 Imagine a world where the sum of all knowledge is accessible for anyone. Knowledge is being presented in so many different ways. Some of it is text, and you can easily access and skim through it. Some of it you have to see. And some of it you have to touch and experience. We're having this remote experience today right now. I'd love to be in Leipzig with you, or together with you. But we can't, because times are crazy. And the digital world at least makes it possible to gain knowledge in a different way. And of course, we at Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia Deutschland, we see that and we try to provide good content for everyone. We try to help the community of the Wikisphere, of the Wikiversum, like in the Wikidata community and the Wikipedia community, or Wikimedia Commons and so many more projects, to access great sources to make it work in different contexts. To be able to remix knowledge, to put it to good use and to reach an audience worldwide. It's been 20 years now and the Wikipedia has started without much photos and there was even a debate going on whether photos and images are good for the Wikipedia. Because text you can easily edit and anyone can do it. But photos and videos, there's a whole different approach and there's a whole more skills to or other sets of skills to be able to access and to edit it. And that makes it harder to renew stuff and to adapt it. And but also to create it. And the communities and the volunteers in the Wikisphere, they are sometimes having a hard time to get good CGI's for example or to get good graphics to make those, to make beautiful articles and to make good shows. They are not always available. This costs money, the studio, the equipment and the graphics, the producing. And there's already a lot of money spent on producing that kind of content. And we want to bring that to good use in Wikipedia and in the other spheres. We have been reaching out, we have been approached by the community to reach out to the public broadcasts. And that's what we did. This is our journey and I want to go on this together with you a little bit of recap and then a way of you to help us with that mission and to also reach out and bring good content into the public sphere to really be able to help others, to help educators in those crazy times. And yeah, together make the sum of all knowledge available to anyone in different ways. Not only text, but also videos like this one. So the talk is called Public Service Public Value and the subline is when stars collide. There's a reason for that. You know I could talk now about how stars are going around each other and they attract each other and then they come together and then there's a bang and sometimes there's a neutron star and then shooting all kinds of crazy stuff out of it which we can then measure here on earth. I could also show you this video and I think the video provided here with NASA content would be a much better way to approach this knowledge. And the beautiful thing about this not only because it's good stuff coming out of it and which matches the talk, but also that the NASA content is not copyright protected, most of it, because it's provided by a federal agency on the US Copyright Law. But also the ESA is a European Space Agency. It also now provides content under an open license which can be adapted. So we had a big publicly funded agency, the ESA, which produced good content, scientific content which could be put to good use and they actively decided to adapt Creative Commons licensing to adapt open licenses so that people could do good stuff with it. And that's what we wanted the public broadcasters to do as well, which was not an easy task, but we had great experiences and corporations and we're working together now really The public broadcasters in Germany are having a budget of about 8 billion euros per annum and they make content available online. Well, you can access it. You can't really download most of it, you cannot remix it, which is a problem for educators because remix is like a standard case, an everyday case for teachers. I used to be a teacher, I took screenshots, put them on papers and built little quizzes out of stuff or not used a whole broadcast but parts of it and that's not really how I can use public broadcast most of the time because it has all rights reserved and I can just use it in a non-commercial manner and there lies the first problem, what is non-commercial when I'm teaching a public school? Okay, but when I'm teaching in the afternoon in kind of overtime, paid by the hour to help a student privately or when I'm having a blog or a website and there's advertisements on that to pay the fees for the hosting. Do I then monitorize the content or if there's a private partnership and the sponsoring there, if I'm putting it in student paper and publishing it and then selling the student paper because printing stuff costs, is this then monetarized? Is this commercial? Is it not? So there's a whole kind of worms right there. So the content that's provided by the public broadcast is bottom line, is not usable for for any day use and not usable for Wikipedia, at least not for remix and republishing issues. That's bad and that's especially when there's 8 billion euros every year going into those public broadcasts. That should be something we should engage in. Now we approach them and in most cases when you approach the lawyers of the public broadcasts they say well we'd like if you use that content but if you are asking me for permission to use that content in that specific context I have to say no. If you ask me I have to say no and this is a bullshit situation right there. I mean you have someone who provides good non-fictional content which should be used for educational use. He wants it to be used in that way. There's an educator who wants to use it in that way but we can't come together because of licensing policies. I know it's legally right but it still feels wrong and we could, other than piracy, we can do something about it. I mean the content the public broadcasts provide, they are editorially independent. So they may be publicly funded but the politics stay out of the editorial process. So there may be some in the superficial reports and there's a whole debate going on about that in Germany for example but the editors are free and there's good content produced and content you can trust on. Content where there's a whole set of producers behind it who fact check and who if they make a mistake make it right again. The public broadcasts are non-for-profit and they want to provide public content as they