Building a Culture of Appreciation for the New Global Network” (Saturday 16:00h). I hope to see you there!

Hilman Fathoni, Creative Commons Indonesia (CCID), Legal Lead

Aleck Ncube, CC Zimbabwe

Freyja van den Boom, Researcher and Project Manager Future TDM

Hildah Nyakawa, Executive Director at Jamlab, CC Kenya

I’m excited about the summit because I’ll be able to meet and interact with fellow Open Education contributors and enthusiasts.

I have been hosting School of Open sessions here in Kenya and at the summit I’ll be co-hosting a session with P2PU on Learning Circles on Saturday from 11:30 am to 12 noon.

Kristina Alexanderson, CC Sweden

Savithri Singh, CC India Public Lead

Emmanuel Malongo, CC Tanzania, Education & Technology

Nasir Khan, CC Bangladesh

I am a big fan of Creative Commons – the idea of CC and the great people who believe in this. It is a great opportunity for me to get involved with the awesome projects and initiatives under CC. Recently I heave been working with the government of Bangladesh on establish an open policy for open data portal of Bangladesh (http://data.gov.bd). I am interested in attending the Community & Movement and The Future of the Commons track related sessions.  I was a fellow of IOL first session and attended the Global Summit in 2015 and Asia Pacific regional summit in 2014 & 2016. It was always exciting to discuss in person with the people who are connected via online. When CC volunteers came to a place to discuss something great always happens!