 Are we good to start? I haven't gotten any all clear. Me? It's okay. I don't see a... Manar, should we wait for you to officially start? Please start. All right. Well, hello everyone. Welcome to our session, Building an Initiative for UNESCO Recommendation on Open Culture. We're absolutely thrilled to be taking part in Wikimedia 2023. My name is Brigitte Vizna. I'm the Director of Policy and Open Culture at Creative Commons. I'm here with my colleague Conor Benedict, Open Culture Coordinator. Unfortunately, Jocelyn Miara, our Open Culture Manager cannot join us for this session, but she's with us in spirit. And we're here to talk to you about this exciting initiative that is just taking off. And so this is one of the first opportunities that we have to talk about it in public. It's very exciting. It's one of the activities under our Open Culture program, which I'll give an overview of in just a moment. So our Creative Commons Open Culture program consists of four areas. The first one is policy where we try to influence policy reform to shape policy for the future to encourage better sharing of cultural heritage and open culture. Our work mainly consists in copyright reform, but we're also building new areas of policy, which we think will be supportive of open sharing of culture and cultural heritage. And this is what this presentation is about. We also work in infrastructure. And that is, of course, maintaining and promoting our Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools. You will have heard from our colleagues talking about this at Wikimedia this year as well. We also have capacity building programs. We have our CC certificate, one that is specifically designed for GLAM, so galleries, libraries, archives and museums. We offer consultancy and training. And we work towards community support and engagement. And this presentation is also part of our outreach to you, our wide community to help us in achieving our goals. So I'll give an overview now of what this particular initiative is. So it's called TARIC. And TARIC is the acronym for Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture. And it's a community initiative. We are leading it, but it's really much community driven. And our overall aim is to develop an international policy framework. So we call it a recommendation, but it could take other forms eventually, we'll see. But the overall aim, as I said, is to recognize the importance and to support global open sharing of culture. So by open sharing, we mean, of course, open access, but access that includes the notion of use and reuse. So it's very important for us that when people access cultural heritage, they are also able to use it and reuse it in different contexts so as to engage meaningfully with it. This one's part of the policy component of our program. So why are we implementing or developing this TARIC initiative? Well, because we recognize that preservation, access, sharing, use and reuse of cultural heritage, of cultural artifacts and documents is essential to culture's survival. Without sharing, a culture cannot survive. So at the same time, the cultural heritage institutions that hold the cultural heritage in question, so GLAMS, they often cannot realize their missions in the digital world. They face a lot of barriers. Most of them are legal or policy related. The laws simply make it very complicated for them to digitize, to make available online, to allow certain use by their own audiences and users that would enable people to all over the world interact with their own shared cultural heritage. Today, still, citizens all over the world, they face great challenges in sharing culture online, even though internet and new technologies have made this increasingly easy, the laws haven't caught up. And so we believe that there cannot be full enjoyment of culture without open sharing of culture, but sharing that is meaningful, ethical, inclusive and responsible. And these are the reasons why we are leading the TARIC initiative, making sure that there is this policy framework that will enable GLAMS to conduct their missions in the digital world for everyone in the world to be able to enjoy and share their cultural heritage. So a little bit of background, this doesn't come out of thin air. It builds on years and years and even decades of work in the open GLAM or open culture movement. We published recently a report called Pioneers of Open, which showcases the first few institutions that have decided to make their collections open. And since then, huge strides have been made. I'll mention the Open GLAM survey by Andrew Wallace and Doug McCarthy, which tracks all the institutions that have open policies that give open access to their collections. It's huge, but by some accounts, it's still about only 1% of the world's cultural heritage institutions that make their collections openly accessible. That's because major barriers and huge challenges still remain. We've published a report again last year that tries to kind of summarize what are the key challenges that institutions face, and they come down to three main categories, money, people and policy. So of course, financial constraints, the risk or the fear of losing revenue, the fact that people and institutions sometimes have a conservative mindset and are afraid of taking a leap towards Open and the policy issues that I've mentioned, which Tarak tries to address. I also want to mention the Monjecult Declaration that was adopted in September 2022 by UNESCO in Mexico City. And this is a breakthrough in cultural policy because for the first time, culture has been declared a global public good. And so we think that in order for people to enjoy culture as a global public good, there should be a recognition of open solutions, of better sharing of culture that will help people and being able to enjoy it as a public good. Why do we call it a recommendation? Well, because we kind of follow the model of the UNESCO recommendations on open educational resources or OER and open science. They were adopted in 2019 and 2021, respectively. And we see that there's a huge opportunity for a similar kind of instrument in the field of open culture. I also want to mention the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that recognizes that enshrines the enjoyment of culture and participation in cultural life as a fundamental human right. And we think that through a positive recognition of open culture, that right will be easier to enjoy for all citizens. And the other, I guess, important international framework in which this fits in is the Sustainable Development Goals that were established by the United Nations a decade ago, where culture is underpinning actually all of the 17 Development Goals, but where efforts are currently made to make culture a goal in and of itself. And at Creative Commons, we fully support that movement. I won't go through the whole list of our tarot objectives, especially since they're still in draft. We've come up with a few that you can