In the unlikely chance you haven’t noticed, it’s Election Day in the United States. For the past few months, we’ve been sharing resources from the commons to help you get informed, get excited, and most importantly, get voting!

Below are some of our favorite election related resources from this year from the commons:

• Our profile of Creative Commons political photographer Gage Skidmore
• How to Vote in Every State: A project by Vlog Brothers
• Get Your Friends to Register to Vote: by CC board member Ben Adida
• The Conversation’s CC-licensed news coverage
• Internet Archive’s Political Ad archive
• An open source dataset of polling information from Pierre-Antoine Kremp
• We’ll miss President Barack Obama’s often CC-licensed Flickr page
• The Wikipedia articles that list the political stances of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
• Coral Project’s open source “Tell our next president” feature to encourage voters to share their feelings about the election.
• Emergency Kitten, a website that delivers a CC licensed photo of a kitten every time the page is refreshed, which is a perfect antidote to election news fatigue.

Open knowledge and intellectual freedom have been key issues this primary season. Creative Commons is proud to provide the tools to release the world’s knowledge through equitability and accessibility. We stand with the American people as they cast their votes today.

The post Election resources from the Commons: A guide for Election Day appeared first on Creative Commons.

According to Arturo Rodolfo Sanchez, a member of the ATLAS community and outreach team, “The large hadron collider is running now at 13 TeV. This is an energy level never seen before in a collider.” This exciting development is built on the power of open science – at ATLAS, data sharing and an open, innovative approach to information collaboration has become a fundamental part of this important scientific community.

This year, ATLAS decided to release the data from 100 trillion proton-proton particles to the public under CC0, the first release of 8 TeV data. More than 3000 scientists from 174 countries work on ATLAS, and more are joining every day. At the CERN open data platform educational portal, scientists, educators, and science enthusiasts can access the work of thousands of scientists working together to hunt for the Higgs-Boson particle and other important scientific discoveries.

Sanchez’s vision of science is open, and he believes that CERN’s is as well – working with Creative Commons, he describes a new kind of research organization built with the power of community. Though the 7000 ton ATLAS detector in the large hadron collider lives “100 meters below a small Swiss village,” the data moves far beyond the confines of the institution, providing insights and experimentation to the entire world.

This interview was conducted with the assistance of Noam Prywes, a post-doctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Why is open data and open science important to CERN? Why have you chosen to use CC0 for this dataset in particular?

Open Data, open software and open hardware are very important for us! It is part of our policy in the ATLAS Collaboration and the other Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. This is important for us because we are a scientific community and our main goal is to look for answers as humankind, not as an institution. We are also funded by taxpayers – CERN as an organisation and facility, and the experiments like ATLAS (part of the LHC) use public sector funding.

Independently of the member country, most of them have as policy/law to publicly release any final result, publication, dataset, and conclusion that public funding research institutions generate. In ATLAS, we develop resources (datasets and tools) that can be used mainly for educational projects carrying out by ATLAS and not-ATLAS members. Of course, this is not a restriction! We don’t want to limit the use that a person (educator, scientific, artist, etc…) could have with the data.

There are a lot of people out there with many different ways of thinking, so who knows what can be possible or not possible with those resources? This is why we went for the CC0 license for the datasets released by ATLAS on its Open Data project. The same has been done by the CERN Open Data project. I can complement my answer by mentioning several projects from CERN or CERN groups:

• Root: A modular scientific software framework
• CERN Open Data project for the release of experiment data and resources
• ATLAS OpenData and educational resources, our platform!
• CERN Open Hardware Project
• Invenio and Indico: Very successful projects born at CERN: and
• Open Lab: Another training and educational project where public and private sector come together

What’s the relationship between your initiative and other open data and open access initiatives in scientific communities? How are you working together? Is there anything unique about your relationship to open access that’s different from other open science initiatives?

As you can see, the CERN community is keen on the involvement of a high number of people, countries, institutions and research fields involved. Therefore, any project that includes two or more groups working at CERN or in CERN-hosted experiments is already an international enterprise!

Let me give you the ATLAS example: we are an experiment with ~3000 members coming from more than 120 universities around the world. Many of them are senior professors in their home institutions. Thousands of students can be or are already involved in ATLAS educational, training or outreach activities. This leaves us with the possibility of having a professor in a North American university using public data to write some code to train her new master’s student. At the same time, an ATLAS college in a German university is running a complete laboratory course in particle physics using the ATLAS public data together with a combination of public software and custom code. Meanwhile, a group of Latin-American ATLAS members are presenting public seminars and running exercises for high school students using public apps and public ATLAS data.

