Every year, Creative Commons invites community members from around the world to join us at our Global Summit. It is crucial that we come together as a community, celebrate each other, light up the commons, and collaborate. In order to reach the largest number of community members possible, we invest a significant amount of resources into our scholarship program, which this year supports 150 participants, or 38% of all Summit attendees. Summit scholarship recipients come from 59 countries and represent every world region. CC has invested more money and supported an increasing number of participants over the past few years, providing an average gift of over $600 to give $90,700 in total in 2019.

This year, we’re welcoming representatives from organizations including: Derechos Digitales, Global Voices, Kenya Copyright Board, Jordan Open Source Association, Aga Khan University, Jamlab, Visualizing Palestine, Communia, Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, ANSOL – Portuguese Association for Free Software, Karisma Foundation, SPARC Africa, and Open Culture Foundation. These professionals are experts in their fields and leaders in their communities. While the majority of our scholarship recipients come from Europe (39%), we have a relatively even spread of world regions represented, with 66% joining us from the Global South.

Below, hear from eleven scholarship recipients about their experience and background, their sessions, and what they are most looking forward to at the CC Global Summit.

Juliana Soto, CC Colombia
I’m part of the CC community in Colombia since 2010 and I’m excited to participate in this year’s CC Global Summit. I’m involved with the free culture movement in my region because I believe in collaboration, openness, and diversity and because we need to keep saying that sharing is not a crime. I’m pleased to be a speaker in four sessions during the Summit and I definitely want to highlight one: “Common strategies in Latin America” an open conversation on Saturday, May 11 at 9 am.

Subhashish Panigrahi, CC India and Bangladesh
I’m Subhashish, a documentary filmmaker and open culture activist by night and a community manager by day. Having been a part of the CC community since 2011, this is going to be my first summit and I cannot be more excited to meet in person many of mentors and old friends as well as make new friends. I am based in Bengaluru, India where I got involved with the Wikipedia/Wikimedia community and then with the CC and Openness community. I believe that knowledge only grows and spreads when shared in an open manner—CC revolutionizes the way knowledge is shared in society. On Saturday (May 11), I will be speaking about OpenSpeaks, a project that I founded to create open resources like OER, Open Toolkits, and Open Source software to help educate language archivists.

Emilio Velis, CC Salvador
I’m Emilio and I am part of the El Salvador CC Chapter. I have been involved in my local chapter since 2013, and also been part of other communities related to technology and open hardware. I am eager to be part of this summit because I’m interested in how we can work together to document and share open projects in a way that people can get the best out of it. This time, I am presenting a session this Friday at 4pm on ontologies for open hardware and how different communities are working on it. I’m looking forward to seeing you all!

Siyanna Lilova, CC Bangladesh
My name is Siyanna and I’m the Global Network Representative of the newly found CC Bulgaria Chapter. For the last year I’ve been actively involved with the copyright reform and developing the open knowledge movement in Sofia. I’m excited to attend my first Global Summit and I am eager to meet so many like minded people from around the world working together to create a more collaborative and open future.

Kin Ko, CC Hong Kong
I’m Kin Ko, a CC member from Hong Kong. Most of the time we are working with the Chinese community on open content and culture, and I’m excited to learn about the experiences from, and share our learnings with, other parts of the world.

I’ve been a user and adopter of CC because I believe in openness and diversity. In recent years I’ve taken a step forward to get involved in some volunteering works, such as joining the CC Global Summit program committee. I’m the founder of LikeCoin Foundation which is running Civic Liker, a movement to encourage people to nano tip open contents. Technically speaking, we are building LikeChain, a blockchain for open content registry. I’ll be hosting the session “Civic Liker – a movement to reward CC licensed contents with a monthly budget” on Saturday 11-11:45am. i’m easily reachable by @ckxpress – Telegram/Twitter/LINE/Messenger/WeChat and email kin@ckxpress.com

Alexandros Nousias, CC Greece
It was back in 2007 when with no resources at all I took the plane to Dubrovnik to attend the CC Global Summit. Unofficially I had been following CC since 2004 but never as part of the community. That moment changed my life as I came across with people, ideas, trends, methods and tools that would define me as a professional, a citizen and an individual. I’m Alexandros Nousias, CC Greece Legal Lead and on Friday at the Building the Commons Lightning Talks (4:30pm – 5:30pm), I will explain why after a 15 year discussion around the topic, we need to re-engineer the concept of open as it applies in a) digital creation b) you and me as data subjects and information agents, taking into account the technological advancements of now.

Mehtab Khan, Creative Commons
I’m Mehtab, a doctoral candidate at University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and a former Research Fellow at Creative Commons. I’m from Pakistan and coming to the Global Summit from San Francisco, USA. I’m excited to attend because this is the first time I’ll be attending the Global Summit. I’m looking forward to participating in discussions about critical issues in the Open Movement and meeting community members from all over the world! I’m involved with CC because I believe that knowledge should be accessible and affordable for everyone. I’ll be a part of two sessions on May 9: “Do you use OpenGLAM? Help review shared #OpenGLAM principles” at 9:00 am, and “Traditional Knowledge and the Commons: What’s Next?” at 10:45 am.

Kamel Belhamel, CC Algeria
I’m Kamel, coming from Algeria, I’m member of the Membership Committee of the Creative Commons Global Network Council. I’m excited to attend CC Global Summit 2019 – Lisbon, Portugal. I’ll be a part of a session on Open Access Scholarly Publication in Algeria. Also, I’ll attend Opening Africa , this collaborating session by CC Africa Chapters and individuals, which will highlight various achievements and developing inter-regional links for collaboration across Africa.

Nour El Houda, CC Algeria
I’m Nour El Houda, coming from Algeria, I’m a member of CC Algeria Chapter. I’m excited to attend CC Global Summit 2019 – Lisbon, Portugal. I’ll be a part of a session on Ethics of Openness Lightning Talks on Thursday, May 9 from 11:00am – 11:25am.

Paula Eskett, CC New Zealand
Kia ora, I’m Paula from Christchurch, New Zealand. This year will be my 3rd CC Summit. I’m really excited because I’m in a new role within libraries in NZ (managing a district of public libraries) with a large team and have real opportunities and mandate to introduce and guide others in to our world of Open and CC. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with old friends, and making new connections and learning. I’ll be running a session on Day 1 at 1pm: Stories and SDG’s from the libraries of Aotearoa NZ. I’m the current president of our national library association LIANZA, and proud to share the way our libraries are a national force for equity, openess,community building and helping to bring to life the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) of the UN2030 agenda across New Zealand.

Veethika Mishra, CC India
I’m Veethika Mishra, and I attended CC Global Summit the previous year (in Toronto) to propagate the idea of Openness in Design. After interacting with the amazing set of people at the conference, and learning about their passion and approach to make the world a better place, I decided to contribute to the movement actively. I’m from Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, and I work as an Interaction Designer.