CreativeCommons.org

Photo by-sa Freddy B. Used with permission from Photographer.

I’m in Sapporo for the CC Legal Day, Commons Research Mini-conference which the Metrics Project is but part, and to further promote the CC Case Studies project. As Greg outlined so clearly last week and I presented at the launch of CC Singapore a few days ago, this project is doing quite well with 112 submissions from around the world assisted by a great system for supporting this community project, and even better brilliant people adding case studies daily!

Also, you kind readers might have noticed that we have launched and/or refreshed several projects over the last few weeks to prepare for a coming change. As of August, my role with Creative Commons will change from managing community and business development to being liaison in ongoing similar affairs. This also means that I will be spending most of my time on projects outside of Creative Commons — most still involve using Creative Commons licensing and technology.

I’m not leaving the culture of free and open, nor Creative Commons, both of which I have been involved with for some time. Rather, I will be, as of August 2nd, devoting most of my energy to projects I’ve been delaying or couldn’t do as effectively since I have been living and breathing Creative Commons. My job and peers at Creative Commons are amazing and working for CC, in my capacity at least which I can speak to, is a dream job. If anything, I will be pushing Creative Commons even more by action, projects, and facilitation in another capacity.

Thus, if you want to find out more about what I will be doing, you know where to find me. And, if I’ve been working with you, your business, your community, and/or organization, jon@creativecommons.org still works (and will so). I am continuing work on a couple of projects that have not launched in relationship to Open Library/PDWiki project. I also am on-demand still for speaking at events and conferences globally - particularly in Asia since I will be spending most time in China from August - December 2008. I’m still on the books and will facilitate any discussions to the appropriate people. I’m more excited that ever to keep growing the commons!

photo from the craft economy

The Craft Economy, a Canadian band we have talked about before, recently got back in the news in regards to their latest CD-stapling adventure. The band has taken to the streets of Toronto, stapling 150 packages that contain a CD of two CC licensed (BY-NC) tracks as well as a message regarding recent Canadian legislation on Bill C-61. From The Craft Economy blog:

We’re handing out / sending / posting a bunch of CDs this weekend, throughout Toronto and the Hillside Festival in Guelph, that have a demo of Menergy and The Crash, The Wagons, The Dying Horses on it (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 license, to bring attention to Bill C-61 (and yeah, some upcoming shows, and yeah, our upcoming CD - but really, that’s a good thing).

We think fighting C-61 is important, and we think you should as well. We’ve posted this before, but do some research on this bill. It’s a mess [...] Bill C-61 is going to change the way you get to listen and watch the videos and music you pay for [...] The Craft Economy has licensed our music, including this CD, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 license. This license gives you the freedom to share our music with your friends and enemies, and remix and use it in new and creative ways, provided you attribute the work back to us, and you don’t make money off our work. It’s fair for you and us. This is the way art should work.Please do more reading on C-61 at the following links. A fair and civil future relies upon us, and our action.

You can read the full statement on their website (DISCLAIMER: one instance of NSFW language).

CASH Music, an acronym for ‘Coalition of Artists and Stakeholders’, has been an impressive member of the CC community since they debuted late last year. Part music label, part creative community, CASH Music has major plans to change the landscape of contemporary artistic output with a particular focus on the dialogue between content creators and consumers. They already have some amazing projects out under their moniker and with more on the way, we decided to catch up with CASH Music partner Jesse Von Doom to learn more about CASH’s goals, their business model, and what they have in store for the future.

Can you give our readers some background on CASH Music? How did it begin? Who is involved? On a broad level, what are you trying to accomplish?

CASH is an acronym for Coalition of Artists and Stake Holders. The name was chosen to reflect the goals and the people involved. The idea was born in a simple conversation between Kristin Hersh and Donita Sparks about achieving sustainability in the currently volatile music world. Their managers, Billy O’Connell and Robert Fagan respectively, continued the conversation and became the first two partners in what would be CASH. At the time I was running a graphic and web design firm with my business partner, Jack McKenna. A few business connections and friends-in-common later, Jack and I started working for CASH and quickly became partners ourselves. 

Since then we’ve won the support of seasoned advisors, organizations like Creative Commons, and some talented artists. But it still goes back to that first conversation between Kristin and Donita. We’re trying to help find healthy sustainability for artists while giving listeners more of a stake in the music for a new and better experience.

CASH is unsurprisingly identified with music. With that said, you have been working on a variety of projects that don’t have musical components. Why is that?