Since CERN is so international, how do you choose how you release data and publish research? Is open access a more acute concern because of national boundaries? What about funding sources? Are there countries that demand open access as a precondition for money? Has that influenced scientists from different locales?

The way to release data is in a worldwide common framework: on a web platform, with a lot of files to create the best documentation possible.

This last step is in fact the most difficult one, so, we run local trainings as well, with different audiences in order to get feedback and repair the holes and make the web and user interfaces better every day.

The fact that CERN is a multinational organisation with so many funding governments and institutions consolidate the openness of the research and the resources products of those. Many legal aspects are taking into account and I am do not know all the details, but the spirit is to share and be as useful as possible.

CERN is in such an individual position in terms of the science it does, so what kind of innovative measures are you taking to publicize this science? How are you highlighting the work that scientists and communities are doing with the published data?

We have been working very hard in the communication side by using every possible media out there to communicate results, activities, tutorials, and even how physicists spend their time. This is done by the CERN community and included in each of the experiments now. Our presence in social media is strong (at least for a scientific community!) and more and more people are aware of what we do and why it is important. Students around the world come to visit CERN and the experiments, and some others visit the place virtually. In the case of the data, the challenge right now is to use the power of the media and the web in order to explain how to use it. Developing easy but still powerful user Interfaces is the key! With a lot of energy and ideas we are trying to reach more people every day, even with the limited resources that we have.

I am reaching the end with the beginning of this story – the ATLAS Open Data platform. In the outreach group we are learning and developing tools and protocols that help us disseminate the data publicly, trying to prove to ourselves and the members of the experiment that there is interest to use those datasets and resources by the international community.

Our aim is getting more data out there! We want to make that data and tools available for the world to see.

The post Making data and tools available for the world to see: Arturo Sanchez of CERN on why ATLAS uses CC0 data appeared first on Creative Commons.

It’s Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual week-long event that highlights the importance of sharing scientific and scholarly research and data. The goal is to educate people on the benefits of open publishing, advocate for changes to policy and practice, and build a community to collaborate on these issues. This year’s theme is open in action.

Scientist Erin McKiernan practices Open Science with a capital “O.” She is a researcher, an advocate for scientific diversity, and an educator on a mission to make science more inclusive and supportive. Erin’s work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Computational Neuroscience, and she has written book chapters and articles for a variety of media, including Scientific American and The Guardian. Her Shuttleworth Foundation sponsored project “Why Open Research?” is a lighthearted, educational take on the importance of open access scientific research. Erin lives and works in Mexico, where she is a professor in the Department of Physics, Biomedical Physics Program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

You are an international researcher who advocates for open science, open data, and other open systems. What initially interested you about working in research and education outside of the mainstream academic publishing climate? What drives you to continue doing this work?

I first became interested in open access while working as an adjunct professor at the University of Puerto Rico. I worked at one of the smaller campuses and we had limited access to the scientific literature. Struggling to access articles on a daily basis really puts the problem in perspective. Even more frustrating was watching my students struggle to access the literature they needed for their classes and research projects. I saw how it hindered their learning. Around the same time, I joined Twitter and began to connect with people in the open advocacy space. Through reading their tweets and blogs, I learned more about open access and open science in general, and found a very supportive community.

For the last four years, I have worked as an educator and researcher in Mexico, where we have similar problems with a lack of access to scientific information as those I saw while working in Puerto Rico. While I’m lucky to work now at a large public institution with relatively good access to the scientific literature, many other scientists and students in Mexico struggle every day to access the information they need. This, along with a belief that increasing transparency makes for better science, is what drives me to continue my open advocacy work.

The theme of this year’s Open Access week is “Open in Action.” How do you put “open in action?” How can other scientists and researchers put “open in action” through their research, teaching, and educational activities?

In 2014, I publicly pledged to publish my work only in open access journals. Since then, I have expanded this pledge and have committed to share not only my published articles but also my preprints, code, data, and laboratory notebooks when possible. You can find my full pledge here.

I understand not all researchers are comfortable with this level of sharing, especially at first, but I think all researchers can commit to simple actions. For example, you can upload author versions of your published articles to open repositories to ensure all your work is accessible regardless of the venue in which it was originally published. Around 80% of journals currently allow this type of self-archiving. Another simple action educators and researchers can take is to share their slide decks from classes or seminars on open platforms like Figshare. As researchers take these simple steps and start to see the benefits, I hope they’ll be encouraged to take even bigger steps (like data sharing) in the future.

