Platform co-ops are online services collectively owned and governed by the people who depend on and participate in them.

The most valuable networks, however, are those that facilitate group affiliations to pursue shared goals—which is to say, networks that are treated like commons … First, platforms are us: Platforms aren’t just software applications and the companies that administer them. What gives a platform value, in most cases, is the community of users that employ the platform, along with the networks, data, and ideas they create. In other words, what makes platforms so valuable is what we put into them. Second, platforms don’t need to

promote inter-institutional collaboration and provide shared open-source platforms enabling co-creation and sharin

Open-source software relies on the development of communities of both developers and users in order to be successful. The success comes from sharing knowledge about how the software is constructed and can be utilized.

borative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues.”

encourage technological autonomy and provide ways for students, faculty and institutions to own and control their own data. lower the barrier to participation on the open web for BC faculty and students. provide a more sustainable ed tech infrastructure to BC higher education that gives institutions more control over their tools.  Institutions are currently at the mercy of vendor pricing, upgrade cycles, and exit strategies.  This puts institutions at a certain degree of risk when there are changes to any of the variables beyond their control.  Open-source approaches reduce the risk to institutions in this regard. assist BC faculty in evaluating and making informed pedagogical decisions around open-source teaching and learning applications.

The OpenETC is a community of educators, technologists, and designers sharing their expertise to foster and support open infrastructure for the BC post-secondary sector.  No contracts or agreements are required to join us, just a willingness and ability to

ips for a clear and informative notice There is no one, right way to give notice, and different situations may require more or less complicated notices and marking. The following tips may be helpful, however, in designing a clear and informative notice. 1. Define the work Substantively define the work to which you are applying the license. A notice that "this work" is offered under a CC license tells a user much less than one that gives the work's title or defines the work. If you intend to license a song, name the song. If you intend to license part of a work, describe that part. For instance, an author of a novel could offer one chapter under a CC license and use the following notice: "Chapter X of Novel Y by Author Z is offered under [license version].” Licensors who define the licensed work make it easier for users to understand which works and parts of works are licensed and available for use. 2. Identify any parts of the work to which the license does not apply Here the licensor should describe all of the elements of the work (as defined in the first step) to which the license does not apply, and thus are not available for use under the license terms. You may list reserved elements in the general notice, or you can describe and implement a marking procedure such as watermarking or text notices that you will use to denote those elements of the work that are not licensed. Licensors should inform users about any portions of the work to which the license cannot apply because the licensor does not have the necessary rights, and any places where the licensor has opted not to apply the license as a strategic matter. 3. Identify the rights licensed that you have in the work (as far as you know) and any rights that are not licensed because you do not have them. When licensors are the owners of, or are authorized to exercise, all rights related to their creative works, including copyright and publicity/privacy rights, marking a work is not problematic. However, some licensors do not own all rights related to their works. Copyright is a bundle of rights, such as the right to copy and the right to distribute, which are divisible and may be held by different parties. A licensor without all the rights should list those they have. For instance, a licensor who holds the performance rights to a recording of a song, but not the rights in the composition, should say so. Licensors should attempt to alert users of any rights held by others that may impact their ability to reuse the work. 4. Grant any additional permissions Licensors can use notices to grant additional permissions beyond the license grant. For instance, a licensor who chooses a NoDerivatives or NonCommercial license can grant users permission to create derivatives or make commercial uses under specific conditions. Note that licensors can use notices to broaden the license grant and give additional permissions, but notices cannot restrict any permissions already granted by the CC license. 5. Convey any supplementary requests or information Licensors should use notices to inform us

licensors that do not have all the necessary rights can inform users with notice statements and/or marking that explains the limitations on the license, warning, for instance, that a particular element of a work is not freely available or that additional rights clearance may be necessary.

nses are designed to let others know how they ma

CC licensors can use notices and marking to inform users of any limitations on the application of the CC license to their work

Marking works offered under other CC licenses

Using third party content in your work that is not offered under the same license terms as the rest of your work

Marking/Creators/Marking third party content

Third party content could be offered under a Creative Commons license, restricted by All Rights Reserved copyright

hird party content refers to material created by others, or more precisely, in which the licensor is not the copyrig

Finally we just developed 2 specific labels for cultural institutions. The Cultural Institution (CI) Labels are specifically for archives, museums, libraries and universities who are engaging in processes of collaboration and trust building with Indigenous and other marginalized communities who have been excluded and written out of the record through colonial processes of documentation and record keeping.

Inspired by Creative Commons, we began trying to address the gap for Indigenous communities and copyright law by thinking about licenses as an option to support Indigenous communities.

Dwayne Tomah called on the strength of his ancestors, and sang a song that had not been sung for 128 years.

In 2015, the Library of Congress’ National Audiovisual Conservation Center (NAVCC) included these cylinders in their digital preservation program for American and Native American heritage

The Labels embrace this epistemological complexity in a different kind of way – and they allow for flexibility as well as community specificity to be incorporated in ways that settler-colonial law cannot accommodate.

but there are 17 Traditional Knowledge labels and four licenses, creating an intentionally local and culturally dependent information ecosystem.

Partnering with the Penobscot Nation we just received an IMLS grant to run IP training and support workshops for US based tribes over the next two years.

How does information colonialism impact the communities where you work? How are you working to mitigate exploitation of cultural resources? Information colonialism is an everyday problem for all the communities with whom we work and collaborate. It is not only the legacies of past research practices, but how these are continued into the present. There are more researchers working in Indigenous communities now than there were at the height of initial colonial documenting encounters from the 1850s onwards – and the same logics of extraction through research largely continue. This means that many of the same problems that we are trying to address in Local Contexts – namely the making of research derived from Indigenous knowledge and participation often conducted on Indigenous lands as owned by non-Indigenous peoples – continues.

