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Made

with

Creative

Commons

Paul Stacey and Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

Made With Creative Commons

by Paul Stacey & Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

© 2017, by Creative Commons.

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC
BY-SA), version 4.0.

ISBN 978-87-998733-3-3

Cover and interior design by Klaus Nielsen, vinterstille.dk

Content editing by Grace Yaginuma

Illustrations by Bryan Mathers, bryanmathers.com

Downloadable e-book available at madewith.cc

Publisher:

Ctrl+Alt+Delete Books

Husumgade 10, 5.

2200 Copenhagen N

Denmark

www.cadb.dk

hey@cadb.dk

Printer:

Drukarnia POZKAL Spółka z o.o. Spółka komandytowa

88-100 Inowrocław,

ul. Cegielna 10/12,

Poland

This book is published under a CC BY-SA license, which means that you
can copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the content for
any purpose, even commercially, as long as you give appropriate credit,
provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. If you
remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your
contributions under the same license as the original. License details:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Made With Creative Commons is published with the kind support of
Creative Commons and backers of our crowdfunding-campaign on the
Kickstarter.com platform.

“I don’t know a whole lot about nonfiction
journalism. . . The way that I think about these things, and in terms of
what I can do is. . . essays like this are occasions to watch somebody
reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention
and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than
most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.”



- David Foster Wallace

Foreword

Three years ago, just after I was hired as CEO of Creative Commons, I
met with Cory Doctorow in the hotel bar of Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel. As
one of CC’s most well-known proponents—one who has also had a successful
career as a writer who shares his work using CC—I told him I thought CC
had a role in defining and advancing open business models. He kindly
disagreed, and called the pursuit of viable business models through CC
“a red herring.”

He was, in a way, completely correct—those who make things with Creative
Commons have ulterior motives, as Paul Stacey explains in this book:
“Regardless of legal status, they all have a social mission. Their
primary reason for being is to make the world a better place, not to
profit. Money is a means to a social end, not the end itself.”

In the case study about Cory Doctorow, Sarah Hinchliff Pearson cites
Cory’s words from his book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free:
“Entering the arts because you want to get rich is like buying lottery
tickets because you want to get rich. It might work, but it almost
certainly won’t. Though, of course, someone always wins the lottery.”

Today, copyright is like a lottery ticket—everyone has one, and almost
nobody wins. What they don’t tell you is that if you choose to share
your work, the returns can be significant and long-lasting. This book is
filled with stories of those who take much greater risks than the two
dollars we pay for a lottery ticket, and instead reap the rewards that
come from pursuing their passions and living their values.

So it’s not about the money. Also: it is. Finding the means to continue
to create and share often requires some amount of income. Max Temkin of
Cards Against Humanity says it best in their case study: “We don’t make
jokes and games to make money—we make money so we can make more jokes
and games.”

Creative Commons’ focus is on building a vibrant, usable commons,
powered by collaboration and gratitude. Enabling communities of
collaboration is at the heart of our strategy. With that in mind,
Creative Commons began this book project. Led by Paul and Sarah, the
project set out to define and advance the best open business models.
Paul and Sarah were the ideal authors to write Made with Creative
Commons.

Paul dreams of a future where new models of creativity and innovation
overpower the inequality and scarcity that today define the worst parts
of capitalism. He is driven by the power of human connections between
communities of creators. He takes a longer view than most, and it’s made
him a better educator, an insightful researcher, and also a skilled
gardener. He has a calm, cool voice that conveys a passion that inspires
his colleagues and community.

Sarah is the best kind of lawyer—a true advocate who believes in the
good of people, and the power of collective acts to change the world.
Over the past year I’ve seen Sarah struggle with the heartbreak that
comes from investing so much into a political campaign that didn’t end
as she’d hoped. Today, she’s more determined than ever to live with her
values right out on her sleeve. I can always count on Sarah to push
Creative Commons to focus on our impact—to make the main thing the main
thing. She’s practical, detail-oriented, and clever. There’s no one on
my team that I enjoy debating more.

As coauthors, Paul and Sarah complement each other perfectly. They
researched, analyzed, argued, and worked as a team, sometimes together
and sometimes independently. They dove into the research and writing
with passion and curiosity, and a deep respect for what goes into
building the commons and sharing with the world. They remained open to
new ideas, including the possibility that their initial theories would
need refinement or might be completely wrong. That’s courageous, and it
has made for a better book that is insightful, honest, and useful.

From the beginning, CC wanted to develop this project with the
principles and values of open collaboration. The book was funded,
developed, researched, and written in the open. It is being shared
openly under a CC BY-SA license for anyone to use, remix, or adapt with
attribution. It is, in itself, an example of an open business model.

For 31 days in August of 2015, Sarah took point to organize and execute
a Kickstarter campaign to generate the core funding for the book. The
remainder was provided by CC’s generous donors and supporters. In the
end, it became one of the most successful book projects on Kickstarter,
smashing through two stretch goals and engaging over 1,600 donors—the
majority of them new supporters of Creative Commons.

Paul and Sarah worked openly throughout the project, publishing the
plans, drafts, case studies, and analysis, early and often, and they
engaged communities all over the world to help write this book. As their
opinions diverged and their interests came into focus, they divided
their voices and decided to keep them separate in the final product.
Working in this way requires both humility and self-confidence, and
without question it has made Made with Creative Commons a better
project.

Those who work and share in the commons are not typical creators. They
are part of something greater than themselves, and what they offer us
all is a profound gift. What they receive in return is gratitude and a
community.

Jonathan Mann, who is profiled in this book, writes a song a day. When I
reached out to ask him to write a song for our Kickstarter (and to offer
himself up as a Kickstarter benefit), he agreed immediately. Why would
he agree to do that? Because the commons has collaboration at its core,
and community as a key value, and because the CC licenses have helped so
many to share in the ways that they choose with a global audience.

Sarah writes, “Endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons thrive when
community is built around what they do. This may mean a community
collaborating together to create something new, or it may simply be a
collection of like-minded people who get to know each other and rally
around common interests or beliefs. To a certain extent, simply being
Made with Creative Commons automatically brings with it some element of
community, by helping connect you to like-minded others who recognize
and are drawn to the values symbolized by using CC.” Amanda Palmer, the
other musician profiled in the book, would surely add this from her case
study: “There is no more satisfying end goal than having someone tell
you that what you do is genuinely of value to them.”

This is not a typical business book. For those looking for a recipe or a
roadmap, you might be disappointed. But for those looking to pursue a
social end, to build something great through collaboration, or to join a
powerful and growing global community, they’re sure to be satisfied.
Made with Creative Commons offers a world-changing set of clearly
articulated values and principles, some essential tools for exploring
your own business opportunities, and two dozen doses of pure
inspiration.

In a 1996 Stanford Law Review article “The Zones of Cyberspace”, CC
founder Lawrence Lessig wrote, “Cyberspace is a place. People live
there. They experience all the sorts of things that they experience in
real space, there. For some, they experience more. They experience this
not as isolated individuals, playing some high tech computer game; they
experience it in groups, in communities, among strangers, among people
they come to know, and sometimes like.”

I’m incredibly proud that Creative Commons is able to publish this book
for the many communities that we have come to know and like. I’m
grateful to Paul and Sarah for their creativity and insights, and to the
global communities that have helped us bring it to you. As CC board
member Johnathan Nightingale often says, “It’s all made of people.”

That’s the true value of things that are Made with Creative Commons.

*Ryan Merkley*

*CEO, Creative Commons*

Introduction

This book shows the world how sharing can be good for business—but with
a twist.

We began the project intending to explore how creators, organizations,
and businesses make money to sustain what they do when they share their
work using Creative Commons licenses. Our goal was not to identify a
formula for business models that use Creative Commons but instead gather
fresh ideas and dynamic examples that spark new, innovative models and
help others follow suit by building on what already works. At the onset,
we framed our investigation in familiar business terms. We created a
blank “open business model canvas,” an interactive online tool that
would help people design and analyze their business model.

Through the generous funding of Kickstarter backers, we set about this
project first by identifying and selecting a diverse group of creators,
organizations, and businesses who use Creative Commons in an integral
way—what we call being Made with Creative Commons. We interviewed them
and wrote up their stories. We analyzed what we heard and dug deep into
the literature.

But as we did our research, something interesting happened. Our initial
way of framing the work did not match the stories we were hearing.

Those we interviewed were not typical businesses selling to consumers
and seeking to maximize profits and the bottom line. Instead, they were
sharing to make the world a better place, creating relationships and
community around the works being shared, and generating revenue not for
unlimited growth but to sustain the operation.

They often didn’t like hearing what they do described as an open
business model. Their endeavor was something more than that. Something
different. Something that generates not just economic value but social
and cultural value. Something that involves human connection. Being Made
with Creative Commons is not “business as usual.”

We had to rethink the way we conceived of this project. And it didn’t
happen overnight. From the fall of 2015 through 2016, we documented our
thoughts in blog posts on Medium and with regular updates to our
Kickstarter backers. We shared drafts of case studies and analysis with
our Kickstarter cocreators, who provided invaluable edits, feedback, and
advice. Our thinking changed dramatically over the course of a year and
a half.

Throughout the process, the two of us have often had very different ways
of understanding and describing what we were learning. Learning from
each other has been one of the great joys of this work, and, we hope,
something that has made the final product much richer than it ever could
have been if either of us undertook this project alone. We have
preserved our voices throughout, and you’ll be able to sense our
different but complementary approaches as you read through our different
sections.

While we recommend that you read the book from start to finish, each
section reads more or less independently. The book is structured into
two main parts.

Part one, the overview, begins with a big-picture framework written by
Paul. He provides some historical context for the digital commons,
describing the three ways society has managed resources and shared
wealth—the commons, the market, and the state. He advocates for thinking
beyond business and market terms and eloquently makes the case for
sharing and enlarging the digital commons.

The overview continues with Sarah’s chapter, as she considers what it
means to be successfully Made with Creative Commons. While making money
is one piece of the pie, there is also a set of public-minded values and
the kind of human connections that make sharing truly meaningful. This
section outlines the ways the creators, organizations, and businesses we
interviewed bring in revenue, how they further the public interest and
live out their values, and how they foster connections with the people
with whom they share.

And to end part one, we have a short section that explains the different
Creative Commons licenses. We talk about the misconception that the more
restrictive licenses—the ones that are closest to the
all-rights-reserved model of traditional copyright—are the only ways to
make money.

Part two of the book is made up of the twenty-four stories of the
creators, businesses, and organizations we interviewed. While both of us
participated in the interviews, we divided up the writing of these
profiles.

Of course, we are pleased to make the book available using a Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Please copy, distribute,
translate, localize, and build upon this work.

Writing this book has transformed and inspired us. The way we now look
at and think about what it means to be Made with Creative Commons has
irrevocably changed. We hope this book inspires you and your enterprise
to use Creative Commons and in so doing contribute to the transformation
of our economy and world for the better.

*Paul and Sarah *

Part 1

The Big Picture

The New

World of

Digital

Commons

Paul Stacey

Jonathan Rowe eloquently describes the commons as “the air and oceans,
the web of species, wilderness and flowing water—all are parts of the
commons. So are language and knowledge, sidewalks and public squares,
the stories of childhood and the processes of democracy. Some parts of
the commons are gifts of nature, others the product of human endeavor.
Some are new, such as the Internet; others are as ancient as soil and
calligraphy.”1

In Made with Creative Commons, we focus on our current era of digital
commons, a commons of human-produced works. This commons cuts across a
broad range of areas including cultural heritage, education, research,
technology, art, design, literature, entertainment, business, and data.
Human-produced works in all these areas are increasingly digital. The
Internet is a kind of global, digital commons. The individuals,
organizations, and businesses we profile in our case studies use
Creative Commons to share their resources online over the Internet.

