For the first time, the CC movement completed a comprehensive and collaborative effort to renew and grow its network, finalized at the recent Global Summit in Toronto. It’s important to acknowledge the hard work of all the people involved from the beginning, which included research (the Faces of the Commons is a 300 page multi region report with recommendations and insights), an open consultation with the broad CC community including Affiliates, partners, funders, and the CC Board, and 22 online and in-person meetings and more than the eighty percent of the active members of the network involved. This bottom-up process included discussions, proposals and specific edits and changes, reflecting the dynamic global community we have built together around Creative Commons during all this years. We all should be proud of all this process.
This new Strategy has a lot of benefits:
- Global collaboration. Connected with the work of the Platforms, communities will work together to set priorities, goals, objectives and strategies.
- Resilience. The previous model for Affiliate involvement was focused on institutional relationships. Today, we are focusing on individuals and supporting organizations instead. We are providing a path to create a network of trust and real collaboration for the future.
- Growth and inclusion. The new strategy is meant to include new and diverse global voices in the conversation and to provide more capacity and agency for teams working locally. We are creating a strategy focused on supporting and activating people. Shared decision-making, goal-setting, structure for collaboration. The new strategy creates new governance bodies to provide space for the community to identify priorities for the global work. This is a first for CC: the network takes care of the network.
- Resource allocation. The strategy creates two funds specifically focused on the network to support community activities, actual project work and identified movement priorities.
More information about the What's Next on the new Strategy, on the blogpost wrote by Alek T., Ryan M. and Claudio R. Also, on the CC Website.
We called Transition to the process going after finishing the Network Strategy until the basic structure for the Network is set up to drive their own governance. Until the first Global Network Council meeting.
The reason why this period is called Transition is because the new Strategy requires structures still are not in place to properly work, but the network needs to sort this out to start working before of that. For instance, under the New Strategy, Platforms are approved by the Global Network Council; but the first GNC meeting will be just in April 2018.
That's the reason of the Advisory Group work. They are a group of volunteers long time contributors of the Network who are providing guidance and advise during the Transition period.
There are tree elements for this Transition period. These are just elements or layers that will drive our work during this first stage before the Strategy is fully implemented, providing us a vision, timelines and compromises to orientate the work we need to do in the meantime.
Chapters are made up of people, with individuals whose work is focused on the place where they live. Institutions and contributors working in the same place even not being members can participate into the Chapters activities.
| Transition timeline for Chapters | |
|---|---|
| First Chapter meetings (every member is automatically part of the chapter in the country where they live) | 3rd week of November until last week of January, 2018 |
| Chapters select their Global Network Council representative | at the first Chapter meeting |
Platforms are how we organize areas of work for the Creative Commons community, where individuals and institutions organize and coordinate themselves across the CC Global Network.
During this transition period we have been working into four different Platforms:
| Network Platforms |
|---|
| Copyright Reform |
| Open Education |
| GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) |
| Community Development |
The main governance body for the new Strategy is the Global Network Council. In order to start its work, creation of the new Chapters is required, as far the Global Network Council consists of elected representatives of all CC Chapters and representatives of CC HQ.
| Transition timeline for Governance | |
|---|---|
| Opening of the new memberships | October, 2017 |
| First Chapter meetings (every member is automatically part of the chapter in the country where they live) | 3rd week of November until last week of January, 2018 |
| Chapters select their Global Network Council representative | at the first Chapter meeting |
| First Global Network Council meeting | April 13, 2018 (Toronto and virtual) |