Reporting from the Global CC Summit

The first session - Day 0 - was a closed session for the CC affiliate community. There were a heap of ideas floated, many of which have been floating around for sometime.

Key themes were:
- a renewed focus on technology from HQ
- the need for better communication across affiliates, regions and HQ
- the need to focus international priorities
- grant funding (a common concern, as you can imagine).
- copyright reform
- language and translation barriers (particularly in Asia, though translation is a major drain on resources all over the world)

I am particularly interested in greater communication and openness from affiliates, and I suspect a tool like Loomio might be of use.

Greetings from Seoul! I'll post something more detailed on our blog when I have more time, though here's some highlights from day two:

• CC Korea's Jay Yoon talked about his involvement in the last ten years of CC, and reminded us that it was a long struggle, but one that was making remarkable progress.
• CC co-founder Lessig took a surprise break from his run to be the next US president, and outlined his move from CC into presidental politics.
• Harvard's Yochai Benkler talked about the commons in relation to neoliberalism.
• CC Netherlands Paul Keller outlined Europeana, which is a bit like DigitalNZ
• Lila Tretikov of the Wikimedia Foundation spoke of the importance of truly universal access to knowledge, and noted that we have to keep working to make this happen.

More soon.

Greetings from Seogwipo! The CC Summit concluded on Saturday with a day of discussion among affiliates and like-minded organisations. I chose to attend some of the more navel-gazing sessions about CC as a global organisation, as I think improving this network is fundamental to growing the global commons.

My general feeling, which was compounded as the conference went on, is that:
* CC orgs need to do a better job of letting people join the movement and help out. While the global network is a remarkable achievement, it is remarkably small given the scale of the problem. We need more people.
* Aligned with this, we need to move away from associating affiliates with individuals. In more than a few countries, CC affiliates are primarily associated with a handful of individuals. The network should work to build more resilient organisations.
* Similarly - and this was not an idea I floated - I believe it should be a requirement of CC affiliates to be open to volunteers.
* I also continue to feel that the affiliates need to do a better job of communicating to each other, though language barriers and the digital-divide make this a difficult thing to do.

While this sounds critical, the global network is a remarkable and inspiring achievement, and should make us all optimistic about the future of the global commons.

That's enough from me! Feel free to ask any questions.