 He's soon to become the Chief of staff at Wikimedia, but today he's here as the CEO of creative commons The makers of CC licenses used to share content and the simple permissive terms to enable use and reuse so Please give a big hand to our next speaker Ryan Merkley. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Oh This is probably the nicest room. I've ever gotten to speak in this is so beautiful Mark and I were just admiring all of the detail up there It's just such a beautiful space to get to speak in and I can sort of see your faces if I step a little bit forward So hello everybody and good afternoon. My name is Ryan Merkley. I'm today the CEO of creative commons But as they mentioned in the intro, I am outgoing after five years in this position And the incoming Chief of Staff at Wikimedia where I'll start Middle of September so today I'm wearing my CC hat This is actually the last time that I'll speak publicly about creative commons. So that's kind of Bittersweet a bit of a treat for me because the first time I spoke for creative commons publicly was actually at wikimania 2014 I'd been on the job about six weeks or so And got the chance to speak at the London conference there And it was a very different event from my perspective as a As a friend as a cousin to the movement and CC who have such close relationships I was remarking to someone in the hall today how how many Organizations and individuals and partners and friends of the movement come to this conference now And it's really really heartening to see what we like to call the big open be a place where we all Recognize that there's some stuff. We're all working on together And that there's a bigger picture that goes beyond just Wikimedia or just CC or just Mozilla or just the internet archive But there are many many organizations with common goals and a lot of overlap And so I'm really happy to be part of that and to continue obviously being part of that So let me spend a couple of minutes on what CC licenses are I know lots of you are fluent in them because they sit as one of the core tools used by the Wikimedia movement They're gonna spend just a minute on it Copyright is automatic from the minute that you fix the work Which is the minute you've create the work copyright is yours whether you want it or not You don't have to register it. You don't have to do anything copyright belongs to you And that problem of having copyright and not being able to get rid of it easily Was the problem that the founders of creative commons wanted to solve? They wanted to make it easy for people the growing Enormous group of humans who were making great things and wanted to share them on this new thing at the time the internet This was almost 20 years ago. They wanted to make it easy They wanted to make it so you didn't have to hire a lawyer in order to let other people use your work and so they Came up with this idea that they would hack copyright that they would build on top of the laws of copyright Which are international and supported by international treaties and also national laws and that they would make a simple set of Licenses that any person could use without paying for them that would work in every jurisdiction Eventually and through the very hard work of international communities and legal experts those licenses were adapted for every single country in the world and then combined in the About eight years ago into the 4.0 license, which is kind of one license to rule them all a single license that worked worldwide And the idea was some pretty simple terms that each user who made a work could share under those terms They you pick your terms and it's kind of a standard offer and it takes out that friction of Permission I no longer need to ask you to use your work. You've said you can just use my thing here The terms as long as you follow them were fine And that was meant to increase access to those works It was meant to create more equitable access to works because you didn't have to know who to ask you didn't have to have Agency or power all you had to do is read the terms And it was invented in intended to drive Greater creativity and more innovation because we don't know where those things come from and the best thing you can Do is remove the barriers that enable that to happen so that as people find those works They can do whatever they may wish to do with them and whatever they need to do with them for whatever their purposes are So the terms as many of you already know by which is you may use my work so long as you give attribution Share alike, which means if you make a derivative work, you must license the new work under the same terms Non-commercial which is you can use it for whatever you like as long as your primary purpose is not a commercial use or a for-profit use And no derivatives you may use my work, but you can't make anything new out of it You must use it as I've given it to you So I'm here to talk a little bit a little bit about CC and our impact and our relationship to the SDGs and You know us for the licenses those licenses have been applied to over 1.6 billion licensed works around the world In just about everything you could possibly copyright from the obvious things like photos and video to the newer things like 3d models and People are sharing those things all over the world one of the areas we do the most of our work in probably intersects with SDG for down here The education SDG And for us We really think that the CC licenses put this sort of infrastructure of open into open education Now open education is this idea that these tools that we or these resources that we want can be used by anyone In any way they want sounds a lot like Wikipedia But in addition to that that those the as we take open education forward it goes beyond just the idea of open Educational resources reusable tools licensed that anyone can remix and reuse and adapt But actually to the idea of a meaningful engagement with the learner the idea that the learner Can have those materials adapted for them and so that they can reflect them And so you'll see the names of people who sound like your name in the materials that you're learning from Or that your stories can be adapted into the learning materials that are being given to you or even better That you can be co-author of those materials as a student as part of