You Are the Power of Open: 2011 Creative Commons Annual Campaign

Last week we launched our Annual Campaign. Please join us in powering the future of openness! In addition to fueling the activities below, Creative Commons relies on donations to build and constantly improve the technical and legal tools that enable openness to flourish. The future of openness is bright, but ensuring that future requires urgent and sustained effort. CC is continuing to improve the usefulness of our licenses and helping even more artists, institutions and governments share their works. We are reaching a critical mass and need your support now more than ever. Donate now, or read more.

Copyright Experts Discuss CC License Version 4.0 at the Global Summit

The Creative Commons 2011 Global Summit was a remarkable success, bringing together CC affiliates, board, staff, alumni, friends and stakeholders from around the world. Among the ~300 attendees was an impressive array of legal experts. Collectively, these experts brought diversity and depth of legal expertise and experience to every facet of the Summit, including knowledge of copyright policy across the government, education, science, culture, and foundation sectors. We designed the Summit’s legal sessions to leverage this expertise to discuss our core license suite and the 4.0 license versioning process. Read more.

Blackboard to add support for CC Attribution

Blackboard, the popular Learning Management System (LMS), has announced that they will build in support for CC licensing, specifically enabling instructors the ability to publish and share their course materials under the CC Attribution (CC BY) license. Cable Green, CC’s Director of Global Learning, notes, “The core part of any OER is an open license, and Blackboard has shown its leadership by empowering instructors to share so others can revise, reuse, remix and redistribute their courses.” Read more.

• The Open Course Library released the first 42 high-enrollment courses for Washington State Community Colleges under CC BY.

• UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning released Guidelines for Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher Education, citing that "OER are teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain and released with an open license (such as Creative Commons)."

• CC Portugal launched its second localized suite of CC licenses!

• Open Access Week 2011 involved CC affiliates and community from around the world, including Perú, Poland, Croatia, and the U.S.

• You may recall that the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative's Technical Working Group, with the input of the wider community, has been working to create a set of metadata terms to describe learning resources. The public draft specification is open for comment through November 11.

• Musician Christopher Willits has released 121 stems from "Tiger Flower Circle Sun" for a remix project with SoundCloud! Deadline to remix the stems via CC BY-NC-SA is February 1, 2012.

• The Polish version of The Power of Open — stories of creators sharing knowledge, art, & data using Creative Commons — is now available for download. Thanks to the CC Poland team for proofing!

• Lastly, new CC job opportunities are on the horizon; if you have a knack for time management and logistics coordination, see our announcement.