From Exploratory Dialogue to Roundtable

At our Open Heritage Dialogue held at UNESCO House last April, we had convened to find answers to an important question: How can equitable access to heritage help solve global challenges? What we heard was that it can in a diversity of ways: from supporting access to education to strengthening social inclusion and spurring artistic creativity, all the way to helping find concrete solutions to fight climate change. 

Five months later, on 29 September, we returned to Paris ready to move the conversation forward. Together with the Representation of Québec within the Permanent Delegation of Canada to UNESCO, we brought together around 30 participants to our Open Heritage Roundtable to discuss possible ways forward at UNESCO, with whom CC is an NGO in official partnership (consultative status). Participants hailed from UNESCO permanent delegations, UNESCO national commissions, national government and ministries of culture, national libraries and archives, international NGOs from the open heritage community, including the Open Heritage Coalition, among others, and their interventions were made in French and English. 

Concretely, our goal was to explore the feasibility of elaborating a new UNESCO Open Heritage Recommendation that would ensure heritage is protected, preserved and equitably shared as a means to address global challenges. The welcome remarks clearly set the tone for the discussion: “Fin des réflexions, début de l’action.” (“The end of reflection. The beginning of action.”). The program was structured in two parts, allowing for high-level contributions to set the stage for a roundtable discussion inviting all participants to chime in with questions, comments and new perspectives. 

In this blog post, we share eight hot takes from the Roundtable discussions, which centered on the urgent need to start the process for the development of a UNESCO Recommendation on Open Heritage.

Hot take #1 – Open heritage is a real thing

One thing became clear over the course of the event: open heritage is not an abstract idea waiting to be tested. It is already happening in institutions and communities around the world. Qatar National Library, for example, has digitized more than 15 million pages of books, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, archival documents, photographs, and other materials. Open access is one of its core values, and the Library does not assert new copyright over reproductions of public domain works. At the same time, its experience demonstrates some of the challenges that make international alignment so important. This includes complex copyright rules, inconsistent institutional practices, dispersed collections, differences in metadata, and the cost and capacity required to build and maintain digital infrastructure. Open heritage is already embedded in thousands of institutions, as identified in the OpenGLAM survey. Institutions around the world are already showing what becomes possible when heritage is opened for people to discover, study, interrogate, reuse, and create with. Yet they still make up only about 1% of all cultural heritage institutions worldwide. The question is no longer whether open heritage can work. It is how we create the conditions for more institutions, communities, and countries to participate.

Hot take #2 – Open heritage is about agency and critical thinking 

The roundtable also pushed the conversation beyond simple access as a technical exercise. Cultural heritage institutions provide access to more than artefacts and documents. They are gateways to understanding our world and ourselves as humans. They provide context and make it possible for people to compare sources, question received narratives, understand how histories have been constructed, and recognize what (or who) may be missing from the record. This is something that is top of mind in Luxembourg’s national cultural policy. Access to source material and its metadata can give people greater agency to form their own judgements and reach their own conclusions about the past, rather than relying solely on the narratives presented to them in the present. This need takes on greater urgency at a time of democratic fragility, growing misinformation, and technological upheaval. 

Hot take #3 – Open heritage means living heritage 

The possibilities really expand when people can engage with heritage in participatory, interactive ways. One example shared during the Roundtable came from Germany, where high school students used an openly available digital reproduction of a Renaissance portrait held at Frankfurt’s Städel Museum to reinterpret the work in ways that reflected their own experience with the centuries-old painting. It was a small but powerful example of “living heritage” i.e. heritage that remains relevant not simply because we preserve it, but because new generations can encounter it, use it, question it, and make new meaning from it. (UNESCO uses “living heritage” as a quasi synonym for “intangible cultural heritage”—in the example, it was used as a way to illustrate the value of heritage when it comes alive via remixes and re-interpretations, moving beyond its wall-decorating function to deepen human connections). These practices are increasingly becoming part of institutional infrastructure. Major German museums have already made hundreds of thousands of public domain objects openly available online, alongside broader national investments in research data infrastructure and cultural data spaces. 

Hot take #4 – AI is reshaping the contours of open heritage

From Aruba came another dimension. For small island developing states (SIDS) shaped by colonial histories, heritage may be dispersed across institutions and borders. Digital access can help reconnect people with cultural memory while supporting research, education, and new cultural creation. Global access goes hand in hand with local cultural strengthening. And as artificial intelligence increasingly relies on what is discoverable in the digital knowledge environment, the need to clarify what equitable access and responsible use mean take on heightened urgency: cultures and smaller languages such as Papiamento risk being underrepresented in the AI-mediated cultural discourse when heritage is not discoverable in the digital environment.

From experiences in Québec, we heard that the rise of AI confers a new responsibility on CHIs: making heritage accessible while ensuring that its cultural, social and economic values are preserved. AI is forcing the sector to move beyond the well-trodden debate opposing open and closed data as absolutes—neither offer lasting solutions and neither are “equitable.” New realities call for an “ouverture raisonnée” (a thoughtful openness approach), which supports innovation while protecting authors’ rights, collective interests and the value of heritage data. 

The Roundtable allowed for a fruitful exchange spotlighting different places and different institutional contexts, but they point toward a shared challenge: how can we ensure responsible and ethical access to heritage in the age of AI? The development of a future Recommendation would offer the discussion space that is direly needed to address these fundamental questions together, in line with the work undertaken under the 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of AI. 

Hot take #5 – An Open Heritage Recommendation means welcoming heritage to the UNESCO “open family” 

UNESCO has already shown what international alignment around openness can accomplish. The 2019 Recommendation on Open Educational Resources and the 2021 Recommendation on Open Science established shared international frameworks for advancing openness in education and science. They give Member States common approaches to addressing challenges and translating principles into policy and practice. For example, in the Netherlands, experiences with the implementation of these Recommendations met resounding success, according to a participant. When considered alongside education and science, heritage is conspicuous by its absence. It is the missing part of the triptych, the glaringly missing third pillar. 

The opportunity now is to build on UNESCO’s successful experience and bring heritage, as a transversal issue, more fully into the “open” normative family, at a moment when equitable access to reliable, trustworthy information is becoming more important than ever. A UNESCO Recommendation on Open Heritage could fill the policy gap at UNESCO and erect that missing third pillar, by providing a shared international framework for equitable access to public domain heritage in the digital environment.

Hot Take # 6 – Open heritage is about connecting UNESCO’s transversal dots 

The Roundtable further surfaced connections between open heritage and work already underway across UNESCO’s diverse areas of its mandate: cultural diversity, heritage preservation, digital infrastructure, education, artificial intelligence, and respect for cultural rights, including participation in cultural life.

Some of those connections are already visible in Member States’ implementation of existing UNESCO instruments. Germany’s Culture Data Space (Datenraum Kultur) and Art Doc Archive in Berlin, for example, feature in its reporting under the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Open heritage and many of UNESCO’s activities are already intersecting in practice. Let us recall that the Preamble of UNESCO’s Constitution affirms “that the wide diffusion of culture (…) [is] indispensable to the dignity of man and constitute[s] a sacred duty.” (para. 4). 

This was an important thread in the broader discussion: rather than launching a separate policy conversation, a future Recommendation on Open Heritage would crystallize the existing connections in place and bring increased intersectoral coherence to the work UNESCO and its Member States are already doing in the context of heritage’s rapid digital transformation and in ensuring that culture can be enjoyed at a global public good.Simply put, open heritage aligns with UNESCO objectives and approaches.

Hot take #7 – The open heritage foundation has already been laid 

Importantly, drafting a Recommendation would not mean starting from scratch. The case for open heritage has been building for years and we know that despite many advances, unnecessary barriers continue to unduly limit access to public domain heritage. Those undue barriers take many forms. Institutions may place restrictive website terms of use or technological restrictions on heritage material in the public domain. Unreasonable access or licensing fees can prevent legitimate uses of the public domain. National laws can create new layers of “pseudo-copyright” restrictions. Unfounded copyright claims and incorrect labeling of the public domain generate confusion and can have a chilling effect on creativity and knowledge generation. And inconsistent approaches across institutions and jurisdictions can leave users, and institutions themselves, uncertain about what is possible, leaving the promise of open heritage largely unrealized.