The commons is not just about shared resources, however. It’s also about
the social practices and values that manage them. A resource is a noun,
but to common—to put the resource into the commons—is a verb.2 The
creators, organizations, and businesses we profile are all engaged with
commoning. Their use of Creative Commons involves them in the social
practice of commoning, managing resources in a collective manner with a
community of users.3 Commoning is guided by a set of values and norms
that balance the costs and benefits of the enterprise with those of the
community. Special regard is given to equitable access, use, and
sustainability.

The Commons, the Market, and the State

Historically, there have been three ways to manage resources and share
wealth: the commons (managed collectively), the state (i.e., the
government), and the market—with the last two being the dominant forms
today.4

The organizations and businesses in our case studies are unique in the
way they participate in the commons while still engaging with the market
and/or state. The extent of engagement with market or state varies. Some
operate primarily as a commons with minimal or no reliance on the market
or state.5 Others are very much a part of the market or state, depending
on them for financial sustainability. All operate as hybrids, blending
the norms of the commons with those of the market or state.

Fig. 1. is a depiction of how an enterprise can have varying levels of
engagement with commons, state, and market.

Some of our case studies are simply commons and market enterprises with
little or no engagement with the state. A depiction of those case
studies would show the state sphere as tiny or even absent. Other case
studies are primarily market-based with only a small engagement with the
commons. A depiction of those case studies would show the market sphere
as large and the commons sphere as small. The extent to which an
enterprise sees itself as being primarily of one type or another affects
the balance of norms by which they operate.

All our case studies generate money as a means of livelihood and
sustainability. Money is primarily of the market. Finding ways to
generate revenue while holding true to the core values of the commons
(usually expressed in mission statements) is challenging. To manage
interaction and engagement between the commons and the market requires a
deft touch, a strong sense of values, and the ability to blend the best
of both.

The state has an important role to play in fostering the use and
adoption of the commons. State programs and funding can deliberately
contribute to and build the commons. Beyond money, laws and regulations
regarding property, copyright, business, and finance can all be designed
to foster the commons.

It’s helpful to understand how the commons, market, and state manage
resources differently, and not just for those who consider themselves
primarily as a commons. For businesses or governmental organizations who
want to engage in and use the commons, knowing how the commons operates
will help them understand how best to do so. Participating in and using
the commons the same way you do the market or state is not a strategy
for success.

The Four Aspects of a Resource

As part of her Nobel Prize–winning work, Elinor Ostrom developed a
framework for analyzing how natural resources are managed in a commons.6
Her framework considered things like the biophysical characteristics of
common resources, the community’s actors and the interactions that take
place between them, rules-in-use, and outcomes. That framework has been
simplified and generalized to apply to the commons, the market, and the
state for this chapter.

To compare and contrast the ways in which the commons, market, and state
work, let’s consider four aspects of resource management: resource
characteristics, the people involved and the process they use, the norms
and rules they develop to govern use, and finally actual resource use
along with outcomes of that use (see Fig. 2).

Characteristics

Resources have particular characteristics or attributes that affect the
way they can be used. Some resources are natural; others are human
produced. And—significantly for today’s commons—resources can be
physical or digital, which affects a resource’s inherent potential.

Physical resources exist in limited supply. If I have a physical
resource and give it to you, I no longer have it. When a resource is
removed and used, the supply becomes scarce or depleted. Scarcity can
result in competing rivalry for the resource. Made with Creative Commons
enterprises are usually digitally based but some of our case studies
also produce resources in physical form. The costs of producing and
distributing a physical good usually require them to engage with the
market.

Physical resources are depletable, exclusive, and rivalrous. Digital
resources, on the other hand, are nondepletable, nonexclusive, and
nonrivalrous. If I share a digital resource with you, we both have the
resource. Giving it to you does not mean I no longer have it. Digital
resources can be infinitely stored, copied, and distributed without
becoming depleted, and at close to zero cost. Abundance rather than
scarcity is an inherent characteristic of digital resources.

The nondepletable, nonexclusive, and nonrivalrous nature of digital
resources means the rules and norms for managing them can (and ought to)
be different from how physical resources are managed. However, this is
not always the case. Digital resources are frequently made artificially
scarce. Placing digital resources in the commons makes them free and
abundant.

Our case studies frequently manage hybrid resources, which start out as
digital with the possibility of being made into a physical resource. The
digital file of a book can be printed on paper and made into a physical
book. A computer-rendered design for furniture can be physically
manufactured in wood. This conversion from digital to physical
invariably has costs. Often the digital resources are managed in a free
and open way, but money is charged to convert a digital resource into a
physical one.

Beyond this idea of physical versus digital, the commons, market, and
state conceive of resources differently (see Fig. 3). The market sees
resources as private goods—commodities for sale—from which value is
extracted. The state sees resources as public goods that provide value
to state citizens. The commons sees resources as common goods, providing
a common wealth extending beyond state boundaries, to be passed on in
undiminished or enhanced form to future generations.

People and processes

In the commons, the market, and the state, different people and
processes are used to manage resources. The processes used define both
who has a say and how a resource is managed.

In the state, a government of elected officials is responsible for
managing resources on behalf of the public. The citizens who produce and
use those resources are not directly involved; instead, that
responsibility is given over to the government. State ministries and
departments staffed with public servants set budgets, implement
programs, and manage resources based on government priorities and
procedures.

In the market, the people involved are producers, buyers, sellers, and
consumers. Businesses act as intermediaries between those who produce
resources and those who consume or use them. Market processes seek to
extract as much monetary value from resources as possible. In the
market, resources are managed as commodities, frequently mass-produced,
and sold to consumers on the basis of a cash transaction.

In contrast to the state and market, resources in a commons are managed
more directly by the people involved.7 Creators of human produced
resources can put them in the commons by personal choice. No permission
from state or market is required. Anyone can participate in the commons
and determine for themselves the extent to which they want to be
involved—as a contributor, user, or manager. The people involved include
not only those who create and use resources but those affected by
outcome of use. Who you are affects your say, actions you can take, and
extent of decision making. In the commons, the community as a whole
manages the resources. Resources put into the commons using Creative
Commons require users to give the original creator credit. Knowing the
person behind a resource makes the commons less anonymous and more
personal.

Norms and rules

The social interactions between people, and the processes used by the
state, market, and commons, evolve social norms and rules. These norms
and rules define permissions, allocate entitlements, and resolve
disputes.

State authority is governed by national constitutions. Norms related to
priorities and decision making are defined by elected officials and
parliamentary procedures. State rules are expressed through policies,
regulations, and laws. The state influences the norms and rules of the
market and commons through the rules it passes.

Market norms are influenced by economics and competition for scarce
resources. Market rules follow property, business, and financial laws
defined by the state.

As with the market, a commons can be influenced by state policies,
regulations, and laws. But the norms and rules of a commons are largely
defined by the community. They weigh individual costs and benefits
against the costs and benefits to the whole community. Consideration is
given not just to economic efficiency but also to equity and
sustainability.9

Goals

The combination of the aspects we’ve discussed so far—the resource’s
inherent characteristics, people and processes, and norms and
rules—shape how resources are used. Use is also influenced by the
different goals the state, market, and commons have.

In the market, the focus is on maximizing the utility of a resource.
What we pay for the goods we consume is seen as an objective measure of
the utility they provide. The goal then becomes maximizing total
monetary value in the economy.10 Units consumed translates to sales,
revenue, profit, and growth, and these are all ways to measure goals of
the market.

The state aims to use and manage resources in a way that balances the
economy with the social and cultural needs of its citizens. Health care,
education, jobs, the environment, transportation, security, heritage,
and justice are all facets of a healthy society, and the state applies
its resources toward these aims. State goals are reflected in quality of
life measures.

In the commons, the goal is maximizing access, equity, distribution,
participation, innovation, and sustainability. You can measure success
by looking at how many people access and use a resource; how users are
distributed across gender, income, and location; if a community to
extend and enhance the resources is being formed; and if the resources
are being used in innovative ways for personal and social good.

As hybrid combinations of the commons with the market or state, the
success and sustainability of all our case study enterprises depends on
their ability to strategically utilize and balance these different
aspects of managing resources.

A Short History of the Commons

Using the commons to manage resources is part of a long historical
continuum. However, in contemporary society, the market and the state
dominate the discourse on how resources are best managed. Rarely is the
commons even considered as an option. The commons has largely
disappeared from consciousness and consideration. There are no news
reports or speeches about the commons.

But the more than 1.1 billion resources licensed with Creative Commons
around the world are indications of a grassroots move toward the
commons. The commons is making a resurgence. To understand the
resilience of the commons and its current renewal, it’s helpful to know
something of its history.

For centuries, indigenous people and preindustrialized societies managed
resources, including water, food, firewood, irrigation, fish, wild game,
and many other things collectively as a commons.11 There was no market,
no global economy. The state in the form of rulers influenced the
commons but by no means controlled it. Direct social participation in a
commons was the primary way in which resources were managed and needs
met. (Fig. 4 illustrates the commons in relation to the state and the
market.)

This is followed by a long history of the state (a monarchy or ruler)
taking over the commons for their own purposes. This is called enclosure
of the commons.12 In olden days, “commoners” were evicted from the land,
fences and hedges erected, laws passed, and security set up to forbid
access.13 Gradually, resources became the property of the state and the
state became the primary means by which resources were managed. (See
Fig. 5).

Holdings of land, water, and game were distributed to ruling family and
political appointees. Commoners displaced from the land migrated to
cities. With the emergence of the industrial revolution, land and
resources became commodities sold to businesses to support production.
Monarchies evolved into elected parliaments. Commoners became labourers
earning money operating the machinery of industry. Financial, business,
and property laws were revised by governments to support markets,
growth, and productivity. Over time ready access to market produced
goods resulted in a rising standard of living, improved health, and
education. Fig. 6 shows how today the market is the primary means by
which resources are managed.

However, the world today is going through turbulent times. The benefits
of the market have been offset by unequal distribution and
overexploitation.

Overexploitation was the topic of Garrett Hardin’s influential essay
“The Tragedy of the Commons,” published in Science in 1968. Hardin
argues that everyone in a commons seeks to maximize personal gain and
will continue to do so even when the limits of the commons are reached.
The commons is then tragically depleted to the point where it can no
longer support anyone. Hardin’s essay became widely accepted as an
economic truism and a justification for private property and free
markets.

However, there is one serious flaw with Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the
Commons”—it’s fiction. Hardin did not actually study how real commons
work. Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics for her work
studying different commons all around the world. Ostrom’s work shows
that natural resource commons can be successfully managed by local
communities without any regulation by central authorities or without
privatization. Government and privatization are not the only two
choices. There is a third way: management by the people, where those
that are directly impacted are directly involved. With natural
resources, there is a regional locality. The people in the region are
the most familiar with the natural resource, have the most direct
relationship and history with it, and are therefore best situated to
manage it. Ostrom’s approach to the governance of natural resources
broke with convention; she recognized the importance of the commons as
an alternative to the market or state for solving problems of collective
action.14

Hardin failed to consider the actual social dynamic of the commons. His
model assumed that people in the commons act autonomously, out of pure
self-interest, without interaction or consideration of others. But as
Ostrom found, in reality, managing common resources together forms a
community and encourages discourse. This naturally generates norms and
rules that help people work collectively and ensure a sustainable
commons. Paradoxically, while Hardin’s essay is called The Tragedy of
the Commons it might more accurately be titled The Tragedy of the
Market.

Hardin’s story is based on the premise of depletable resources.
Economists have focused almost exclusively on scarcity-based markets.
Very little is known about how abundance works.15 The emergence of
information technology and the Internet has led to an explosion in
digital resources and new means of sharing and distribution. Digital
resources can never be depleted. An absence of a theory or model for how
abundance works, however, has led the market to make digital resources
artificially scarce and makes it possible for the usual market norms and
rules to be applied.

When it comes to use of state funds to create digital goods, however,
there is really no justification for artificial scarcity. The norm for
state funded digital works should be that they are freely and openly
available to the public that paid for them.