Really, we’re trying to show that remixing and sharing aren’t the only ways to get involved with music. It’s been so rewarding seeing the remixes generated at CASH, ccMixter, and in the wild; but I’ve also been thrilled to see people downloading and spending time with Adam Gnade’s Hymn California novel or flooding Jamie from Xiu Xiu with requests for haiku. People are forming real bonds with the music, the artists, and the communities they’re building around the releases. Music has always been a highly participatory art form — and we’re trying to harness that in new ways.

At CASH artists have been releasing full mix stems for remixing, tracks with community-added vocals, sheet music, writing that’s tied to the music — things that get an audience directly involved with the art. There are also elements of enhancing a release to the public. There are videos, interviews, photos, ebooks, and lyric sheets. Donita Sparks even opened up percentages of licensing for a track off her last album. Listeners could buy shares in a song, letting them participate in the profits from any TV or film licensing. 

The idea is that artists are exploring new ways to bring their music to an audience, with the ultimate goal being to strengthen both sides of that exchange.

Can you discuss CASH’s business model? There seems to be a combination between giving away things for free, selling collector goods, and asking for donations. How did you come up with this combination? How well has it worked so far?

That’s a fair summary of what’s up there now, but it’s more of an interim solution than a true business model. We’re committed to the idea of sustainability, both for the artists involved and for ourselves. That means finding the best model for each artist and helping them to move forward in that direction. When you see an artist offering a subscription, it’s because that’s what fits with their career, rather than it being something we’ve shoehorned them into. So our long-term model is based on the idea that if an artist succeeds at his or her goals, then we succeed. 

But to answer more directly, I’d say I’m very pleased so far. We’ve had over 4.5 million downloads, over 100,000 visitors, and hundreds of subscribers from all over the world. Virtually everything you see on the CASH Music site right now wouldn’t be possible without the support we’ve received from artists and their listeners. Our first project went live eight months ago, and we’ve been able to work on CASH for the better part of a year as a self-funded endeavor. While not all our projects involve commerce, the ones that do have made significant impact for the artists involved.

We’ve been especially happy to see people donating to artists. From the very beginning we were determined to provide direct access to music without placing artificial gateways in front of it. There are obvious questions about whether people would balk at giving money to an artist for content they could download for free, but we’ve seen numerous examples of people trying music and donating what they feel is a fair price. This is a pretty big deal to me. An artist spends time writing the music and money is spent on studio time, all to put out the best possible music. I like to think that people are genuinely considering all that, recognizing the effort, and helping it to continue. 

In every CASH project there is some level of CC licensing, be it large or small. Why did you decide to use CC licenses with CASH Music projects?

The real question is how could we have done it without Creative Commons. CC Licensing simplifies the process of community interaction, it pre-clears music for podcasting and sharing, and it lets the artist define what use of their work they see as fair while retaining their copyright and whatever level of commercial rights they choose to keep. I feel that the entire music industry, independents and majors, should be using Creative Commons licenses for shared music.

Have you seen any interesting cases of reuse as a result of using CC licenses?

Absolutely! There are two that jump to mind right away:

Kristin Hersh doing vocals for a Xiu Xiu track. This went basically unnoticed and I sort of love that. It was a gem hidden in plain sight, and something I could never see happening otherwise.

Lucas Gonze taking Deerhoof sheet music and cranking out midi and all sorts of helpful files. This is a great example. Deerhoof have released their first single off an upcoming album as sheet music, with the plea that artists record their own versions and submit them back to CASH. We’ve gotten some great examples of exactly that, but Lucas took the sheet music and created files that open up potential involvement to a much larger community. It was unexpected, impossible without CC licensing, and its proving an invaluable asset to the project.

In just skimming over the projects listed on CASH Music’s front page it is immediately obvious that CASH focuses on unique and engaging projects. Can you give us a hint of what may be coming in the future?

You can certainly count on more projects and more artist involvement. We’ll continue on in this invitation-only, highly custom way for a while; but there will be a greater role for the public with each new project. Ultimately we’re working towards a fully open-sourced, hosted platform that is available to all, and more details on that are forthcoming. We’re doing our best to be as open as possible, so fairly regular updates can be expected. In the coming months you’ll see new names, new ideas, and plenty of new music. 

photo by Taryn James | CC BY

If you have only been reading the updates on the international Creative Commons blog (this one) about the Case Studies project you have been missing some important news.

Creative Commons Australia, the leaders in the Case Study project, have just released the first draft version of the Case Studies book pdf: Building an Australasian Commons. This is one high quality book that show cases all of the Australian Case Studies. A huge “Congrats!” goes to Rachel Cobcroft and everyone else who has put so much time into this project and produced such a wonderful tool for all to use.

If you like this book enough that you want to print your own copy, GO FOR IT! However, for those of you that will want to print a large number of these my advice is to wait; there will be a newer more finalized version soon which will make some changes you will want.

