Creative Commons is looking for a new CTO. Come work with me!
Do you know anyone good? Yourself?
From the announcement:
This is a fun job that offers technical, management, and communications challenges and opportunities for growth and impact. Using technology to enhance (rather than suppress) sharing has always been an important part of the CC story.
And the job description.
Feel free to share with other FLOSSy communities!
Even though I am a recently minted new parent, I am still keeping up on outside world obligations (barely!) and as such, I will be traveling to some upcoming conferences. Will I see you at any of these?
State Education Technology Directors Association
January 19th – webinar
One that doesn’t need travel is a webinar for SETDA this Thursday on Open Educational Resources and how K-12 schools can really harness the power of open licenses.
American Library Association’s Midwinter Conference
January 20th-22nd – Dallas, TX
I’ll be speaking on a panel titled “Getting the Rights Right” about Creative Commons and Open Access (essentially, why OA is truly transformational when paired with CC licenses).
February 15th-17th – Houston, TX (Rice University)
Connexions is a great platform for writing, editing, and sharing open textbooks. I’ve only been to the conference once before, and just as an attendee, but this year I’ll be speaking about the metadata work I am doing at Creative Commons under the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) project.
If you’ll be in either Dallas or Houston on those dates and want to get a beer, let me know!
On top of all the other changes in my life this summer, I’ve also accepted a position at Creative Commons starting full-time in September.
Because of my complicated history with CC, I did a quick interview to reintroduce myself to the CC community.
Some things that might be of interest to the Ubuntu community is the project that I am working on initially, LRMI. The Learning Resources Metadata Initiative is a project to create a vocabulary to describe educational materials (type, audience, assessment metrics, copyright license, etc) with the hope of submitting it to Schema.org for inclusion. If you are interested in metadata/web standards, please take a look; we’re looking for great individuals for the Technical Working Group.
If you aren’t interested in creating the standards, but are instead interested in how online (and Free/Open) education can change the world, talk to me about how FLOSS is at the center of that change. Tools (web or desktop based) can be built to make the work of learning more efficient, especially if those tools consume metadata that aids in every step.
Still curious? Read on. Entire interview reproduced below.
How did you get involved in CC initially?
It all started back when I was a student at the University of Michigan School of Information working with the fledgling Open.Michigan initiative (of which current CC staff member Tim Vollmer was one of the founders). Open.Michigan is the initiative at the University of Michigan that helps faculty, students, and staff share their educational material with the world as OER (Open Educational Resources). I was drawn to this project primarily because it aligned with my background as a member of the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) community. As I saw in the FLOSS world, our ability as creators of useful objects such as software and educational material to share these objects with each other in a way that allows them to not only read them, but also build upon them, is changing the way we interact with the world. One part of this ability is the legal assurance that you will not be sued for building upon someone else's work. This is where my interest, and involvement, with Creative Commons got its start.
I was an intern under the amazing Jon Phillips (rejon) during the summer of 2008 then stayed on as a Community Assistant for the next year. I continued my outreach as an unpaid fellow traveling to conferences until coming back to Creative Commons full-time.
Education Technology & Policy Coordinator, that's a mouthful. What does that mean? How does it relate to the work of other CC staff?
It is a mouthful! It means that I am the person you should talk to if you are working in the world of education, specifically Open Education, and have questions regarding integrating or consuming metadata, license choice and its ramifications, or any other legal, technical, or policy issue. This work dovetails nicely with the work being spearheaded by Tim Vollmer, Policy Coordinator, as I am focusing my time mostly in the education and technology realm while Tim also works on issues such as government data sharing and funder policy. I will be sort of a bridge between the CC technology team (note we’re hiring a CTO) and the policy and legal people, and a liaison for technology/policy discussions externally. My new boss is Cable Green, Director of Global Learning, who holds the big picture of how to scale OER.
I’m also looking forward to seeing how my new role can support and be informed by the work of the many OER leaders in the worldwide CC affiliate network.