call it public value and I think we can help with that. We have this beautiful big platform where anyone who's searching for information lands at some point whether he's approaching it via speech assistance which is then asking Wikipedia or Wikidata for information or whether he just puts it into a search box and then finds it and accesses for example the text in Wikipedia. The content can be reused in all kinds of manners because it is openly licensed. Like most likely so there's a whole range of licenses you can choose. We choose the the most open licenses of Wikipedia that's a community decision. CC by, CC by share like or even CC zero. I won't go too deep into that but just you just have to remember you can use that content, you can remix it, you can put it into another content, you have always have to name the source although if it's not CC zero you always have to name the source and if you edit it you have to make that visible. Yeah but the content provided by the public broadcasters in this case the ID which is a public broadcast in Germany is of course provided all rights reserved so you can't do a lot with it. You can access it still it's good stuff and there's a lot of years in them in the media take and on YouTube and stuff but there is potential and I'll show you why. We had a campaign then it was called public money public content you may see where this is coming from and we approached the public broadcasters to work together on this with the same argument I just made here to you. We in every step of the way we work together with the community and with the awesome people of Wikileaks broadcast and we are I'll come back to that in a minute. So first some public broadcasters in this case FUNK which is a corporation between the big two big public broadcasters in Germany for who are producing content for young people and younger audiences and they try to like summarize Wikipedia pages which is a problem for the community because they say well it's nice if you summarize it but if the article changes can we then change the video. No video editing is more expensive and you have to have certain programs for that and skills that fewer people have so there's a little smaller community to do it so that's not content we really can use on Wikipedia although the videos were quite they were quite high quality they were rejected by the Wikipedia community. We came together in best faith but this just didn't work out as it sometimes does. Next try was to provide pictures of people in this case there was a reportage a portrait of an actor or actress in this case and they put that in in Wikimedia Commons so that it could be used for example on Wikipedia and it was used in several pages and also pages all over the internet always with a little mark that the content was provided by the public broadcasting which is fine but community or some community members and said well this photo is well too good to be publicly licensed so there's a whole other kind of worms and another problem right there. We overcame that with a great pilot project which I want to talk about right now and if you're listening in a public broadcast working together with public broadcasters somewhere in the world you should now be very interested because what we achieved here is public is openly licensed content being reused on all sorts of sites. We cannot track everything but we can track what we already did like in the in the own media take in the in the own channels of the of the ZDF and on the YouTube channels and stuff we can see how often this content was approached and was used. We can track how much it was used in Wikipedia and how often it was clicked on and we can guess because it has been published as well because provided under a free and open license on Schultz server and stuff like that so on networks for schools and on servers that provide educational content and we can see that it is being adapted there and that the community the educational community really wants to do things with it and is putting it to good use. How much? Come to that in a minute. First the ZDF started with a with climates and environmentally connected content to and provided a material from there so they came together with the producers with the editors with everyone involved in the process and they said in cooperation with us we also gave some hints maybe. We cannot give the whole episode of TerRex which is big beautiful and very expensive and has a lot of third-party content into the public domain or into licenses openly. It's just too expensive and not really we cannot really do that but there are some content inside these episodes which is built or which is produced completely in-house or which we can target and which we can buy the licenses for without straining our budget too much. So videos, CGI's, short pieces that are being produced anyway that just have to be licensed under a CC license as well and then uploaded into Wikimedia Commons. So this was the way to go for the ZDF and for the TerRex team and they did it and they put a lot of videos there which was then adapted by the community the Wikipedia community so the ZDF didn't do any editing in the Wikipedia they just gave their input their content to the comments and then there was good stuff happening by the community. They adapted it and put it into mostly German speaking because of course it's German videos, German speaking Wikipedia, German language Wikipedia articles also some English Wikipedia articles but there was also another another beautiful thing happening as you can see right here. They also did now it started to do read-ups and because they saw it's good it's high quality content we can build upon that we can remix it and we can read up it in Dutch, in Welsh, in Esperanto and we can put subtitles on there in Latin and in Dutch and Catalan and in Spanish. So this content is now free and is evolving and it's good high quality non-fictional mostly scientific content that helps the Wikipedia communities to further reach their audience to help provide knowledge to everyone even if you're maybe visually impaired or mentally impaired or you just don't want to read a long text right now because the head is buzzing and there's not enough coffee in the world and you can just watch a video to maybe grasp the idea of this specific article or this paragraph there a little better. It's another way of providing information and it works together like a charm and we can see that also by the numbers on which those files are approached. So we tried first to do a page view analysis so we put all the content we monitored in which sites is