We also know what more equitable access can make possible: new opportunities for education, research, creativity, cultural participation, and connection across communities and borders. Interventions during the Roundtable made compelling pleas: “donnez-nous de la donnée” (“give us data”), especially to ensure people with disabilities as well as marginalized and vulnerable groups can participate in cultural life and shape their own narrative. 

Recognizing these benefits and documenting these barriers—in addition to offering co-created, clear policy solutions to them—are some of the great achievements of the Open Heritage Statement. Developed through years of research, consultation, and collaboration within the Open Heritage Coalition, and boasting 116 signatories from all continents to date, it represents a global community coming together around a shared aspiration that public domain heritage should be as broadly accessible and reusable as possible, while respecting cultural governance frameworks. The foundation is there. The Open Heritage Statement offers UNESCO Member States a tangible starting point to deepen understanding and enrich the dialogue. 

Hot take # 8 – Open heritage is an invitation to connect as humans

Heritage is brimming with connections—between people and places, past and present, memory and identity, evidence and understanding. More equitable sharing of heritage can be the source of intercultural, transborder and mutually enriching collaborations. Open heritage can create the conditions for people to connect with heritage as a shared resource and, vitally, with each other. But only if unnecessary, unfair barriers do not stand in the way.

The need to protect those conditions is becoming more urgent, not less. As our cultural record increasingly moves into digital environments—and as those environments increasingly shape how people learn, create, and understand the world—questions about who can access heritage, whose heritage is visible, and what people can do with it carry growing consequences. A shared understanding of these questions, and a multilateral dialogue about how to answer them, are one of the many outcomes of a potential Recommendation. 

Looking ahead – Where there’s a will there’s a way

The Roundtable was an eye-opening exercise in that it grounded the urgency to develop a Recommendation in practical, evidenced, real-life needs. It also surfaced the positive energy that the Open Heritage Coalition generated and that continues to fuel policy action on many fronts, from grassroots advocacy initiatives in the Wikimedia community to civil servant foresightedness and ability to mobilize entire countries at all levels of leadership. 

What the Roundtable also made clear is that the conversation is no longer only about whether equitable access to heritage is valuable—116 (and counting) influential organizations have voiced this in no uncertain terms. It is increasingly about how UNESCO Member States can work together now to make open heritage possible on a global scale and how a UNESCO Recommendation could provide a framework for sustained international cooperation in the face of global challenges.

With the 2029 UNESCO General Conference in view as our desired finish line, the time to move that critical conversation forward is now. The next step is for a Member State to make a proposal to the UNESCO Executive Board in the spring of 2027. Building on what is already well underway, Member States now have the opportunity to erect the missing “open” third pillar. And where there’s a (political) will, there’s a way. 

What does it mean to be part of the CC community today?

It’s a question we ask ourselves regularly at CC—and one we recently brought directly to our community through our annual Community Survey. This year, 62 community members from 23 countries shared their experiences, priorities, ideas, and hopes for the future of the Commons.

What we heard most clearly is that you want  to participate. You want to learn from one another, contribute your skills, build relationships across regions and areas of practice, and help shape the future of the open movement. 

The survey gave us a clear picture of what meaningful participation means to you, what the barriers are, and what CC can do to help. Here’s what we heard and how it’s shaping our plans for the year ahead. 

A community that wants to participate

Overall satisfaction with the CC community increased this year, reaching 3.8 out of 5—up 19% from 2025. Sixty-four percent of respondents rated their engagement with the community a 4 or 5, and 60% said you would recommend the CC community to others.

Perhaps most encouragingly, half of you said you were interested in participating in self-led activities like ad-hoc working groups.

And the open-ended responses made the sentiment behind those numbers especially clear:

• “Thank you for existing and doing great work!”
• “Thank you for leading the way!”
• “I am really happy to be part of the CC community.”

These responses are a reminder that our community is not simply an audience for CC’s work. You see yourselves as part of the work—and many of you are looking for more opportunities to contribute.

The question is: how?

The clearest gap in this year’s responses was not a lack of interest. It was a lack of clarity about how to participate.

Thirty-three of you specifically asked for clearer ways to get involved. You wanted better information about chapters and regional groups, clearer direction about what volunteers can do, easier ways to find peers and mentors, structured opportunities to work on projects, and greater visibility and recognition for community contributions.

This is an important distinction. If you want to participate but can’t figure out where your skills, interests, or time fit, the problem isn’t necessarily motivation. Sometimes the infrastructure for participation simply isn’t visible enough.

Key Takeaways

Building capacity, not just delivering information

The survey also gave us a clearer picture of what you need from CC as a community resource.

• 78% of you want training or skill sharing.

• 67% want shared tools and templates.

• 65% want peer connections.

You asked for practical licensing guidance, FAQs, case studies, examples, short videos, factsheets, customizable templates, toolkits, asynchronous training, and translated materials.

Importantly, you don’t just want resources from CC. You want resources you can remix and reuse with your own communities. Our role can be much more powerful when we act as infrastructure, connector, facilitator, and amplifier—helping you take what you need and adapt it to your own contexts.

That means community engagement isn’t only about creating more events or sending more communications. It is also about creating more options for participation and building pathways between levels of engagement. We have started thinking about those pathways:

LEARN → CONNECT → CONTRIBUTE → ORGANIZE → LEAD

That’s also why we are working toward more “train-the-trainer” approaches as we roll out new guidance. Our resources become much more valuable when you can adapt and tailor them to your own contexts, and then share that knowledge with others.

AI matters—but the Commons is bigger than AI

It’s no surprise that AI is an important topic for our community right now. When we asked what topics you wanted training and information about, AI and the Commons received the most selections, with 37 respondents choosing it.

But the responses also made something else clear: your interests remain broad. Open Education, CC licenses and tools, and Copyright each received 30 selections. Open Culture and Heritage received 26, while Open Science and Contemporary Culture and Independent Creators each received 22.

AI is reshaping the information ecosystem, but is only one part of the work our community cares about. The principles of sharing, access, collaboration, attribution, and community governance continue to matter across education, science, culture, heritage, and creative practice.

Our community engagement needs to reflect that whole ecosystem.

A truly global Commons needs regional infrastructure

The survey also reinforced the importance of regional and local engagement.

You asked for local-language resources, regional training, mentorship, stronger cross-regional networks, support for chapters and regional groups, local ambassadors and trainers, and greater recognition for local contributors.

You also identified practical infrastructure needs: more translation and better ways to discover activities happening in different places.

One particularly useful reminder was that some of you did not know that local chapters existed at all. This tells us that regionalization is not simply about creating more regional activity. It’s also about making the activity that already exists easier to find, connect to, and participate in.

A global community cannot function as a single centralized conversation. You need opportunities to build relationships and solve problems in your own languages, regions, and contexts—and then bring those experiences into conversation with the wider Commons.

The community has a lot to give

While you certainly asked for additional support, you’ve also offered to contribute your own skills and support to the movement.

You told us you would like to run workshops and trainings, translate and localize resources, promote CC and recruit new members, host events, support local chapters, share knowledge and research, contribute images and networks, and collaborate on projects and advocacy.

That creates an exciting opportunity: with the right frameworks, resources, and infrastructure in place, we can make it easier for community members to contribute while amplifying the grassroots work already happening across the CC community.  

Where We’re Going Next

The findings from this year’s survey are already shaping our community strategy for the year ahead. Here are some of the focuses we plan to bring into our 2027 planning:

1. Creating clearer pathways to participation

We’ll be working to improve engagement on Zulip, create more meaningful ways to participate in ongoing work, support distributed projects, and strengthen volunteer translation and regional events.

2. Building community capacity

We’ll expand “train-the-trainer” approaches, particularly around licensing guidance and other practical resources that you can use in your own contexts.

3. Creating resources you can remix

We’ll develop more short, reusable, localizable resources—from simple license comparison guides to CC FAQs, short videos, translated resources, and adaptable presentation materials.

4. Creating meaningful opportunities to contribute to AI work

We’re exploring new ways for our community to contribute to CC’s AI work— from regional consultations, and working groups to roundtables, case studies, translations, and opportunities to share your expertise and experience.