You've been a copyright specialist at MLibrary for two years. There's a ton of cool stuff coming out of MLibrary. Tell us about that.
At MLibrary I worked for the Copyright Office which, contrary to what Melissa Levine’s (our fearless leader’s) title of "Copyright Officer" may imply, is not the copyright cop of the university. Instead, much of what I did was outreach and education on how faculty, students, and staff can share their scholarly works more broadly. This included issues of data sharing, open education, and open access publishing.
Specific to the library, the Copyright Office spearheaded the change of default CC license on the MLibrary website from CC Attribution-NonCommercial to CC Attribution. I hope that our reasoning for making the switch, which I outlined in a blog post, will help other galleries, libraries, archives, or museums (GLAM-institutions) adopt a similar license choice.
It is also about time for this year's Copyright Camp which is put on by MPublishing (the division within MLibrary that the Copyright Office resides). Copyright Camp is an unconference on all things copyright; from libraries to musicians, policy to practice, even education to robots!
Along with our outreach efforts, the Copyright Office also manages important projects at MLibrary including a new one concerning "orphan works."
So your most recent project is this orphan works thing, say more…
"Orphan works" are works (nominally books in our case) that are still under copyright but the copyright holder is not findable and/or contactable. These works are thus still unable to be legally reused without permission but there is no one to ask permission to reuse them.
With the leadership of Melissa and the help of my coworker Bobby Glushko, I built the process that powers the Orphan Works Project. The goal of the MLibrary Orphan Works Project is to either find the work's copyright holder OR determine that they are truly an orphan and make them available to users of MLibrary. (If you are a copyright holder of any works in the MLibrary collection, please fill out the form available on the project website.)
One could characterize part of the orphan works problem as one of a lack of metadata, or works with inadequate provenance. In a way, CC is mitigating future orphan works issues by making it easy for metadata to travel with works on the web.
You mentioned metadata and provenance, what excites you about the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative?
LRMI excites me because it will finally allow all of the hard work being done by the various online education projects (open or not) to correctly tag their works with important information (such as license, audience, subject, learning outcomes, etc) to be indexed and exposed by popular search engines. Currently we have a smorgasbord of education-specific search engines that attempt to give learners access to the world's knowledge but they routinely fall short due to technical limitations. If the metadata applied to these resources is consumed and used by popular search engines, learning management software, and even the student's own computer then, I hope, big advances in education can be made more easily.
How can people get involved in LRMI?
There is a Call for Participation (CfP) and more information on the LRMI project wiki page that has all of the details.
You're also a technologist, not just a metadata technologist — no disrespect to the meta! What do you do with the Ubuntu community?
The Ubuntu community was the first FLOSS community I felt at home in. When I moved to Michigan for graduate school there was no local community team (aka "LoCo" in Ubuntu parlance) so I took it upon myself to create one. Little did I know that there was a wonderful group of individuals waiting for something like this and the team took off. The Michigan LoCo Team has since been your go-to group for Ubuntu (and FLOSS) related activities including release parties and bug and packaging jams. During graduate school when I should have been studying for exams or writing papers I spent a lot of my Ubuntu/FLOSS time reporting and triaging bugs.
Do you see underplayed opportunities for CC and OER communities to leverage Ubuntu and other FLOSS communities and vice versa? Or instances that we just know more about?
Everywhere. The FLOSS community is first and foremost a sharing or gift economy. This aligns well with the OER community (as I said before). There are many FLOSS projects that are primarily developed to be used in OER (such as the OERbit publishing platform and OERca content management system from Open.Michigan) that could have far greater impact when applied to non-institution specific endeavors.
I also firmly believe that some of the sticking points holding wide spread adoption of OER back can be addressed using software, and specifically FLOSS. Examples of this are the Open Attribute browser plugin that makes attributing CC-licensed works dead simple, the Open Badges platform being created by Mozilla that will help online learners record and display their efforts, and AcaWiki which aims to make high-quality scholarly article summaries available in every discipline. These are all great projects to get involved with from both the education side and the software side, if you are looking for something to contribute to in your free time!
