Creative Commons and the Open Policy Network are pleased to announce the first round of fellows for the Institute for Open Leadership. The Institute is a training program to develop new leaders in education, science, public policy, and other fields on the values and implementation of openness in licensing, policies, and practices. We received over…

Whether patients, or part of traffic, or exercising or simply walking with one of the behavioral trackers du jour, we are constantly giving data about ourselves and our surroundings to data collecters with few returns. From privacy regulations to bureaucratic barriers to collecting and locking up information just in case it might create monetary value…

Trung Dangy / CC BY-NC-SA If you’re a fan of photo-and-knowledge-sharing community Fotopedia, you’ve likely heard that the site is closing this Sunday, August 10. When Creative Commons heard the news, we contacted Fotopedia to ask if there were some way that we could help save all of the Creative Commons–licensed photos on the site.…

The keys to an elegant set of open licenses are simplicity and interoperability. CC licenses are widely recognized as the standard in the open access publishing community, but a major trade association recently published a new set of licenses and is urging its members to adopt it. We believe that the new licenses could introduce…

Creative Commons leaflet / Sviatlana Yermakovich / CC BY-SA Creative Commons is happy to announce the launch of CC Belarus. Youth organization Falanster is now the belarusian Creative Commons affiliate team! On August 29, the official launch of CC Belarus will take place in Minsk. For now, CC Belarus will focus on the following topics:…

(SOO logo here. Earth icon licensed CC BY by Erin Standley from the Noun Project.) After months of discussions, deliberations, and planning between CC staff, African Regional Coordinators, African Affiliate teams, and others in the open space, Creative Commons Africa is set to storm Africa by having a continent-wide launch for School of Open in…

Girl in white kimono, George Hendrik Breitner, 1894; CC0 Yesterday Europeana published a great case study documenting the experiences of the Dutch Rijksmuseum in opening up access to their collection of digital public domain images. The case study was written by Joris Pekel, community coordinator for cultural heritage at the Europeana Foundation. Over the last…

Project 365 #303: 301009 Blink And You’ll Miss It! / Pete / CC BY Another run of School of Open courses is starting up in August, September and October! The first course to kick things off is a second iteration of “Why Open?” “Why Open?” was collaboratively developed and facilitated one year ago in August…

Fiction-writing community Wattpad has upgraded to the Creative Commons Version 4.0 licenses and unveiled several improvements to its CC implementation. As of today, there are 300,000 CC-licensed stories on Wattpad, making this one of the largest adoptions of Version 4.0 to date. From the press release: (72 KB PDF) “The biggest question facing new writers…

Code4CT girls with cc4kids certificates / Kelsey Wiens / CC BY #Code4CT is a three-week training program from Innovate South Africa with twenty-four grade 10 and 11 girls from Centre for Science and Technology (COSAT) in Khayelitsha (Cape Town, South Africa). The three-week course consists of sessions on how the web works and actively participating…