see on the slide. Of course, recognizing the value of open sharing of culture and the sharing of heritage is a primary goal and not necessarily just an exception often to copyright protection. So we kind of want to turn the policy framework on its head where access to culture and sharing of culture becomes the primary goal instead of protection and prevention of use by others. We want to promote open source software. We want to uphold and protect the public domain. We want to promote accessibility for people with disabilities. We see how this could empower marginalized groups including young people, women, Indigenous peoples. But at the end of the day, we see this as ensuring that everyone's fundamental right to participate in cultural life and Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is protected and upheld. So our role with this initiative consists of three main things, to create, to exchange, and to collaborate. So in terms of creating, we co-create resources to raise awareness, to share knowledge and to spark new ideas. We'll give a list of the resources we plan on publishing or co-creating first in a moment. We also exchange. So we nurture spaces to hold global and local conversations to exchange real-life experiences that really then build our more top-level aspirations. And we collaborate. We aim to build networks to empower communities of like-minded open culture enthusiasts. And I'm sure there are many in the audience today to stimulate collaboration so that we can collaborate, coordinate our efforts towards our common goals. And I'll pass over to Connor. Thank you. So in May of this year, we hosted our first open culture roundtable on this subject. We gathered about 40 experts from around the world in areas such as policy, open culture experts, and, yeah, 40 experts from various fields. The day was a series of facilitated discussions on subjects such as the history of open culture, where we dove into the key milestones and achievements, such as, as Brigitte mentioned, the other UNESCO recommendations, but also the development of specific tools for GLAMs, such as the CC's public domain tools and the Wikimedia and Residence Program, for example. Then our second conversation was a bit of context mapping, where we talked about our collaborators and the different stakeholders, such as Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects, and more large influences on the context of open culture, such as policy trends and social trends that should be taken into consideration. And our third conversation on the day was looking where do we want to go, so vision-building and bold steps, ideas for where this should end up and kind of the long-term thinking and the things necessary to get us there. Our facilitators used graphic facilitation tools to guide the conversation, and what you see here is the graphic recording, which summarizes the different conversations that we had. So on the history of open culture, you can see that certain things need to be taken more into consideration, and there were definitely some areas that we need to put some more focus on. In context mapping, you can see that some areas such as building bridges in our network and what the role of open culture is to create clear goals. Then in our bold steps, we see an opportunity to tell stories as a way to kind of bring people more into the fold. So this is our following our meeting. We conducted a community consultation, our community engagement survey, and these are kind of our key takeaways. The first is to continue to engage our global community, such as the Wikimovement, but also other partners such as IFLA, ICOM, and others. We should continue to offer several pathways of engagement, so things such as online consultations, virtual and in-person meetings such as this and writing sprints where we work on these documents and statements together, and to share updates widely in different formats, so that could be newsletter reports and presentations such as this one, but also in webinars and being present in events. So the next steps for us, the open culture team, which includes myself, Brigitte and Justin, and collaborators are to work on what is Terak, which is a two-page document that summarizes what we're working on and where we're trying to go, and this public consultation is open for the rest of today. We're also working on a bit of background in context, so elaborate the things that have come before this and the global, yeah, the global context of open culture to make it more clear what is open culture and what is not. A working description of open culture, and this would include, for example, a Wikipedia article, as there isn't one currently on open culture or open claim. And lastly, or following that, a values and principles document, which we are going to get started at the CC Summit, which is at the beginning of October, to kind of say what is the foundation of the work that we're doing, and the objectives and outcomes are also part of this two pages that we're working on. So how to get involved. First and foremost, one way to get involved is through the open culture platform, which is we host monthly meetings, but there's also a mailing list, and there's a series of working groups, both on on this tariff initiative, but on various other areas as well. And there's an annual activity fund where we support various initiatives kind of all over the world. Another way to get involved is to contribute to the working groups, as mentioned, enter the document we're working on, so that includes draft and commenting, but also very importantly, translation, so that this work can be disseminated more globally and be accessible in that way. And lastly, to connect us to your UNESCO National Commission, because that's one area that really is more, is easier done from a local context than from kind of remotely. Over to you. Thank you, Connor. So if you want to get involved, don't hesitate. Get in touch with us. We have created a dedicated email address called culture at creative commons.org. I, as well as Jocelyn and Connor will receive your message so feel free to ask us any of your questions or say how you would like to to get involved in this initiative. The link that you see at the bottom of the screen is our main webpage on the creative commons website. It'll give you this overview of our open culture program. There's also a dedicated resource page that you will be able to see where many of our key resources are available, often in multiple languages. We also welcome translation, so we have a specific translation effort to make sure that our resources reach the most as many linguistic communities as possible. So really super excited that the WIC community gets involved in this. Don't hesitate. I realize that there is not really an opportunity to ask questions during this session, but we stay at your disposal and really look forward to hearing from you all. So thank you very much for your attention and enjoy the rest of the community. Thank you.