As some of you may know, I work for the University of Michigan Library where my title is Copyright Specialist. One of the projects I am most proud of is the change of the default Creative Commons license for content created by librarians and staff at MLibrary and posted online from CC:BY-NC to CC:BY, removing the non-commercial restriction. Why is this important? Well, see what I wrote on the MPublishing blog, copied below under the terms of the CC:BY 3.0 license :)
Back in October of 2008, MLibary became one of the first academic libraries to apply a Creative Commons license to its website content. At the time, the Library opted for the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (“CC BY NC”) license. More recently, on November 18th, 2010, the library changed the default Creative Commons license used for all content created by librarians and staff hosted on the library website to an Attribution-only (“CC BY”) license.
Why did we opt for a CC BY NC license initially then – after some experience – remove the non-commercial restriction? Greg Grossmeier, Copyright Specialist at MPublishing, explains how the Creative Commons License MLibrary chose enables content creation.
Why use a Creative Commons license at all?
Before we get into the reasons why MLibrary changed its license, it is important to review the types of uses we are hoping to encourage by using any Creative Commons license in the first place. In the most simple of terms, we hope to encourage adaptations and redistribution of our content.First, we are delighted to see our work actually used, improved or incorporated into new resources. When other organizations reuse our work (for example, another institution using some of our libguides) we know that others appreciate our work and find it useful. Second, by using a Creative Commons license that allows derivatives we enable others to make translations of the work without the need to get prior permission. With our use of a Creative Commons license we enable others to make translations and redistribute them for even wider reuse of our work.
Why remove the NonCommercial restriction?
First, removing the NonCommercial restriction provides greater clarity for those wishing to reuse our content. The NonCommercial clause in the CC licenses does not fully define what a “commercial use“ is. Thus, an individual or organization wishing to use our work cannot always be certain that their use would be acceptable. If they are uncertain, the users or organizations will either contact MLibrary to ask for clarification/permission (something which we wanted to avoid by using a Creative Commons license in the first place) or they will elect to simply not use our material. Unfortunately, the second scenario is typical.A report released by Creative Commons in 2009 found that content creators see more uses as noncommercial than do content reusers. This means that individuals and organizations tend to self-censor their reuses of a NC-licensed work because they erroneously believe that their use will be considered a commercial use, thus not permissible by the license.
The MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) project uses a NonCommercial license from Creative Commons for their content. They elected to be explicit with their interpretation of what “non-commercial“ means. While this is very useful for users of MIT OCW materials it does not scale easily. This is because it is simply defining “non-commercial“ for MIT — and that definition might not be the same for all creators using NonCommercial licenses. Thus, it is not advisable for all creators using a NonCommercial license to write their own definition of “non-commercial.”
If 1000 people are asked to write their definition of “non-commercial” you will probably get 1000 different definitions. If all users of NonCommercial licenses produced their own definition of “non-commercial” then potential users will need to read that definition closely, and possibly ask for legal advice, each time they wish to reuse a work. Ironically, the more specific each content creator is about its particular view of ‘commercial’, the more confused and inconsistent the situation becomes. This confusion and inconsistency is the exact situation that Creative Commons aspires to eliminate.
Secondly, with the use of the Attribution-only license, the library is making a strong commitment to compatibility with other Freely and Openly licensed materials such as Wikipedia. If two licenses are incompatible with each other it means that content from one can not be incorporated into a work under the other. The NonCommercial clause is incompatible with many other open content licenses, including other Creative Commons licenses. In fact, it is only compatible with three out of the six Creative Commons licenses.
As the chart above shows, the most compatible license available (aside from waiving all copyrights) is the Attribution-only license. This allows others to reuse our content in the largest number of places and contexts including, importantly, the CC BY SA licensed Wikipedia.