For example, Indigenous names have been used for names of cars (Cherokee); for software (Apache); for varieties of strawberries (Sto:lo). For Indigenous peoples, names are not just words in common, they have embedded temporal and relational meanings including integral connections to place. For Indigenous peoples, names matter and are not open for others to use in ways that minimize and reduce them for commercial gain.

reative Commons community come in to help think through these issues in conversation with Indigenous peoples and through Indigenous experiences?

: what would it look like if we invested time and support to Indigenous communities who have been disproportionately affected by colonial property laws – including copyright.

ially in how knowledge is shared,

problem that we responded to by developing the TK Labels.

Our initial impulse was to craft several new licenses in ways that incorporated local community protocols around the sharing of knowledge. Pretty quickly however we ran into a significant problem: with the majority of photographs, sound recordings, films, manuscripts, language materials that had been amassed and collected about Indigenous peoples, and that were now being digitized, Indigenous peoples were not the copy

Combining both legal and educational components, Local Contexts has two objectives. Firstly, to support Indigenous decision-making and governance frameworks for determining ownership, access to and culturally appropriate conditions for sharing historical and contemporary collections of Indigenous material and digital culture. Secondly, to trouble existing classificatory, curatorial and display paradigms for museums, libraries and archives that hold extensive Indigenous collections by finding new pathways for Indigenous names, perspectives, rules of circulation and the sharing culture to be included and expressed within public records.

We were able to see more clearly the ways in which copyright has functioned as a key tool for dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their rights as holders, custodians, authorities and owners of their knowledge and culture.

Your project recasts the Creative Commons vision of “universal access to research and education and full participation in culture” through a local and culturally determinant lens. How is the vision of Local Contexts complementary to the CC vision, and how does it come into conflict?

How can we have an open movement that works for everyone, not only the most powerful? How have power structures historically worked against Indigenous communities, and how can the Creative Commons community work to change this historic inequality?

Traditional Knowledge Labels

Local Contexts is both a legal and educational project that engages with the specific challenges and difficulties that copyright poses for Indigenous peoples seeking to access, use and control the circulation of cultural heritage.

Anderson’s work on Local Contexts is a collaboration with Kim Christen, creator of the Mukurtu content management system and Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation at Washington State University

for practical strategies for Indigenous communities to reclaim their rights and assert sovereignty over their own intellectual property.

NYU professor and legal scholar Jane Anderson presented the collaborative project “Local Contexts,”

Providing open access to digital collections transfers significant power from institutions to the public they exist to serve. As the Covid-19 pandemic progresses, it has never been more vital for museums to explore how they can make new connections with audiences and support creators, educators, scholars and innovators working through this difficult time.

The decision to engage audiences beyond cultural institutions’ own websites requires imagination and a change of attitude on the part of museum leaders

which now employs a ‘National Wikimedian’ to develop collaborations and services that advance the representation of Wales and the Welsh language on Wikimedia projects. York Museums Trust releases the majority of its online images to the public domain.

n practice, closed policies are rarely successful. Firstly, copyright is ineffective at preventing misuse — bad actors undeterred by copyright will always do bad things. Research conducted for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has found little to no reported misuse of images from online collections. Secondly, few museums actually make a profit from image licensing, as revealed by recent Freedom of Information responses, case studies, empirical data and institutions’ own admissions. These business models are increasingly unsustainable.

few institutions in the UK have implemented open access policies. The British Museum, the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery — four London institutions with national collections — all assert copyright in digital reproductions of public domain works, and impose significant restrictions on the reuse of these materials via Creative Commons licences. The ambiguity of the widely used ‘non-commercial use only’ stipulation limits image use in a range of educational conte

s arise around materials resulting from an act of reproduction of visual artworks in the public domain, unless the ‘author’s own intellectual creation’

In 2015, the Intellectual Property Office of the United Kingdom issued a (non-binding) copyright notice suggesting that ‘simply creating a copy of an image won’t result in a new copyright’, but noting that uncertainty existed around digitised copies o

In the European Union, the standard of originality for a new copyright requires that the work be the ‘author’s own intellectual creation’. So should, for instance, someone who digitises a Hogarth engraving from 1735 be entitled to a copyright in the new digital version? T

. This may sound obvious but the reality is less straightforward. Copyright law in this area is complex and lacks international harmonisation.

. In February, the Smithsonian released 2.8 million images of its collections for unrestricted public reuse. This spectacular announcement followed recent initiatives by , the Cleveland Museum of Art , Paris Musées, the Metropolitan Museum of Art

in a license like this is far better off using a Creative Commons license. If my word isn’t good enough, check this critique of the license which was written, oddly enough, a full year after I began discouraging its use.

n the Spring of 1998 I coined the term “open content” and began evangelizing the idea. As of today, Google knows about over 125,000 uses of the term “open content” or opencontent. Google and DMOZ both have categories for “Open Content.” Harvard Law uses the term. We’ve been mentioned by the New York Times, The Economist, MIT Technology Review, Wired, Reuters, and others popular news media. Creative Commons at Stanford Law has cited OpenContent has a major inspiration. MIT has opened its content with its OpenCourseWare initiative, CMU has its Open Learning Initiative, and other schools are following. Several printed books have been published under the OPL. &c.

. So in terms of high level structure, the OPL was here about five years before CC.

The OCL predates the GFDL (Nov 2002) and Creative Commons (Dec 2002) by over four years, while the improved OPL predates both by over three years.

first licenses to bring the ideals of open source software to the world of content

icense was so great, why doesn’t anyone use it anymore?”

cond restricts users’ abilities to make certain commercial uses of the material.

authors could choose to invoke: one restricts users’ abilities to creative derivative works,