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Platform Discussion: CC-Culture

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Define the platform

You may be able to describe the scope of the platform work. What is it for? What is the space is filling?, etc.

A CC Culture platform would be for:

  • sharing resources/tools/guides to empower/enable CC users, and those wanting to spread a commons-based approach in the arts.
  • artists/ cultural producers finding like-minded colleagues and collaborators (as an example, neither Sebastiaan nor I had met or heard of each other before the Summit, despite working for many years in a very similar way, in very similar fields, in neighbouring countries - with a CC Culture platform, that would surely have been different)
  • space for asking/answering questions or giving advice to one another, especially on the topics which distinguish the CC artistic community from the mainstream - eg questions around remixing, exchangeable file formats or commons-based business models.
  • sharing example CC projects for inspiration
  • sharing teaching resources or stories of successfully introducing & promoting CC to artists/cultural producers
  • ideally the platform would also be a place to organise a CC Culture presence at key Culture-related events or on other online platforms - this is similar to how Open Source Design takes charge of organising a Design track at prominent Free Software events, or encourages community members to give presentations / represent the community at mainstream design events.

NB: at the risk of bikeshedding before we get anywhere… I like the name CC-Create as opposed to CC-Culture. I could certainly live with Culture, but to me, the word Culture sounds more staid/static - more like GLAM, and less like art, remix, design and music. Something to think about, anyway!

Work currently being done?

You may be able to map out who are the actual players in this field, how do they connect with the broad CC movement, what are the documentation already in the field, what achievements does exist, what challenges this area of work is facing, etc.

I've assembled a loose collection of existing networks and resources that I know of. Some (like Libre Graphics Meeting or Open Source Design) are small, niche communities, but fulfil an absolutely vital role in maintaining a network and platform for exchange. Others (like the Free Culture Wiki or subreddit) cover a lot of ground… but they don't have committed communities.

This is an issue to consider for a Creative Commons Culture platform which covers multiple forms of media - if it's too broad, or perceived as low quality, or not directly applicable to people's practice, it will simply be another inactive mailing list to add to the pile. The state of the existing field makes me think that for a CC-Culture platform to succeed where others have failed, it needs to be actively curated, conversations facilitated and regularly updated, with a plan to get to a level of community-led sustainability - it won't just develop organically on its own.

Video / Animation
  • matrix.org: Audiovisual Production channels
  • Blender Open Projects - actually, Blender Cloud is a great (rare!) example of a sustainable free culture community: people pay a subscription in order to access behind-the-scenes content, community interaction, and assets for remix. Their subscriptions fund software development, tutorials and culture projects. Those cultural projects improve & promote the software, and create more free culture assets to be used in other tutorials/projects, thus making subscriptions more enticing.
Photography
Music & Sound
  • CASH Music - a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering artists through free and open tools for the web, story-driven education, and new kinds of funding. Bottom line: we help musicians find careers that are healthy for their art and for them
  • Free Music Archive - an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads directed by WFMU, the most renowned freeform radio station in America.
  • ccMixter - a community music remixing site featuring remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons licenses. [forum]
  • freesound - Freesound is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds. Browse, download and share sounds. [forum]
  • CC list of Music resources/communities

Rationale

why should CC have this platform? Under this topic you should be able to articulate the reason why this particular area of work is needed within the broad CC ecosystem/network. What is the reason CC network should focus their work into this? How this platform work connects with the CC strategy?

  • As an artist at the CC summit, I felt massively outnumbered by all the lawyers and GLAMers and policy folk - I really appreciate their work, but I was constantly thinking, "where are the artists..?"
    From the perspective of a newbie, CC as a network seems very strong in fields of GLAM, copyright reform, Open education, and open data, and there is a lot of fantastic work on releasing existing work into the commons… but not so much on a) creatively repurposing that work once released, or b) creating new work in the commons (in a collaborative way). If CC's goal is creating 'a vibrant commons' then it needs to support those goals too.

  • a Culture platform can introduce CC licenses, uses and commons-based practises to a wider audience,reaching different networks than CC currently reaches. I would hazard a guess that culture-focused success stories might appeal to a much wider range of people than copyright policy success stories ;)

  • artists and cultural producers are seen by many as being particularly, impressively creative*. But… I think they could be a lot more creative, particularly when it comes to copyright, and the way that they interact & collaborate with other artists. Creative Commons is a key tool to enable that creativity, but more work & exchange is needed to test ideas, iron out new workflows, and improve and disseminate a lot more creative new business models.

* debatable - other forms of creativity are just not as highly valued…

Who’s here? Who should be here and who’s not here?

You may be able to identify not just a list of people interested into being part of this platform, but also the kind of skills this group of people have/lack, what are the people needs, who are the partners we will reach out to, etc

Who's here? please add your name!

Who should be here:

  • artists / designers / musicians / video/photographers / creative coders / creative writers
  • teachers at art/design/music schools
  • people from a wide range of cultural backgrounds

Goals and objectives of the platform.

Here you may be able to articulate the purposes of the platform, in a general broad way. What do you want to achieve in the short, medium, or long term? What does success look like? Is it possible to succeed? How?