By using the most compatible license available from Creative Commons, MLibrary enables efficient content creation. We make it possible for users to worry less about license incompatibility and permissions — and instead spend more time on the actual creation of quality content. We hope to see the positive influence of this throughout the local, national, and international library communities.
The above was originally posted on the MPublishing Blog under the title “MLibrary & Creative Commons: Commitment to Compatibility.” Reproduced under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.
Last week I was interviewed (.mp3) for the very awesome, very fun Lococast hosted by the always enjoyable Rick Harding and Craig Maloney. We hit on many of my various interests including: copyright, open data, open educational resources (OERs), Creative Commons, community management, the Michigan LoCo team, and Ubuntu more generally,
It was great fun sitting down with Rick and Craig for about an hour; they always make it enjoyable.
Tonight I gave a presentation to the wonderful University of Michigan Wikipedians student group on copyright.
I pretty much threw this presentation together at the last minute (started around 5pm, the presentation was at 7, I also ate dinner during that time) but I think it went ok. However, I know it could be better and it could address more topics more clearly. Mike Linksvayer has even already given me some very valuable feedback on identi.ca.
Do you have any feedback? Any recommendations on how to better phrase something? Any other points specific to Wikipedia that I didn’t remember to talk about?
You may have already heard, but Severed Fifth, Jono Bacon’s music project, has been ramping up recently.
I want to highlight a few things that I think are fairly interesting.
First, Fair Pay:
Jono is experimenting with the same model that many others have done (notably: Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and GirlTalk) where you let the music fan pay for the enjoyment they get from the music (that is about the best way to put that, because they aren’t really paying for the bits, those cost practically nothing). When this choice is put in front of music fans, either paying zero or some other non-zero amount, many pay some non-zero amount. My recollection is that the amount is somewhere around $8 for an album.
What would be curious to look at in the case of Severed Fifth is what that amount is. As we saw with the Humble Bundle from Wolfire, Linux users paid more per game than any other platform. Will the awareness of Jono’s project in the FLOSS world translate into a higher average “Fair Pay” for Severed Fifth? That probably isn’t measurable, unfortunately.
Second, Frets on Fire:
Boy do I love me some Rock Band, er, Frets on Fire! I think this is one of the cooler things about CC-licensed music: easier conversion into kick ass formats like Frets on Fire with no worries about copyright law (more accurately, the copyright holder) telling you that enjoying Jono’s music in a certain way is not permitted.
Third, YouTube:
This one might seem obvious, but I promise there is a bit more to it. Basically, because the Severed Fifth music is licensed under a CC license, people can us it in their YouTube videos without getting take-down notices. Pretty awesome stuff. Now the really interesting part. Jono has licensed the Severed Fifth music under CC:BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license. That means, simply, you can use, redistribute, and remix the work as long as you give attribution to the author (Severed Fifth, or Jono) and share any derivative work you make under the same license, CC:BY-SA.
Now, using Severed Fifth music in your video means that your video, a derivative work of both your footage and the Severed Fifth music, is now required to be licensed CC:BY-SA. From the legal code of the license: “For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical composition or sound recording, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image (“synching”) will be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License” (see section 1b). This is great, now all of those awesome videos Jono showcased in his blog post are now available for your reuse under the terms of the CC:BY-SA license! I think that might be my favorite part of the new happenings around Severed Fifth; Jono spreading the Freedom!
Today, Creative Commons has announced their campaign to support the new Catalyst Grants.
If you haven’t heard of it, the Catalyst Grant program is pretty awesome. It helps people who are working on great projects keep them going by providing the much needed funding. From the Catalyst Grant page:
Creative Commons is investing up to $100,000 to empower individuals and communities deeply rooted in the principles of openness and sharing. With the Catalyst Grants program, Creative Commons will seed activities around the globe that support our mission. Our goal is to scale our community’s efforts and support them in becoming self-sustainable. Through a rigorous public review and transparent evaluation process, the best proposals submitted by CC affiliates and the broader community, will be selected to receive $1,000–$10,000 to make their ideas a reality.