the content implemented in or embedded in and then tried to measure the viewership of the pages which didn't really work because there was now it's over 120 files and we cannot really reproduce that. We also tried to do a media view counter which also then strained at some point it exceeded the limitations of the tools we were having to measure that as soon as the files were too many. So we could like the direct comparison of files, how they're performing, how they're doing but we couldn't really track all of them. So then a great colleague of mine, he built this beautiful media view tool so that you can really monitor a whole category. So we can monitor how often the files in the category of TerraX provided videos. You see the short link right there bits.ly slash TerraX 30 so the last 30 days of usage of TerraX content from Wikimedia Commons and we can see a monthly usage of over a million views which is a lot because this is not just someone randomly browsing and finding this video and it's an autoplay but searching for information on the topic like as a Taj Mahal or like the harbor of Catago or something like that or Covid vaccine and then they're clicking on the article, they're clicking on the video embedded in the article and view it and this is a very qualified counter right there and this happens over a million times with the content that the data has provided now every month and still growing and that's good in several ways. First it's great for the community because they can more easily reach the audience and they can help the audience understand the topic better. It makes Wikimedia more beautiful for the audience of course. We just talked about that and also for the content provider because of course the content is branded. There's a little logo in there and it's called a video provided by TerraX. I have stated on the brand a few times now and of course anyone who uses it has to quote the TF and TerraX at that point. It has to give attribution which is good for the brand and makes it more likely that at some other point when you're searching for information on the topic you'll be circling back to TerraX for example and hopefully to Wikimedia. But there's more. We have done some high level roundtables where we brought together unions, teachers unions as well as journalists' unions as well as young journalists, people who work in research and in universities, library organizations and of course the Wikimedia community to see how we better can work together and what we can do and how we can monitor it and what is likely to be done and what not. Because of course also the public broadcasters have wishes for the community and for Wikimedia Deutschland and as well as the other way around. Our main arguments here are that it improves the public good. It saves taxes. If schools, public schools don't have to buy additional video content for example but can use the content that is already publicly funded for free. It strengthens the cooperation between different spheres of making knowledge available and it's further helping them reaching their audience and exactly the platforms that they're searching for information on. So as I said our campaign was called Public Money, Public Good and there were some reactions and we had some great corporations coming after that. I now on this point have to thank all the stakeholders that support the campaign, not only the Cars Communication Club, Cars Computer Club, but also the Libraries Association, the Teachers Association in Germany and Kiran University and some others that you can see there. If you're a stakeholder on an international level and want to join this claim for more content provided by the public broadcasters, reach out to me, band.feeler at wikimedia.de and we can talk about it or maybe after that in the Q&A. So we wrote a lot of letters. There were 10,000 little postcards being sent to the public broadcasters where anyone could put a little comment. I want to use that because and there were a lot of educators, teachers and knowledge workers who reached out to us and said finally I want to use or I have used in a limited way the content already and there's so much more and so much better stuff I want to do with it. I want to screenshot it and put it on a paper and then build a quiz out of it, whatever and there are the limitations of copyright and the creative commons licensing makes it easier for me. Also the idea, the second or another really big public broadcast in Germany also tried to adapt creative commons licensing. They did even with their most important broadcasts like Tagesschau which is the common news broadcast for every German. They are providing graphics and short videos under our creative commons NCND so non-for-commercial and no variations and stuff. So at least it is available indefinitely now so it can be linked upon and it can be used in certain ways especially in schools but you cannot really use on Wikipedia right now. They also put some podcasts like the Coronavirus Update which is like one of the most listened to podcasts right now, a scientific podcast here in Germany under a CC license which is also a great step and there's a reason why they are hesitant to put content under a more open license not only because licensing issues and because of the money you have to you have to originally pay for it but also in fear of there's some yeah some uses that they don't want. In our experience though we see that on the TTF content there's a lot of good stuff happening with it and none of the fears were matched, none of the fears really came true. There are adaptations and there are read-ups but they are good, they are in the way we would have wanted it and sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith and see good stuff happening right as of right now the licensing policies and the public broadcasters they make so the bad stuff's happening anyway people will steal it, will adapt it, will put little horns on people's heads and whatever and they don't really care about copyright which also would not be possible with Creative Commons because there's limitations to licensing given with Creative Commons and putting it in a context where it's not right is one of those limitations but whatever but Creative Commons makes the uses you want to give, you want to make possible available and this all very much cheaply and there will be stuff coming out from the idea I hope as of now this is the chair of the idea of the big public broadcast in Germany and they say it's like it's a cornerstone it's an important building block on which how to make our content available indefinitely