What can open advocates do to begin to fix scholarly publishing?  

One of the best things advocates can do is lead by example. If you are a researcher and believe in the importance of open research, then share your articles, code, data, and tell people about your choices and successes. As people see you sharing and being successful, it will inspire them to do the same.

Another thing advocates can do is help educate their students and colleagues. Ask your colleagues where they plan to publish and why they chose that venue. Tell them about open publishing options in their field. Do this respectfully — the idea is not to preach or push, but rather to give them options. Many researchers are happy to explore new, more open venues, but simply aren’t aware of the wide variety of platforms that exist for sharing their work.

Finally, if you sit on employment, grant review, or promotion and tenure committees, speak out about how the current emphasis on journal-level metrics, like impact factor, is hurting researchers and not always rewarding the best science. Encourage these committees to look at article-level metrics instead, and to value the importance of open publishing and science communication.

Your project “Why Open Research” provides a long list of reasons why open publishing is good for researchers, their career, and the future of science. What are the some of the benefits you’ve seen personally from your work in open?

Yes, I built Why Open Research? as a fun and visual way to show researchers the benefits to them of sharing their work. In addition, together with an excellent group of collaborators in the open advocacy and research space, I also recently published an article in the journal eLife called “How open science helps researchers succeed.”

I would say the biggest way in which I’ve benefitted from openly sharing my work is increased visibility. I’ve been able to reach a larger audience that I would have if I published only in closed-access journals. People have reached out to me through my blog and Twitter to discuss my work, and even talk about potential collaborations. This increased visibility is particularly important for researchers in the early stages of their career, who are looking to build a name for themselves. I think open research has helped me do that. Another way I’ve benefitted is receiving feedback. I’ve put preprints out and received detailed feedback from others in the field that helped me improve my manuscripts before journal submission. In my view, the more eyes on my work before final publication, the better. Open platforms have helped me get more eyes on my work.

How can other researchers be better advocates for open science and open data? How can the scientific community come together to support each other in this worthy goal?

Again, it’s important to start with your little corner of the world. Begin by sharing your own work and speaking to your colleagues about your choices. Establish a set of best practices for managing and sharing data from your lab, use electronic notebooks that can be easily shared, tweet and blog about your research. Most importantly, teach your students to do the same. In this way, we ensure that the next generation of researchers sees open research practices as the default way of doing science rather than the exception to the rule.

The scientific community as a whole is diverse. We have people working all over the world, and under very different conditions. We have to be aware of these different conditions (limited or no access to high-speed internet, limited financial resources for research, institutions with varying levels of infrastructure), and think about how some of the solutions we propose for promoting open science and open data may be affected by these factors.

It is important that researchers from these countries and institutions be given a chance to voice their specific concerns when we’re discussing how to move forward. Some of the most relevant and innovative solutions for improving science and science communication are likely to come from developing countries.

The open advocacy space is perhaps even more diverse, with not only researchers at a variety of institutions, but also librarians, scholarly communication experts, policy makers, publishers, etc. I think the most important thing we can do is keep talking, and create more spaces (conferences, conference calls, community events) where we can overlap and talk about the unique challenges facing each of our communities.

The post Supporting a diverse community of scientists: How Erin McKiernan puts “Open in Action” appeared first on Creative Commons.

Curious about what’s going on with European copyright? Need a refresher on what the Commission’s new copyright proposal means for you? Don’t worry! We’re here to help!

• Read our letter and blog post to encourage an improved proposal.
• Check out our summary of the proposal from last month.
• Follow our friends at Communia and read their policy recommendations for a more humane copyright in the EU
• Participate in Mozilla’s #cczerohero campaign by uploading your photos to Flickr with a CC0 license

If you are able to come, the Creative Commons community will be at the Mozilla Festival in London from October 28-30.

Come find us! Tweet @creativecommons during the event or follow the #mozfest hashtag to learn about how we’re coming together for copyright reform in the EU.

Let’s be sure the changes to EU copyright don’t break the web. Stand with us and our partners if you believe it’s time to #fixcopyright.

The post Commons-friendly EU copyright at MozFest 2016 appeared first on Creative Commons.

Wikipedians are an integral part of the CC Community, and as a key Wikipedian in Wiki Loves Women, WikiAfrica, and Wiki Loves Africa, Isla Haddow-Flood’s work is a crux for that community.

Isla’s accomplishments with these projects are self-evident: a Wikipedian since 2011, she has been integral in illuminating the content gaps and voices of women, Africans, and other marginalized groups within Wikipedia. As the former project manager for WikiAfrica and current volunteer, Isla’s work seeks to create content for all Wikipedians around the world and raise up the voices of the many, rather than the few.

