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-Create platform would be for:
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sharing resources/tools/guides to empower/enable CC users, and those wanting to spread a commons-based approach in the arts (eg. art, remix, design, literature, performance, photo & video, visual storytelling, games and music)
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artists / cultural producers finding like-minded colleagues and collaborators
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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.
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sharing example CC projects for inspiration
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behind-the-scenes stories
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sharing and remixing work and 'sources' eg design files, game assets
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sharing teaching resources, or stories of successfully introducing & promoting CC to artists/cultural producers
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discussions on negotiating the use of CC licenses with establishment publishers/broadcasters.
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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.
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.
There are some small but vital communities working on arts in relation to Free Software, such as Open Source Design - [forum], Libre Graphics Meeting - [mailing list], or Blender Cloud / Open Projects. While there's some crossover, only a subset of CC artists are using Free Software tools and/or engaged with the Free Software community.
There are a handful of very small, low-activity 'Free Culture' pages/chats/groups: Free Culture subreddit, Free Culture Wiki, and Free Culture on matrix.org. These platforms are not well known or easily discovered.
Two practical and active resource and remix sites exist in the audio field: ccMixter - [forum], and freesound - [forum] Unfortunately this type of community does not appear very common in other artistic fields, and there is not much intermedia crossover.
Many artists are sharing CC work on platforms like Vimeo or Flickr, but beyond the ability to filter works by license, there's not a specific CC-focused community or space on those sites for these artists to exchange with one another or build upon each others' work. On these platforms Creative Commons is just a copyright license, not a community, or an artistic approach.
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 does this platform work connect with the CC strategy?
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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.
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In advocacy work, CC has come up against collecting societies and publishers who ostensibly represent 'the will of artists' when campaigning for stricter, lengthier copyright terms, automated takedowns, upload fitlers and so on. Currently CC does not have many artists in the community who can present an alternative, pro-commons perspective to counter these arguments. See issue #12 for more context.
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The creativity of CC-Create's participants can serve the wider CC community by collaborating with the network on materials for campaigns and commons-focused issues.
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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 ;)
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artists and cultural producers could be a lot more creative 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.
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
- Sam Muirhead - Camera Libre. Video, animation, open source community building, and peer production beyond software. Mozilla Fellow working on remixable visual storytelling, Open Source Animation, and Cut, Copy & Paste: giving people a fun, lo-fi, no-risk experience of open collaboration through creative workshops.
- Terry Williams. Photographer/lens-based media artist, producer - Ontario, Canada. Interested in analog photographic and printing processes, glitch art, generative art, as well as transmission art and other signal-based realizations of images and information. Especially interested in open-source platforms for terrestrial (non-internet) radio, and open platforms for artists working in other media, such as Processing, Arduino, and Pure Data. Recently joined the Commons community as coordinator of CC Global Summit 2018.
- Subhashish Panigrahi - Bangalore, India. Wikimedian, documentary filmmaker, FLOSS and open culture advocate, co-founder, O Foundation (OFDN)
- Veethika Mishra - Bangalore, India. Tabletop Game Designer, Visual Designer, Interaction Designer at Red Hat.
- Alanna Mayer - Ontario, Canada. I do a lot of heritage work but I'm also a photographer with some stock for sale and a lot of CC licensed stuff on Flickr. I'm also a freelance writer and attempt to make lots of what I do CC-BY-NC-SA
- Suraj Barthy, Chennai, India. Interaction Designer & Musician. I have an Everyday Art Project where I make one work of art from scratch, everyday. surajbarthy.com
- artists / designers / musicians / video/photographers / creative writers
- teachers at art/design/music schools
- people from a wide range of cultural backgrounds
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 solidarity & community.
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:
- news, tools & resources related to culture and the commons - eg. an update on the apertus open source cinema camera or CASH Music platform, a post about Morevna Project's adaptation of Pepper and Carrot, from a comic to an animated motion comic or the CC search tool.
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:
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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.
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short interviews with community members, by community members - eg. Krita has a set of standard questions which they invite their users to answer, and publish the results on their blog. example interview. These interviews could take the form of a 'chain' - one artist answers 5 questions about their own work. They then invite another artist to answer the same questions, replacing one of them with a new question. That way, threads of interviews can develop on the forum with minimal organisational intervention, and no extra publishing stage.
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.
- define scope/aims of CC-Create platform
- reach out to key people within existing artistic communities & CC network for input
- refine platform proposal
- proposal will be discussed at the second Global Network Council meeting
- 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
- At CC Summit, May 2019:
- reconnect with key community members to prepare for launch
- demo & launch platform (+ social media push)
- update regularly, continue outreach
- invite/encourage participants to take a more active role in organising, updating, community development.
Connected with the timeline, it is expected to include a policy position in the way of a white paper, for instance, which points out the agreements within the platform connected with CC strategy.
... input from existing CC staff / community members needed ...
Under this topic you may be able to answer: What 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)?
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.
Following discussions with community members, the proposed infrastructure for the CC-Create platform is a Discourse forum, hosted at a creativecommons.org subdomain, with the existing #cc-create Slack channel as a secondary space.
Why Discourse, rather than Slack alone? Why not Github, or a wiki..?
See the CC-Create: Infrastructure document for answers!