as possible and easily accessible as possible. Even this press release though you see on the photo right there there's an all rights reserved so this is copyrighted content which I quote here so way to go but there's good stuff there's good faith I have good faith and there's a lot of good will on all institutions and we're working together by that to that to that common goal. There's also a global task force of public broadcasters like and they're saying we share the common duty and form educate and entertain the engagement with audiences of all ages across the range of broadcast and online services Wikipedia is critical to our success in serving them whenever wherever and however they want and to reach that dear public broadcast is all around the world whether you're the NPR the NHK the PBS the BBC the RA, CBC, EBC or ORF your content should be freely licensed where freely licensed wherever possible it should be paid fairly it should be accessible everywhere and it should be accessible anytime and then we can build upon it and there's all kinds of good stuff shooting out of it and we can measure that now so our mission is clear and there's a lot of good people working together on all sides to make it possible and I have to thank all the partners that we've been doing great stuff up until now and will be doing great stuff in the years to come and the community who is open for adapting the content and putting it to good use on different Wikipedia pages and if you are a public broadcaster and think well I want that I want a part of that feel free to reach out to us and we will make and bring this thing international our arguments condensed are there at bit.lead slash public broadcast on the medium block of the Wikimedia foundation where we're trying to condensate this whole talk into a few paragraphs thank you for listening for attending this session here and I'm very happy to take your questions now and to together free more great content to build amazing stuff out of it thank you very much we are now connected to our speaker remotely not for a satellite just like the the usual public broadcasting studios do but via internet because we're modern with Fiedler who is our correspondent today more or less hello Bernd how are you today hello I'm fine and I hope you are all as well you've heard a lot and I hope you have some questions we're still waiting for questions you can still ask them via IRC or Twitter with the hashtag rc3wikipacker we're listening to all of them and will relate them to our speaker here you had an interesting slide at the end of your talk towards the end of your talk with Tom Buro who was stating something along the lines of cc licenses are an important part of what the public broadcasting institutions in Germany are doing and at the very bottom right you made me aware of that I didn't even see it first that there was an all rights reserved clause this looks for me like there is an cultural cultural obstacle still to be to be surmounted to be surpassed is there any hope that this cultural change is taking taking place yes okay that wasn't okay how would you say that's this well it's it's really not easy they are buying licenses and then they can do limited and limited limited stuff with it and they are now they have a lot of contracts and if you have a big ship like like the idea was that if you have all kinds of standard contracts and you have to change those first before you can do anything so that's a chicken and egg problem the authors say we can't because they are not the contracts are not there so I can't waive any rights and the and the public broadcaster say well the authors wouldn't agree to it so we don't have the contracts yet and there's a big cultural change going on right now there's a lot of a reduction a lot of editors a lot of content creators who want to try out stuff who are reaching out to us but it takes time because it's a big wheel we're trying to turn here and big wheels take time to start turning well 2020 has taught us to be patient and wait for changes but there might be some people in the audience who don't want to wait and what you what you told me about these standard contracts sounds awfully familiar for people who work in work with public administrations who have facing similar problems with subcontractors and and people that depend upon and one way that has been shown in that realm would be to to provide boilerplate licenses that the that the institutions can actually use and reuse has anybody tried that um yeah well they they are using creative comments right now but um I think um what what exactly do we use boilerplate licenses yeah of course I mean creative comments is of is of course a boilerplate license for sub licensing but you told me about um as far as I understand that the public broadcasting institutions use subcontractors to to actually produce their contents and they would have to to enter contracts and new licenses that permit sub licensing under creative comments uh clauses so if somebody let's say vikimedia or some other instance were to provide the public broadcasters with boilerplate licenses for their subcontractors wouldn't that be an option uh if we not not not to want to not to want to drop the hot potato in your lap but we can't we can't look that far into the into the chronic prisoners of the public broadcasters and their sub subcontractors but um this is exactly where how terax did it in the end so they haven't they're having a subcontractor and at the very beginning of the of the um process of the broadcasting process and production process they said well let's try this and we will take some of some of this stuff and release it under creative comments are you all right with that um on an in an ongoing production and most contracts are already set and you always go back to the same contractor um uh you can't really do that or that's that's hard you just uh you need an outside impulse for that and that's where the audience comes comes into play because I bet all of you have a as a loved podcast or some some broadcast that's that you see by at the public broadcasters and you want to bring to the comments or content you want to bring into the comments and of course you can reach out to the to the broadcaster you can reach out to the redaction and say we want to do that and we want to see that in the comments why isn't it and then they have to ask the the legal people and the legal people then sometimes consult with us and then we can try to do something um so uh it's big wheels but many many small angles where you can attack that sounds like a call to action for