The Digital Revolution

In the early days of computing, programmers and developers learned from
each other by sharing software. In the 1980s, the free-software movement
codified this practice of sharing into a set of principles and freedoms:

-   The freedom to run a software program as you wish, for any purpose.
-   The freedom to study how a software program works (because access to
    the source code has been freely given), and change it so it does
    your computing as you wish.
-   The freedom to redistribute copies.
-   The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to
    others.16

These principles and freedoms constitute a set of norms and rules that
typify a digital commons.

In the late 1990s, to make the sharing of source code and collaboration
more appealing to companies, the open-source-software initiative
converted these principles into licenses and standards for managing
access to and distribution of software. The benefits of open source—such
as reliability, scalability, and quality verified by independent peer
review—became widely recognized and accepted. Customers liked the way
open source gave them control without being locked into a closed,
proprietary technology. Free and open-source software also generated a
network effect where the value of a product or service increases with
the number of people using it.17 The dramatic growth of the Internet
itself owes much to the fact that nobody has a proprietary lock on core
Internet protocols.

While open-source software functions as a commons, many businesses and
markets did build up around it. Business models based on the licenses
and standards of open-source software evolved alongside organizations
that managed software code on principles of abundance rather than
scarcity. Eric Raymond’s essay “The Magic Cauldron” does a great job of
analyzing the economics and business models associated with open-source
software.18 These models can provide examples of sustainable approaches
for those Made with Creative Commons.

It isn’t just about an abundant availability of digital assets but also
about abundance of participation. The growth of personal computing,
information technology, and the Internet made it possible for mass
participation in producing creative works and distributing them. Photos,
books, music, and many other forms of digital content could now be
readily created and distributed by almost anyone. Despite this potential
for abundance, by default these digital works are governed by copyright
laws. Under copyright, a digital work is the property of the creator,
and by law others are excluded from accessing and using it without the
creator’s permission.

But people like to share. One of the ways we define ourselves is by
sharing valuable and entertaining content. Doing so grows and nourishes
relationships, seeks to change opinions, encourages action, and informs
others about who we are and what we care about. Sharing lets us feel
more involved with the world.19

The Birth of Creative Commons

In 2001, Creative Commons was created as a nonprofit to support all
those who wanted to share digital content. A suite of Creative Commons
licenses was modeled on those of open-source software but for use with
digital content rather than software code. The licenses give everyone
from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple,
standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work.

Creative Commons licenses have a three-layer design. The norms and rules
of each license are first expressed in full legal language as used by
lawyers. This layer is called the legal code. But since most creators
and users are not lawyers, the licenses also have a commons deed,
expressing the permissions in plain language, which regular people can
read and quickly understand. It acts as a user-friendly interface to the
legal-code layer beneath. The third layer is the machine-readable one,
making it easy for the Web to know a work is Creative Commons–licensed
by expressing permissions in a way that software systems, search
engines, and other kinds of technology can understand.20 Taken together,
these three layers ensure creators, users, and even the Web itself
understand the norms and rules associated with digital content in a
commons.

In 2015, there were over one billion Creative Commons licensed works in
a global commons. These works were viewed online 136 billion times.
People are using Creative Commons licenses all around the world, in
thirty-four languages. These resources include photos, artwork, research
articles in journals, educational resources, music and other audio
tracks, and videos.

Individual artists, photographers, musicians, and filmmakers use
Creative Commons, but so do museums, governments, creative industries,
manufacturers, and publishers. Millions of websites use CC licenses,
including major platforms like Wikipedia and Flickr and smaller ones
like blogs.21 Users of Creative Commons are diverse and cut across many
different sectors. (Our case studies were chosen to reflect that
diversity.)

Some see Creative Commons as a way to share a gift with others, a way of
getting known, or a way to provide social benefit. Others are simply
committed to the norms associated with a commons. And for some,
participation has been spurred by the free-culture movement, a social
movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative
works. The free-culture movement sees a commons as providing significant
benefits compared to restrictive copyright laws. This ethos of free
exchange in a commons aligns the free-culture movement with the free and
open-source software movement.

Over time, Creative Commons has spawned a range of open movements,
including open educational resources, open access, open science, and
open data. The goal in every case has been to democratize participation
and share digital resources at no cost, with legal permissions for
anyone to freely access, use, and modify.

The state is increasingly involved in supporting open movements. The
Open Government Partnership was launched in 2011 to provide an
international platform for governments to become more open, accountable,
and responsive to citizens. Since then, it has grown from eight
participating countries to seventy.22 In all these countries, government
and civil society are working together to develop and implement
ambitious open-government reforms. Governments are increasingly adopting
Creative Commons to ensure works funded with taxpayer dollars are open
and free to the public that paid for them.

The Changing Market

Today’s market is largely driven by global capitalism. Law and financial
systems are structured to support extraction, privatization, and
corporate growth. A perception that the market is more efficient than
the state has led to continual privatization of many public natural
resources, utilities, services, and infrastructures.23 While this system
has been highly efficient at generating consumerism and the growth of
gross domestic product, the impact on human well-being has been mixed.
Offsetting rising living standards and improvements to health and
education are ever-increasing wealth inequality, social inequality,
poverty, deterioration of our natural environment, and breakdowns of
democracy.24

In light of these challenges there is a growing recognition that GDP
growth should not be an end in itself, that development needs to be
socially and economically inclusive, that environmental sustainability
is a requirement not an option, and that we need to better balance the
market, state and community.25

These realizations have led to a resurgence of interest in the commons
as a means of enabling that balance. City governments like Bologna,
Italy, are collaborating with their citizens to put in place regulations
for the care and regeneration of urban commons.26 Seoul and Amsterdam
call themselves “sharing cities,” looking to make sustainable and more
efficient use of scarce resources. They see sharing as a way to improve
the use of public spaces, mobility, social cohesion, and safety.27

The market itself has taken an interest in the sharing economy, with
businesses like Airbnb providing a peer-to-peer marketplace for
short-term lodging and Uber providing a platform for ride sharing.
However, Airbnb and Uber are still largely operating under the usual
norms and rules of the market, making them less like a commons and more
like a traditional business seeking financial gain. Much of the sharing
economy is not about the commons or building an alternative to a
corporate-driven market economy; it’s about extending the deregulated
free market into new areas of our lives.28 While none of the people we
interviewed for our case studies would describe themselves as part of
the sharing economy, there are in fact some significant parallels. Both
the sharing economy and the commons make better use of asset capacity.
The sharing economy sees personal residents and cars as having latent
spare capacity with rental value. The equitable access of the commons
broadens and diversifies the number of people who can use and derive
value from an asset.

One way Made with Creative Commons case studies differ from those of the
sharing economy is their focus on digital resources. Digital resources
function under different economic rules than physical ones. In a world
where prices always seem to go up, information technology is an anomaly.
Computer-processing power, storage, and bandwidth are all rapidly
increasing, but rather than costs going up, costs are coming down.
Digital technologies are getting faster, better, and cheaper. The cost
of anything built on these technologies will always go down until it is
close to zero.29

Those that are Made with Creative Commons are looking to leverage the
unique inherent characteristics of digital resources, including lowering
costs. The use of digital-rights-management technologies in the form of
locks, passwords, and controls to prevent digital goods from being
accessed, changed, replicated, and distributed is minimal or
nonexistent. Instead, Creative Commons licenses are used to put digital
content out in the commons, taking advantage of the unique economics
associated with being digital. The aim is to see digital resources used
as widely and by as many people as possible. Maximizing access and
participation is a common goal. They aim for abundance over scarcity.

The incremental cost of storing, copying, and distributing digital goods
is next to zero, making abundance possible. But imagining a market based
on abundance rather than scarcity is so alien to the way we conceive of
economic theory and practice that we struggle to do so.30 Those that are
Made with Creative Commons are each pioneering in this new landscape,
devising their own economic models and practice.

Some are looking to minimize their interactions with the market and
operate as autonomously as possible. Others are operating largely as a
business within the existing rules and norms of the market. And still
others are looking to change the norms and rules by which the market
operates.

For an ordinary corporation, making social benefit a part of its
operations is difficult, as it’s legally required to make decisions that
financially benefit stockholders. But new forms of business are
emerging. There are benefit corporations and social enterprises, which
broaden their business goals from making a profit to making a positive
impact on society, workers, the community, and the environment.31
Community-owned businesses, worker-owned businesses, cooperatives,
guilds, and other organizational forms offer alternatives to the
traditional corporation. Collectively, these alternative market entities
are changing the rules and norms of the market.32

“A book on open business models” is how we described it in this book’s
Kickstarter campaign. We used a handbook called Business Model
Generation as our reference for defining just what a business model is.
Developed over nine years using an “open process” involving 470
coauthors from forty-five countries, it is useful as a framework for
talking about business models.33

It contains a “business model canvas,” which conceives of a business
model as having nine building blocks.34 This blank canvas can serve as a
tool for anyone to design their own business model. We remixed this
business model canvas into an open business model canvas, adding three
more building blocks relevant to hybrid market, commons enterprises:
social good, Creative Commons license, and “type of open environment
that the business fits in.”35 This enhanced canvas proved useful when we
analyzed businesses and helped start-ups plan their economic model.

In our case study interviews, many expressed discomfort over describing
themselves as an open business model—the term business model suggested
primarily being situated in the market. Where you sit on the
commons-to-market spectrum affects the extent to which you see yourself
as a business in the market. The more central to the mission shared
resources and commons values are, the less comfort there is in
describing yourself, or depicting what you do, as a business. Not all
who have endeavors Made with Creative Commons use business speak; for
some the process has been experimental, emergent, and organic rather
than carefully planned using a predefined model.

The creators, businesses, and organizations we profile all engage with
the market to generate revenue in some way. The ways in which this is
done vary widely. Donations, pay what you can, memberships, “digital for
free but physical for a fee,” crowdfunding, matchmaking, value-add
services, patrons . . . the list goes on and on. (Initial description of
how to earn revenue available through reference note. For latest
thinking see How to Bring In Money in the next section.) 36 There is no
single magic bullet, and each endeavor has devised ways that work for
them. Most make use of more than one way. Diversifying revenue streams
lowers risk and provides multiple paths to sustainability.

Benefits of the Digital Commons

While it may be clear why commons-based organizations want to interact
and engage with the market (they need money to survive), it may be less
obvious why the market would engage with the commons. The digital
commons offers many benefits.

The commons speeds dissemination. The free flow of resources in the
commons offers tremendous economies of scale. Distribution is
decentralized, with all those in the commons empowered to share the
resources they have access to. Those that are Made with Creative Commons
have a reduced need for sales or marketing. Decentralized distribution
amplifies supply and know-how.

The commons ensures access to all. The market has traditionally operated
by putting resources behind a paywall requiring payment first before
access. The commons puts resources in the open, providing access up
front without payment. Those that are Made with Creative Commons make
little or no use of digital rights management (DRM) to manage resources.
Not using DRM frees them of the costs of acquiring DRM technology and
staff resources to engage in the punitive practices associated with
restricting access. The way the commons provides access to everyone
levels the playing field and promotes inclusiveness, equity, and
fairness.

The commons maximizes participation. Resources in the commons can be
used and contributed to by everyone. Using the resources of others,
contributing your own, and mixing yours with others to create new works
are all dynamic forms of participation made possible by the commons.
Being Made with Creative Commons means you’re engaging as many users
with your resources as possible. Users are also authoring, editing,
remixing, curating, localizing, translating, and distributing. The
commons makes it possible for people to directly participate in culture,
knowledge building, and even democracy, and many other socially
beneficial practices.

The commons spurs innovation. Resources in the hands of more people who
can use them leads to new ideas. The way commons resources can be
modified, customized, and improved results in derivative works never
imagined by the original creator. Some endeavors that are Made with
Creative Commons deliberately encourage users to take the resources
being shared and innovate them. Doing so moves research and development
(R&D) from being solely inside the organization to being in the
community.37 Community-based innovation will keep an organization or
business on its toes. It must continue to contribute new ideas, absorb
and build on top of the innovations of others, and steward the resources
and the relationship with the community.