Now, go add your own Case Studies to the project wiki so that the next version might have YOUR case study included!

Original Creative Commons Australia announcement here: LINK .

An interesting article in today’s Los Angeles Times focuses on Sean Tevis, a Kansan Democrat running for state legislature who, like many in the political process, found fundraising to be his biggest obstacle. Frustrated by his inability to generate funding, Tevis turned to popular webcomic XKCD for inspiration, creating his own comic that offered his opinions on political issues. The comic, and the content on the rest of Tevis’ site, is released under a CC BY-NC-ND license.

After releasing the comic, Tevis quickly saw his empty war chest fill up, with thousands of people donating small amounts that eventually amassed the politician over $90,000. While much of this success is due to Tevis’ knack for humorous writing, it also has to do with the fact that he’s distributing his content under terms that keep it sharable and easier to evangelize.

CC’s Business Development team Jon Phillips and myself got a chance to meet up a few weeks ago with the awesome staff over at the Spain-based SafeCreative project. They’re working to build a free and open global intellectual property registry that allows users to publicly assert and identify their rights over a work. The project supports CC licensing, and it’s definitely making important strides in authenticating creative works.

Mario and his team have been gaining lots of traction in the recent months, and we’re excited to announce today that they just put out a call for all you law-techie geeks types out there who are interested in getting involved and helping to building bridges from their project to communities in the US. The job would involve posting on their English blog, translating over some of their FAQ’s, and helping to field questions from users. If you’re interested, details are available here.

We are delighted to announce the successful localization of the Creative Commons licenses in Singapore, the 47th worldwide to do so. The CC Singapore team, led by Associate Professor Samtani Anil and Assistant Professor Giorgios Cheliotis, has worked under the auspices of the Centre for Asia Pacific Technology Law & Policy (CAPTEL) and in collaboration with Creative Commons International to port the licenses to Singaporean law.

The launch event will be celebrated on Sunday, July 27, at the International Symposium on Electronic Art. The ceremony will be followed by several panels organized by CATPEL and Creative Commons Singapore on copyright issues in digital media and a keynote address from Professor Lawrence Lessig. For more in information we invite you to read our press release.

Congratulations, CC Singapore!

The Miro team have put their summer video intern, Parker Higgins to work launching two new channels for the open-video application: 

The goal of these channels is to showcase interesting and entertaining material from all over the internet that’s been released under open licenses. Free Culture TV is more specialized, and will contain programming from the Free Culture movement: documentaries, lectures, or short films that address the struggle against a permissions-based society. Yes, We’re Open! will have all kinds of entertainment, from feature length movies to documentaries, shorts, music videos, and anything else you can imagine, all openly licensed.

Miro defines ‘openly licensed’ as:

… an alternative to the “all rights reserved” associated with copyright. When people assign an open license to their work, they are giving the public certain rights, like the freedom to copy and distribute, or to remix and mash up, depending on the terms of the license. One popular example are the Creative Commons licenses, which are applied to many of the videos in these channels.

If you don’t already have Miro installed, download it here. Once you’re set up, click on the following links to automatically subscribe to the channels that Parker is curating:

• Free Culture TV 1-click subscribe
• Yes, We’re Open! 1-click subscribe.

Most importantly, if you have content to submit to either of the channels, get in contact with Parker.

Jamison Young is a musician who records endlessly and plays live as often as he can. Young releases all his music under a CC licence, some through ‘fairplay’ label (and former Featured Commoner) Beatpick, who helped get Young’s track “Memories Child” into the soundtrack for new feature film “The X-Files: I Want to Believe“. We Caught up with Young and asked him some questions regarding his decision to use CC licences and what his current and future plans are - read on to find out more.

photo by Guillaunme Charriau | CC BY

Can you give our readers a bit of background about yourself and your music?

I’ve been writing, performing and recording songs for a while, yet its only in the last five or so years that I have settled down enough to get some kind of career going with what I do. I play live, although mostly based in Europe and that is where I’m based - I’m originally from Australia.

What are your influences?

Any song that lets me escape, songs from the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s of all types and also contemporary artists like Beck. I like songs that I can listen to again and again yet still stay fresh. Learning about copyright and Creative Commons has given me a new view on my influences though.

What licenses do you use and why?

I licensed the songs from the album “Shifting Sands Of A Blue Car” under a Creative Commons Attribution license. When I look at the amount of self published art that is used commercially compared to published content and then look at how much quality self published content is available online, less restrictions for my music makes more sense for me. Also, a lot of home creators that use a song might want to use the content in conjunction with a services like youtube or myspace, and who can say if these services are a commercial or non-commercial from the user of the contents point of view.

