Event Details

Twenty-five years ago, Creative Commons gave the world a new vocabulary for sharing through licenses and tools that made openness legible, legal, and actionable. What began as an act of infrastructure became a movement with cultural heritage institutions around the world opening their collections.

In the early 2000s, a handful of trailblazing galleries, libraries, archives, and museums made a radical choice: to digitize their collections and release them freely, without restriction, to anyone in the world. There was no playbook. There was no mandate. There was only a conviction that cultural heritage, the shared memory of humanity, belonged to everyone, and that the internet had made it possible, for the first time, to act on that conviction at scale.

This panel traces that origin story. How did the open culture movement begin? Who were the institutions and individuals willing to go first, and what did they risk? How did CC licenses and public domain tools become the infrastructure that made openness not just a philosophy but a practice? And what did twenty-five years of building this movement teach us about what it takes to change not just institutions, but the systems that govern them?

This is the story of a movement that started with a few courageous institutions and a set of powerful legal tools that grew into a global force for equitable access to our shared human heritage.

Panelists:

• Medhavi Gandhi, Founder of the Heritage Lab
• Merete Sanderhoff, Curator and senior advisor of digital museum practice at SMK
• Andrea Wallace, UK Director of the GLAM-E Lab
• Giovanna Fontenelle, Program Officer, Content Enablement at Wikimedia Foundation
• Brigitte Vézina, moderator, Director of Policy and Open Culture at Creative Commons
• Dee Harris, moderator, Director of Open Culture Storytelling