Why is it important for more women to be involved with Wikipedia? What kinds of benefits does a more balanced gender dynamic bring to Wikipedia?

A lot of research has been done into the systemic bias behind the skewed content on Wikipedia. This is especially profound in relation to both content about Africa and content about women. Only 16% of the biographies on the English Wikipedia are about women and on English Wikipedia alone there are, on average,100 times more geotagged articles relating to France than articles similarly geotagged to the continental space of Africa.

There has been similar research done on Wikipedia contributors. The demographic of voluntary contributors has obvious implications on the makeup of the content, and the earlier systemic bias of the content makes sense because only 25% of edits to subjects about the Sub-Saharan region come from within that region and that less than 20% of (all) Wikipedia contributors are female. One analysis of content shows that only 12% of biographies in sub-saharan Africa are about women.

When the the collective impact of content and contribution gaps from women and Africans are combined, it creates not just a gap but an abyss. Women in Africa are some of the most marginalized groups in the world and Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that is meant to reflect the knowledge of all geographies, genders, interests, cultures and perspectives equally and this is not currently happening. The status quo will remain the same until people across Africa, especially women, see themselves and their reality truly and truthfully reflected – until they see they have an equal standing in the world and that they can be part of the global conversation and they see that Wikipedia is relevant to them, only then, will they can contribute their knowledge.

Why are you involved with Wiki Loves Women, WikiAfrica, and Wiki Loves Africa? What kinds of projects or events have been the most exciting to organize?

I have been a registered Wikipedian since 2011 and have been involved in supporting the WikiAfrica movement. WikiAfrica is an international project that encourages individuals, interested groups and organisations to create, expand and enhance online content about Africa.

As part of this movement I have partnered with people passionate about the Open Movement, including Florence Devouard, Iolanda Pensa, and Kelsey Wiens on a number of innovative projects in collaboration with several organisations. The interventions have been aimed at activating communities, capacitating volunteers, and encouraging the ‘liberation’ of content from organizations across Africa on to Wikipedia.
Wiki Loves Africa is an annual photographic competition where people contribute photos or media of that year’s specific theme. This year is Music and Dance running from the 1st December 2016 to 31st January 2017. We’ve previously covered Cuisine (2014) and Cultural fashion and adornment (2015). Photography is one of the easiest ways to contribute to Wikipedia via Wikimedia Commons. It requires a good eye, an amazing subject, and an understanding of Creative Commons licences. It has been a successful project that sprung from the belief that there is so much to celebrate on a continent that is so visually and culturally rich.

The Wiki Loves Women project seeks to fill two major subject gaps – women and Africa. These gaps exist in content on these two themes, but also in terms of participation in the editorial level. It currently takes place in Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut.

What compels you to keep doing this work?

Because it is important, and because I love it! For a number of challenging reasons, Africa just doesn’t play in the same knowledge space that other regions do. This has to change, and with technology, it can. To do this,

It is important for people from Africa to tell their own stories: changing the narrative, shaking up stereotypes and sharing what they want to think, and how they want to feel, about being African.

And one way to do this is to share our complex, amorphous reality, both past and present, with the world on Wikipedia.

How does Wiki Loves Women and Wiki Loves Africa bring the offline online?

Both projects work at developing the community of volunteers around the content through training, events and contests.Wiki Loves Women has an amazingly varied array of events offline and online and interventions that the teams runs in the four countries that it is currently active in. You can see the range through the blog posts that are featured on our website.
Every year for Wiki Loves Africa, we reinforce the outreach of the project by supporting focus countries. These countries introduce and train interested individuals to contribute by arranging launch events, photo-hunts, upload, and prize-giving events.

For both projects it is about developing people’s passion about the world they live in, their immediate surroundings, traditions and issues. It is also about widening their understanding of copyright and copyleft – and introducing them to the Open Movement, specifically to Creative Commons to provide a slow yet fun, exciting, and social immersion into the world of Wikipedia. We work closely with Wikimedia volunteers and Usergroups, who in turn work with the CC affiliates and Open Street Maps (where possible) across Africa to ensure that we are all helping each other, and in some cases our activities have supported affiliate development and growth in countries, such as in Ethiopia.

How do you work with varying connectivity as well as offline community building for an online community?

The issue about connectivity and data is a very real one. We have come up with a solution, WikiFundi, that is funded by the Orange Foundation and currently being developed. It should be rolling out to the community in early 2017. WikiFundi is an offline editable environment that provides a similar experience to editing Wikipedia online. WikiFundi allows for training on, and contribution to, Wikipedia when technology, access and electricity outages fail or are not available at all.