How do you distribute your works?

I’ve written a lot of songs, yet only produced one album. People find out about my tunes through services like Jamendo , Myspace , last.fm , facebook , youtube, and when content gets remixed using a CC license. I see the recording as a promotional tool for a live show. When I play tunes at festivals I make an effort hand out postcards with my info. When I perform a show at a bar or cafe I send posters and postcards prior to the event.

Have you seen any interesting examples of reuse as a result of using CC licenses?

The uncultured project used the song “how far” in many of its clips. Shawn from the uncultured project went looking for free content to use with his clips on Jamendo and found my songs. Shawn’s film project deals with issues that relate to poverty in Bangladesh. The clip at this link has had almost 500,000 plays.

Recently I started to license my live performances under a CC BY license. In Europe although venues are already paying a blanket license for the use of content, often the venue has to pay an extra fee for the use of live music. As a result many bars and cafes don’t have live music. My hope is that putting a Creative Commons license on the live performance of my songs for this use shall create more opportunity for a promoted live event. A lot of artists play shows in spaces that don’t have an agreement with a rights organizations for live music, yet these shows are mostly not promoted beyond the artists network of friends.

As an artist, how important is CC to you?

Prior to the 90’s it seemed necessary to have a recording and publishing industry, yet with the internet and changes in recording technology, the old system looks to be less and less relevant to today’s artist. I grew up in a system where i watched TV, people grow up in a world today where we have the tools to make the media. I see the Creative Commons licenses as a good way for people to get together and create.

Recently one of your songs, “Memories Child” got picked up to be played in the feature film “The X-Files: I Want to Believe“, how did this happen? How do you feel about it?

The director of the film heard the track and wanted to use it. Beatpick created a synchronization license in conjunction with Fox Films for the use of the song.

The use of the song is great news for me, its going to be a bit of a jolt to the system when the film is released though. My hope is that I’ll get more live work and the opportunity to promote and record a fresh production album. Artists that get known for what they create have people employed pushing buttons and pulling the strings, I do what I can with the resources i have, and for now I’m happy moving along on this path.

How does the Beatpick service work?

Beatpick doesn’t own any part of the artists copyright - the artist gives Beatpick the right to synchronize rights for use of the artists song. When the artist signs with Beatpick the artist also gives Beatpick the right to use their songs without having to pay the rights organizations. The contract that the artist agrees to with Beatpick is not permanent, and Beatpick license nothing exclusively. Beatpick license their artists songs using BY-NC-SA. Any proceeds Beatpick make from licensing a song are split with the artist/creator.

Will you collect any royalties as a result of the use of your song in the film?

As the song shall be performed in so many places I made the decision to sign with ASCAP as an artist/publisher and collect for the use. The difference between ASCAP and APRA (Australian equivalent) is that ASCAP artists can license using a Creative Commons license. Like APRA, ASCAP issue blanket licenses for use of their members songs to media, however members with ASCAP are able to license what they create as they choose and also pick up when a performance shows up in the system.

From the ASCAP bill of rights:

“We have the right to choose when and where our creative works may be used for free.”
“We have the right to license our works and control the ways in which they are used.”

What are your plans for the future? Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know?

I’m interested to have songs remixed via CC mixter in conjunction with a production recording. I’ve also started to collect images from travels that I project with my live show. I’m also interested in traveling with my tunes through transforming and developing countries.

Finding out about Creative Commons has been a stepping stone to understanding more clearly how the business of music works. Since i found out about Creative Commons I’ve started to put ideas I have that involve the use of Creative Commons licenses on the site iarts.

Jamendo, a music site with over 10,000 CC-licensed albums, has teamed up with MP3tunes:
Give it a try at www.mp3tunes.com/jamendo - you’ll find 10 exclusive playlists of the best in rock, hip hop, jazz and more from Jamendo. Sign up for a Music Locker - it’s free to try - and then with a single click get each playlist you like added to your to your collection. You can also add personal music from your computer in your Locker with free, easy-to-use software.

This is very cool. Heavily curated playlists are one way to address the discovery problem. Using freely licensed music is how internet music startups can get the economics of all other internet startups. Unsaid in the announcement linked above, all of the playlisted tracks in the Jamendo/MP3tunes collaboration are licensed under CC BY-SA, allowing commercial use and recalling a recently posted quote from Lucas Gonze on commercial use and “empowering businesses to build support systems for your music.”

Despite the humid weather Wednesday night, around 60 New Yorkers made it out to our July Salon at The Open Planning Project. After presentations from Livable Streets Network, Wikia Search and Max Silvestri’s hilarious Silvestri’s facebook foibles, we adjourned for pizza and beer on TOPP’s wonderful deck.

