 Aloha everybody. My name is Billy Meinke and I'm an educational technologist with the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I'd like to acknowledge Creative Commons New Zealand for bringing me out to this wonderful place. Being able to visit Auckland Christchurch and now beautiful Wellington has been a real treat. It didn't take long for me to see why so many of you call this place home. It's a gem and I can say that with some authority because I live in Hawaii. For several years I worked on the education team at Creative Commons headquarters based the United States which was an incredible experience, a crazy period in my life, a period of exploration and discovery. As stewards of the Commons we walked the bleeding edge of innovation helping guide individuals and groups and agencies the world around that wanted to be a part of a thriving and robust Commons by sharing content with the world. I want to read a quote from Larry Lawrence-Lestig, one of the founders of Creative Commons. It's kind of why he formed Creative Commons to begin with. He said, what's needed is a way to say something in the middle. Neither all rights reserved nor no rights reserved but some rights reserved and thus a way to respect copy rights but enable creators to free content as they see fit. In other words we need a way to restore a set of freedoms that we could just take for granted before. So from music and creative works to heritage works and cultural history and science and education and everything that lies between them I witnessed the power of a simple technology to change the world but the licenses are only tools and when you look more closely you see that people are at the heart of the Commons and these people are connected by the notion that we can and we should nurture the Commons together and if we do so we all win. Now this idea isn't unique to content as I'm sure you've heard twice or three times or more over the last few days. Leaders in the free software movement emerged in the 80s. One of the more notable individuals was Richard Stalman. Richard Stalman said, I could have made money this way and perhaps amuse myself writing code but I knew that at the end of my career I would look back on the years of building walls to divide people and I feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place. Now Stalman's a bit of a radical not everybody can agree with everything he says but it's important to have him in the space and he's someone to turn to when we think about freedoms and being open. He's dedicated his life to keeping software free and promoting the idea that when we as citizens should have freedoms to do what we wish with software to make our own lives better and to contribute back to communities we work for the greater good. Now as the name of this conference suggests the idea of free software has been around for some time it's not worth getting into the nitty gritty details of which terminology is more accurate or misleading or fully descriptive or whatever. A key point of the free software movement is that users are guaranteed certain freedoms. They're granted freedoms to do things with software that they couldn't have otherwise. The code is set free and that's a magnificent thing. Now this is important in an increasingly digital age where the cost of copying and distributing content carries a marginal cost of zero. We're literally talking about fractions of a penny. You see digital content is what they call non-rivalrous meaning that I can take something I have and give it to you without taking away from what I still have. You see it all over the place on the internet memes like this being shared and remixed and shared again. It's collective creativity on a massive scale but the law hasn't adapted to suit the affordances of the digital world. Every increasingly restrictive copyright laws have been introduced over the last few decades extending the default length of time it takes for works to enter the public domain automatically. When you create a work in the United States as in many countries we'll be waiting 70 years or more after your death until we can freely reuse your work. Does that sound reasonable in a digital age? An age where the marginal cost is near nothing? I think not. Copyright and patents were originally designed to last a period of time long enough to incentivize the creation of new works but several times during the 20th century default copyright term was extended after big media firms won cases to further lock away the likes of Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, and the Happy Birthday song. Good news is we're making headway. While there are real threats to this such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership we're actually sitting at the most on the most robust Commons we've ever had. Countless free and open-source software projects provide technical infrastructure that we rely on every day. Content and code and data are being put into the Commons at a rate that should make every single one of us smile. This is from Creative Commons 2014 State of the Commons report. As you can see more than 880 million works have been dedicated to the Commons via CC licenses and we're approaching one billion works that's estimated to hit in 2016. It's really incredible. So let's talk about the potential we have at hand. Let's talk about a Commons-based future. For the next couple of minutes I'd ask you to close your eyes. Yes, close them. Take a long deep breath, put your phone down, tilt your laptop down, check the backs of your eyelids for holes. You won't need to look at any slides, I won't put anything cool up here, don't worry. Just imagine this. In a Commons-based future educational opportunity is ubiquitous. Think anybody who wants to learn can learn. The only barrier to education is the willingness to try and when you try you have a pool of shared knowledge at your fingertips that we could only have imagined a few years ago. You don't think in terms of a textbook because the web is your learning platform and you own your educational future and when you want to know more you're connected to citizens who share your thirst for knowledge. You begin to string together digital artifacts along your journey and you can see how others navigated the seas of open educational resources before you. You create your own pathways so that others can follow in your footsteps. You participate in the Commons. You have the world's cultural heritage available to you. You search the archives of thousands of museums in hundreds of countries and help curate collections of millions of images and sounds and videos that tell the story of our world before now. You can see streams of artifacts flowing into the Commons as new discoveries are unearthed. You can walk the halls of the Louvre or the Smithsonian or any number of places anywhere on earth that you've always wished to see. When you find something truly compelling you can take a 3D scan of it, walk down to your local library and print it. You can place your hands on history, work with it, play with it, understand it. You make new things from things of the past. You breathe life into history. You're participating in the Commons. You stand on the shoulders of giants and tap into a distributed body of research that spans all domains of science. You have access to the latest studies and reports and to the underlying data and code that produce them. You can ask questions of the data that no one thought to or was able to before. You make visualizations from it to help others find meaning in it. You thumb through scientific studies being done all over the world in real time. You can become part of a community of enthusiasts who push the limits of what it means to be a citizen scientist. Science for you is a living, breathing thing and you're participating in the Commons. Government operates openly, bringing a heightened level of transparency and efficiency. Civic data is a few key strokes away and the government invites you to make the data more useful and consumable. Legislation is codified and publicly versioned and you're notified when a change is proposed or made to the laws you care most about. Citizens are more informed and involved in the way their tax dollars are spent and they support government leaders who work to ensure this transparency continues in perpetuity. You have knowledge about your community and your world in the palm of your hand. You're participating in the Commons. You can all open your eyes now. I might show something cool in a sec. This Commons-based future isn't a reality, as you may have begun to think. Every one of the advantages and capabilities and freedoms I mentioned a minute ago are based on the technology we have today and each of them is happening somewhere in the world but none of them are happening everywhere. By participating in the Commons we can work towards a future where more people have a life that involves the Commons. The Commons can grow. By participating in the Commons we're opening up education. We're making education a reality for everyone everywhere. We're opening up culture. We're breathing new life into history. We're opening up science and inviting new discovery like never before and we're opening up government and collectively building a better government together. So one final thought from the inventor of the World Wide Web which turned 25 years old just last year. Tim Berners-Lee said, in software, open refers to free or open source software standards, data, platforms, access and scope. These push control to the edge. These push control to the edge where innovation thrives. Open platforms let users choose which software to install. The open data movement seeks to boost government economic efficiency, knowledge and public trust by liberating people's data. Like decentralization, openness empowers people contributing to the innovation that produces economic and social gains. So please join us in nurturing the Commons. Thank you.