Post by Daniel Villar-Onrubia
This year I had the chance to attend for the first time the Creative Commons Global Summit, hosted by CC and CC Portugal (well done to Teresa Nobre and the rest of the team!) at Lisbon’s Museu do Oriente and the Cineteatro Capitolio between the 9th and 12th of May. The event was packed with topical presentations and workshops by contributors from a diverse range of backgrounds, including the open education sphere but also activism, policy-making and the GLAM sector.
One of highlights for me was the session on ‘Playful approaches to copyright literacy: supporting open educational practices in a global context’
Open educational practices (OEPs) are built on understanding of copyright and licensing, but it can be difficult to engage people with copyright, which can limit their ability to contribute to the intellectual commons. The workshop recognises the importance of copyright literacy in supporting OEPs. We explore international attempts to raise copyright awareness amongst librarians and specialists supporting open education initiatives, starting with a recent statement from IFLA. Participants will then play two openly licensed games and discuss how they can be used and adapted.
CC Global Summit 2019 Schedule
Two of the speakers at that session were Jane Secker and Chris Morrison, who presented two of the games they have created as part of the UK Copyright Literacy initiative:
1. Copyright the Card Game. As indicated by its very title, it is a card game on copyright and its four ‘suits’ are:
- “Copyright works – what is the material that someone wants to use? Is it protected by copyright and how is it defined in the law?
- Usages, or what the law calls the ‘restricted acts’ that are the exclusive right of the copyright holder. How does what you want to do with a work map onto the usages as defined in the law?
- Licenses – how do licences work? What licences are available and how might they be used to enable you to go beyond what the law might allow
- Exceptions – what copyright exceptions exist in the UK and how can you make better use of them”
2. The Publishing Trap. A board game that “allows participants to explore the impact of scholarly communications choices and discuss the role of open access in research by following the lives of four researchers – from doctoral research to their academic legacies”
Jane and Chris will be visiting DMLL in July to run a couple of workshops on both games and we are looking forward to making use of them in the context of our Digital Fluency agenda.
At the summit I also had the chance to play a poker-style card game designed by Tohatoha (New Zealand) to teach Creative Commons licensing. More info about the game available from their website.
Another great moment at the conference was the joint keynote by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle (Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain) on their graphic novel Theft! A History of Music, which looks at how inspiration from previous works and borrowing practices have been essential to music. Indeed, they made the case that current copyright restrictions would have made illegal the experimentation and development of whole musical genres such as Jazz.
The comic is released under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence and can be downloaded from the website of their Centre. And they have also made available a version without text for anyone who wants to translate it into another language.
Isaac Campbell 
Fortepan flyer
I also very much enjoyed the presentation by Isaac Campbell on Integrating Historic Photographs in Your Community. He talked about FORTEPAN, a fascinating project initiated in Hungary that now has a sister initiative in Iowa. Both are massive repositories of openly licenced or public domain photos donated by families, amateur and professional photographers, and public collections.
Beyond the online repositories themselves, the most inspiring part was to hear about activities aimed at fostering the engagement of local communities with the archives. For instance, school pupils picked pictures and did research project not just in obvious disciplines such as history or visual arts, but also mathematics. Other creative ways of bringing the archives to life was by means of installations involving devices such as peek-boxes or wheat-pasing (a non-destructive, bio-degradable, scalable and cheap way of displaying large-scale images in public spaces). It would be good to see some activities along those lines happenning in the contet of Coventry UK City of Culture 2021.
For further details on the Fortepan initiative you can read this article by András Török: Thinking – in Three Ways – about the Fortepan Online Community Photo Archive.
And it was my pleasure to be with Leo Havemann and Javiera Atenas too at the workshop on ‘Fostering Openness in Education: considerations for sustainable policy making.’
Considering solid evidence-based driven framework by Haddad & Demsky (1995) : (a) Evaluation of the sector drawing on data, research, experience and international knowledge; (b) contextual analysis of the socio-political and economic, demographic, and cultural conditions and prospects; and (c) an assessment of the interest groups, their rationalities and their roles in education, our OE policy design workshop aims at fostering a discussion towards promoting co-creation of OE policies analysing a series of elements from the perspective of international stakeholders.
CC Global Summit 2019 Schedule
You can now read more about this on our recent paper Atenas, J., Havemann, L., Nascimbeni, F., Villar-Onrubia, D., & Orlic, D. (2019). Fostering Openness in Education: Considerations for Sustainable Policy-Making. Open Praxis, 11(2), 167-183. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.11.2.947
Another great experience was the photowalk hosted by Flickr’s COO Ben MacAskill.
These are just a handful of the many worthwhile activities happening at the conference, but I also enjoyed listening to Hailey Babb talk about her OER advocacy work as both Vice-President Academic and President of the University of Lethbridge Students’ Union (Canada), presentations on valuable initiatives such as the Open Press Project, the OER Worldmap, the Visual Thinkery’s Remixer, MHz Curationist, the Global Digital Library and a long etc., as well as very informative discussions on the Article 17 (formerly Article 13).