The commons boosts reach and impact. The digital commons is global.
Resources may be created for a local or regional need, but they go far
and wide generating a global impact. In the digital world, there are no
borders between countries. When you are Made with Creative Commons, you
are often local and global at the same time: Digital designs being
globally distributed but made and manufactured locally. Digital books or
music being globally distributed but readings and concerts performed
locally. The digital commons magnifies impact by connecting creators to
those who use and build on their work both locally and globally.

The commons is generative. Instead of extracting value, the commons adds
value. Digitized resources persist without becoming depleted, and
through use are improved, personalized, and localized. Each use adds
value. The market focuses on generating value for the business and the
customer. The commons generates value for a broader range of
beneficiaries including the business, the customer, the creator, the
public, and the commons itself. The generative nature of the commons
means that it is more cost-effective and produces a greater return on
investment. Value is not just measured in financial terms. Each new
resource added to the commons provides value to the public and
contributes to the overall value of the commons.

The commons brings people together for a common cause. The commons vests
people directly with the responsibility to manage the resources for the
common good. The costs and benefits for the individual are balanced with
the costs and benefits for the community and for future generations.
Resources are not anonymous or mass produced. Their provenance is known
and acknowledged through attribution and other means. Those that are
Made with Creative Commons generate awareness and reputation based on
their contributions to the commons. The reach, impact, and
sustainability of those contributions rest largely on their ability to
forge relationships and connections with those who use and improve them.
By functioning on the basis of social engagement, not monetary exchange,
the commons unifies people.

The benefits of the commons are many. When these benefits align with the
goals of individuals, communities, businesses in the market, or state
enterprises, choosing to manage resources as a commons ought to be the
option of choice.

Our Case Studies

The creators, organizations, and businesses in our case studies operate
as nonprofits, for-profits, and social enterprises. Regardless of legal
status, they all have a social mission. Their primary reason for being
is to make the world a better place, not to profit. Money is a means to
a social end, not the end itself. They factor public interest into
decisions, behavior, and practices. Transparency and trust are really
important. Impact and success are measured against social aims expressed
in mission statements, and are not just about the financial bottom line.

The case studies are based on the narratives told to us by founders and
key staff. Instead of solely using financials as the measure of success
and sustainability, they emphasized their mission, practices, and means
by which they measure success. Metrics of success are a blend of how
social goals are being met and how sustainable the enterprise is.

Our case studies are diverse, ranging from publishing to education and
manufacturing. All of the organizations, businesses, and creators in the
case studies produce digital resources. Those resources exist in many
forms including books, designs, songs, research, data, cultural works,
education materials, graphic icons, and video. Some are digital
representations of physical resources. Others are born digital but can
be made into physical resources.

They are creating new resources, or using the resources of others, or
mixing existing resources together to make something new. They, and
their audience, all play a direct, participatory role in managing those
resources, including their preservation, curation, distribution, and
enhancement. Access and participation is open to all regardless of
monetary means.

And as users of Creative Commons licenses, they are automatically part
of a global community. The new digital commons is global. Those we
profiled come from nearly every continent in the world. To build and
interact within this global community is conducive to success.

Creative Commons licenses may express legal rules around the use of
resources in a commons, but success in the commons requires more than
following the letter of the law and acquiring financial means. Over and
over we heard in our interviews how success and sustainability are tied
to a set of beliefs, values, and principles that underlie their actions:
Give more than you take. Be open and inclusive. Add value. Make visible
what you are using from the commons, what you are adding, and what you
are monetizing. Maximize abundance. Give attribution. Express gratitude.
Develop trust; don’t exploit. Build relationship and community. Be
transparent. Defend the commons.

The new digital commons is here to stay. Made With Creative Commons case
studies show how it’s possible to be part of this commons while still
functioning within market and state systems. The commons generates
benefits neither the market nor state can achieve on their own. Rather
than the market or state dominating as primary means of resource
management, a more balanced alternative is possible.

Enterprise use of Creative Commons has only just begun. The case studies
in this book are merely starting points. Each is changing and evolving
over time. Many more are joining and inventing new models. This overview
aims to provide a framework and language for thinking and talking about
the new digital commons. The remaining sections go deeper providing
further guidance and insights on how it works.

Notes

1.  Jonathan Rowe, Our Common Wealth (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler,
    2013), 14.
2.  David Bollier, Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the
    Life of the Commons (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2014), 176.
3.  Ibid., 15.
4.  Ibid., 145.
5.  Ibid., 175.
6.  Daniel H. Cole, “Learning from Lin: Lessons and Cautions from the
    Natural Commons for the Knowledge Commons,” in Governing Knowledge
    Commons, eds. Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison, and
    Katherine J. Strandburg (New York: Oxford University Press,
    2014), 53.
7.  Max Haiven, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism,
    Creativity and the Commons (New York: Zed Books, 2014), 93.
8.  Cole, “Learning from Lin,” in Frischmann, Madison, and Strandburg,
    Governing Knowledge Commons, 59.
9.  Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 175.
10. Joshua Farley and Ida Kubiszewski, “The Economics of Information in
    a Post-Carbon Economy,” in Free Knowledge: Confronting the
    Commodification of Human Discovery, eds. Patricia W. Elliott and
    Daryl H. Hepting (Regina, SK: University of Regina Press,
    2015), 201–4.
11. Rowe, Our Common Wealth, 19; and Heather Menzies, Reclaiming the
    Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto (Gabriola
    Island, BC: New Society, 2014), 42–43.
12. Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 55–78.
13. Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal
    System in Tune with Nature and Community (Oakland, CA:
    Berrett-Koehler, 2015), 46–57; and Bollier, Think Like a
    Commoner, 88.
14. Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison, and Katherine J.
    Strandburg, “Governing Knowledge Commons,” in Frischmann, Madison,
    and Strandburg Governing Knowledge Commons, 12.
15. Farley and Kubiszewski, “Economics of Information,” in Elliott and
    Hepting, Free Knowledge, 203.
16. “What Is Free Software?” GNU Operating System, the Free Software
    Foundation’s Licensing and Compliance Lab, accessed December 30,
    2016, www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.
17. Wikipedia, s.v. “Open-source software,” last modified November
    22, 2016.
18. Eric S. Raymond, “The Magic Cauldron,” in The Cathedral and the
    Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental
    Revolutionary, rev. ed. (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media,
    2001), www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/.
19. New York Times Customer Insight Group, The Psychology of Sharing:
    Why Do People Share Online? (New York: New York Times Customer
    Insight Group, 2011), www.iab.net/media/file/POSWhitePaper.pdf.
20. “Licensing Considerations,” Creative Commons, accessed December 30,
    2016, creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/.
21. Creative Commons, 2015 State of the Commons (Mountain View, CA:
    Creative Commons, 2015), stateof.creativecommons.org/2015/.
22. Wikipedia, s.v. “Open Government Partnership,” last modified
    September 24,
    2016, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open\_Government\_Partnership.
23. Capra and Mattei, Ecology of Law, 114.
24. Ibid., 116.
25. The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, “Stockholm
    Statement” accessed February 15, 2017,
    sida.se/globalassets/sida/eng/press/stockholm-statement.pdf
26. City of Bologna, Regulation on Collaboration between Citizens and
    the City for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons, trans.
    LabGov (LABoratory for the GOVernance of Commons) (Bologna, Italy:
    City of Bologna,
    2014), www.labgov.it/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/Bologna-Regulation-on-collaboration-between-citizens-and-the-city-for-the-cure-and-regeneration-of-urban-commons1.pdf.
27. The Seoul Sharing City website is english.sharehub.kr; for Amsterdam
    Sharing City, go to www.sharenl.nl/amsterdam-sharing-city/.
28. Tom Slee, What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy (New
    York: OR Books, 2015), 42.
29. Chris Anderson, Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit by
    Giving Something for Nothing, Reprint with new preface. (New York:
    Hyperion, 2010), 78.
30. Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of
    Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
    (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 273.
31. Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk about the Next
    American Revolution: Democratizing Wealth and Building a
    Community-Sustaining Economy from the Ground Up (White River
    Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2013), 39.
32. Marjorie Kelly, Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership
    Revolution; Journeys to a Generative Economy (San Francisco:
    Berrett-Koehler, 2012), 8–9.
33. Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation
    (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2010). A preview of the book is
    available at strategyzer.com/books/business-model-generation.
34. This business model canvas is available to download
    at strategyzer.com/canvas/business-model-canvas.
35. We’ve made the “Open Business Model Canvas,” designed by the
    coauthor Paul Stacey, available online
    at docs.google.com/drawings/d/1QOIDa2qak7wZSSOa4Wv6qVMO77IwkKHN7CYyq0wHivs/edit.
    You can also find the accompanying Open Business Model Canvas
    Questions
    at docs.google.com/drawings/d/1kACK7TkoJgsM18HUWCbX9xuQ0Byna4plSVZXZGTtays/edit.
36. A more comprehensive list of revenue streams is available in this
    post I wrote on Medium on March 6, 2016. “What Is an Open Business
    Model and How Can You Generate Revenue?”, available
    at medium.com/made-with-creative-commons/what-is-an-open-business-model-and-how-can-you-generate-revenue-5854d2659b15.
37. Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating
    and Profiting from Technology (Boston: Harvard Business Review
    Press, 2006), 31–44.

How

to Be

Made with

Creative

Commons

Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

When we began this project in August 2015, we set out to write a book
about business models that involve Creative Commons licenses in some
significant way—what we call being Made with Creative Commons. With the
help of our Kickstarter backers, we chose twenty-four endeavors from all
around the world that are Made with Creative Commons. The mix is
diverse, from an individual musician to a university-textbook publisher
to an electronics manufacturer. Some make their own content and share
under Creative Commons licensing. Others are platforms for CC-licensed
creative work made by others. Many sit somewhere in between, both using
and contributing creative work that’s shared with the public. Like all
who use the licenses, these endeavors share their work—whether it’s open
data or furniture designs—in a way that enables the public not only to
access it but also to make use of it.

We analyzed the revenue models, customer segments, and value
propositions of each endeavor. We searched for ways that putting their
content under Creative Commons licenses helped boost sales or increase
reach. Using traditional measures of economic success, we tried to map
these business models in a way that meaningfully incorporated the impact
of Creative Commons. In our interviews, we dug into the motivations, the
role of CC licenses, modes of revenue generation, definitions of
success.

In fairly short order, we realized the book we set out to write was
quite different from the one that was revealing itself in our interviews
and research.

It isn’t that we were wrong to think you can make money while using
Creative Commons licenses. In many instances, CC can help make you more
money. Nor were we wrong that there are business models out there that
others who want to use CC licensing as part of their livelihood or
business could replicate. What we didn’t realize was just how misguided
it would be to write a book about being Made with Creative Commons using
only a business lens.

According to the seminal handbook Business Model Generation, a business
model “describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers,
and captures value.”1 Thinking about sharing in terms of creating and
capturing value always felt inappropriately transactional and out of
place, something we heard time and time again in our interviews. And as
Cory Doctorow told us in our interview with him, “Business model can
mean anything you want it to mean.”

Eventually, we got it. Being Made with Creative Commons is more than a
business model. While we will talk about specific revenue models as one
piece of our analysis (and in more detail in the case studies), we
scrapped that as our guiding rubric for the book.

Admittedly, it took me a long time to get there. When Paul and I divided
up our writing after finishing the research, my charge was to distill
everything we learned from the case studies and write up the practical
lessons and takeaways. I spent months trying to jam what we learned into
the business-model box, convinced there must be some formula for the way
things interacted. But there is no formula. You’ll probably have to
discard that way of thinking before you read any further.