Community Is Infrastructure

One of the things I find most exciting about this year’s survey is that you aren’t asking us simply to do more. You’re asking us to make more possible.

Clearer pathways. Better tools. More opportunities to learn from one another. Stronger regional connections. Resources you can take home and adapt. And meaningful ways to contribute your own expertise.

That gives us a powerful direction for the work ahead.

CC has always been about building the conditions for people to share, collaborate, and create. Our approach to community engagement should be no different.

The future of the commons won’t be built by CC alone. It will be built by the people who use these tools, teach them, translate them, adapt them, organize around them, challenge them, and carry them into new contexts.

Our role is to help make that possible. And, based on what we heard this year, you’re ready.

We are in a critical moment for the open web, and must raise the issues of openness and the commons to the level of public dialogue as we try to steer AI development to serve the public interest. We are also in a moment when open is being hailed as a panacea for digital sovereignty. This warrants interrogation.

On September 21st, Creative Commons convened leading experts, practitioners, and builders for a day of conversation about the collaborative underpinnings of openness, investigating all the layers of the stack for a better, shared understanding of what openness can—and cannot—do to help communities and nations drive towards digital sovereignty.

This event was made possible through the generous support of the Siegel Family Endowment. We are grateful to our co-hosts at the NYU Engelberg Center for making the space for a conversation like this.

Clear throughlines from the convening were:

• Openness creates choices
• Sovereignty depends on our ability to exercise and sustain those choices
• Sustaining the people, institutions, and shared resources that make openness possible must be part of any sensible sovereignty strategy

As we prepare for the AI Summit in Geneva next year, we see it as our responsibility to convene conversations, to collaborate with aligned organizations, and, ultimately, to build tools that enable the future we want to see.

We started the day with a simple proposition: that openness and digital sovereignty are deeply intertwined, but openness alone is not a sovereignty strategy. Digital sovereignty is all about our ability to make meaningful choices about the digital systems on which we depend. And yes, openness can help create those choices through the freedom to inspect, adapt, share, collaborate, and—perhaps most importantly—move away from systems that no longer serve us when that’s necessary.

These freedoms only translate into sovereignty, though, when we have the capacity to exercise them. Infrastructure, skills, governance, resources—these are all things we need to make those choices real. 

Open Collaboration / Open Sovereignty

When discussing openness, collaboration and digital sovereignty, a conversation led by Vidisha Mishra from Global Solutions Initiative, panelists explored how countries and communities can build capacity together rather than assuming sovereignty means doing everything alone. We heard about the possibilities for middle-power collaboration, and the role that shared resources can play in expanding our options. Paul Samson from CIGI described this as “strategic interdependence.” This is a mindset we can lean into while leveraging the heightened awareness that openness has. It is also critical to moving forward on initiatives like 50 in 5—advancing DPI in 50 countries in 5 years, an important effort to share learnings, best practices and technologies to advance global digital public infrastructure. Mitchell Baker, co-founder of the Mozilla project, pointed to the counterintuitive fact that “instability might drive openness” and that it is up to us to leverage this opportunity, especially because, as Liv Marte Nordhaug from the DPGA summarized, “we have to move fast, because things are being broken.”

Open Infrastructure

It was with that provocation that the conversation shifted to open infrastructure. My brilliant colleague Monica Granados brought in an ecology metaphor to her framing of the infrastructure of commons, which allowed for both some humorous metaphor-building and, ultimately, a greater understanding of the moment that faces us. When the wolves in Yellowstone were extirpated due to unregulated hunting practices, there were a number of negative knock-on effects in the ecosystem: their prey grew in population, which led to overgrazing, erosion, and a negative impact on smaller mammals that otherwise relied on a careful balance in the natural habitat.

What would happen to the commons if the wolves of open infrastructure—open organizations like us—were to disappear? (P.S. careful reintroduction of and support of wolves, through intervention and regulation, has rebalanced conditions in Yellowstone.)

The conversation focused on bridging policies and practice. What is the flexibility afforded by working in the open? What are some of the commercial realities and challenges of building and maintaining infrastructure that can endure? And how do our definitions need to shift in this moment? Kaitlin Thaney from Invest in Open Infrastructure discussed that the definitions landscape is shifting from “ideological to pragmatic.” Instead of getting stuck in strict definitions, we’re better served by thinking about bigger picture challenges and what broader conceptions of openness can enable.

Yael Elmatad of OpenAthena reflected that there is a certain “safety in openness,” while Ellie Bertani of GitLab Foundation said that one perspective is to consider “value captured from, versus value delivered to” when we think about how new tools are built. If we build on open foundations, we stand the best chance of democratized access and shared innovation. At the same time, builders have to remain competitive, and open infrastructure must be acknowledged. Jan Gerlach from the Wikimedia Foundation spoke in-depth about a “crisis of attribution” in this moment. This lack of recognition for open foundations was repeated as a concern throughout the day. As Jan says, “This is what a sustainability crisis looks like.”

Open Data

In fact, matters of attribution were echoed in the panel on open data, led by Angela Oduor Lungati of Ushahidi. Here, we were reminded that openness is never just a technical question but rather about the communities, contexts, and people behind the data. These realities on the ground are frequently overlooked but must be considered if we are to build holistic data governance policies at any level.

E.M. Lewis-Jong of the Mozilla Data Collective spoke of the need for “a stack of interventions to guard public benefit of data,” as Chris Lewis of Public Knowledge lamented that “people are locking down every way they can.” Jane Anderson of Local Contexts spoke of uses of Indigenous data that showed a complete disregard for provenance and respectful reuse, because “what gets built has consequences.” Promisingly, there are efforts underway in the community to rebalance power.

From CC’s perspective, we continue to believe that we must balance meaningful access and reuse rights with responsible stewardship and public benefit. There is no single solution that will suit all data sharing because not all needs are the same. The importance of grounding the open infrastructure we build in local languages, cultural contexts, and open practices, all of which enable genuine participation, are not optional add-ons to our digital infrastructure—they must be considered a core part of it. Open practices can help us resist digital homogenization and make space for a digital future that reflects the diversity of the people who inhabit it.

I would like to believe that we can all agree that we should not have to translate ourselves into someone else’s language, culture, or worldview to participate in a digital future.

Open Source

The open source panel reminded attendees how we’re collectively beholden to market forces that shape the systems we use every day but also, conversely, how open source can help shape markets and shift the types of systems we use as part of our daily public infrastructure. The biggest hindrance may simply be usability and preference for simplicity, but panelists reflected that this may come at the expense of privacy considerations and shared benefit. Amanda Cesari from Google Open Source reframed the challenges of an influx of low-effort contributions faced by moderators of Github for example as “low quality contributions at scale,” which could just be called spam, plus the observation about the growing burden this puts on maintainers who lack proper review tooling. The line of the day from Duane O’Brien of the Open Source Initiative summed up a consistent undercurrent: “Open by itself does very little but enables a lot.”

Who Sustains the Commons?

These conversations reinforced something that as a movement we need to carry forward in our case for openness: digital sovereignty is not achieved by owning more of the technology we depend on but rather by having meaningful agency over it and the capacity to exercise that agency over time. I recently finished reading Cory Doctorow’s latest book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. In it, he repeats the following question several times (paraphrased): When it comes to technology, we need to ask who is it doing things for and who is it doing things to?

For us, as a movement, as a patchwork quilt of communities with overlapping belief structures, we have to keep publicly asking the question until there’s a good answer: Who sustains the commons? If openness is one of the building blocks of digital sovereignty, then we have to build the conditions that allow open resources to exist, evolve, and endure. While we have made gains, one of the reasons that open alternatives haven’t become a more substantial part of our digital infrastructure is that openness does not automatically come with a sustainability model for support. All of us benefit enormously from shared resources, but collectively, and as societies, we have not built the institutions, financing, or public commitments that are needed to sustain them.

We cannot expect voluntary efforts alone to sustain openness while treating it as a basic principle of digital sovereignty.