  • More cultural content being creatively remixed or built upon
  • More artists using and benefiting from the use of CC licenses
  • change (increase!) in the perceived value of remixed or 'derivative' creative works.
  • more understanding of - and ability to experiment with - different commons-based business models for artists
  • sharing of ideas and experiences across different fields of CC media
  • existing artistic CC users coming together to find collaborators, inspiration and a sense of community (I vividly remember my first time at Libre Graphics Meeting, experiencing that wonderful feeling - 'I'm not alone!')

Outline of objectives and activities that will help reach them.

What do you want to achieve both in the short term and in the long term? What outcomes are expectable from this platform? What resources do you have/need?

Some ideas for regular content types for a Culture platform - although none are particularly time-intensive to produce on their own, somebody still has to take on the task, so it would be good to think about how the load could be shared, or what resources might be available to support the people doing this work.

Format ideas:

But rather than just being a content delivery system to inform interested parties about CC culture projects, the platform should aim to draw out knowledge which currently exists in the community, but isn't widely distributed:

  • facilitated community Q&As - for example, "dual licensing - how do you use different licenses to earn a living, cater to different users, or further your goals?" Questions like this ought to be supported with examples to kick off the conversation, eg. Jahzzar offers commercial licenses to those who can't meet the terms of his music's CC-BY-SA license.

  • short interviews with community members - eg. Krita has a set of standard questions which they invite their users to answer, and publish the results on their blog. Here's today's interview.

A timeline.

You may be able to develop a rough timeframe of work from the first meeting at the Summit to 12 months ahead as a minimum and in a longer frame if that is possible. You may be able to connect the activities and objectives with this timeline considering the people, resources and urgency.

I don't feel ready to suggest a timeline by myself, but here's a rough sketch of an approach we could take in the run-up to launch- please add new ideas and comments:

  • define scope/aims of Culture platform
  • reach out to key people within existing culture communities & CC network for input
  • select, set up and test infrastructure
  • plan initial content / formats
  • document roles & tasks of organising the Culture platform
  • document ways in which people can get involved, contributing guidelines etc
  • reconnect with key community members to prepare for launch
  • launch platform (+ social media push)
  • update regularly
  • invite/encourage participants to take a more active role in organising, updating.

Policy position.

Connected with the timeline, it is expected to include a policy position in the way of a white paper, for instance, who points out the agreements within the platform connected with CC strategy.

… input from existing CC staff / community members here please …

Structure of work.

Under this topic you may be able to answer: What it will be the way to coordinate the work of this platform (mailing list, slack channel, etc?) How many calls/meetings do we need in order to achieve our activities? How the platform will govern itself (committees? people?, etc)?

I have experience working open and collaboratively on a range of different infrastructures (eg. Discourse, GitLab, Wordpress, Loomio, Drupal forums, Mailing Lists, Lurk…) but I can't make specific recommendations until I've talked to other potential organisers. Ditto for questions about calls/meetings etc.

One thing is very clear for me, however: the organisation of the platform itself should be run openly (eg, following Mozilla's Work Open Lead Open guidelines).
In this way the work is made transparent and roles are documented so that community members understand how it works and what needs to be done, and there's no shortage of invitations to get involved. Furthermore, should somebody drop out from an organisational role or be unable to complete a task, others have the context, tools and permission to be able to step in.

personal note from Sam: Infrastructure ethics

I'm very committed to helping set up and grow a CC culture platform, but there's one aspect of the existing Creative Commons platforms which I am already uncomfortable with as a user, and I would be far more uncomfortable as a steward/host/platform provider:

I do not believe that commons projects should be built on proprietary infrastructure (eg. Google, Slack).

This would be a major barrier for me. Some reasons why:

  • Free/Libre Open Source tools are aligned with the mission of commons projects. VC-backed proprietary tools are not. Neither are monopolistic corporations focused on harvesting user data for ad revenue.

  • using proprietary infrastructure tells participants "if you want to join our community, you must submit your personal data to corporations for surveillance, advertising and sale to third-party data brokers."

  • the long-term accessibility and adaptability of content/data is more secure with F/LOSS than proprietary (ability to self-host/change providers, more adherence to open standards, protection from service providers removing functionality, increasing prices, changing T&Cs eg. Slack dropping support for IRC, charging high prices for large communities or access to archives)

  • by using proprietary infrastructure, alternative F/LOSS infrastructure is not used - preventing exposure to, promotion and improvement of Free/Libre Open Source tools.

  • if we use F/LOSS, we have the ability to roll our own solutions to meet our own specific needs, and those solutions in turn contribute to the F/LOSS ecosystem and other communities.

  • the choices made by our community affect the next community. If somebody asks me how to set up their online commons-based project, thanks to the use of F/LOSS infrastructure at OSCEdays, I can give them detailed feedback and advice on Discourse, Gitlab, Nextcloud and a bunch of other open collaboration tools, I can show them how to get started, what commercial services are available to host such services, etc. If all I have ever used are the big proprietary services, then my answer is likely going to be influenced by what I'm familiar with, or whatever has the most effective marketing: "I guess you need a Slack channel" or "well everyone uses Gmail anyway, so just start a Google Group."

I'm keen to hear your views on this, and of course I am also happy to put the time and effort in to evaluate and facilitate discussion on potential F/LOSS infrastructure for a CC-Culture/CC-Create platform, in order for us to be able to make a decision which serves the needs of the community, and the wider commons movement.

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