Another End of Year list, but one which I hope you’ll take to heart: the amazing accomplishments of the volunteers running School of Open programs around the world, comprised of the Creative Commons, P2PU, Mozilla, and related open communities.

SOO logo on Holiday Wreath by Kelly Teague under CC BY-SA

This year, our community:

• Gave School of Open a facelift
• Established a community blog
• Tried out a new community discussion forum called Discourse
• Developed and ran online courses on Why Open?, Open Research, Copyright 4 Educators, Creative Commons for K-12 Educators, Writing Wikipedia Articles, ABC of Copyright for Librarians in Latin America, and more
• Launched School of Open Africa with nine programs in four countries
• Ran a second Open Educational Resources (OER) Summer Camp on Luxi Island in China
• Celebrated the Web We Want through a day of awareness, learning and practice for open licensing and its relationship to free culture in Colombia
• Hosted Maker Parties across Africa and combined CC and Mozilla communities to further open education work at Mozfest
• Teamed up with Wikipedians to bolster articles about all things related to open education
• Launched a series of OER awareness workshops for librarians and academics in Romania
• Developed Creative Commons for Kids in South Africa
• Activated the next generation of open advocates in Africa through the Kumusha bus
• All the while bolstering each other up in our meta-community full of beautiful faces

For 2015: Some changes are on the horizon. Mainly, we’ll be working to revamp our website to better support our volunteers wherever they are based, streamline the process for volunteers who want to run their own online courses, and re-strategize around what it means to develop and run a School of Open program. Above all, we want to increase our impact by combining forces with all open web and education advocates who are being leaders in their regions. Stay tuned…

On behalf of our intersecting communities, CC wishes you a wonderful holiday and a Happy New Year!

See how far we’ve come:

• What we did in 2013
• Highlights from the Class of 2012