The open web is incredible, but its vulnerabilities are increasingly clear. Open source software is rightly celebrated as a foundation of digital sovereignty, but we still fail to properly reward maintainers. The people who maintain open source software are still too often expected to do so without the resources or recognition their work requires. Open infrastructure projects can become dependent on philanthropic funding or on the priorities of a particular government or administration. And the open knowledge movement shows that even the most valuable public goods—the actual critical knowledge infrastructure of the web—are vulnerable when the people and institutions behind them are not recognized and cannot be sustained.

Projects like Wikipedia reveal fragile dependencies. They demonstrate the extraordinary value of shared knowledge, but that value depends on communities of contributors, editors, and donors and on the continued ability to support the work that keeps such resources alive. The conversations during our event showed that these are not peripheral concerns but rather the key questions about the resilience of our digital foundations.

Our uncritical dependence on these under-resourced open communities deserves just as much attention as our dependence on centralized technology providers. If we want open systems to provide durable alternatives, then maintainers, shared infrastructure, and open knowledge need to be part of our policy discussions and particularly our public funding strategies. We cannot talk about digital sovereignty as a matter of choice and control without also talking about the responsibility to sustain the resources that make those choices possible.

Expanding Collaboration

This event was part of the Road to Geneva, and a more deliberate effort amongst organizations with shared priorities to collaborate on a larger stage. This time around, we brought together advocates, technologists, and civil society leaders. We need to expand the forum to include builders, policymakers, and funders.

We want a future where openness is not simply an aspiration, but a sustainable practice. Where collaboration expands our choices rather than creating new dependencies. And where digital sovereignty is measured not just by what a country can control but by the meaningful choices available to people, communities, and institutions.

If we can build better alignment amongst our shared agendas, we stand to have greater collective impact. As we head into the Geneva AI Summit next June, the team at CC will be doing what we can to help build a more unified agenda for openness and the commons.

Creative Commons has been exploring questions around artificial intelligence for a long time: how this profound technological shift might affect people’s motivations to share, whether the intentions behind sharing work before AI became mainstream still hold when we consider how those works are being used now, and how we sustain a thriving commons when the fundamental bargain of the open web has shifted.

Throughout these changes, we have been guided by a commitment to balance creator agency in how people participate in the commons, while preserving the public’s right to reuse. CC licenses operate through copyright, and in many jurisdictions, copyright exceptions and limitations may permit certain AI development and training uses. That can leave people who want to share openly with limited ways to impose conditions, leading some to resort to restricting access instead. This risks pushing us towards an all-or-nothing binary between a free-for-all or enclosure. We fear the end result will be a retracted knowledge commons.

So we’ve been revisiting some fundamental questions:

• When are norms enough, and when are enforceable conditions needed? 
• If copyright alone cannot provide the balance we need between agency and user rights, what other frameworks should we be willing to explore in service of the commons? 
• Can we create meaningful boundaries around shared knowledge in order to protect it? How does that approach substantively differ from enclosure or monopolistic value capture?

The answers to these questions have evolved as we have continued to listen and learn from communities and leaders, and as the technology and its impacts have changed.

Copyright is a tool, not a governance framework

These tensions aren’t new. 

In 2019, a story broke about an IBM dataset, built largely on CC-licensed images gathered from Flickr, being used to train facial recognition technology. Creative Commons responded in a concerned and balanced manner, restating what we’ve echoed since: “copyright is not a good tool to protect individual privacy, to address research ethics in AI development, or to regulate the use of surveillance tools employed online.” 

In short: copyright isn’t a governance framework. 

But for two decades, CC licenses have created new possibilities for sharing and reuse, unlocking overly restrictive copyright in prosocial ways. This is a classic example of a flashpoint between Creative Commons licenses as legal tools and the motivations and intentions people bring to participating in the commons—the broader social contract around open sharing. It was not the first time, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

Both things can be true

At that juncture, and many times since, Creative Commons has reaffirmed its commitment to the commons, holding in balance that creators deserve meaningful agency while we preserve important limits on the scope of copyright.

We continue to believe that both things can be true. 

The challenge is finding ways to preserve agency and choice without sacrificing the public-interest uses that open knowledge makes possible. Should individuals and communities have a say in how shared knowledge projects, like Wikipedia, are governed? Yes. Should the public interest be prioritized while protecting lawful reuse, such as transformation of copyrighted works into accessible formats? Also, yes. 

I won’t go into too much detail on our journey of the past few years with AI—both as an organization and a community—but there are a few key points that are worth reminding us all of.

In 2020, we explored what works can benefit from copyright protection, as image generation by AI systems was gaining more traction. There are still discussions on this subject today, but ultimately we continue to believe in the concept of authorship as something distinctly human. This is not to say that a human cannot use said technology, but rather that a human must be at the creative helm in order to benefit from copyright protection. 

We also restated that copyright is not the appropriate regulation mechanism for AI: “Any attempt at regulation is premature, especially through an already over-taxed copyright system that has been commandeered for purposes that extend well beyond its original intended purposes. AI needs to be properly explored and understood before copyright or any intellectual property issues can be seriously considered.”

When the virtuous cycle gets complicated

In early 2023, not long after ChatGPT’s public release in November 2022, we continued our public reflections on the tensions that were rising more acutely to the surface: specifically, the use of the open web as training material for large language models. Given our long-held belief in the virtuous cycle of creativity—that all creativity builds on past creativity, that all knowledge builds on past knowledge—how could we see this as anything other than building on the past?

But once again, that belief had to be held in balance with other considerations:

As Catherine Stihler, then CEO of Creative Commons, wrote at the time, “Copyright, and intellectual property law in general, are only one lens to think about AI.” She went on to ask how AI trained on the commons could contribute back to the commons, support creators, and maintain human oversight and responsibility. 

As AI took over all conversations, news feeds, and much of our intellectual capacity, the technology—or family of technologies—was advancing at a rapid rate. We took our conversations to the community through webinars, workshops, one-on-ones, and by making this subject the theme of the CC Global Summit in late 2023. 

An alignment assembly of participants indicated the same split within the community that we’ve seen echoed over and over again: lean back and let it happen, or lean in and steer it. Today, as we did then, we are guided by the messy middle, trying to find common ground and balanced solutions in a world of either/or.

What does it mean to give back? 

One of the guiding principles of our work is reciprocity. 

As we ideated last year, there are many ways to potentially give back. Reciprocity can mean attribution, contributing new knowledge or resources back to the commons, supporting the infrastructure that makes sharing possible, or creating clear public benefit. That last piece matters. If people have confidence that what they contribute is helping create something that benefits others, there is a greater reason to keep participating in the cycle of sharing. 

If major AI development had been infused with this kind of reciprocity from the beginning, we might not find ourselves where we do today. Calling for credit for creators? Turns out it’s reasonably possible, and there are advances every day. Cooperative dataset development? The New Commons Incubator is a recent example of civil society and industry collaborating. Developers sharing things back into the commons? Non-profit labs like OpenMined and OpenAthena are strong examples of this, not to mention for-profit entities like Nvidia and Hugging Face. 

And then there is support for open infrastructure itself. If the major labs were to reciprocate with the open web, it might help us get back to the happy work of creating and sharing knowledge. They don’t seem likely to get there without a nudge, which is why we find policy proposals around approaches such as levies (e.g., this one from Open Future Foundation) worth tracking and considering.

A world of gradients, not binaries

Last year, we released a paper, From Human Content to Machine Data, to ground the work we were doing on CC Signals. 

We envisioned a world of gradients, of choice, that would continue to power open sharing while balancing creator agency with public-interest uses. We believed it could be possible, but we knew it would require a mutual commitment. Across technical, legal, and philosophical strata, we heard then, and still hear today, from our community that there are deep and real concerns about the future sustainability of the commons.

As the saying typically attributed to Heraclitus goes, no one ever steps in the same river twice, and that may be the truest description of CC’s work for the last several years. Each time we put a foot down, we find ourselves in a new reality.

This happened very distinctly not long after we sought public feedback on CC Signals in 2025. At the time, CC Signals was ideated as a preference signals framework. 

First, the work of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) AI Preferences group was perceived as moving too slowly for us to rely on a standardized system through which everyone could communicate preferences evenly. At that same time, commons-based projects were increasingly facing real technical costs and impacts, largely as a result of real-time use of data for inference or grounding. In some cases, we’ve heard of projects blocking all bot traffic as their only perceived recourse.