your work And those who know the wiki education foundation know that that's core to basically how they work this idea of Having people contribute to something that has value in the world and learning while they're doing it And all the research says that when you give people those kinds of experiences They learn better so we've we figured out how to learn better we figured out how to teach people better and meet them where we are We've also threw open education worked on the issues of inclusion and equity because those materials are accessible to everyone Michael's talk this morning one of the things he talked about was how a hundred and change a hundred million dollars to one project In some ways would seem like a drop in the bucket And for those of us who work in open education where philanthropy has done so much amazing work to seed the world of open Education we also know that it's kind of a drop in the bucket when you compare it to what? Governments spend every single day on education around the world It's trillions and trillions of dollars And so the real money is if you can get governments to get together and see the value of open education and the potential of Collaborating internationally where the one thing that you build gets reused and reused and reused Sounds obvious to those of us who've worked in open source and open content for so long Where the first rule of open source is never write new code Look at what's already been built and see if there's something that already serves your challenge See if there's a way that you can remix it and reuse it see if there's a community already trying to do it Why don't we do that in education? Think how farther and faster we could go excuse me We could go with SDG for if everything that anyone built became primary material for the next thing everyone else built And one of the things Creative Commons does as part of our work is advocacy all over the world and most recently Earlier in the summer. I was in Paris at UNESCO Where a number of its organizations including creative comms, but lots of other players who we work with in the movement and countries representative countries from all over the world Spent two days in a room editing and working on a recommendation from UNESCO Which would endorse the concepts of open education and start to embed them in the work of international governments to start to get at Those trillions and trillions of dollars now Recommendation from UNESCO is about as high as you can go and international before you get to something like the SDGs So it's a pretty big deal and this November that recommendation will actually go to UNESCO And will be hopefully approved by all of the member states. I'm pretty excited about that work I think there's a real opportunity for Advocates and governments and educators everywhere to grab on to that because these things as you've already seen with the SDGs Stand as an example that people can point to and say no, this is this is where we want to go This is the direction that we hope to seek and we're gonna go there together And I think there's there's a lot of power there and a lot of potential when that gets approved Hopefully in November before I run out of time one thing I just wanted to float because in Michael's comment this morning one of the things he said and I really liked was he talked about the value of play And the importance of throwing out new ideas and seeing if they stick And so I want to share with you an idea that comes from a colleague of mine His name is cable green and he's the director of open education at CC and well known in the open education community And cable for a number of years has been talking about this idea that I really have kind of started to fall in love with And maybe more so because this is the perfect place to talk about it is the idea of an SDG degree The idea that we would reframe the SDGs the most challenging issues facing our society and build education systems around them Where every student at appropriate levels for where they are would have curriculum that was designed to invite them into the problems And also to work on how they would tackle them and we would do it in an open educational context So everything that they made would be shared openly they'd be able to start their work once they were introduced to the issue Looking at other work that had come before so that they can continue to iterate and remix and rebuild and come up with new ideas You could even have actual university degrees But instead of a degree and say the arts you might have a degree in life on land or life below water Built around tackling those challenges and addressing those issues in a way That would help us move that ball forward with everything published openly all of the papers open access all the materials open educational resources And everything designed not just for use but for remix because until we start remixing those problems and realize that innovation could come from anywhere And everywhere will never really tackle these challenges together in the ways that meet every single community where they are I really want to thank the organizers for this this theme It's exciting to be able to kind of take the work that we do every day and mash it up against a very different idea That's so obviously intersex, but it's not a place that I think we normally would have gotten to by ourselves And so I find that really exciting and I appreciate the opportunity to kind of think a little bit differently about the work that we do Last thought you know the the thing that really lights me up is collaboration I get excited about the kinds of work that can only be done when people work together The things that we can only do when it's all of us not just one of us And the thing that we've all decided to do and build together is one of the greatest Greatest collaborations in human history and it has the potential to work on every single one of these goals and beyond And so that's really really exciting for me I look forward to working with all of you in the future in my new capacity And I want to thank everybody for all the opportunities that I've had to work with you in my previous role at CC Thanks very much and enjoy the conference Thank you Also you get this Appreciation that's very thoughtful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much