CC global network strategy proposal

Thank you. Will read and give feedback. Cheers Diane. Great about cross party work on Domestic Violence Victims Bill on International Women's Day yesterday. Compassion does not have a political colour. Cheers Diane.

Diane P. McCarthy| Senior Lecturer and lT Research, Department of Computing
ARA Institute of Canterbury, 130 Madras Street, Christchurch
PO Box 540, Christchurch 8140, NZ
Txt to 0220617682 preferred.
DDI 03 940 8244 | Email [email protected]

Any idea who's moderating the feedback/comments on the online document? They're moving pretty slowly... First impression: the document seems surprisingly poorly written, and the scope is absurdly broad ("Our vision for the Creative Commons Global Network is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity.”)... This is lovely "“The mission of the Creative Commons Global Network is to build a global commons of creativity and knowledge, and grow a movement that advocates, promotes and enables openness and sharing around the world.” but then, without irony, they point people towards their (closed, proprietary) Slack channel. facepalm

And they seem to eschew the Oxford comma, e.g. "... advocates, promotes and enables..." from above, but then throughout the document, where they (incorrectly) use "i.e." or "e.g." they always follow it with a superfluous comma. Bizarre.

As for copy-editing concerns, please bear in mind that this is a draft, and that many of the people who contributed to the writing of this document are not native English speakers. At this stage I'm more concerned about the overarching ideas and restructuring proposals.

@davelane your question about CC HQ's use of Slack has already been asked and answered. Keitha and I got in touch with them last year when they started using Slack to ask why, and were told the same thing that (I presume) you were also told when you asked: CC HQ has chosen to use Slack because that's where the people are. It is for a similar reason that, for example, CCANZ uses Twitter - as do you, as does NZOSS.

CC HQ did not take the decision to use Slack lightly. And it seems to have paid off, as you can see here: https://creativecommons.org/2016/12/09/a-month-of-slack/ Community engagement is up, which is what it's all about.

I'm proud of this community because I believe we are all operating in good faith. You have made your criticism and it has been heard and responded to. I encourage you now to think through the global network proposal and consider how it might affect us, and what feedback needs to be given.

Thanks for you clarification, and keeping the discussion open. I think the substantial problem I have with the CCHQ decision, and why I can't let it lie, is that, unlike Facebook and Twitter, Slack is a manufactured, self-selected subset of the community. And, unlike Facebook and Twitter, there're very viable open alternatives to Slack.

Billy Mienke put it well when he said (my paraphrase) that "you have to go to where the people are when you're building a community. When you've convinced them to join you, however, you hold the conversation on your terms (i.e. according to your community's espoused ideals, which, in this case, Slack does not meet).

Therein lies the (major, in my opinion) rub. I am very unimpressed by the lack of explanation from CCHQ, who have chosen to bury the discussion rather than open it. We understand that at a meeting we didn't attend (it was at 5am our time) many (a majority, even) within the core CC community opted to adopt an open source alternative to Slack and then CCHQ overrode that decision and pushed further discussion out into the oblivion of the indeterminate future. I consider that bad faith, sorry.

(I made my good-faith comments on the proposed CC Global Strategy last week on their "live document"...)

I'm also sad that we can't compare CCHQ's touted participation numbers with Slack against those for, say, a CC Rocket.Chat... Guess we'll never know which would've resulted in greater engagement, and that's really too bad.

Elizabeth, has the motivation behind this new Global Network Strategy proposal been described anywhere? Feels quite weird and off-putting to me.

There's some background here: https://consultation.creativecommons.org/ But other than that, I gather from chatting to some international colleagues that the motivation is to make the global network more useful to the international community and less US-centric. I agree that the proposal as it currently stands is not there yet.

The proposal partly came out of discussions and feedback from affiliates at the last Global Summit. The international network is seen as CC's greatest strength; but there is also the feeling that its potential remains unfulfilled. I gave this feedback pretty strongly myself, and am excited to see the greater discussion enabled by the new Slack channels, non-open-source-ness of that tool notwithstanding.

The aim of the proposal, as I understand it, is to turn the CC affiliate network into more of a global movement, with reduced barriers to entry for orgs and individuals that have no connection to a local affiliate. This is all to the good, though there are some thorny issues around how this might affect the day-to-day operational work of local affiliates. There are significant tensions IMO on the extent to which CC is a US / global / national / regional movement.

My feeling is that the big challenges and big wins for CC remain at a national / local govt level, with CC HQ's role to tackle the multi-nationals and IGOs, and that any proposal shouldn't interfere with this structure too much.

But this selfish NZ-centric view should be coupled with the recognition that less-strong affiliates rely on greater support from the CC mothership, and that some jurisdictions have had trouble generating a local movement (for a bunch o' reasons - volunteer fatigue, personalities/egos, resources, etc). This may well help get around those barriers.

As an aside, I think the folks involved are doing an excellent job working through an extremely complex issue in the open.