These efforts are in tension with the missions of some commons-based projects, from open access repositories to cultural heritage institutions and everything in between: to share openly for public benefit. 

Second, there was clear pushback on the idea that the major AI labs would do anything that was remotely voluntary. What we heard directly from representatives of the labs during workshops was that they might take anything framed as a “yes, if…” or “no, unless…” as a blanket “no.” Open knowledge that was being shared with a simple request for, say, attribution, would simply be treated as unavailable. 

That is not the future we want either.

Why is it not common sense to give credit where credit is due? Why is it not simply better for all of us if we know where our knowledge comes from? Why should we not give people a choice on whether and how they participate in the AI ecosystem? And what is the future of the commons if we do not adopt some commons sense about all these things?

Rethinking what openness requires 

Earlier this year, my colleague, Sarah Hinchliff Pearson, wrote that this moment requires us to update some of our mental models about open knowledge. AI did not create all of the vulnerabilities we are facing, but it has accelerated and amplified them, forcing us to reconsider some long-held assumptions about what openness requires.

One of those assumptions is about boundaries: whether openness can include conditions around reuse, such as attribution, reciprocity, or protections intended to address harmful or inequitable uses, without becoming enclosure. For a movement that has spent decades pushing against unnecessary restrictions, even talking about boundaries can be uncomfortable. But Sarah makes an important distinction. Boundaries are not necessarily barriers to openness. They can also help create the mutual commitment that makes people willing to share in the first place. 

When the conditions change, the tools may need to change

Our work on CC Signals has continued to evolve, and we’re tackling multiple considerations in parallel, including exploring approaches beyond copyright that could provide new ways to support agency and reciprocity while protecting public-interest uses.

Importantly, we’re still working to uphold attribution as a design principle for AI systems, understanding it will look different at different levels of the stack, and show up differently depending on how systems are built. 

In tandem, we’re going deep with a handful of commons-based knowledge projects that actively want to continue to share openly, but are feeling constrained by a multitude of factors. In some cases, these are financial pressures. In others, it’s loss of community contribution or pushback against these technologies. In still others, it’s the deep sense of unfairness that many are significantly benefiting from the commons without contributing enough back. We are working on these projects to better understand their needs and assess potential approaches alongside broader surveys about CC licensor sentiment. We want to ensure our work is grounded in real-world needs.

We’re also looking at what it would mean to condition bulk access to large collections of data through an experimental legal tool. Can this restore reciprocity to the ecosystem? Can this encourage contributors to continue sharing? Can we gently nudge the new world order in the direction of attribution as a standard expectation? Furthermore, what opportunities does this open up for research and open source developers globally, who all operate in varied and uncertain legal environments with regard to reuse of data for AI development?

In April and in May, we talked through this shift in experimentation, from a normative framework (which is still being considered!) to a legal tool that would balance public-interest uses with agency.

The principles remain

That brings us back to the questions we started with, that guide our work. 

• When are norms enough and when is enforcement needed? 
• Can copyright, alone, provide the balance we need? 
• Can boundaries coexist with openness? 

We believe in a thriving commons above all else. We believe that for a thriving commons to exist, reciprocity is required to sustain it. We believe that to encourage people to continue a full and sincere embrace of open sharing practices in this new world order, they have to have some agency. We continue to believe that copyright is not the hammer for every nail, and that new tools are needed. And we continue to believe that none of the experiments should come at the expense of public-interest uses, which must be strongly protected.

These principles do not always point neatly in the same direction. That is why this work takes time and many considerations. The challenge is not to choose one principle over another but rather to find ways for openness, agency, reciprocity, and public interest to coexist. 

We believe that it is possible to give meaningful agency to those who create and steward open knowledge projects while preserving openness and public-interest uses that make the commons so valuable. So we’ll continue to move carefully—at the speed of the many communities of the commons—while we try to build new structures that help the commons not just survive, but thrive, in this new world order.

Creative Commons (CC) is happy to announce the launch of a new publication entitled Guidance for Indigenous Collections and Indigenous Data: Recommendations from Creative Commons and Local Contexts. This publication is the result of a collaboration with Local Contexts, as both organizations share commitments to equitable knowledge sharing, proper attribution, and respect for diverse cultural and community protocols. It aims to support cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) in navigating the complex legal, ethical, and cultural issues regarding open access to Indigenous heritage and associated data. 

In this blog post, we offer some background to the publication, share some hot takes from the launch webinar, and invite you to learn more about this topic. 

Background

CC has long promoted equitable access to cultural heritage (most recently by leading the Open Heritage Statement), and it is part of our mission to support cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) like museums, libraries, and archives in making their heritage collections openly available in the digital environment. Many CHIs are using CC licenses and tools to communicate the copyright status of digitized cultural heritage materials and to educate the public about reuse possibilities.   

That said, we know that heritage materials’ copyright/public domain status is not the only factor to consider in order to determine access and reuse possibilities, let alone determine rightful ownership or guardianship. Indeed, various governance frameworks may determine how cultural heritage is shared and used, including Indigenous rights and interests. This is something that the Statement addresses in multiple areas: in its Preamble at paragraphs t) u) and v) as well as in Articles 16 and 17. In short, the Statement recognizes that there are other legal and ethical considerations to take into account when making heritage openly accessible, including respect for the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and for the principles of participation and free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) as well as FAIR principles and CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. 

This means that some heritage materials may not be suitable for open access. There may be legitimate reasons not to digitize, allow access, or openly share heritage with CC licenses or tools. This requires institutions to transparently engage with, consult, and involve communities of origin to enable FPIC  in decision-making processes involving access to heritage. 

At CC we had been pondering these questions for many years. We’ve explored how to ensure more participation, involvement and agency in relation to Indigenous heritage held in CHIs, and the role that CC licenses and tools can play in the process. Based on this prior work, CC was able to identify four lines of action for CHIs:

1. consider, in addition to the public domain status of a cultural element, additional legal, ethical or contractual restrictions that may govern the conditions of access, use and reuse;
2. acknowledge that access and reuse restrictions might be justified in certain situations; 
3. engage and liaise with source communities to determine a framework for digitization and making collections available; and
4. clearly communicate and educate their users about the terms of use and reuse, and any conditions thus established.

The Guidance at a glance

The purpose of this new Guidance is to advance practical understanding among cultural heritage practitioners of how open heritage interplays with the protection of Indigenous rights over their heritage and data. Following a hands-on approach, the guidance unpacks the key issues underlying equitable access to and reuse of Indigenous cultural heritage and maps out the practical steps institutions can take when engaging with Indigenous communities. 

Most importantly, it clarifies how the CC licenses and tools and Local Contexts Labels can work together towards greater cultural equity, supporting communities in sharing on terms that reflect their cultural authority, and supporting respectful cultural exchanges and intercultural dialogue. In other words, it aligns open licensing tools with Indigenous data sovereignty frameworks. This strengthens support for communities, institutions, and users navigating knowledge care and stewardship—both historical and legacy collections and those coming into institutions into the future.

The Guidance is the result of deep collaboration and exchange between CC and Local Contexts and benefited from inputs across both teams. 

Hot takes from the webinar

The webinar Responsibilities, Ethics, and Access held on September 1 was an opportunity for CC to set the scene, for the authors to present the publication and highlight key insights, and to hear from a museum’s on-the-ground perspective on adopting Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Labels. CC was thrilled to have the support of interpreter Guillermo Jauregui, who gave attendees the option of following along in English or via simultaneous Spanish interpretation (special thanks to Wikimedistas de Uruguay and Wiki Colombia for making this possible).

In addition to CC’s Dee Harris and Brigitte Vézina, the panelists were: 

• Jane Anderson, Director, Indigenous Data Law Lab, NYU; Co-Founder, Strategic Advisor, and Council Member, Local Contexts
• Maui Hudson (Whakatōhea), Director, Te Kotahi Research Institute, University of Waikato; Strategic Advisor and Council Member, Local Contexts
• Hop Hopkins, Executive Director, Local Contexts
• Corrie Roe, Director of Programs, Local Contexts
• Anne Young, Director of Legal Affairs and Intellectual Property at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Newfields

The webinar explored key questions, including:

• How do open licensing frameworks interact with Indigenous data sovereignty?
• What tools and protocols help institutions work ethically with Indigenous collections?
• How can institutions move from policy commitments to meaningful practice?