In every interview, we started from the same simple questions. Amid all
the diversity among the creators, organizations, and businesses we
profiled, there was one constant. Being Made with Creative Commons may
be good for business, but that is not why they do it. Sharing work with
Creative Commons is, at its core, a moral decision. The commercial and
other self-interested benefits are secondary. Most decided to use CC
licenses first and found a revenue model later. This was our first hint
that writing a book solely about the impact of sharing on business might
be a little off track.

But we also started to realize something about what it means to be Made
with Creative Commons. When people talked to us about how and why they
used CC, it was clear that it meant something more than using a
copyright license. It also represented a set of values. There is
symbolism behind using CC, and that symbolism has many layers.

At one level, being Made with Creative Commons expresses an affinity for
the value of Creative Commons. While there are many different flavors of
CC licenses and nearly infinite ways to be Made with Creative Commons,
the basic value system is rooted in a fundamental belief that knowledge
and creativity are building blocks of our culture rather than just
commodities from which to extract market value. These values reflect a
belief that the common good should always be part of the equation when
we determine how to regulate our cultural outputs. They reflect a belief
that everyone has something to contribute, and that no one can own our
shared culture. They reflect a belief in the promise of sharing.

Whether the public makes use of the opportunity to copy and adapt your
work, sharing with a Creative Commons license is a symbol of how you
want to interact with the people who consume your work. Whenever you
create something, “all rights reserved” under copyright is automatic, so
the copyright symbol (©) on the work does not necessarily come across as
a marker of distrust or excessive protectionism. But using a CC license
can be a symbol of the opposite—of wanting a real human relationship,
rather than an impersonal market transaction. It leaves open the
possibility of connection.

Being Made with Creative Commons not only demonstrates values connected
to CC and sharing. It also demonstrates that something other than profit
drives what you do. In our interviews, we always asked what success
looked like for them. It was stunning how rarely money was mentioned.
Most have a deeper purpose and a different vision of success.

The driving motivation varies depending on the type of endeavor. For
individual creators, it is most often about personal inspiration. In
some ways, this is nothing new. As Doctorow has written, “Creators
usually start doing what they do for love.”2 But when you share your
creative work under a CC license, that dynamic is even more pronounced.
Similarly, for technological innovators, it is often less about creating
a specific new thing that will make you rich and more about solving a
specific problem you have. The creators of Arduino told us that the key
question when creating something is “Do you as the creator want to use
it? It has to have personal use and meaning.”

Many that are Made with Creative Commons have an express social mission
that underpins everything they do. In many cases, sharing with Creative
Commons expressly advances that social mission, and using the licenses
can be the difference between legitimacy and hypocrisy. Noun Project
co-founder Edward Boatman told us they could not have stated their
social mission of sharing with a straight face if they weren’t willing
to show the world that it was OK to share their content using a Creative
Commons license.

This dynamic is probably one reason why there are so many nonprofit
examples of being Made with Creative Commons. The content is the result
of a labor of love or a tool to drive social change, and money is like
gas in the car, something that you need to keep going but not an end in
itself. Being Made with Creative Commons is a different vision of a
business or livelihood, where profit is not paramount, and producing
social good and human connection are integral to success.

Even if profit isn’t the end goal, you have to bring in money to be
successfully Made with Creative Commons. At a bare minimum, you have to
make enough money to keep the lights on.

The costs of doing business vary widely for those made with CC, but
there is generally a much lower threshold for sustainability than there
used to be for any creative endeavor. Digital technology has made it
easier than ever to create, and easier than ever to distribute. As
Doctorow put it in his book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, “If
analog dollars have turned into digital dimes (as the critics of
ad-supported media have it), there is the fact that it’s possible to run
a business that gets the same amount of advertising as its forebears at
a fraction of the price.”

Some creation costs are the same as they always were. It takes the same
amount of time and money to write a peer-reviewed journal article or
paint a painting. Technology can’t change that. But other costs are
dramatically reduced by technology, particularly in production-heavy
domains like filmmaking.3 CC-licensed content and content in the public
domain, as well as the work of volunteer collaborators, can also
dramatically reduce costs if they’re being used as resources to create
something new. And, of course, there is the reality that some content
would be created whether or not the creator is paid because it is a
labor of love.

Distributing content is almost universally cheaper than ever. Once
content is created, the costs to distribute copies digitally are
essentially zero.4 The costs to distribute physical copies are still
significant, but lower than they have been historically. And it is now
much easier to print and distribute physical copies on-demand, which
also reduces costs. Depending on the endeavor, there can be a whole host
of other possible expenses like marketing and promotion, and even
expenses associated with the various ways money is being made, like
touring or custom training.

It’s important to recognize that the biggest impact of technology on
creative endeavors is that creators can now foot the costs of creation
and distribution themselves. People now often have a direct route to
their potential public without necessarily needing intermediaries like
record labels and book publishers. Doctorow wrote, “If you’re a creator
who never got the time of day from one of the great imperial powers,
this is your time. Where once you had no means of reaching an audience
without the assistance of the industry-dominating megacompanies, now you
have hundreds of ways to do it without them.”5 Previously, distribution
of creative work involved the costs associated with sustaining a
monolithic entity, now creators can do the work themselves. That means
the financial needs of creative endeavors can be a lot more modest.

Whether for an individual creator or a larger endeavor, it usually isn’t
enough to break even if you want to make what you’re doing a livelihood.
You need to build in some support for the general operation. This extra
bit looks different for everyone, but importantly, in nearly all cases
for those Made with Creative Commons, the definition of “enough money”
looks a lot different than it does in the world of venture capital and
stock options. It is more about sustainability and less about unlimited
growth and profit. SparkFun founder Nathan Seidle told us, “Business
model is a really grandiose word for it. It is really just about keeping
the operation going day to day.”

This book is a testament to the notion that it is possible to make money
while using CC licenses and CC-licensed content, but we are still very
much at an experimental stage. The creators, organizations, and
businesses we profile in this book are blazing the trail and adapting in
real time as they pursue this new way of operating.

There are, however, plenty of ways in which CC licensing can be good for
business in fairly predictable ways. The first is how it helps solve
“problem zero.”

Problem Zero: Getting Discovered

Once you create or collect your content, the next step is finding users,
customers, fans—in other words, your people. As Amanda Palmer wrote, “It
has to start with the art. The songs had to touch people initially, and
mean something, for anything to work at all.”6 There isn’t any magic to
finding your people, and there is certainly no formula. Your work has to
connect with people and offer them some artistic and/or utilitarian
value. In some ways, this is easier than ever. Online we are not limited
by shelf space, so there is room for every obscure interest, taste, and
need imaginable. This is what Chris Anderson dubbed the Long Tail, where
consumption becomes less about mainstream mass “hits” and more about
micromarkets for every particular niche. As Anderson wrote, “We are all
different, with different wants and needs, and the Internet now has a
place for all of them in the way that physical markets did not.”7 We are
no longer limited to what appeals to the masses.

While finding “your people” online is theoretically easier than in the
analog world, as a practical matter it can still be difficult to
actually get noticed. The Internet is a firehose of content, one that
only grows larger by the minute. As a content creator, not only are you
competing for attention against more content creators than ever before,
you are competing against creativity generated outside the market as
well.8 Anderson wrote, “The greatest change of the past decade has been
the shift in time people spend consuming amateur content instead of
professional content.”9 To top it all off, you have to compete against
the rest of their lives, too—“friends, family, music playlists, soccer
games, and nights on the town.”10 Somehow, some way, you have to get
noticed by the right people.

When you come to the Internet armed with an all-rights-reserved
mentality from the start, you are often restricting access to your work
before there is even any demand for it. In many cases, requiring payment
for your work is part of the traditional copyright system. Even a tiny
cost has a big effect on demand. It’s called the penny gap—the large
difference in demand between something that is available at the price of
one cent versus the price of zero.11 That doesn’t mean it is wrong to
charge money for your content. It simply means you need to recognize the
effect that doing so will have on demand. The same principle applies to
restricting access to copy the work. If your problem is how to get
discovered and find “your people,” prohibiting people from copying your
work and sharing it with others is counterproductive.

Of course, it’s not that being discovered by people who like your work
will make you rich—far from it. But as Cory Doctorow says, “Recognition
is one of many necessary preconditions for artistic success.”12

Choosing not to spend time and energy restricting access to your work
and policing infringement also builds goodwill. Lumen Learning, a
for-profit company that publishes online educational materials, made an
early decision not to prevent students from accessing their content,
even in the form of a tiny paywall, because it would negatively impact
student success in a way that would undermine the social mission behind
what they do. They believe this decision has generated an immense amount
of goodwill within the community.

It is not just that restricting access to your work may undermine your
social mission. It also may alienate the people who most value your
creative work. If people like your work, their natural instinct will be
to share it with others. But as David Bollier wrote, “Our natural human
impulses to imitate and share—the essence of culture—have been
criminalized.”13

The fact that copying can carry criminal penalties undoubtedly deters
copying it, but copying with the click of a button is too easy and
convenient to ever fully stop it. Try as the copyright industry might to
persuade us otherwise, copying a copyrighted work just doesn’t feel like
stealing a loaf of bread. And, of course, that’s because it isn’t.
Sharing a creative work has no impact on anyone else’s ability to make
use of it.

If you take some amount of copying and sharing your work as a given, you
can invest your time and resources elsewhere, rather than wasting them
on playing a cat and mouse game with people who want to copy and share
your work. Lizzy Jongma from the Rijksmuseum said, “We could spend a lot
of money trying to protect works, but people are going to do it anyway.
And they will use bad-quality versions.” Instead, they started releasing
high-resolution digital copies of their collection into the public
domain and making them available for free on their website. For them,
sharing was a form of quality control over the copies that were
inevitably being shared online. Doing this meant forgoing the revenue
they previously got from selling digital images. But Lizzy says that was
a small price to pay for all of the opportunities that sharing unlocked
for them.

Being Made with Creative Commons means you stop thinking about ways to
artificially make your content scarce, and instead leverage it as the
potentially abundant resource it is.14 When you see information
abundance as a feature, not a bug, you start thinking about the ways to
use the idling capacity of your content to your advantage. As my friend
and colleague Eric Steuer once said, “Using CC licenses shows you get
the Internet.”

Cory Doctorow says it costs him nothing when other people make copies of
his work, and it opens the possibility that he might get something in
return.15 Similarly, the makers of the Arduino boards knew it was
impossible to stop people from copying their hardware, so they decided
not to even try and instead look for the benefits of being open. For
them, the result is one of the most ubiquitous pieces of hardware in the
world, with a thriving online community of tinkerers and innovators that
have done things with their work they never could have done otherwise.

There are all kinds of way to leverage the power of sharing and remix to
your benefit. Here are a few.

Use CC to grow a larger audience

Putting a Creative Commons license on your content won’t make it
automatically go viral, but eliminating legal barriers to copying the
work certainly can’t hurt the chances that your work will be shared. The
CC license symbolizes that sharing is welcome. It can act as a little
tap on the shoulder to those who come across the work—a nudge to copy
the work if they have any inkling of doing so. All things being equal,
if one piece of content has a sign that says Share and the other says
Don’t Share (which is what “©” means), which do you think people are
more likely to share?

The Conversation is an online news site with in-depth articles written
by academics who are experts on particular topics. All of the articles
are CC-licensed, and they are copied and reshared on other sites by
design. This proliferating effect, which they track, is a central part
of the value to their academic authors who want to reach as many readers
as possible.

The idea that more eyeballs equates with more success is a form of the
max strategy, adopted by Google and other technology companies.
According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, the idea is simple: “Take whatever
it is you are doing and do it at the max in terms of distribution. The
other way of saying this is that since marginal cost of distribution is
free, you might as well put things everywhere.”16 This strategy is what
often motivates companies to make their products and services free
(i.e., no cost), but the same logic applies to making content freely
shareable. Because CC-licensed content is free (as in cost) and can be
freely copied, CC licensing makes it even more accessible and likely to
spread.