To celebrate the launch of WikiFundi, in early 2017 there will be the WikiChallenge African Schools that encourages schools in eight countries in Africa to compete by writing Wikipedia articles about their city, town, village, suburb or local landmark using the WikiFundi software. The competition is a fun introduction to writing Wikipedia articles and will add information about Africa to the global online encyclopedia. Wikipacks, that includes WikiFundi and training resources and information on Wikipedia and Creative Commons, will also be distributed to the Wikimedia volunteer groups in early 2017.

Get involved!

Wiki Loves Women

• Website: www.wikiloveswomen.org
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WikiLovesWomen
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/WikiLovesWomen
• Goethe-Institut page: www.goethe.de/wikiloveswomen
• On Wikipedia:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wiki_Loves_Women

Wiki Loves Africa

• Website: http://wikilovesafrica.org
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wikilovesafrica
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/wikilovesafrica
• On Wikimedia Commons:
  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Africa_2016

WikiAfrica Movement links

• Website: http://www.wikiafrica.net/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WikiAfrica
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/WikiAfrica
• WikiFundi: http://www.wikifundi.org/

The post Isla Haddow-Flood on how Wikipedians are changing the narrative around Africa appeared first on Creative Commons.

While IRC has been a good choice for us in the past, Slack is more mobile friendly and integrates with the workflows of users who are using Slack for other projects, creating a more robust (and chatty) community. In the words of Open edX, who made a similar community decision last year, “Slack essentially presents a beneficial network effect: it is easier to integrate our Slack team into your workflow, rather than adding another tool.”

In addition, Slack scores high for accessibility, public familiarity, and adoption. If you want, you can still get in touch with us via IRC. We built a bridge from IRC to Slack so you can continue hanging out in #creativecommons on Freenode if that’s where you feel most comfortable. We’ll also continue to monitor the IRC channels for those who come looking for support.

This won’t replace our other methods of communication, like email lists and social, but it will give us a great tool to engage existing and new communities. It’s important to us that we have an open space for collaboration, and we hope you’ll join and invite others as well.

We encourage you to join at https://slack-signup.creativecommons.org/ (you’ll be automatically validated via your email), and come say hi in the #general channel. We’ll be adding channels as communities form around particular topics or
areas of interest, so please do start a conversation about what you want to
see in our Slack organization.

Questions? Feel free to ping us on social or send an email to info@creativecommons.org.

The post We’re on Slack! Join us! appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today Vice President Biden announced a comprehensive plan for his Cancer Moonshot initiative, which seeks to achieve a decade’s worth of progress on cancer research in five years.

As an invited participant in the Moonshot, we commend the Vice President’s radical approach to solving this crucial issue. In April, Biden referenced Ryan Merkley’s viral article in Wired, citing a need for better collaboration and the sharing of cancer data. Today’s announcement underscores the initiative’s commitment to open data, open access, and research. The “audacious, creative, and disruptive approaches” to innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and information sharing through crowdsourcing are a direct result of the advocacy work from the open community.

The Cancer Moonshot report acknowledges existing challenges to making progress against cancer, including “a lack of open access and rapid sharing of research data and results.” Biden’s report recognizes the need for open collaboration, open access to research and data, and the need for education and incentives to change existing models.

In June, we made four recommendations to the Cancer Moonshot to accelerate the speed and probability for new cancer treatments and cures:

1. Make open access the default for cancer research articles and data.
2. Take embargo periods on research articles and data to zero.
3. Build and reward a culture of sharing and collaboration.
4. Share cancer education and training materials as open educational resources.

As Biden writes, the Moonshot seeks to “unlock scientific advances through open publication,” including the creation of a Genomic Data Commons, which has already accumulated 32,000 patients in a few months. The Genomic Data Commons holds great potential for a more open data landscape and the number of people served has already proven its efficacy.

At today’s presentation, Vice President Biden reiterated the importance of access to information about cancer for researchers, doctors, patients, and families. Further, he said that cancer has now reached an “inflection point,” and that the research and treatment system needs to be reimagined for the 21st century.

It is crucial that this transformation involves reforms that truly support free, immediate open access to publicly-funded cancer research and data. We believe that open sharing and collaboration can begin to address many of the inefficiencies in the existing research and dissemination cycle that the report addresses and seeks to solve.

As the Moonshot Initiative continues, we look forward to joining the many voices involved in order to ensure that we reach our shared goal: Eliminating cancer within our lifetime.