A Pyramid of Five Stages

A highlight was the pyramid overview of the five stages the Guidance recommends for recognizing Indigenous rights in cultural heritage materials (on page 13 of the Guidance), which Maui explained as building on one another rather than standing alone. Acknowledgement sits at the base (for example, many institutions already practice land acknowledgment) and is, as Maui said, “in some ways, the least you can do.” 

He said that attribution is a stronger form of that same recognition, tied to Local Contexts’ TK Labels.  Authorship goes even further, bringing the tools of copyright and CC licensing into the relationship. Access and Authority sit at the top of the pyramid, where communities take part directly in decisions about digitization, exhibition, transfer, and repatriation. The Authorship Assessment (on page 19 of the Guidance) offers institutions a step-by-step way to work through where a given piece of content actually sits. 

From there, other panelists discussed where open access and Indigenous rights pull against each other in practice.

“As open as possible and as closed as necessary”

Jane quoted the guiding phrase “as open as possible and as closed as necessary” from the Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement, and it became a throughline for the conversation. The tension between open access and Indigenous rights, she said, often comes from an unexamined presumption that everything should be open without accounting for how a collection was made, or what sensitivities sit within it. Local Contexts’ contribution is nuance about what openness means, and for whom, she said.

A Whakatōhea example

Maui shared how his tribe, Whakatōhea, has been applying the Guidance’s five-stage framework in an active relationship with the Fowler Museum at UCLA. After identifying a kaitaka (a traditional feather cloak) at the museum, tribal representatives visited in 2024, applied Local Contexts Labels to it and related items, and gifted a woven poi to travel alongside the cloak as a companion piece. That relationship is now culminating in an exhibition of Whakatōhea weaving opening October 10, 2026, for a six-month run, the first time TK Labels will appear in an overseas collection.

Newfields’ repatriation work

Anne said that Newfields’ work with Indigenous collections was based on their institutional values of stewardship and inclusivity. She also emphasized the need to move beyond action and for museums to approach ethical change in a thoughtful manner, to substantively improve inclusive practices, to defer to the lead of Indigenous communities, and to not make rushed promises that cannot be met. For Newfields, this meant deference to and collaboration with Indigenous communities. She shared that having Local Contexts Notices in their collections management system, visible in online collections portal, gave them another tool and opportunity for engagement with representatives from Indigenous communities. This served as an invitation to begin the conversation, and could be an opportunity to introduce representatives to Local Contexts as part of the consultations.

Labels are guidance, not a legal mandate

Asked how Local Contexts handles competing claims within or between communities, Jane explained that the Labels are built for multiplicity rather than a single authoritative answer. Multiple communities can apply distinct labels reflecting different perspectives on the same material. Because the Labels don’t carry legal force, they leave room for the kind of internal community governance an institution may never see from the outside. 

Panelists also clarified a point that came up repeatedly in the Q&A: institutions do not need a copyright holder’s permission before opening a conversation with a source community. That relationship-building can run alongside, not after, the legal process.

Practical next steps for institutions

Hop closed with concrete calls to action: 

• Read and share the Guidance internally and externally
• Implement Local Contexts tools alongside CC licenses since they can live in the same metadata field
• Connect with existing cultural institution networks, and most of all, 
• Pick one of the five areas of action (the pyramid above) and take a step today rather than waiting for a perfect plan. 

Corrie added that institutions should ask content management systems (CMS) and digital asset management systems (DAMS) to support a field for Local Contexts data in the rights record, and check whether the CMS or DAMS is already part of Local Contexts’ integration partner program before building something from scratch.

 

Download the Guidance

Since 2002, Creative Commons (CC) licenses have served as legally enforceable tools for digital sharing. Beyond their functionality, they also signal a commitment to open sharing in the public interest. 

CC’s general guidance has been to acknowledge and support all valid uses for each of our current six licenses and two public domain tools.  

When making decisions about which CC tool to use, we’ve long encouraged licensors to share their work under the most flexible CC license or tool applicable, while recognizing that some contexts call for added restrictions. This practice fosters robust knowledge and cultural exchange, which in turn strengthens our collective commons. Access to educational, scientific, and cultural content remains essential to society. 

However, that guidance was developed for a world of reuse by people, a premise that doesn’t fit as neatly in a world of widespread machine use of content through AI. 

So we went back to our own guidance and asked, “Does this still hold up?”

The short answer is: yes. 

You might be surprised that this guidance hasn’t substantially changed from what we’ve given in previous resources, even as AI reshapes how content and data is being used. 

This full document explains how we got here and contextualizes our guidance for use of existing licenses in this new environment. Our goal is to continue to balance public access with licensor choice, providing options even in this new complex world of sharing. Recognizing that the broader legal, cultural, and technological context will continue to change, we hope this guide serves to clarify and support, in this moment, the valuable educational, cultural, and scientific work that is produced across the globe, every day. 

We know that licensing alone cannot address all of the challenges to sharing that AI presents. Our broader work is about finding ways to support agency, attribution, and responsible reuse in a world where content and data can move through systems far beyond the reach of copyright licensing. This means developing new tools and practices while continuing to support a balance of open exchange of knowledge and culture to serve the public interest. CC Signals is one part of that work: a flexible, commons-friendly framework for communicating expectations around AI use of content and data. Just as our existing licenses offer choices between more and fewer rights reserved, CC Signals will offer a spectrum of options for when and how work is used in AI.

We encourage people to share openly using CC licenses and tools to help achieve their goals and values. Open sharing remains essential to the public-interest work of so many. Knowledge and culture are more valuable when people can use, learn from, build on, and share them.

We will be hosting two virtual events to share this updated guidance and how it affects different sectors like Education, Science, and Culture on October 14, 2026. We will start with a short presentation on the guidance and will then take questions from the audience and hear about any feedback you might have.

Register for Session A on October 14 from 9:30–10:30 am EDT with speakers Sarah Hinchliff Pearson, Brigitte Vézina, and Shanna Hollich.

Register for Session B on October 14 from 4–5 pm EDT with speakers Sarah Hinchliff Pearson, Monica Granados, and Shanna Hollich.

Visit the Licensing Guidance page.

Submit your questions and feedback about the guidance.

The Prodigious Value of Sharing Heritage

Cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) such as museums, libraries, and archives, carry the important public-interest mission of providing access to the heritage in their collections. Their mission is grounded in broad public access and extensive human engagement, the existence of a vibrant cultural commons, and heritage enjoyed as a shared resource. CHIs understand that, as a representation of who we are, heritage helps define our shared humanity and that providing access to heritage generates numerous benefits for society. As such, CHIs, as stewards of trustworthy information imbued within knowledge and culture, have a crucial role to play in growing and protecting the commons and enabling uses that benefit humanity. 

AI—the Major Disruptor 

The recent emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has had a phenomenal impact on CHIs, especially as the content they steward is accessed and used for AI development. One key question centers on the conditions, norms, and expectations governing the use of openly licensed and public domain cultural heritage materials as data for AI development. Examples include the open datasets available at AI4Culture, Hugging Face’s BigLAM, Harvard’s Institutional Books, Authors’ Alliance The Public Interest Corpus, as well as, potentially in the future, the European Books Data Commons. This is prompting discussions around who can access and reuse those data, and for what purpose. Heritage collections often yield—by virtue of the stewardship duties that underpin them—diverse, high-quality, contextualized, and well-curated datasets. While inclusion of heritage collections data could expectedly yield better, more representative AI systems, CHIs face many challenges, including: 

• Infrastructure challenges, which threaten the economic sustainability of the open infrastructure and open ecosystem, including:

• • Increased bot traffic by dominant, profit-driven AI companies putting a strain on the infrastructure and increasing knock-on costs (as reported in Are AI Bots Knocking Cultural Heritage Offline?, GLAM-E Lab);
  • No sharing back of any value generated (as discussed in “Safeguarding Cultural Rights and Redistributing the Value Generated by AI Use of Cultural Data” in the 2025 UNESCO Report of the Independent Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence and Culture).
• Commercial AI practices at odds with the values and norms of the commons, including:

• • Lack of transparency and attribution, (as tackled at the Oulu Löyly event’s working group, May the Source be with You), decontextualization (as noted in Artificial intelligence and creativity, a Report by the Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Alexandra Xanthaki), and loss of provenance trail, due to the opacity of AI models and systems; 
  • Lack of information and understanding about how the content is being reused, whether for training, inference, or search; or whether the content is being memorized by the model or retained post-training (as mentioned in the CC blog post From Signals to Infrastructure: Strengthening the Commons for the AI Era);
  • Further enclosures of the content into proprietary systems (as it happened for academic research on X/Twitter).