If you are successful in reaching more users, readers, listeners, or
other consumers of your work, you can start to benefit from the
bandwagon effect. The simple fact that there are other people consuming
or following your work spurs others to want to do the same.17 This is,
in part, because we simply have a tendency to engage in herd behavior,
but it is also because a large following is at least a partial indicator
of quality or usefulness.18

Use CC to get attribution and name
recognition

Every Creative Commons license requires that credit be given to the
author, and that reusers supply a link back to the original source of
the material. CC0, not a license but a tool used to put work in the
public domain, does not make attribution a legal requirement, but many
communities still give credit as a matter of best practices and social
norms. In fact, it is social norms, rather than the threat of legal
enforcement, that most often motivate people to provide attribution and
otherwise comply with the CC license terms anyway. This is the mark of
any well-functioning community, within both the marketplace and the
society at large.19 CC licenses reflect a set of wishes on the part of
creators, and in the vast majority of circumstances, people are
naturally inclined to follow those wishes. This is particularly the case
for something as straightforward and consistent with basic notions of
fairness as providing credit.

The fact that the name of the creator follows a CC-licensed work makes
the licenses an important means to develop a reputation or, in corporate
speak, a brand. The drive to associate your name with your work is not
just based on commercial motivations, it is fundamental to authorship.
Knowledge Unlatched is a nonprofit that helps to subsidize the print
production of CC-licensed academic texts by pooling contributions from
libraries around the United States. The CEO, Frances Pinter, says that
the Creative Commons license on the works has a huge value to authors
because reputation is the most important currency for academics. Sharing
with CC is a way of having the most people see and cite your work.

Attribution can be about more than just receiving credit. It can also be
about establishing provenance. People naturally want to know where
content came from—the source of a work is sometimes just as interesting
as the work itself. Opendesk is a platform for furniture designers to
share their designs. Consumers who like those designs can then get
matched with local makers who turn the designs into real-life furniture.
The fact that I, sitting in the middle of the United States, can pick
out a design created by a designer in Tokyo and then use a maker within
my own community to transform the design into something tangible is part
of the power of their platform. The provenance of the design is a
special part of the product.

Knowing the source of a work is also critical to ensuring its
credibility. Just as a trademark is designed to give consumers a way to
identify the source and quality of a particular good and service,
knowing the author of a work gives the public a way to assess its
credibility. In a time when online discourse is plagued with
misinformation, being a trusted information source is more valuable than
ever.

Use CC-licensed content as a marketing tool

As we will cover in more detail later, many endeavors that are Made with
Creative Commons make money by providing a product or service other than
the CC-licensed work. Sometimes that other product or service is
completely unrelated to the CC content. Other times it’s a physical copy
or live performance of the CC content. In all cases, the CC content can
attract people to your other product or service.

Knowledge Unlatched’s Pinter told us she has seen time and again how
offering CC-licensed content—that is, digitally for free—actually
increases sales of the printed goods because it functions as a marketing
tool. We see this phenomenon regularly with famous artwork. The Mona
Lisa is likely the most recognizable painting on the planet. Its
ubiquity has the effect of catalyzing interest in seeing the painting in
person, and in owning physical goods with the image. Abundant copies of
the content often entice more demand, not blunt it. Another example came
with the advent of the radio. Although the music industry did not see it
coming (and fought it!), free music on the radio functioned as
advertising for the paid version people bought in music stores.20 Free
can be a form of promotion.

In some cases, endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons do not even
need dedicated marketing teams or marketing budgets. Cards Against
Humanity is a CC-licensed card game available as a free download. And
because of this (thanks to the CC license on the game), the creators say
it is one of the best-marketed games in the world, and they have never
spent a dime on marketing. The textbook publisher OpenStax has also
avoided hiring a marketing team. Their products are free, or cheaper to
buy in the case of physical copies, which makes them much more
attractive to students who then demand them from their universities.
They also partner with service providers who build atop the CC-licensed
content and, in turn, spend money and

resources marketing those services (and by extension, the OpenStax
textbooks).

Use CC to enable hands-on engagement with
your work

The great promise of Creative Commons licensing is that it signifies an
embrace of remix culture. Indeed, this is the great promise of digital
technology. The Internet opened up a whole new world of possibilities
for public participation in creative work.

Four of the six CC licenses enable reusers to take apart, build upon, or
otherwise adapt the work. Depending on the context, adaptation can mean
wildly different things—translating, updating, localizing, improving,
transforming. It enables a work to be customized for particular needs,
uses, people, and communities, which is another distinct value to offer
the public.21 Adaptation is more game changing in some contexts than
others. With educational materials, the ability to customize and update
the content is critically important for its usefulness. For photography,
the ability to adapt a photo is less important.

This is a way to counteract a potential downside of the abundance of
free and open content described above. As Anderson wrote in Free,
“People often don’t care as much about things they don’t pay for, and as
a result they don’t think as much about how they consume them.”22 If
even the tiny act of volition of paying one penny for something changes
our perception of that thing, then surely the act of remixing it
enhances our perception exponentially.23 We know that people will pay
more for products they had a part in creating.24 And we know that
creating something, no matter what quality, brings with it a type of
creative satisfaction that can never be replaced by consuming something
created by someone else.25

Actively engaging with the content helps us avoid the type of aimless
consumption that anyone who has absentmindedly scrolled through their
social-media feeds for an hour knows all too well. In his book,
Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky says, “To participate is to act as if
your presence matters, as if, when you see something or hear something,
your response is part of the event.”26 Opening the door to your content
can get people more deeply tied to your work.

Use CC to differentiate yourself

Operating under a traditional copyright regime usually means operating
under the rules of establishment players in the media. Business
strategies that are embedded in the traditional copyright system, like
using digital rights management (DRM) and signing exclusivity contracts,
can tie the hands of creators, often at the expense of the creator’s
best interest.27 Being Made with Creative Commons means you can function
without those barriers and, in many cases, use the increased openness as
a competitive advantage. David Harris from OpenStax said they
specifically pursue strategies they know that traditional publishers
cannot. “Don’t go into a market and play by the incumbent rules,” David
said. “Change the rules of engagement.”

Making Money

Like any moneymaking endeavor, those that are Made with Creative Commons
have to generate some type of value for their audience or customers.
Sometimes that value is subsidized by funders who are not actually
beneficiaries of that value. Funders, whether philanthropic
institutions, governments, or concerned individuals, provide money to
the organization out of a sense of pure altruism. This is the way
traditional nonprofit funding operates.28 But in many cases, the revenue
streams used by endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons are
directly tied to the value they generate, where the recipient is paying
for the value they receive like any standard market transaction. In
still other

cases, rather than the quid pro quo exchange of money for value that
typically drives market transactions, the recipient gives money out of a
sense of reciprocity.

Most who are Made with Creative Commons use a variety of methods to
bring in revenue, some market-based and some not. One common strategy is
using grant funding for content creation when research-and-development
costs are particularly high, and then finding a different revenue stream
(or streams) for ongoing expenses. As Shirky wrote, “The trick is in
knowing when markets are an optimal way of organizing interactions and
when they are not.”29

Our case studies explore in more detail the various revenue-generating
mechanisms used by the creators, organizations, and businesses we
interviewed. There is nuance hidden within the specific ways each of
them makes money, so it is a bit dangerous to generalize too much about
what we learned. Nonetheless, zooming out and viewing things from a
higher level of abstraction can be instructive.

Market-based revenue streams

In the market, the central question when determining how to bring in
revenue is what value people are willing to pay for.30 By definition, if
you are Made with Creative Commons, the content you provide is available
for free and not a market commodity. Like the ubiquitous freemium
business model, any possible market transaction with a consumer of your
content has to be based on some added value you provide.31

In many ways, this is the way of the future for all content-driven
endeavors. In the market, value lives in things that are scarce. Because
the Internet makes a universe of content available to all of us for
free, it is difficult to get people to pay for content online. The
struggling newspaper industry is a testament to this fact. This is
compounded by the fact that at least some amount of copying is probably
inevitable. That means you may end up competing with free versions of
your own content, whether you condone it or not.32 If people can easily
find your content for free, getting people to buy it will be difficult,
particularly in a context where access to content is more important than
owning it. In Free, Anderson wrote, “Copyright protection schemes,
whether coded into either law or software, are simply holding up a price
against the force of gravity.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that content-driven endeavors have no
future in the traditional marketplace. In Free, Anderson explains how
when one product or service becomes free, as information and content
largely have in the digital age, other things become more valuable.
“Every abundance creates a new scarcity,” he wrote. You just have to
find some way other than the content to provide value to your audience
or customers. As Anderson says, “It’s easy to compete with Free: simply
offer something better or at least different from the free version.”33

In light of this reality, in some ways endeavors that are Made with
Creative Commons are at a level playing field with all content-based
endeavors in the digital age. In fact, they may even have an advantage
because they can use the abundance of content to derive revenue from
something scarce. They can also benefit from the goodwill that stems
from the values behind being Made with Creative Commons.

For content creators and distributors, there are nearly infinite ways to
provide value to the consumers of your work, above and beyond the value
that lives within your free digital content. Often, the CC-licensed
content functions as a marketing tool for the paid product or

service.

Here are the most common high-level categories.

Providing a custom service to consumers of
your work * \[MARKET-BASED\]*

In this age of information abundance, we don’t lack for content. The
trick is finding content that matches our needs and wants, so customized
services are particularly valuable. As Anderson wrote, “Commodity
information (everybody gets the same version) wants to be free.
Customized information (you get something unique and meaningful to you)
wants to be expensive.”34 This can be anything from the artistic and
cultural consulting services provided by Ártica to the custom-song
business of Jonathan “Song-A-Day” Mann.

Charging for the physical copy *
\[MARKET-BASED\]*

In his book about maker culture, Anderson characterizes this model as
giving away the bits and selling the atoms (where bits refers to digital
content and atoms refer to a physical object).35 This is particularly
successful in domains where the digital version of the content isn’t as
valuable as the analog version, like book publishing where a significant
subset of people still prefer reading something they can hold in their
hands. Or in domains where the content isn’t useful until it is in
physical form, like furniture designs. In those situations, a
significant portion of consumers will pay for the convenience of having
someone else put the physical version together for them. Some endeavors
squeeze even more out of this revenue stream by using a Creative Commons
license that only allows noncommercial uses, which means no one else can
sell physical copies of their work in competition with them. This
strategy of reserving commercial rights can be particularly important
for items like books, where every printed copy of the same work is
likely to be the same quality, so it is harder to differentiate one
publishing service from another. On the other hand, for items like
furniture or electronics, the provider of the physical goods can compete
with other providers of the same works based on quality, service, or
other traditional business principles.

Charging for the in-person version *
\[MARKET-BASED\]*

As anyone who has ever gone to a concert will tell you, experiencing
creativity in person is a completely different experience from consuming
a digital copy on your own. Far from acting as a substitute for
face-to-face interaction, CC-licensed content can actually create demand
for the in-person version of experience. You can see this effect when
people go view original art in person or pay to attend a talk or
training course.

Selling merchandise * \[MARKET-BASED\]*

In many cases, people who like your work will pay for products
demonstrating a connection to your work. As a child of the 1980s, I can
personally attest to the power of a good concert T-shirt. This can also
be an important revenue stream for museums and galleries.

Sometimes the way to find a market-based revenue stream is by providing
value to people other than those who consume your CC-licensed content.
In these revenue streams, the free content is being subsidized by an
entirely different category of people or businesses. Often, those people
or businesses are paying to access your main audience. The fact that the
content is free increases the size of the audience, which in turn makes
the offer more valuable to the paying customers. This is a variation of
a traditional business model built on free called multi-sided
platforms.36 Access to your audience isn’t the only thing people are
willing to pay for—there are other services you can provide as well.