The post Help us make a giant leap against cancer: Biden presents five-year Cancer Moonshot plan appeared first on Creative Commons.

As connectivity continues to increase globally, more people than ever live in a ubiquitous and nonstop media environment. In light of these changes, the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s work has never been more important. Founded four years ago after the exposure of government collusion to create a financial blockade against Wikileaks, the Freedom of the Press Foundation develops tools and processes to advocate for journalists to fight against censorship to call for more transparency and accountability in both government and media.

From technical tools that allow news organizations to support the privacy and security of their sources to their public work for a more engaged and political press, the Freedom of the Press Foundation has received international acclaim for their important work in both disrupting and supporting both traditional and alternative journalism.

Trevor Timm is the co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Learn more about how you can support their work at their website.

How does the Freedom of the Press Foundation work to create a more equitable world? How can openness drive significant change both in the press and the work of your organization?

Our overarching mission is to protect and defend journalism that’s dedicated to transparency and accountability. A lot of that work revolves around government transparency and wanting to help journalists and whistleblowers connect in a more secure environment so that information that the public should know but the government’s keeping secret can eventually become public and we can force a more open and transparent government.

This happens in a variety of ways. We advocate for reforms to the Freedom of Information Act. We build tools like visual security tools to help journalists and sources communicate securely. We train journalists how to use encryption tools in the newsroom and we have a variety of lawsuits going on right now dealing with government transparency.

When you say “government transparency” do you mean specifically in the realm of journalism or do you work for transparency in other realms as well?

We certainly focus on [other forms of transparency]. For example, our two lawsuits right now involve transparency as relates to journalists specifically, but what we want to do is facilitate journalists to make government more transparent across different fields. While our specialty area definitely involves journalists themselves, the idea is that journalists are often the conduit for accountability inside government whether we’re talking about the environment or civil rights or healthcare. We want to make sure that journalists can do their job without interference to the best of their abilities.

You work a lot with encryption and privacy tools. How can organizations that are concerned with transparency be transparent and also work smart in terms of privacy and encryption?

There are a few cases where privacy rights and free speech rights collide and these are difficult questions that I think a lot of people have strong opinions on. When we’re talking about the government, I think that they are held to a higher standard of openness than private citizens.

We are generally in favor of strong privacy rights for private individuals, especially vis a vis the government, but when we’re talking about government officials it’s different. The apt term is the difference between secrecy and privacy. Government officials essentially work for the public and so they should be transparent as possible about what they’re doing behind closed doors. Unfortunately, a lot of officials in the United States government have an opposite view—that it’s okay to violate the privacy of private citizens but it’s okay for the government to keep information secret.

The biggest display of this is in the past few years has of course been the Snowden revelations. Edward Snowden worked with reporters to expose a government mass surveillance system that essentially nobody outside of government knew about. This meant that the government was essentially vacuuming up all sorts of information from private citizens yet keeping this information completely secret. We think that principal should be flipped on its head. That its the private citizens that deserve privacy and it’s the government that should be much more transparent about what they’re doing.

At Creative Commons, one of our tenets is to work open and to work transparent. How can open organizations support your work in privacy and encryption for journalists and for publishing and for creation?

The principles of openness are embedded in everything we do.

For example, our high profile work on SecureDrop, which is essentially a document submission system for news organizations that allows sources to securely send them documents and information. All of our tools are completely open source and free software. We think when you’re talking about security tools it’s incredibly important for the code to be completely open so that other outside experts can make sure that the tools are actually living up to their promises.

For us, Creative Commons licenses are incredibly important for the advocacy we do as well. All of our blog posts are licensed with Creative Commons licenses by default and it allows us to be able to get our message out a lot more broadly because different websites are allowed to essentially repost everything that we post on our website. CC allows our message to spread farther and we’re not losing anything by doing so.

When it comes to copyright and censorship, oftentimes we see ourselves as an advocate for news organizations to be more open licensed as well. Copyright claims can often lead to censorship in a lot of cases when information is clearly newsworthy and should be shared as widely as possible. While Creative Commons and Freedom of the Press Foundation are working on two different tracks, we certainly see those tracks as parallel.

How do you feel like other journalists and media outlets could use CC in their work?

I think especially for non-profit news organizations, which there are more and more of these days, it’s more important for them to have their stories be read as widely as possible than it is for them to get clicks on a particular website.

By licensing stories with CC licenses, this is an incredible way to have your stories published on many more platforms and also retain the recognition and respect you get for producing journalism in this way.