On the surface, this points to a conflict between the practices of commercial AI developments and CHIs’ commitment to provide open access and commons-based expectations of reciprocity and respect for the social contract underpinning sharing of heritage in the commons. It reveals how trust is slowly being eroded. And all this is happening against a backdrop of high legal uncertainty around copyright and, by the same token, the application of CC licenses and tools.

CHIs More Hesitant to Share in the Commons

We can map reactions to AI scraping along a spectrum from wide embrace to protective, defensive closing up. This is well reflected in Europeana’s report Making Public AI reality: How cultural heritage can lead the way, which identifies two groups at each end: boundary setters and opportunity seekers. The onset of AI traffic basically leaves CHIs with two options: 

• Allow unrestricted extraction by all AI developers, or
• Restrict access in blunt and overbroad ways (“defensive enclosure”).

In fact, some institutions, e.g., the National Library of the Netherlands, and Trove, the National Library of Australia’s open access API (see here and here), have responded by closing up access, revealing a paradox: CHIs, whose mission is to share their collections, end up locking up heritage. This conundrum is rattling the fragile scaffolding of open heritage, as content that would have otherwise been made available openly is now being further restricted, with access to heritage in the public interest as collateral damage. Indeed, this tension is acknowledged in the Open Heritage Statement. To recall, the concept of open heritage encourages access and reuse of heritage free of unfair, unnecessary barriers; it does recognize that openness is neither absolute nor monolithic. The Statement’s preamble paragraph (s) emphasizes ethical and responsible AI and states:  

[W]e are attentive to the challenges and opportunities brought about by emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and future technologies, and the need for more ethical and responsible artificial intelligence with respect to access and reuse of public domain heritage.

This serves as a timely reminder that when CHIs embrace openness, it is as a means to an end—not open for open’s sake. CHIs often embrace openness in accordance with its underlying principles, which recognize nuance, contextuality, and the interplay among various governance frameworks. That said, closing up completely is not the answer (it’s inefficient at best and harms public interests at worst) and risks undoing 20+ years of open heritage using CC licenses and tools. We thus need to move beyond a reactive enclosure pattern towards a more sustainable sharing equilibrium. 

From Fragmentation to a Sustainable Commons 

We know that many CHIs want to continue sharing their collections while ensuring that AI developers use them responsibly. Against this backdrop, how can CHIs make their heritage collections openly and equitably accessible in a way that aligns with their mission as responsible stewards? How can CHIs “actively shape the conditions under which their collections are accessed and reused by AI systems, without compromising their commitment to openness” as Open Future and Europeana state? More specifically, under what conditions should heritage data be made available for AI training and use? By whom? For what purpose?

As a response to these questions, CC is developing CC Signals, new tooling which will restore agency in CHIs as data stewards, while maintaining the open nature of heritage shared in the commons. CC Signals will attempt a balancing act between: 

• Preserving access to valuable heritage resources, and
• Ensuring that the institutions and communities who steward them remain active participants in shaping the AI ecosystem. 

CC Signals tooling will create a middle path between the current binary of “free for all vs defensive enclosure.” CC Signals will enable this by establishing standardized, prosocial conditions for access and reuse in an AI context. As part of this work, CC is exploring avenues for combining contract and copyright law to give CC Signals legal force. All forms of CC Signals will incorporate protections for public interest reuse.  Put simply, CC Signals would set and uphold the boundaries that the commons needs in order to thrive. CHIs are well positioned to test and implement CC Signals as part of ethical frameworks for sharing heritage in the commons for AI use. CHIs are key actors to help shape an AI ecosystem that fosters collaboration, ensures equitable access, and yields long-term public benefit. 

How You Can Help

While we don’t have all the answers yet, we know we need to start having ambitious conversations to make sure CHIs’ voices inform our increasingly AI-mediated world. Today, you can contribute to shaping the AI that works for open heritage: 

• Sign the Open Heritage Statement to show your support for ethical and responsible AI.
• Learn more about the CC signals project and/or how you can get more involved.  
• Help build and support the commons’ infrastructures and prosocial technologies that align with open values and embody the open spirit.
• Invest in the open infrastructure.

As the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) convenes its 81st session in New York in September, Creative Commons is bringing together leading civil society and digital rights organizations for “A Conversation on Collaboration,” a day-long symposium examining how to balance digital sovereignty with open collaboration.

Alongside co-organizers Public Knowledge, Ushahidi, Project Liberty Institute, the Engelberg Center, the Global Solutions Initiative, and the AI Disclosures Project, CC will be adding to conversations that governments, the European Union, and the United Nations have been having this year. 

Open source and digital sovereignty are closely related. While open source does not suffice for digital sovereignty, it is a critical building block. While definitions of digital sovereignty vary, it is generally accepted that digital sovereignty at the national level entails the ability to independently control everything from infrastructure, to hardware, to software, to data.

The day’s conversations will work through questions including:

• Where are open practices complementary, and where is there friction?
• How does this vary at different levels of the open stack—from infrastructure, to software, to data?
• What can we learn from conceptions of sovereignty at the individual and community level?
• How does Middle Power Collaboration enter the equation?

Panels will explore the full range of these questions, leaving participants with examples of open collaboration. 

Logistics

• NYU Engelberg Center, Lipton Hall at D’Agostino Hall, 108 West 3rd Street, New York.
• Monday, September 21, 2026
• 10:00 am to 3:00 pm. (doors open at 9:30 am.; lunch will be provided midday.)

Registration

• Register Here
• Space is limited. Tickets are $10 for students and $25 for general attendees.

We are excited to announce that we will be supporting four regional events for CC’s 25th Anniversary—representing regions around the world with groups who are working to advance open knowledge. We’re delighted to be working with a variety of trusted partners and look forward to sharing more about their plans and reporting back on how these events went. 

We want to thank everyone who submitted a proposal for an event. There were so many great ideas, and we hope to have more opportunities to support regional work like this in the future. 

25 Years of Creative Commons | Argentina

In Córdoba, LibreBase will celebrate 25 years of Creative Commons alongside Argentina’s longstanding cultura libre, free software, and open knowledge communities. The one-day gathering will bring together creators, educators, researchers, publishers, technologists, and activists for conversations and hands-on workshops exploring the impact of open licensing across culture, education, and knowledge. Participants can explore a showcase and digital swap of CC-licensed works, learn about remixing and Wikimedia Commons, and join a closing conversation on the future of the digital commons including emerging questions around generative AI.

Celebrating the Commons Through Indigenous Languages | India

Co-located with WikiConference India 2026 in Kochi, OpenSpeaks will celebrate Creative Commons’ 25th anniversary by centering Indigenous languages, community archives, and the knowledge commons. The celebration brings together Wikimedians, archivists, GLAM practitioners, and language activists through a six-month program of online workshops culminating in an in-person gathering, the launch of a community-led language documentation consortium, and the creation of an open educational resource for future trainers. By supporting communities to document and openly license knowledge in more than 60 languages, the event highlights how Creative Commons can help preserve cultural heritage and keep marginalized languages thriving online.

Expanding Open Horizons: Creative Commons for Indonesia’s Educators | Indonesia

The Open Horizons team will bring Creative Commons’ 25th anniversary to educators across Indonesia through a series of community-based workshops in seven cities. Teachers, university lecturers, and open education practitioners will learn about copyright, Creative Commons licensing, and creating and sharing Open Educational Resources, with local facilitators trained to carry the work forward. The program will culminate in a celebration in Yogyakarta, featuring a talk show, showcase, and workshop, with participants contributing more than 100 openly licensed works documenting education and local culture to Wikimedia Commons.

