For the first time, the CC movement has completed a comprehensive and collaborative effort to renew and grow its network, finalized at the recent Global Summit in Toronto. It’s important to acknowledge the hard work of all the people involved from the beginning, which included research (the Faces of the Commons is a 300 page multi region report with recommendations and insights), an open consultation with the broad CC community including Affiliates, partners, funders, and the CC Board, and 22 online and in-person meetings and more than the eighty percent of the active members of the network involved. This bottom-up process included discussions, proposals and specific edits and changes, reflecting the dynamic global community we have built together around Creative Commons during all this years. We all should be proud of all this process.

This new Strategy has a lot of benefits:

1. Global collaboration. Connected with the work of the Platforms, communities will work together to set priorities, goals, objectives and strategies.
2. Resilience. The previous model for Affiliate involvement was focused on institutional relationships. Today, we are focusing on individuals and supporting organizations instead. We are providing a path to create a network of trust and real collaboration for the future.
3. Growth and inclusion. The new strategy is meant to include new and diverse global voices in the conversation and to provide more capacity and agency for teams working locally. We are creating a strategy focused on supporting and activating people.
4. Shared decision-making, goal-setting, structure for collaboration. The new strategy creates new governance bodies to provide space for the community to identify priorities for the global work. This is a first for CC: the network takes care of the network.
5. Resource allocation. The strategy creates two funds specifically focused on the network to support community activities, actual project work and identified movement priorities.

It has been a long road, but now the strategy work is complete. For the transition period, we are planning to focus on Chapters, Platforms and Governance.

Chapters (formerly Country teams). The local work is key for the new Network Strategy. To coordinate this efforts we will trust in Chapters as units for the governance and to coordinate local work. After concerns from several affiliate teams, we’ve decided to use Chapters instead of a reference of a “country” or “nation”. However, it will be those borders that we use to organize each team (with some exceptions, for example in Mainland China and Taiwan). These Chapters will be made up of people, with individuals whose work is focused on the place where they live, have accepted the Creative Commons Charter and have been vouched by two actual members. The membership recruiting process is starting in the coming weeks. More details of this process will be published very soon.

We expect Chapters to have their first team meeting no later than January 2018, primarily to appoint a coordinator (which will be the main point of contact for the movement), elect a representative to send to the Global Network Council, and draft a plan of work for the rest of the year.

Platforms. Platforms are areas of work, a collaborative space for individuals and institutions to organize and coordinate themselves across the broad network. Platforms will be the way we will create and communicate spaces of strategic collaboration to have worldwide impact. They will be the way our network will work collaboratively.

The conversation on platforms started at the Global Summit. So far, community members have organized around:

• Copyright Reform Platform
• Open Education Platform
• Open GLAM Platform
• Community development Platform

You can learn more about it and how to get involved and participate on our wiki and directly on Slack.

There may be more platforms in the future, but during this transition period -before the new Governance structure is set up by the next Global Summit on 2018- the work of the platforms will be oriented to fill a specific need and requirement from the network on each area, being particular activities, documentation or products.

These platforms will set specific priorities and plan of work in the coming months, to develop their plan of work until next Global Summit on 2018.

Governance. The main governance body for the new Strategy is the Global Network Council, and it’s important to us to focus on establishing the new Chapters as soon as we can, and to make that happen we will be opening the membership process in the coming weeks for anyone to join. For the transition period, during the coming days there will be an open call to constitute an Advisory Committee, to advise on this transition and provide support to the Chapters, with global and diverse representation.