Check out my flickr photos from last night, and Nick Grossman from TOPP’s post on it here.

Many thanks go to The Open Planning Project and Brooklyn Brewery for supplying us cases of their beer. 

The next CC Salon NYC will be in mid-September, so look for the invite soon.

This time around, the SF Salon’s theme will focus on Creative Commons in the realm of film and media. We’ve got an all-star line-up of inspiring folks who will be talking about how CC and open and shared culture are all vital and exciting components of the media world. The night will start off with Jolene Pinder, an Associate Producer at Arts Engine, Inc. in NYC. Jolene will be screening a short CC-licensed film and talking about the various ways in which Arts Engine uses CC licenses. Next, CC’s very own Creative Director, Eric Steuer, will be talking about the soon to be launched film maker’s toolkit. And last but not least, Robin Sloan, Product Strategist from Current TV will wrap up the evening.

Mark your calendars for Wednesday, August 13, from 7-9pm.
The event will be held at Shine Bar in San Francisco.

We hope you will join us for what is sure to be an entertaining and memorable CC Salon!

Only one month after the official release of the Case Studies project and already the response has been great! As you saw from my one week update the media response has also been very positive.

We aren’t resting on our laurels yet! There is more to be done but here is what is new:

• We are now up to over 110 case studies which is up from 90 when we publicly launched the project. Thanks to everyone who has helped and added case studies!
• With all of the activity going on in the Case Studies project it might seem hard to know what is going on. Not any more! We enabled a feature on the main page so you can see the last edited case studies.
• The future of the Case Studies project is looking great also. To see what is planned and what is already done check out the Case Studies Roadmap.
• Also, be sure to check out the new featured Studies on the main Case Studies page.

Again, a big thank you to everyone who has participated in the project thus far. There is always room for more contributors though!

One of my favorite bands, Deerhoof, has teamed up with innovative media company CASH Music (we’ve talked about CASH’s great work here, here, and here) for a very interesting project. In a sly nod to the ubiquity of pre-release music leaks, the group has issued the sheet music for its upcoming single “Fresh Born” under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license in advance of the October release of Offend Maggie, the band’s new album on Kill Rock Stars.

It’s a neat experiment in encouraging interactivity: Deerhoof’s recorded version of “Fresh Born” isn’t even available yet, but there are already several great recordings of the song - all made by other people - floating around online. Visit the CASH site for the most up-to-date collection of links to versions of the song. Lucas Gonze has made the music easier to work with digitally by retranscribing it with music notation software. Also, be sure to check out New York public radio station WNYC’s cool video of Deerhoof fans using their sight-reading abilities to collaboratively create a rendition of the song.

Creative Commons has announced the release of two very important tools for the developer community. These tools, liblicense and LicenseChooser.js, provide simple and standard ways of reading or writing license information to a variety of files.

liblicense is specifically geared towards the desktop application developer who wants to use license information in media files but does not want to implement the low-level code themselves. LicenseChooser.js, however, is designed to be used in web applications such as a media sharing site for users’ pictures or music.

Both of these software packages aim to make the lives of the developers’ easier. One way in which that is accomplished is that these tools will continue to be updated as new versions of Creative Commons licenses are released thus moving the burden from the developer to Creative Commons.

There will be a public demonstration of liblicense at OSCON on July 24th. For more information see the Press Release.

A Google twofer for Creative Commons today!

Google Knol opened today, intended to be a platform for authoritative articles about a specific topics, also known as knols, by a created single author or collaboratively. The default license for a new knol is CC Attribution. A creator can also choose CC Attribution-NonCommercial or All Rights Reserved.

Separately, Google Code added an option for software projects to specify a separate license for content associated with a software project — CC Attribution or CC Attribution-ShareAlike. This does not change Google Code’s selection of free and open source software licenses for source code. (Note: Creative Commons also recommends and uses free and open source software licenses such as the GNU GPL for source code.)

It’s really great to see both Google Knol and Google Code launching with and launching support for CC licensing on the same day, and interesting how their choice of licenses to offer differs. Knol defaults to the most liberal CC license, but allows authors to choose a more restrictive (NonCommercial) license, or even the most restrictive option — no public license.

As prior to its launch Knol was often speculatively compared to Wikipedia, it should be noted that the default Knol license (CC BY) could permit using Knol content in Wikipedia (with attribution of course), but knols under more restrictive options could not be incorporated into Wikipedia. On the other hand Wikipedia content could not be incorporated into knols (except in the case of fair use of course), even in the case Wikipedia migrates to CC BY-SA — Knol doesn’t offer a copyleft license.

The two CC licenses offered by Google Code are those that are in the spirit of free and open source software, befitting Google Code’s user base — free and open source software developers.

