The Creative Commons Summit 2019, held in Lisbon, Portugal

Prodip Roy (ALIA DCP), Member, The Creative Commons Global Network

Lisbon, May 12, 2019

 

The Creative Commons Summit 2019 was held in Lisbon, Portugal. Creative Commons Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Ryan Markley inaugurated the summit and it continues till Saturday, 11 May 2019.

Many people came together from around the world to participate in the Creative Commons Global Summit. The gathering was a chance for CC network members, digital rights activists, open content creators, and commons advocates to meet together, share information, and collaborate on projects. Since 2015, the CC Global Summit has nearly doubled in size. The Summit has grown every year as hundreds of leading activists, advocates, librarians, educators, lawyers, technologists, and more have joined for discussion and debate, workshops and planning, talks and community building.

The Summit was co-hosted by CC and CC Portugal. The 2019 Global Summit ran over 3 full days and features 6 tracks, 120 sessions, 450+ Commoners, 2 evening events including an after party with Tribe of Noise, and 100+ countries represented. CC is working to spread the open license worldwide. Local community members from different countries of the world are cooperating in this regard. CC also has been working to create special policies for open content education in different sectors over the world.

The keynotes and Friday night party was held at Cineteatro Capitólio, a major Art Deco cultural landmark that recently reopened its doors. All workshops, talks, planning sessions, and small group sessions were held in Museu do Oriente, a vibrant new museum in a refurbished industrial building on the Alcântara Waterfront. The close-up party with CC Portugal was held at Titanic Sur Mer renown as the music panorama in Portugal for the past decade.

The summit goal is unleashing a global community in action. This year, individuals participated in the reformed CC Global Network, chapters set upped and hosted their first meetings, the Global Network Council also gathered for the first time, platforms have solidified their goals and proposed projects. The summit was continuing down the path from re-organisation and rebuilding to action.

There are several sessions that have explored this and related topics around supporting productive copyright reforms including Creators of the Commons (artists, makers, creators), Building the Commons (tools, tech, community that makes the commons run), Ethics of Openness (diversity, equity, inclusion, gender, de-colonisation and the role of the commons), Open Education, Open Science and Open Access, Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums and Legal, Policy and Copyright Reform. 

The Creative Commons Summit 2019 has provided a timely and useful venue to discuss how CC members and advocates could work together to ensure that the international implementations do the least harm to user rights and maximise the potential benefits for the commons.

Bangladeshi delegates in the CC summit 2019! 

Two Bangladeshi delegates also participated in the summit 2019. The team comprised of the Dean of the School of Business of Bangladesh Open University, Mostafa Azad Kamal and from the same University’s Administrative Officer, Shayok Lohani. Both of them have been awarded the CC Global Summit Scholarship 2019 to attend the summit.