I’m not sure how much news organizations think about this. Unfortunately, a lot of news organizations and their lawyers are often maximalist when they think about copyright solely because that’s the only way that they’ve ever done things. I hope that with more news organization’s disrupting the space that people will see that being copyright maximalists can actually be a detriment and not necessarily a help to getting the word out about the work.

Switching gears a bit, one aspect of the Freedom of the Press Foundation that’s particularly interesting is how you utilize crowd’s funding in your work to support other organizations. Do you feel like this model is extensible to other non-profits and do you feel like other non-profits can support each other in this way? How do you balance your own funding needs in conjunction with supporting other organizations?

That’s a really good question. I don’t think that crowdfunding is necessarily a long-term answer for sustaining news organizations that may employ dozens of people.

I think it is a great way to (excuse the expression,) kick start an organization that may not have a lot of notoriety. It can give new organizations seed funding to get themselves on their feet and be the spark for growth in the future. But it is, quite honestly, very expensive to run a news organization, and crowdfunding can certainly be a supplement to a lot of what they do. But ultimately to be sustainable, other sources of funding are certainly needed, unless you’re talking about an organization that only has a handful of people working for it. I’m certainly a big believer in crowdfunding, but I don’t think it’s the be all end all for solving monetary woes inside news organizations.

How do you work both within and outside traditional journalism by crafting tools that are used by mainstream media while still supporting an active and engaged alternative media?

I think it’s an important balance to strike. We are huge fans of independent media and non-profit media.

There needs to be more voices that can be heard by millions and millions of people and the only way for that to happen is to get their name out there and have ordinary people show their support.

But on the other hand, as many problems as I have with legacy news organizations, a lot of them still do important work. I can list ten criticisms of The New York Times or The Washington Post, yet there are dozens and dozens of journalists who work at both those papers who are among the best journalists in the world and that the public would be much poorer off if they didn’t exist. When we’re talking about defending reporters’ rights, we want to make sure that we’re defending the rights of journalists at The New York Times and The Washington Post, but we will also want to make sure that we are defending the rights of independent media, individual bloggers, citizen journalists, and any organization that crops up that some people may be uncomfortable with, but that their rights are still protected as much as the most mainstream outlet out there.

The post Embedding openness in everything we do: Freedom of the Press Foundation appeared first on Creative Commons.

I have been a fan of Marisa Anderson’s music since discovering her albums at the legendary Chapel Hill radio station WXYC, where my show usually ran from from 4-8AM.

At 4 in the morning in a windowless studio, the title of Anderson’s 2011 release “The Golden Hour” seemed apropos. I would listen to her virtuosic, dreamy fingerpicking through my headphones, fuzzy around the edges but always precise; Anderson’s playing is euphoric and timeless, grounded in the best of traditions while reaching its branches toward future plateaus. Feeling her music tangibly in the studio during those rapturous early morning hours, I felt the kind of intimacy with Anderson that only the best folk musicians can inspire, evoking the “high lonesome sound” that touches the listener at her core.

While Anderson is a successful independent artist who works with a variety of record labels including Mississippi and Chaos Kitchen, she has also worked with radio stations aligned with Creative Commons, such as WFMU and KBOO community radio in Portland. Anderson uses her work with these stations to augment her catalog, releasing “community-owned songs” for free on the internet, including the 2013 Elizabeth Cotten split 7”, released under a BY NC-ND license.

Anderson’s music can be found on the Free Music Archive, on KBOO, and at a record store near you. Anderson is currently on tour through Europe and the United States and generously answered these questions by email.

You are a student of American music as well as a musician yourself. How has your scholarship shaped the way you play and think about music and your craft?

In many cases when we say “American music” we are actually talking about music that arose in the southeastern United States as a result of the cultural collisions of the past 500 years. The melodies are hybrids, the songs were passed orally, and the words adapted to reflect the singer’s situation or to comment on current events of the time. This is particularly true for many religious and patriotic songs where the words were basically propaganda attached to a melody that belonged to another song.  For example, compare “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to “John Brown’s Body,” or “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” to “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye.”

I think of myself as existing along a continuum, as being caught up in a conversation that moves backward and forward through time. Tradition is what we glean from the past and what we pass onto the future.

Recording technology froze the folk process and tricked us into thinking that songs have fixed identities. I like to think that I’m picking up a conversational thread from another time, shining my own light on it, and passing it on into the future.

