“Choose Hope” by Carla Orozco, licensed CC BY-NC-SA.

For over 40 years, millions across the globe have collectively celebrated the achievements, histories, ideas, and contributions of women on March 8 and increasingly, throughout March for Women’s History Month using #HerStory and #BecauseOfHerStory. This year, we wanted to do something special to celebrate this annual event, so we reached out to several members of the Creative Commons Global Network and the broader open community to ask them to share their personal stories, ideas, and insights by responding to five questions. The result is this five-part blog series called, “Her Story.” Throughout this series, we’ll also be highlighting the work of women artists who submitted pieces to Fine Acts’ Reimagining Human Rights challenge. 

Our hope is that these conversations will inspire you to reflect on your own stories and ideas. We also hope it will motivate you to think about how you can help make open sharing more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable. Put simply, we want to make sharing better—to do that, we need your help.

In part five of this series, participants responded to the following question: What initiatives or projects in the open movement are you most excited about and why?

• Florence Devouard | Co-Lead, Wiki Loves Women; Wikimedian for 19 years; Former Chairwoman, Wikimedia Foundation

Pour ma part, je suis une wikipédienne dans l’âme. J’aime la diversité des personnes qui forment sa communauté et j’aime cette approche de “neutralité de point de vue” car quelque soit notre bagage militant (notre positionnement politique, religieux etc.), on est prié d’essayer de le laisser à la porte lorsque l’on contribue. Bien loin de se retrouver dans l’entre-soi comme sur de nombreux réseaux sociaux, il est possible de multiplier les interactions avec des personnes totalement différentes de nous. Pour ma part, j’aime également appartenir à plusieurs sous-communautés, plutôt que de me consacrer à une seule, ce qui génère plus d’opportunités excitantes à explorer ! Puisqu’on me demande des exemples concrets, je vais en prendre trois.

– Un groupe d’action : les sans pagEs. C’est un groupe francophone très actif né du besoin de combler le fossé et le biais de genre sur Wikipédia.

– Un autre groupe d’action : le UserGroup “Wikimedians for offline wikis“. C’est un groupe hétéroclite de personnes cherchant à faciliter l’accès à la connaissance et à la culture auprès des personnes peu ou pas connectées à internet.

EN: For my part, I am a Wikipedian at heart. I like the diversity of the people who make up its community and I like its approach of a “neutrality of point of view,” meaning whatever our background (e.g. political, religious positioning, etc.), we are asked to try to leave it at the door when contributing. Far from being in the inter-self as on many social networks, it is possible to multiply interactions with people who are totally different from us. For my part, I also like belonging to multiple sub-communities, rather than dedicating myself to just one, which generates more exciting opportunities to explore! Since I am asked for concrete examples, I will take three.

– An action group: the sans pagEs. It is a very active French-speaking group born from the need to bridge the gap and the gender bias on Wikipedia.

– Another action group: the UserGroup “Wikimedians for offline wikis.” It is a motley group of people seeking to facilitate access to knowledge and culture for people with little or no internet connection.

• Hildah Nyakwaka | Community Coordinator, Center for Digital Resilience

The Visible Wiki Women project is my favourite project. The WikiLovesWomen project, the Decolonizing the Internet project, State of the Internet’s Languages, The CC Bangladesh Open Mapping project are also all exciting initiatives that are bringing to light the work of brilliant and amazing people of colour who are making the open movement and the concept of open access more meaningful to communities across the globe.

• Irene Soria Guzmán | Representative to the Global Network Council, CC México; feminista; académica y activista de la cultura libre

Fuente tipográfica libre Ácrata—hecha por mujeres diseñadoras mexicanas, por que es la primera fuente abierta para destruir al patriarcado. Lxs pitarecas—porque es un proyecto que nos invita a cuestionar los derechos de autor y ha causado polémica en México por compartir libros en internet.

EN: The free open typeface “Ácrata” made by Mexican women designers—it’s the first open-source typeface to destroy the patriarchy. See it here. Lxs pitarecas—it’s a project that invites us to question copyright and has caused controversy in Mexico for sharing books on the internet.

• Isla Haddow-Flood | Chair and Advancement Lead, Wiki In Africa; CoProject Lead, Wiki Loves Women

Beyond the initiatives and projects I co-created and love so much, such as Wiki Loves Women (training women to seize their own agency on Wikimedia projects) and Wiki Loves Africa (using photography as a fun way to break down the barriers to contribution and rewrite the visual perception of Africa), there are so many other amazing projects within the Wikimedia movement, such as WikiDonne, Les sans pagEs, Art + Feminism, WikiGap, Women in Red, etc (more can be found here).

• Primah Kwagala | Executive Director, Women’s Probono Initiative (Uganda)

I am always excited about the opportunities Creative Commons offers artists (to create logos, for instance)—this is always a great opportunity to see and view a diversity of cultures across the globe. The CC Global Summit, in particular, allows for creatives to share their work and progress in the open movement, which is also exciting. However, it’ll be even more exciting if the next CC Global Summits deliberately open spaces for feminist engagement on a global platform.

? There’s more! Read part one, part two, part three, and part four of our “Her Story” blog series today!