A Nigerian Celebration of 25 Years of the Commons | Nigeria

In Ilorin, the CC25 Nigeria team will bring together open knowledge advocates, librarians, educators, creatives, copyright experts, and Wikimedia contributors for a festive and participatory celebration of 25 years of Creative Commons. The event will combine a visual “Commons Gallery,” community conversations and lightning talks, recognition of Nigerian open knowledge leaders, and a hands-on workshop where participants can learn to openly license their own work. Together, participants will reflect on the past 25 years of openness in Nigeria and imagine what the next 25 years of sharing can look like.

 

If you would like to host a celebration for CC’s 25th and have your own funding to do so, we’d love to hear from you! Let us know by tagging us on social media or by sharing on our community forum Zulip! We are so grateful for the incredible work you’ve all done to amplify CC’s impact around the world, and look forward to the next 25 years of community engagement with you. 

With both Wikipedia and Creative Commons turning 25 this year, our participation in Wikimania 2026 felt especially meaningful. A quarter-century in, both organizations have evolved from scrappy experiments to global infrastructure. Our community has grown through a shared commitment to openness, access, and knowledge. The weeklong conference reaffirmed that commitment as AI is reshaping how we access knowledge and share online.

During the conference, CC hosted both a pre-conference salon celebrating our 25th Anniversary and a workshop during the main conference discussing collective action in the age of AI. CC staff also spoke on multiple panels throughout the week that addressed the effects of AI crawling on human creativity and sharing, the coordination gap between cultural institutions and generative AI, and training on CC’s global advocacy for the Open Heritage Statement.

Between all of the week’s activities—which also included attendance at numerous sessions and fruitful conversations as CC’s conference booth—it was clear that top-of-mind for Wikimedians is that amidst the rapid change brought about by AI, our shared values and collective power that once helped shape the open web must now be used to ensure that AI will serve humanity, not the other way around.

With over 1,200 attendees, Wikimania gave us space to trade ideas, learn from other open advocates, and think through emerging conversations around AI. Throughout the week, sessions and conversations highlighted both the plurality of views and challenges we face in the current ecosystem, as well as the opportunities to unite around shared goals, ensuring that open knowledge can serve as an antidote to commercialization of the commons. 

Creative Commons Salon: 25 Years of CC

We hosted a pre-conference salon, with approximately 30 attendees from Wikimedia Foundation, Arcadia, Wiki Community, CC Chapters, and more. While we kept the session playful and informal, it was a chance for us to share some updates on our broader work and allow the many smart folks in the room to chat amongst themselves during activities about the commons, CC’s 25 years, our values, and the connections we’ve made during our time helping influence the open movement.

Co-facilitators—Elliot Bledsoe, President Wikimedia Australia and Co-lead of Creative Commons Australia;  Melissa Hagemann, Director of BOAI Org; and Patricia Díaz Rubio, Executive Director of Wikimedia Chile—each spoke about their experiences becoming a part of the CC’s work at various stages in their careers and across different global contexts.

Melissa has been part of the open movement since 2001, the same year CC was founded. She helped organize the meeting that led to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, work that put her at the forefront of the knowledge commons for over two decades before she joined CC’s board in 2025.

Elliot was a student when he began asking questions about open sharing, and joined a group doing the early work of porting the CC license to the Australian jurisdictional context.

Patricia came to open licensing by way of journalism, training as a social communicator at the University of Chile before joining Wikimedia Chile in 2018 to champion open content and heritage across the region.

An interesting point that Elliot, Terri Janke—an Indigenous cultural and intellectual property lawyer—and the CC Australia team made was that for some people, AI using data without their consent or input is the first time that they have experienced something like what many First Nations and Indigenous communities have experienced for many years even before Generative AI began ingesting training data.

Sharing & Collective Action In the Age of AI

In this CC hosted workshop, we started by imagining a more hopeful future where AI better serves the public interest, picturing what that could look like in 2035, then identified some of the problems that stand between our current moment and that hopeful future. The two challenges that emerged as the most pressing were the lack of attribution and provenance in AI outputs; and the lack of choice for data stewards and creators in how their works get used.

After this exercise, participants split into two groups to begin ideating solutions—from large idealistic social shifts to smaller, more technical solutions—that would address the two most pressing challenges. Ideas ranged from things like the international council of commons arbitration to mitigate the creator choice challenge, to other methods of ensuring source attribution and fairer compensation and remuneration.

Collateral Damage? Human Creativity and Interaction in the AI Crawling Era

Anna Tumadóttir, CC’s CEO, joined Stan Adams (moderator, WMF), Mark Graham (Wayback Machine, Internet Archive), Monica Westin (Cambridge University Press), and Alek Tarkowski (Open Future) for this discussion on the impacts of crawling on human creativity and knowledge sharing, and how organizations are experimenting with technical, policy, and social responses to protect contributors and sustain participation. 

The group brought together a diverse set of organizations experiencing the impacts of large-scale AI crawling from different vantage points, and a key takeaway was just that: the views, experiences, and approaches among longtime advocates vary widely. Working on solutions that serve users globally will require multiple varied and nuanced options to alleviate the technical, legal, and social concerns raised by AI.

Bridging Institutions, Wikidata, and Generative AI: From Data Silos to Shared Infrastructure

This conversation brought together Dee Harris, CC’s Director of Communications and Engagement alongside Denny Vrandečić (Wikidata founder), Lydia Pintscher (Wikidata), João Alexandre Peschanski (WMBR), Dr. Pierre-Carl Langlais (CTO, Pleias), and Mark Graham (Director, Wayback Machine, IA)

Moderator Dr. Shani Evenstein Sigalov opened the conversation with the story about  the Paris Codex, one of four surviving Maya books. It’s digitized and has its own Wikidata entry, but its provenance, physical history, and century of research never made it into the metadata or into anything an AI system could draw on. Shani used this story to frame a shared throughline about why and how institutional knowledge breaks down on its way to AI. 

From there, each panelist held a piece of the bridge. Dee opened by talking about why cultural heritage institutions stay locked between two failing options: opening access risks being scraped into the ground by AI bots, while closing it off means disappearing from the researchers and public the collection was built to serve. João offered a counter-example, a painting rediscovered in technical storage. That framing carried into the rest of the panel, which picked up the same throughline from Wikidata’s infrastructure limits through to what AI builders actually need from institutional data to make the bridge worth crossing.

Global Advocacy: Capacity Building Training

Hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Europe, this session opened with Dee discussing the Open Heritage Coalition and the Open Heritage Statement, with a focus on relationship maintenance with institutions. Partway through, two of the Coalition’s workstream chairs—Hardiansyah, Executive Director of Wikimedia Indonesia, and Patricia Díaz Rubio, Executive Director of Wikimedia Chile—joined the conversation sharing their own experiences building relationships with institutions in their regions. Dee then walked through the Coalition’s Advocacy Toolkit, including core tools like Spectrum of Allies, stakeholder mapping, the Ladder of Engagement, and persuasive messaging through the Sparks and Hooks methodology. The session closed with a practical challenge for the Wikimedia audience: pick one institution, place it on the ladder, and identify their next step up this year.

The People

Across the panels, the chats, the laughs, and the hard questions, Wikimania 2026 reminded us that twenty-five years on, our biggest asset for the next twenty-five is the people who choose, again and again, to create the future they want rather than wait for someone else to do it.

CC’s 25th anniversary celebrations continue with an upcoming workshop on finding and reusing CC-licensed content, legal and community office hours, and more. See all of our upcoming events. We are also still accepting submissions for our 25th anniversary zine. Submit your collages, creative writing, photos, music, and more before August 15!

Further Reading

• Respecting First Nations knowledge on Wikimedia platforms – Wikimedia Australia

• Wikimedia, the commons, and the new AI knowledge loop.

• A Better Way to Give Credit: Introducing the Wikimedia Attribution Framework and API
• Who Pays for the Commons? – Paul Keller

P.S. Check out some photos from the conference on Wiki Commons!