In 2013 you released an album of traditional and public domain songs. While most of these tunes are well-trodden territory for folk musicians, your renditions push on the boundaries of interpretation, creating a rich soundscape while still maintaining the songs’ integrity. Why did you decide to release this album? What compelled you to interpret these songs in this way? Why public domain and traditional songs in particular?

In 2013 I was the artist-in-residence at KBOO community radio in Portland, Oregon. As KBOO is a community-owned radio station, for my residency project I decided to make a record of community-owned songs, or in other words, public domain songs.

I chose to address songs that were already well known standards because I wanted listeners to approach the recordings with some degree of familiarity, to invite the audience into the project rather than use it as a platform to display some obscure knowledge.

I believe that common things in the world around us hold deep surprises, and that looking for the new often involves looking at the old.

Using public domain material freed up the creative side of recording because my responsibility was to arrange and interpret music rather than compose it. I was able to dive deeply into the sonics of the record. This became really important because I was making instrumental versions of songs that contain lyrics and stories that are very familiar to many people. The melodies and chord changes for the songs I chose are simple and repetitious. The major challenge of the record lay in how to make compelling renditions of these simple forms without losing the essential identity of each song.  In other words, how was I to convey the emotional impact of the lyrics without singing, and without significant modification of the melody? I was looking for ways to serve the songs and enrich the melodies when I started working with more diffuse and textural sounds to fill out the emotional palette.

“Battle Hymn of the Republic medley” from Live at WFMU on Shrunken Planet April 28th, 2012 by Marisa Anderson. Released: 2012. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

You often work with independent radio stations like KBOO and WFMU to produce new music under Creative Commons licenses as well as release your work with traditional licensing arrangements under several labels including Mississippi and Chaos Kitchen. Can you talk about what sharing your work looks like in this context? How do you find inspiration in these two different modes of production?

Making and distributing a record is a physical process, with associated costs. Many people are willing to pay for the artifact, or even for a download. Today, when most music is accessible for free, I see these purchases as a modern form of the patronage system and I deeply appreciate people who choose to support my work in that way.

My records are largely improvised and often the version of a song that gets put onto the record is simply one of many versions. The songs change every time I play them and it’s nice to have an avenue for people to hear the evolution of a song that started as an improvisation, became fixed onto a record, and is released into the world through performance.

I appreciate that each arrangement has its value. I don’t feel ownership of a performance in the same way as I do for the actual composition or the physical artifact.  A performance, by its very nature, is a shared event which feels natural to me to release more freely into the world.

What is it like to be a successful independent artist in 2016? Where do you find inspiration for your work? How do you find distribution in the age of the streaming service?

I feel like the luckiest person in the world that I can pay my bills by playing guitar and sharing what I create. It’s a tremendous privilege and one that involves quite a bit of strategy to stay afloat. I’ve found that the key for my survival as an independent artist is threefold: I keep my overhead low both personally and professionally and I do as much as I can for myself, which means at different times I’ve had to be my own booking agent, recording engineer, tour manager, etc. I also make sure that my income comes from multiple sources such as record sales, commissioned work, and performance fees.

I find inspiration in so many places! Sometimes inspiration comes in very concrete forms, from current or historical events or the juxtaposition of a modern viewpoint with a song from a different era.  At other times it’s very abstract: I often respond to natural processes, dreams or memories. I tend to work through aspects of my personal history through composition. I also can get really inspired by the quality of a sound, or by searching for a sound that just feels right.

Probably I don’t think enough about distribution. I have a few different methods that work well enough to get the music into the world and I just trust that the music will find its way to the ears of those who need it. I know how much I need to make in order to survive, and once that amount is secured, I’m a bit lazy. I’d rather be making music than chasing every last dime!

Would you consider releasing more of your work under Creative Commons? What benefits and drawbacks do you see with sharing legally on the Web?

I’m sure that more of my work will be released under Creative Commons or other free licensing structures. I like that more people can share in the music, and that anyone who want to trace my process or the evolution of one of my songs have an avenue to do so.

A friendly reminder: Our partners at the Free Music Archive are raising funds to stay afloat. If you are one of the 40 million people who benefitted from their work this year alone, please consider donating. You’ll ensure that this important project lives on (and get a cool shirt!)

The post Musician Marisa Anderson looks for the new in the old appeared first on Creative Commons.

Are you a seasoned, professional US-based photographer with experience photographing in school settings? Do you use CC or CC0 licensing?

Tweet us your portfolio or send it along to info@creativecommons.org. We’re looking to build a list of photographers for our community to contact for projects, beginning with this specific ask.

Please stay tuned for more announcements!

The post Call for photographers! (US based) appeared first on Creative Commons.