CC’s community grew up around the licenses, but over the past decade it has evolved into a powerful and diverse movement of interests and areas of work including open policy, open education, access to research and data, and cultural sharing. While those communities grew naturally, CC has never had a model for collaboration, shared goal-setting, and mobilizing action. The new network strategy, for the first time, creates a simple structure to enable global collaboration and action.

The Global Network will identify and collaborate on a series of shared interests and priorities, which we have called Platforms. A Platform is an area of work, a space for individuals and institutions to organize and coordinate themselves across the broad network. It’s open to anyone inside and outside the Creative Commons Global Network to support, share experience and collaborate on its goals and objectives. Through Platforms, we want to initiate strategic collaboration between network members that will have worldwide impact.

We are using the opportunity of this Global Summit to open the conversation about designing Platforms in several ways. On Friday, just after the opening, we will host a session called Programs for the New CC Global Network: How Can We Work Together? (Friday 13:30 – 15:00), where we expect to talk about the future work our community would like to be engaged to work in the future and have a big picture conversation about it. On Sunday (13:30 – 15:30), there will be a session called A Platform for Big Thinking about CC, a follow up session to the first, where we expect to think really big about the Future of the Commons, both in terms of challenges surrounding CC but also the Digital Commons.

Then, we will have specific sessions on Platforms related to the Open Education Platform (Friday 15:00 – 16:50), Copyright Reform (Saturday 15:30 – 18:00) and Open GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) (Sunday 13:30 – 15:30). And, strongly connected with this community-driven effort, we also scheduled a specific session on Building a culture of appreciation for the new Global Network (Saturday, 16:00 – 17:30) where we expect to open a conversation about requirements, needs and tools we would like to see to make our community strengthen and grow healthy and diverse.

While participating in the Summit, and especially leading sessions, please keep in mind the possibility of establishing a platform around a shared issue of interest. We have prepared guidelines for people interested in proposing a platform.

The CC Summit is an exciting opportunity for global collaboration and action. Summit participants will begin to share their goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics and lead a global conversation towards a stronger commons and community through an open invitation that starts at Summit, but will continue through the year, and beyond.

The Summit is the beginning of this conversation as well as the beginning of a big experiment in working together. By proposing a platform early on, you can join this early phase of testing how platforms will function. If you have ideas about CC platforms, please share them on social media using #ccplatforms hashtag and in our Slack. We would be very happy to see a broad range of platforms being discussed. Join us.