Photo by Petri Tuohimaa for GMRI, CC BY-NC-ND
“Sarah on a beach near Portland, Maine looking for two species of invasive marine crabs – Carcinus maenas (European green crab) and Hemigrapsus sanguineus (Asian shore crabs).”

In April, I had a chance to meet with Sarah Kirn, Program Manager of Vital Signs, a field and inquiry based science education program at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The meeting took place in our sunny San Francisco office while Sarah was in town for the week. She marveled at the weather, her native state being Maine, where she has worked with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute since 2002. She explained that the Vital Signs program itself actually started in 1999. Back in 1999, Vital Signs was using Apple E-mates, something which, at my age, I’ve never heard of, much less used. The following are excerpts from our meeting, along with some recent edits over email.

I might have used it, I said. I remember using those old Apples…

“No, no, no,” she said. “It’s not an old box-style computer—it was an early portable computer. They’re really…kind of sleek and green and had a little stylus and keyboard. It was a great piece of technology that didn’t make it into mainstream use. So we started developing Vital Signs on Palm computers in about 2001.”

Let’s rewind a bit. Vital Signs, according to their website and info sheet, “is an inquiry-based, field science education program that links students and scientists in the rigorous collection and analysis of essential environmental data. Innovative technology, relevant content, and critical partnerships create an authentic science learning experience for students, a distributed data gathering network for scientists, and a statewide community of teachers, students, and scientists collaborating to learn about and steward aquatic ecosystems.”

Basically, Vital Signs is focused on giving students firsthand experience of being scientists in the field. The environmental data that students collect will be used by students and scientists—real, professional scientists—in their own research. How will Vital Signs do this? One advantage the program has is its geographic location: Maine. All seventh and eighth grade students in Maine have their very own laptops—and not just any laptops mind you, but laptops made by Apple, those cute white Macbooks with the sheen still on their covers. How did they score those? It starts with a governor who had a vision for revolutionizing education.

I read somewhere that the [laptops] are funded by either the state or the Marine Institute…

“The state. The program was started six years ago. Then Governor Angus King was nearing the end of his final term. He wanted to leave a legacy that would position Maine for success in the 21st century. He started thinking about technology in schools. He asked Seymour Papert, ‘how many computers do I need to put in schools to make a difference? If every school had a classroom full of computers is that enough? If every school had three classrooms full of computers, is that enough?’ Papert replied, ‘it really doesn’t matter how many computers you put in the classrooms unless each student has their own.’ Governor King took a budget surplus and made the first round of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative happen.” (Maine was also the first state with high speed internet access to every library and every school.)

So is it all seventh and eighth graders?

“All seventh and eighth graders and their teachers. It actually started with the teachers first, which was critical to the program’s success. Teachers got their computers a year before their students. Governor King had the insight to get teachers involved in the administration of the project. The woman he hired to run it, Bette Manchester, had worked as a teacher and as a principal. She had the insight that when you take a classroom where traditionally the teacher has been the one with all the knowledge and their job has been to impart that knowledge to their students, and you give all the students their own high speed, connected laptops, you’ve given all the students access to more information than could possibly be in their teacher’s head and this had the potential to flip classrooms upside down. So how [do] you help teachers make that fundamental transition in their role, especially given that teachers often have a different relationship with technology than their students do? There’s often more fear, there’s often less willingness to try things, there’s often more fear about being wrong and doing something that’s going to mess it up. So this is where Bette began.”

So how does Vital Signs fit into it—what role does it play with the laptops, with the Maine Learning Technology Initiative?

“We are developing a suite of software that will enable students to make and record rigorous observations of invasive species in their community’s aquatic habitats, and to work online with each other and with scientists to understand the meaning and importance of the observations they made. We will create an interface that allows students, scientists, and the public to query the database, create maps and graphs of the data, and share multimedia reports and data products. Most of this software suite will be web-based and all of it will be freely available to anyone, but it will also become part of the disk image installed on all 32,000 Maine Learning Technology Initiative laptops.”

So the whole point of Vital Signs is first of all to get students used to technology…

“No, not at all, our primary goal is to build science literacy. But let me back up and tell you a bit about the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The Gulf of Maine Research Institute has a three-pronged mission. One, we’re doing fisheries ecosystem research. Fisheries have traditionally been managed on a species by species basis, but there is growing demand for a more holistic approach. Species-specific management was simple, but of course every fish in the ocean is eating other fish and competing with other fish for food and being eaten by other things like whales and other species humans want to protect. So there’s all sorts of complicated issues and if you look at it on a species by species basis, you’ve oversimplified it to the point where it breaks down.