Charging advertisers or sponsors *
\[MARKET-BASED\]*

The traditional model of subsidizing free content is advertising. In
this version of multi-sided platforms, advertisers pay for the
opportunity to reach the set of eyeballs the content creators provide in
the form of their audience.37 The Internet has made this model more
difficult because the number of potential channels available to reach
those eyeballs has become essentially infinite.38 Nonetheless, it
remains a viable revenue stream for many content creators, including
those who are Made with Creative Commons. Often, instead of paying to
display advertising, the advertiser pays to be an official sponsor of
particular content or projects, or of the overall endeavor.

Charging your content creators *
\[MARKET-BASED\]*

Another type of multisided platform is where the content creators
themselves pay to be featured on the platform. Obviously, this revenue
stream is only available to those who rely on work created, at least in
part, by others. The most well-known version of this model is the
“author-processing charge” of open-access journals like those published
by the Public Library of Science, but there are other variations. The
Conversation is primarily funded by a university-membership model, where
universities pay to have their faculties participate as writers of the
content on the Conversation website.

Charging a transaction fee *
\[MARKET-BASED\]*

This is a version of a traditional business model based on brokering
transactions between parties.39 Curation is an important element of this
model. Platforms like the Noun Project add value by wading through
CC-licensed content to curate a high-quality set and then derive revenue
when creators of that content make transactions with customers. Other
platforms make money when service providers transact with their
customers; for example, Opendesk makes money every time someone on their
site pays a maker to make furniture based on one of the designs on the
platform.

Providing a service to your creators*
\[MARKET-BASED\]*

As mentioned above, endeavors can make money by providing customized
services to their users. Platforms can undertake a variation of this
service model directed at the creators that provide the content they
feature. The data platforms Figure.NZ and Figshare both capitalize on
this model by providing paid tools to help their users make the data
they contribute to the platform more discoverable and reusable.

Licensing a trademark* \[MARKET-BASED\]*

Finally, some that are Made with Creative Commons make money by selling
use of their trademarks. Well known brands that consumers associate with
quality, credibility, or even an ethos can license that trademark to
companies that want to take advantage of that goodwill. By definition,
trademarks are scarce because they represent a particular source of a
good or service. Charging for the ability to use that trademark is a way
of deriving revenue from something scarce while taking advantage of the
abundance of CC content.

Reciprocity-based revenue streams

Even if we set aside grant funding, we found that the traditional
economic framework of understanding the market failed to fully capture
the ways the endeavors we analyzed were making money. It was not simply
about monetizing scarcity.

Rather than devising a scheme to get people to pay money in exchange for
some direct value provided to them, many of the revenue streams were
more about providing value, building a relationship, and then eventually
finding some money that flows back out of a sense of reciprocity. While
some look like traditional nonprofit funding models, they aren’t
charity. The endeavor exchange value with people, just not necessarily
synchronously or in a way that requires that those values be equal. As
David Bollier wrote in Think Like a Commoner, “There is no self-serving
calculation of whether the value given and received is strictly equal.”

This should be a familiar dynamic—it is the way you deal with your
friends and family. We give without regard for what and when we will get
back. David Bollier wrote, “Reciprocal social exchange lies at the heart
of human identity, community and culture. It is a vital brain function
that helps the human species survive and evolve.”

What is rare is to incorporate this sort of relationship into an
endeavor that also engages with the market.40 We almost can’t help but
think of relationships in the market as being centered on an even-steven
exchange of value.41

Memberships and individual donations
*\[RECIPROCITY-BASED\]*

While memberships and donations are traditional nonprofit funding
models, in the Made with Creative Commons context, they are directly
tied to the reciprocal relationship that is cultivated with the
beneficiaries of their work. The bigger the pool of those receiving
value from the content, the more likely this strategy will work, given
that only a small percentage of people are likely to contribute. Since
using CC licenses can grease the wheels for content to reach more
people, this strategy can be more effective for endeavors that are Made
with Creative Commons. The greater the argument that the content is a
public good or that the entire endeavor is furthering a social mission,
the more likely this strategy is to succeed.

The pay-what-you-want model
*\[RECIPROCITY-BASED\]*

In the pay-what-you-want model, the beneficiary of Creative Commons
content is invited to give—at any amount they can and feel is
appropriate, based on the public and personal value they feel is
generated by the open content. Critically, these models are not touted
as “buying” something free. They are similar to a tip jar. People make
financial contributions as an act of gratitude. These models capitalize
on the fact that we are naturally inclined to give money for things we
value in the marketplace, even in situations where we could find a way
to get it for free.

Crowdfunding *\[RECIPROCITY-BASED\]*

Crowdfunding models are based on recouping the costs of creating and
distributing content before the content is created. If the endeavor is
Made with Creative Commons, anyone who wants the work in question could
simply wait until it’s created and then access it for free. That means,
for this model to work, people have to care about more than just
receiving the work. They have to want you to succeed. Amanda Palmer
credits the success of her crowdfunding on Kickstarter and Patreon to
the years she spent building her community and creating a connection
with her fans. She wrote in The Art of Asking, “Good art is made, good
art is shared, help is offered, ears are bent, emotions are exchanged,
the compost of real, deep connection is sprayed all over the fields.
Then one day, the artist steps up and asks for something. And if the
ground has been fertilized enough, the audience says, without
hesitation: of course.”

Other types of crowdfunding rely on a sense of responsibility that a
particular community may feel. Knowledge Unlatched pools funds from
major U.S. libraries to subsidize CC-licensed academic work that will
be, by definition, available to everyone for free. Libraries with bigger
budgets tend to give more out of a sense of commitment to the library
community and to the idea of open access generally.

Making Human Connections

Regardless of how they made money, in our interviews, we repeatedly
heard language like “persuading people to buy” and “inviting people to
pay.” We heard it even in connection with revenue streams that sit
squarely within the market. Cory Doctorow told us, “I have to convince
my readers that the right thing to do is to pay me.” The founders of the
for-profit company Lumen Learning showed us the letter they send to
those who opt not to pay for the services they provide in connection
with their CC-licensed educational content. It isn’t a cease-and-desist
letter; it’s an invitation to pay because it’s the right thing to do.
This sort of behavior toward what could be considered nonpaying
customers is largely unheard of in the traditional marketplace. But it
seems to be part of the fabric of being Made with Creative Commons.

Nearly every endeavor we profiled relied, at least in part, on people
being invested in what they do. The closer the Creative Commons content
is to being “the product,” the more pronounced this dynamic has to be.
Rather than simply selling a product or service, they are making
ideological, personal, and creative connections with the people who
value what they do.

It took me a very long time to see how this avoidance of thinking about
what they do in pure market terms was deeply tied to being Made with
Creative Commons.

I came to the research with preconceived notions about what Creative
Commons is and what it means to be Made with Creative Commons. It turned
out I was wrong on so many counts.

Obviously, being Made with Creative Commons means using Creative Commons
licenses. That much I knew. But in our interviews, people spoke of so
much more than copyright permissions when they explained how sharing fit
into what they do. I was thinking about sharing too narrowly, and as a
result, I was missing vast swaths of the meaning packed within Creative
Commons. Rather than parsing the specific and narrow role of the
copyright license in the equation, it is important not to disaggregate
the rest of what comes with sharing. You have to widen the lens.

Being Made with Creative Commons is not just about the simple act of
licensing a copyrighted work under a set of standardized terms, but also
about community, social good, contributing ideas, expressing a value
system, working together. These components of sharing are hard to
cultivate if you think about what you do in purely market terms. Decent
social behavior isn’t as intuitive when we are doing something that
involves monetary exchange. It takes a conscious effort to foster the
context for real sharing, based not strictly on impersonal market
exchange, but on connections with the people with whom you
share—connections with you, with your work, with your values, with each
other.

The rest of this section will explore some of the common strategies that
creators, companies, and organizations use to remind us that there are
humans behind every creative endeavor. To remind us we have obligations
to each other. To remind us what sharing really looks like.

Be human

Humans are social animals, which means we are naturally inclined to
treat each other well.42 But the further removed we are from the person
with whom we are interacting, the less caring our behavior will be.
While the Internet has democratized cultural production, increased
access to knowledge, and connected us in extraordinary ways, it can also
make it easy forget we are dealing with another human.

To counteract the anonymous and impersonal tendencies of how we operate
online, individual creators and corporations who use Creative Commons
licenses work to demonstrate their humanity. For some, this means
pouring their lives out on the page. For others, it means showing their
creative process, giving a glimpse into how they do what they do. As
writer Austin Kleon wrote, “Our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human
beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who
made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect
on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how
people feel and what they understand about your work affects how they
value it.”43

A critical component to doing this effectively is not worrying about
being a “brand.” That means not being afraid to be vulnerable. Amanda
Palmer says, “When you’re afraid of someone’s judgment, you can’t
connect with them. You’re too preoccupied with the task of impressing
them.” Not everyone is suited to live life as an open book like Palmer,
and that’s OK. There are a lot of ways to be human. The trick is just
avoiding pretense and the temptation to artificially craft an image.
People don’t just want the glossy version of you. They can’t relate to
it, at least not in a meaningful way.

This advice is probably even more important for businesses and
organizations because we instinctively conceive of them as nonhuman
(though in the United States, corporations are people!). When
corporations and organizations make the people behind them more
apparent, it reminds people that they are dealing with something other
than an anonymous corporate entity. In business-speak, this is about
“humanizing your interactions” with the public.44 But it can’t be a
gimmick. You can’t fake being human.

Be open and accountable

Transparency helps people understand who you are and why you do what you
do, but it also inspires trust. Max Temkin of Cards Against Humanity
told us, “One of the most surprising things you can do in capitalism is
just be honest with people.” That means sharing the good and the bad. As
Amanda Palmer wrote, “You can fix almost anything by authentically
communicating.”45 It isn’t about trying to satisfy everyone or trying to
sugarcoat mistakes or bad news, but instead about explaining your
rationale and then being prepared to defend it when people are
critical.46

Being accountable does not mean operating on consensus. According to
James Surowiecki, consensus-driven groups tend to resort to
lowest-common-denominator solutions and

avoid the sort of candid exchange of ideas that cultivates healthy
collaboration.47 Instead, it can be as simple as asking for input and
then giving context and explanation about decisions you make, even if
soliciting feedback and inviting discourse is time-consuming. If you
don’t go through the effort to actually respond to the input you
receive, it can be worse than not inviting input in the first place.48
But when you get it right, it can guarantee the type of diversity of
thought that helps endeavors excel. And it is another way to get people
involved and invested in what you do.

Design for the good actors

Traditional economics assumes people make decisions based solely on
their own economic self-interest.49 Any relatively introspective human
knows this is a fiction—we are much more complicated beings with a whole
range of needs, emotions, and motivations. In fact, we are hardwired to
work together and ensure fairness.50 Being Made with Creative Commons
requires an assumption that people will largely act on those social
motivations, motivations that would be considered “irrational” in an
economic sense. As Knowledge Unlatched’s Pinter told us, “It is best to
ignore people who try to scare you about free riding. That fear is based
on a very shallow view of what motivates human behavior.” There will
always be people who will act in purely selfish ways, but endeavors that
are Made with Creative Commons design for the good actors.

The assumption that people will largely do the right thing can be a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Shirky wrote in Cognitive Surplus, “Systems
that assume people will act in ways that create public goods, and that
give them opportunities and rewards for doing so, often let them work
together better than neoclassical economics would predict.”51 When we
acknowledge that people are often motivated by something other than
financial self-interest, we design our endeavors in ways that encourage
and accentuate our social instincts.

Rather than trying to exert control over people’s behavior, this mode of
operating requires a certain level of trust. We might not realize it,
but our daily lives are already built on trust. As Surowiecki wrote in
The Wisdom of Crowds, “It’s impossible for a society to rely on law
alone to make sure citizens act honestly and responsibly. And it’s
impossible for any organization to rely on contracts alone to make sure
that its managers and workers live up to their obligation.” Instead, we
largely trust that people—mostly strangers—will do what they are
supposed to do.52 And most often, they do.