But, Creative Commons can’t do it all. And this is where you come in. By donating to Creative Commons you can directly help support the (no doubt) awesome projects that the grant program will select. Help support the commons by being a catalyst.
(sourcecode is to binary as ??? is to ppt/odp/pdf)
Ted Gould just posted to the planet with his presentation that he gave at the Desktop Summit. At the end of his post you’ll notice that he uploaded his presentation to Launchpad (at lp:~ted/presentations/2009_desktop_summit/).
I think that is a great idea! Not only does it provide the ability for the community to see what others are using for their presentations but it allows anyone to branch a presentation, which has awesome potential. Especially with the presentation format that Ted chose, SVGs. The S5 presentation format (XHTML/CSS/JS based) would also be a great candidate for easy branching and editing of presentations.
But what if you need to create presentations with others who use Powerpoint or Impress and you wanted to harness the power of a Version Control System? Old powerpoint (ppt) files are binary blobs which don’t work well in version control systems (they *work* but not *well*). Impress (odp) and new Powerpoint (pptx) files are effectively zipped archives of xml and images. However, since it is zipped, bzr treats it as a binary. I only tested with bzr but don’t foresee any of the other systems behaving any differently.
Why would you want to use a VCS for your presentation files? Especially a DVCS like bzr/git/hg? COLLABORATION!
Some of you may know that I am currently working with Open.Michigan, a project at the University of Michigan that enables the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). OER is effectively a broader term for the concept of Open CourseWare. Basically, everything used in education is a resource, not just presentations, and thus is useful for others to see, use, and remix. If you are curious to see what kinds of things we produce, see our Educommons installation.
Back to the topic at hand though: presentations and DVCS.
One of the major areas that the OER community could greatly improve upon is the area of remixing; taking the openly licensed materials and using them, adding new material, and creating something original. Remixing, in general, is enabled by having access to the source files of the material being worked with. Sure, you can use a PDF or a mp3 in a remix, but it is usually better to have the original .odt or multitrack file to work from. This is why Open.Michigan provides to the public the ppt files along with the pdfs of the presentations created through the OER program.
But lets leverage some of the tried and true methods of the FLOSS community in the OER community. One of the biggest and most fundamental benefits of the FLOSS world is that everyone has access to the source code, and can easily get it, edit it, and (hopefully) compile a new version of the program; effectively a “remix.” How does the FLOSS community lower the barriers and increase efficiency for that workflow? We provide public access to code repositories, instructions on building the software (documentation), and a bug tracker to inform what needs to be worked on next.
I want to mirror much of that to the OER community. One of the first things that needs to happen is to provide an easy way to manage multiple versions of a single resource (eg: presentation, video/audio, book). A VCS seems like the obvious choice. But there must be a better way than just managing binary blobs, right?
That is the part that I need to figure out next: how to utilize the power of a DVCS in this genre. Then I can move on to figuring out what a bug tracker for OER would look like (and if it is even needed). The documentation is actually already there, at least for Open.Michigan.
Do you have any ideas?
Tuesday night I gave a presentation at the Michigan!/usr/group (MUG) meeting about Creative Commons and its relationship with Free/Libre Open Source Software. I had a great time giving the presentation and judging from the amount and activity of the questions it seems like others enjoyed it, too!
I started off with a quick background on Creative Commons and what we do, in general. Then, after answering a ton of questions which were raised in the first 5 minutes, I went on to discuss CC’s role in the Free/Open Source Software community. Specifically, the FLOSS projects we develop and/or work on and how we can help others create awesome things.
If you weren’t there, you missed the opportunity to be a part of a great conversation between some great MUG members and I. But luckily, my slides are available online:
And, since Craig was nice enough to use my photo camera to record the presentation, we even have video! We only have 34 minutes of video, but that gets the majority of the talk. Apparently my camera records at a 1 gig per 10 minutes rate, we only got 34 minutes because it filled up my 4 gig memory card.
Thanks to everyone who came out, you made it fun.