“So we do fisheries ecosystem research and the twist that we bring to it is that we partner scientists with fishermen. Fishermen have spent, often, generations at sea. For example, I went fishing with one of our fishermen partners and I was looking around on his boat and I didn’t see any charts (he was using an electronic navigation system). I asked if he carried charts on his boat. He looked at me and said, ‘No.’ ‘What if your electronics break down?,’ I asked. He showed me a little notebook that has all the tows three generations of his family had made. He knows the bottom of the ocean the way we recognize streets on land. He just navigates by the bottom. So there’s that kind of incredible knowledge about where fish are, where you want to catch them, what time of year, the temperature of the water and all the rest. Fishermen also have tremendous skill in handling boats. So if you pair both the knowledge and the skill set of fishermen with the rigorous methodology of scientists, we can start one step ahead of everybody else. And contrary to what many people think, fishermen are not all out to destroy the ocean. They would like their kids to be fishermen, the way they are, and their father and their grandfather were. They are really interested in figuring out different ways to better manage the fish.

“The second thing that we do is community-building and education work around marine resources, bringing together managers, the fishermen, scientists, and environmentalists to all put their ideas on the table. We create neutral space for that to happen in what’s been and continues to be an extraordinarily contentious arena. We’ve become trusted for the neutrality that we bring to the table and for giving everybody respect and equal airtime.

“The third thing that we do, something that we see as essential to creating a sustainable marine ecosystem including humans, is science education. We’re committed to building science literacy in Maine so that citizens have the tools to understand natural resource issues and come to their own informed conclusions. We target our education programs at middle school, which is where researchers suggest that kids either stay in science or pop out of it.”

That’s actually kind of true.

“We have two active education programs at GMRI: Vital Signs and LabVenture!. LabVenture! is a fifth and sixth grade program that happens in our building. We’ve raised money to bring every fifth or sixth grade student in the state to our lab for a half-day immersive science experience. Every school district decides whether the program works best with the fifth or sixth grade curriculum, then we send a bus to the school to bring the students to Portland. We use technology to enable them to work independently of their teachers, and use the scientific method to solve a mystery.”

So they’re doing kind of field work?

“Yeah. The mystery is about the X-Fish––what is it and why is it important. They go through four stations. At one, for example, they use a microscope to look at the fish’s stomach contents and take images––still, digital images––of what they see. They make observations, make hypotheses about what they expect to find, document what they see, and then record their conclusions at each station. The concluding presentation of the LabVenture! program is a colloquium drawing from these student-collected digital assets to solve the mystery of the x-fish.

“Vital Signs will be for 7th and 8th grade students and will immerse students in their own communities. Students will go outside with their laptops and work in teams to investigate and document what they see. One person will have dry hands and sit in a dry place and enter the data, the other team members will take pictures of and identify species and habitats, use a GPS to get location data, use probes to measure water quality and soil quality, write general observations. The software will guide them through making their observations and provide on demand help. They’ll collect all that data, they’ll bring it back to the classroom, they’ll send it to our database. The teacher will have a chance to look at it to evaluate student learning. And then students will actually peer review each other’s work. With Vital Signs I see the opportunity to use technology to enable students to take on the work and the role of the scientist in the field—from asking the questions to collecting the data to analyzing the data.”

“We have two interconnected goals with Vital Signs. One, to give students a richer understanding and experience of what science is and how messy and complex it is. Two, to produce quality data that’s useful to the broader scientific community. We’ve already worked with scientists around the state who are studying invasive species and they’re really interested in the data that will come out of Vital Signs. This is a big motivating factor in the students but also the teachers who really like to be able to tell their students so and so scientists are looking at this question just like you are and they’re really interested in the data that you find from this site.”

I’m interested in how the peer review process actually works.

“We’re still working out the details, but the main idea is that students will develop an identity within the program. They’ll be able to gain and demonstrate expertise in the various data collection tasks-–-identifying individual species, taking crisp photographs that let viewers verify identifications, writing interesting and relevant observations, using the water quality probes, etc. When they have been recognized as having achieved proficiency in a particular task, they’ll be able to exercise their knowledge by providing a review of un-verified records. For example, if you’ve demonstrated expertise in identifying European Green Crabs, Carcinus maenas, you’ll be able to search the database for unverified sightings of these crabs and comment on whether they were correctly identified or not.”

Are you looking to expand this outside of Maine?

“Maine is absolutely the perfect place to develop and test Vital Signs, but our attitude towards practically everything that we develop, whether it’s in education or science or community, is that if we solve a problem that we have in Maine, that solution might be really valuable to somebody else outside of Maine. Maybe not for the same thing that we’re dealing with but for something else that they’re concerned about. So we’re always interested in building programs such that they may be modeled and may be replicated or extended outside the Gulf of Maine. With Vital Signs all our code will be released as open source software so the components can be used elsewhere. We’re very interested in partnering with organizations outside of Maine to expand or replicate Vital Signs.”

