Our Global Summit is three short months away, and today I am delighted to provide some exciting updates to our program: two keynotes (more to come), five tracks, and a one week extension for submissions (now due on Friday, February 3).

Keynotes

Our first keynote will be international copyright and intellectual property expert Ruth Okediji, William L. Prosser professor of law at the University of Minnesota. Professor Okediji is the author of several books on copyright and intellectual property and is regularly cited for her work on IP in developing countries. She is an editor and reviewer of the Journal of World Intellectual Property, and has chaired the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Committee on Law and Computers, its Committee on Intellectual Property, and its Nominating Committee for Officers and Members of the Executive Committee. In 2011-2012, she was a member of the National Academies Board on Science, Technology and Policy Committee on the Impact of Copyright Policy on Innovation in the Digital Era. In 2016, she received the prestigious McKnight presidential professorship and was a visiting professor at Harvard from 2015-2016. Ruth was also part of the process of negotiating the recently approved Marrakesh treaty; she joined the Nigerian delegation and helped lead the African Group. She has an upcoming book, Copyright Law in an Age of Limitations and Exceptions. Ruth will be speaking to our first summit goal: “To define sharing and the Commons for our generation.”

Our second keynote will be journalist and lawyer Sarah Jeong, a
contributing editor at Vice Motherboard who writes about technology, policy, and law. She is the author of The Internet of Garbage, and has bylines at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Verge, Forbes, the Guardian, and other publications. In 2017, she was named as one of Forbes’s 30 under 30 in the category of Media. Jeong graduated from Harvard Law School in 2014. As a law student, she edited the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, and worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. She was a Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale for 2016, and also currently a fellow at the Internet Law & Policy Foundry. Sarah will be speaking to our third summit goal: “To discuss the future of the Creative Commons network and grow the CC movement.”

Tracks and track leads

The CC Global Summit will be organized around five tracks:

1. Policy & advocacy (Copyright reform, advocacy strategies, OER policies, etc)
2. Community & movement (CC network strategy, appreciation culture, stronger ties for the community in different domains, mentoring, strong diversity, etc)
3. Spheres of Open (GLAM, Open Education, OER impact, open data, open design, open hardware, open agriculture/farming, etc)
4. The Future of the Commons (Future of the digital commons, future of digital archives, how does CC fit in the broader Commons movement, Commons and economy, open innovation, Open business models, etc.)
5. Usable Commons (health data, 3D printing, legal infrastructure, open infrastructures for collaboration, patent data, etc)

I would also like to congratulate the track leaders, a diverse group of experts from around the world who will be assisting in programming and curating the tracks.

If you want to get in touch with any of the track leaders, please email us at summit@creativecommons.org

Call for Submissions extended

Finally, we’re extending the call for submissions to Friday, February 3rd, so that everyone can have an opportunity to submit their proposals. You can find the Call for Submissions here.

As always, we’re available for questions, discussions, or feedback on our Slack, on social media, or at summit@creativecommons.org.

Thank you to everyone who has participated in this process, and we look forward to seeing you all in Toronto in April.