me um people who are watching right now and listening right now where would they direct such questions would they just add zdf or add the press or whatever on twitter or is there any way that is more impactful maybe send the facts or something like that you know what do that right now you right now during this q&a you can add zdf and add id press to do just that and there are people there watching that watching it and the more impulses there they are the more likely they will be moving but also standard email they are read like every program which that every input from from audiences is being read at the public broadcasters offices so just type an email and say a lot of your content why isn't it creative comments cheers and um and there you go this is um that helps us a lot and it helps the people inside the houses inside the public broadcasters who really want to get things going but there are also the ones who say we don't really need to change that do we but you and us we have to show them that the future lies in creative comments licensing and an open licensing and not just getting on with not providing open content and deleting stuff that is good and that could have been reused if only it would have been licensed correctly okay so we are not screaming into the void but we have allies within the broadcasting authorities that really want our help actually is that true it is and there are a lot of people doing the hard work i mean my job is easy i'm from i'm sitting at the outside and saying why don't you why couldn't you all that would be a good idea and they are confronted with all the people who know the ifs and whens and who always say no because and they're finding reasons why this shouldn't be possible but we are now going on from the production level because the the content providers they want their products and their content to be remixed we're also going from the political level because that's important that's public broadcasters obviously and we're going on from the inter-dumptons so from the chair level and i mean everyone working at the i.d and to the f there there's a little bit if they try something new they can fail and they can get smacked over the head uh with people who are who are angry at them because there are so many angry people out there which uh who attack with the public broadcasters all the time and if they see that it works at one public broadcaster like at the cdf it's very much more likely that another public broadcaster will also try that a try out that course of action well this is very close a little bit on the car that's the way that rings very close to our heart because i mean we do have our double gg alpha alpha night program and we would have loved to include bandas perot in that so for all the people who are right now composing treats at the f well maybe in the future and maybe we're depending on all the people composing treats right now at cdf for all the activists who are well who do have experience with mass mailing members of parliament um they actually they they know that mass mails that follow a template are well um not as not as impactful as individual letters so is it is it a detriment if they include in the in their tweet the hashtag or uh any any other campaigns campaign model or should the germans the german slogan for public money public content öffentliche scale öffentliche is good yeah well you can do that so we can we can monitor it a little bit and see who else is interested in that you can also reach out to the um to the wikileus broadcast group in wikipedia they're a group of activists who have experience in that and who are standing by to help public broadcasts understand the wikipedia and to see whether and where the content fits so there's a lot of ways to engage in that and if you and if you have um ideas for that but just questions you can reach out to me anytime uh you you have my address that's a medium article that's at a wikimedia foundation or you can just write me at um band pulm fitler at wikimedia.com and i'm happy to help because there's good stuff we want to we want to have it in the public domain let's make it possible together that's what i need help that sounds like a call to action in the in the um background background chat we had before we went live you mentioned something about um the big the big how do you say uh the big gulf of um of material that's already been produced and is in a kind of legal limbo that is not so easily released right now can you tell a little bit more about that um i think i'm going to send us to do a question there um i mean we have a similar situation in the united states um with with works that have published that have been published after the 1920s where copyright uh losses has been made more stringent and uh the original creators can't be contacted anymore yeah yeah that um we have two causes of action that the public broadcasters are trying right now i mean if you if you're sitting on a on a treasure box you want to open it up and share it if it doesn't get less uh that's worth was well um so the idea is trying to provide content that they already have produced but uh clearing the rights for that stuff that's already is produced is a pain in the ass and it's really it's really hard um and sometimes impossible to reach every creator who was uh who was connected with a production so everything that is in the past is kind of lost for our goal for creative commons licensing especially stuff that's being produced that has been released after 1970 or so um so they they are opening up the archives and that's that's really a treasure for wikipedia um they can then they can then link to it and they can at least access it definitely um but the other cause of action seems to me much more um yeah much more sustainable to see in in which new productions from now on we can implement creative commons licensing and so that we can only look and walk into the future here although i'd love to see all the good stuff i've been seeing on the air already to to become creative commons but that's really hard well not to end on a on a on a this topic no but to go forth with the utopia there is a way to to open at least the the future releases and you've you've shown us how to do that and we thank you i mean we are the unofficial public broadcasting cosplay channel at rc3 so anybody who's interested in having more interesting night program for future programming please contact bern thanks again so much for being on air right now with us and keep up the good fight in the name of the love of public broadcasting i'm counting on you see you soon see you bye bern