That’s where Creative Commons and open education comes in?

“Right. The first thing I talked to Ahrash [Bissell, ccLearn director] about was actually the student data, and how do you license it so that it is open to be used and obvious that it may be used. One of the things you come up against in education is the need to protect the identity of your students. And there are other considerations: if you’re working for [Creative Commons] or I’m working for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the product of our work is owned by our employers. But students, they’re not employees of the school…

“So what we’re working out is, exactly how do we create attribution? Who gets attribution? Are you able to cite this body of information? We really hope it’s used by people other than the students. And we absolutely encourage students to remix the data. There’s all sorts of things you can repackage and re-purpose.

“Every educational resource that GMRI has created has always been out there for people to use. When we post activities online we don’t presume that teachers will only use the activity the way we’ve written it. And often the activities that we write have suggestions for how to change them that might suit one group of students or an older or a younger group of students. So I think there’s a general assumption that what we post online is going to be reused and remixed.”

Currently, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s website (including what they have up so far for Vital Signs) is CC licensed under CC BY-NC-ND. The environmental focus of Vital Signs for the fall of this year will be Invasive Species Monitoring—so seventh and eighth graders will be out in the field collecting data on invasive species for scientists to study for their research.

When I asked Sarah how and why she ended up managing the Vital Signs program for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, she told me that her first job after college was as an Outward Bound sailing instructor teaching sailing courses off the coast of Maine. The experience inspired her educational [philosophy], or pedagogy, a word she normally doesn’t like. It’s all about giving students a genuine role to play and making learning contextual. After completing her masters in Oceanography, she realized she didn’t want to do just research and that she didn’t want to do just education. Vital Signs was perfect because it was “something in the middle.” “Vital Signs gives students a real role to play in answering authentic questions. When you put learning in an authentic context, it’s much more real.”

We all remember our math teachers don’t we? Sarah remembers her Calculus teacher back in high school…

“Mr. Smith, why are we learning calculus? What’s the big picture?” asked an eighteen year old Sarah.

“Well, Sarah,” he replied, “maybe you’re going to work designing cans in the future. Then you’ll have to maximize volume and minimize surface area…”

“There is no way on earth that I am going to design cans!” she remembers thinking.

Among her many activities including sailing boats, hobnobbing with local fishermen and consulting with scientific experts in her field, Sarah has not quite made the time to design a single can yet. But she is spearheading the ongoing Vital Signs project, which is a significant indicator of the changing science education landscape towards sharing and openness.

Just a quick reminder that CC Salon NYC is happening tomorrow night. July’s salon will feature presentations from Wikia Search, Livable Streets Network, and a special performance from comedian Max Silvestri (of Gabe + Max’s Internet Thing).

Here are the details:

Wednesday, July 23rd from 7-10pm
The Open Planing Project
349 W. 12th St., 1st Floor

We’ll have free (as in beer) beer sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery. Don’t miss this great opportunity to be a part of the CC community in NYC and learn about some great projects and people thinking about the issues we care about.

Follow the event via Upcoming.org and RSVP via the Facebook event or e-mailing me - fred [at] creativecommons.org

Jamglue - featured commoner, remix contest holder extraordinaire - have delivered again with two awesome remix contests, one featuring rap-duo Kidz in the Hall and the other solo-artist Tyga. Both contests feature song stems for both artists’ current singles - “Driving Down the Block” and “Coconut Juice” respectively - released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. As we have noted before, by using CC licences Jamglue allows artists to open up their content to fans in a way that not only allows for positive interaction and creation, but also maintains the commercial interests of the artists at hand.

Unfortunately, the entry date for the Tyga contest has passed (which doesn’t mean you can’t remix it - just not for a prize). Entries for The Kidz in the Hall contest are due by August 17, giving you plenty of time to rearrange and pick apart their music, crafting your own creation in the process.

Dans les jardins de Monte-Carlo | No known copyright restrictions.

Two more amazing photo collections have been added to the continuously growing Flickr Commons, one coming from the George Eastman House and the other from Le Bibliothèque de Toulouse. Both groups’ photostreams are absolutely amazing to pour over, offering stunning images from the turn of the century that are all released in the public domain. Again, in case you have missed any of our other posts on the Flickr Commons, some info below:

The key goals of The Commons are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer. You’re invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments

The rest of the institutions on the Flickr Commons have all recently added new photos as well, increasing the worth of an already phenomenal resource.