2023 was quite a year for the Creative Commons (CC) Open Culture Program, thanks to generous funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing & Peter Baldwin. As the team grew from one full time employee to a team of three, we have had increased capacity to carry out our programmatic work. At the same time, pandemic-related travel restrictions eased, allowing the Open Culture Team to lead and participate in events and convenings in diverse locations, including Morocco, Uruguay, USA, Switzerland, UK, Mexico, and Portugal, to name a few. This allowed us to connect with community members in person, further cementing pre-existing strategic partnerships and engaging with new audiences. In this blog post we look back on some of the year’s key achievements.

Here are the top 5 things we are particularly proud of (in no particular order):

1. We started the TAROC initiative (Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture) with the Lisbon Open Culture Roundtable. Our TAROC information brief is available in English, Shqip, français, Español, 日本語, Türkçe, italiano, عربي.
2. We launched Open Culture Matters, our bi-monthly newsletter, which now has 500+ subscribers and counting.
3. We debuted Open Culture Live: A Webinar Series with “Back to Basics: Open Culture for Beginners”. Other topics discussed in the series include “Respectful Terminologies & Changing the Subject”, and “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution.”
4. We completed Open Culture Voices — a series of insightful video interviews with open culture experts from around the world. It came to a close in November, gathering ca. 70K views across all platforms.
5. We created the Open Culture resources webpage. It includes numerous documents available in multiple languages thanks to our community of volunteers, including 2023 publications:
   • Pioneers of Open Culture,  a report on the success of open culture early adopters; and
   • Needs Assessment report, a survey of the needs and challenges of the cultural heritage community vis a vis the CC public domain tool.

In addition, we published blog posts, organized training activities, signed on to advocacy letters, took part in several events to promote open culture (notably our CC Global Summit, WIPO SCCR meetings, MozFest, Wikimania, WikiIndaba, GLAM Wiki, Wikimedia’s conference for the open culture movement, and much more!), and offered the CC certificate on open culture.

We also supported our community through the OC platform, community-led activities and our Medium Publication.

In 2024, we look forward to building on those achievements and continuing to help people (re)connect with their culture(s).

Posted 24 January 2024