Treat humans like, well, humans

For creators, treating people as humans means not treating them like
fans. As Kleon says, “If you want fans, you have to be a fan first.”53
Even if you happen to be one of the few to reach celebrity levels of
fame, you are better off remembering that the people who follow your
work are human, too. Cory Doctorow makes a point to answer every single
email someone sends him. Amanda Palmer spends vast quantities of time
going online to communicate with her public, making a point to listen
just as much as she talks.54

The same idea goes for businesses and organizations. Rather than
automating its customer service, the music platform Tribe of Noise makes
a point to ensure its employees have personal, one-on-one interaction
with users.

When we treat people like humans, they typically return the gift in
kind. It’s called karma. But social relationships are fragile. It is all
too easy to destroy them if you make the mistake of treating people as
anonymous customers or free labor.55 Platforms that rely on content from
contributors are especially at risk of creating an exploitative dynamic.
It is important to find ways to acknowledge and pay back the value that
contributors generate. That does not mean you can solve this problem by
simply paying contributors for their time or contributions. As soon as
we introduce money into a relationship—at least when it takes a form of
paying monetary value in exchange for other value—it can dramatically
change the dynamic.56

State your principles and stick to them

Being Made with Creative Commons makes a statement about who you are and
what you do. The symbolism is powerful. Using Creative Commons licenses
demonstrates adherence to a particular belief system, which generates
goodwill and connects like-minded people to your work. Sometimes people
will be drawn to endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons as a way
of demonstrating their own commitment to the Creative Commons value
system, akin to a political statement. Other times people will identify
and feel connected with an endeavor’s separate social mission. Often
both.

The expression of your values doesn’t have to be implicit. In fact, many
of the people we interviewed talked about how important it is to state
your guiding principles up front. Lumen Learning attributes a lot of
their success to having been outspoken about the fundamental values that
guide what they do. As a for-profit company, they think their expressed
commitment to low-income students and open licensing has been critical
to their credibility in the OER (open educational resources) community
in which they operate.

When your end goal is not about making a profit, people trust that you
aren’t just trying to extract value for your own gain. People notice
when you have a sense of purpose that transcends your own
self-interest.57 It attracts committed employees, motivates
contributors, and builds trust.

Build a community

Endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons thrive when community is
built around what they do. This may mean a community collaborating
together to create something new, or it may simply be a collection of
like-minded people who get to know each other and rally around common
interests or beliefs.58 To a certain extent, simply being Made with
Creative Commons automatically brings with it some element of community,
by helping connect you to like-minded others who recognize and are drawn
to the values symbolized by

using CC.

To be sustainable, though, you have to work to nurture community. People
have to care—about you and each other. One critical piece to this is
fostering a sense of belonging. As Jono Bacon writes in The Art of
Community, “If there is no belonging, there is no community.” For Amanda
Palmer and her band, that meant creating an accepting and inclusive
environment where people felt a part of their “weird little family.”59
For organizations like Red Hat, that means connecting around common
beliefs or goals. As the CEO Jim Whitehurst wrote in The Open
Organization, “Tapping into passion is especially important in building
the kinds of participative communities that drive open

organizations.”60

Communities that collaborate together take deliberate planning.
Surowiecki wrote, “It takes a lot of work to put the group together.
It’s difficult to ensure that people are working in the group’s interest
and not in their own. And when there’s a lack of trust between the
members of the group (which isn’t surprising given that they don’t
really know each other), considerable energy is wasted trying to
determine each other’s bona fides.”61 Building true community requires
giving people within the community the power to create or influence the
rules that govern the community.62 If the rules are created and imposed
in a top-down manner, people feel like they don’t have a voice, which in
turn leads to disengagement.

Community takes work, but working together, or even simply being
connected around common interests or values, is in many ways what
sharing is about.

Give more to the commons than you take

Conventional wisdom in the marketplace dictates that people should try
to extract as much money as possible from resources. This is essentially
what defines so much of the so-called sharing economy. In an article on
the Harvard Business Review website called “The Sharing Economy Isn’t
about Sharing at All,” authors Giana Eckhardt and Fleura Bardhi
explained how the anonymous market-driven trans-actions in most
sharing-economy businesses are purely about monetizing access.63 As Lisa
Gansky put it in her book The Mesh, the primary strategy of the sharing
economy is to sell the same product multiple times, by selling access
rather than ownership.64 That is not sharing.

Sharing requires adding as much or more value to the ecosystem than you
take. You can’t simply treat open content as a free pool of resources
from which to extract value. Part of giving back to the ecosystem is
contributing content back to the public under CC licenses. But it
doesn’t have to just be about creating content; it can be about adding
value in other ways. The social blogging platform Medium provides value
to its community by incentivizing good behavior, and the result is an
online space with remarkably high-quality user-generated content and
limited trolling.65 Opendesk contributes to its community by committing
to help its designers make money, in part by actively curating and
displaying their work on its platform effectively.

In all cases, it is important to openly acknowledge the amount of value
you add versus that which you draw on that was created by others. Being
transparent about this builds credibility and shows you are a
contributing player in the commons. When your endeavor is making money,
that also means apportioning financial compensation in a way that
reflects the value contributed by others, providing more to contributors
when the value they add outweighs the value provided by you.

Involve people in what you do

Thanks to the Internet, we can tap into the talents and expertise of
people around the globe. Chris Anderson calls it the Long Tail of
talent.66 But to make collaboration work, the group has to be effective
at what it is doing, and the people within the group have to find
satisfaction from being involved.67 This is easier to facilitate for
some types of creative work than it is for others. Groups tied together
online collaborate best when people can work independently and
asynchronously, and particularly for larger groups with loose ties, when
contributors can make simple improvements without a particularly heavy
time

commitment.68

As the success of Wikipedia demonstrates, editing an online encyclopedia
is exactly the sort of activity that is perfect for massive co-creation
because small, incremental edits made by a diverse range of people
acting on their own are immensely valuable in the aggregate. Those same
sorts of small contributions would be less useful for many other types
of creative work, and people are inherently less motivated to contribute
when it doesn’t appear that their efforts will make much of a
difference.69

It is easy to romanticize the opportunities for global cocreation made
possible by the Internet, and, indeed, the successful examples of it are
truly incredible and inspiring. But in a wide range of
circumstances—perhaps more often than not—community cocreation is not
part of the equation, even within endeavors built on CC content. Shirky
wrote, “Sometimes the value of professional work trumps the value of
amateur sharing or a feeling of belonging.70 The textbook publisher
OpenStax, which distributes all of its material for free under CC
licensing, is an example of this dynamic. Rather than tapping the
community to help cocreate their college textbooks, they invest a
significant amount of time and money to develop professional content.
For individual creators, where the creative work is the basis for what
they do, community cocreation is only rarely a part of the picture. Even
musician Amanda Palmer, who is famous for her openness and involvement
with her fans, said, “The only department where I wasn’t open to input
was the writing, the music itself.”71

While we tend to immediately think of cocreation and remixing when we
hear the word collaboration, you can also involve others in your
creative process in more informal ways, by sharing half-baked ideas and
early drafts, and interacting with the public to incubate ideas and get
feedback. So-called “making in public” opens the door to letting people
feel more invested in your creative work.72 And it shows a
nonterritorial approach to ideas and information. Stephen Covey (of The
7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame) calls this the abundance
mentality—treating ideas like something plentiful—and it can create an
environment where collaboration flourishes.73

There is no one way to involve people in what you do. They key is
finding a way for people to contribute on their terms, compelled by
their own motivations.74 What that looks like varies wildly depending on
the project. Not every endeavor that is Made with Creative Commons can
be Wikipedia, but every endeavor can find ways to invite the public into
what they do. The goal for any form of collaboration is to move away
from thinking of consumers as passive recipients of your content and
transition them into active participants.75

Notes

1.  Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation
    (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2010), 14. A preview of the book
    is available at strategyzer.com/books/business-model-generation.
2.  Cory Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the
    Internet Age (San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s, 2014) 68.
3.  Ibid., 55.
4.  Chris Anderson, Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit by
    Giving Something for Nothing, reprint with new preface (New York:
    Hyperion, 2010), 224.
5.  Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, 44.
6.  Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying
    and Let People Help (New York: Grand Central, 2014), 121.
7.  Chris Anderson, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (New York:
    Signal, 2012), 64.
8.  David Bollier, Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the
    Life of the Commons (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2014), 70.
9.  Anderson, Makers, 66.
10. Bryan Kramer, Shareology: How Sharing Is Powering the Human Economy
    (New York: Morgan James, 2016), 10.
11. Anderson, Free, 62.
12. Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, 38.
13. Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 68.
14. Anderson, Free, 86.
15. Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, 144.
16. Anderson, Free, 123.
17. Ibid., 132.
18. Ibid., 70.
19. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor Books,
    2005), 124. Surowiecki says, “The measure of success of laws and
    contracts is how rarely they are invoked.”
20. Anderson, Free, 44.
21. Osterwalder and Pigneur, Business Model Generation, 23.
22. Anderson, Free, 67.
23. Ibid., 58.
24. Anderson, Makers, 71.
25. Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into
    Collaborators (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 78.
26. Ibid., 21.
27. Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, 43.
28. William Landes Foster, Peter Kim, and Barbara Christiansen, “Ten
    Nonprofit Funding Models,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring
    2009, ssir.org/articles/entry/ten\_nonprofit\_funding\_models.
29. Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, 111.
30. Osterwalder and Pigneur, Business Model Generation, 30.
31. Jim Whitehurst, The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and
    Performance (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), 202.
32. Anderson, Free, 71.
33. Ibid., 231.
34. Ibid., 97.
35. Anderson, Makers, 107.
36. Osterwalder and Pigneur, Business Model Generation, 89.
37. Ibid., 92.
38. Anderson, Free, 142.
39. Osterwalder and Pigneur, Business Model Generation, 32.
40. Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 150.
41. Ibid., 134.
42. Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our
    Decisions, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 109.
43. Austin Kleon, Show Your Work: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and
    Get Discovered (New York: Workman, 2014), 93.
44. Kramer, Shareology, 76.
45. Palmer, Art of Asking, 252.
46. Whitehurst, Open Organization, 145.
47. Surowiecki, Wisdom of Crowds, 203.
48. Whitehurst, Open Organization, 80.
49. Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 25.
50. Ibid., 31.
51. Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, 112.
52. Surowiecki, Wisdom of Crowds, 124.
53. Kleon, Show Your Work, 127.
54. Palmer, Art of Asking, 121.
55. Ariely, Predictably Irrational, 87.
56. Ibid., 105.
57. Ibid., 36.
58. Jono Bacon, The Art of Community, 2nd ed. (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly
    Media, 2012), 36.
59. Palmer, Art of Asking, 98.
60. Whitehurst, Open Organization, 34.
61. Surowiecki, Wisdom of Crowds, 200.
62. Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 29.
63. Giana Eckhardt and Fleura Bardhi, “The Sharing Economy Isn’t about
    Sharing at All,” Harvard Business Review (website), January 28,
    2015, hbr.org/2015/01/the-sharing-economy-isnt-about-sharing-at-all.
64. Lisa Gansky, The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing,
    reprint with new epilogue (New York: Portfolio, 2012).
65. David Lee, “Inside Medium: An Attempt to Bring Civility to the
    Internet,” BBC News, March 3,
    2016, www.bbc.com/news/technology-35709680.
66. Anderson, Makers, 148.
67. Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, 164.
68. Whitehurst, foreword to Open Organization.
69. Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, 144.
70. Ibid., 154.
71. Palmer, Art of Asking, 163.
72. Anderson, Makers, 173.
73. Tom Kelley and David Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the
    Potential within Us All (New York: Crown, 2013), 82.
74. Whitehurst, foreword to Open Organization.
75. Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of
    Collaborative Consumption (New York: Harper Business, 2010), 188.

The

Creative

Commons

Licenses

All of the Creative Commons licenses grant a basic set of permissions.
At a minimum, a CC-
licensed work can be copied and shared in its original form for
noncommercial purposes so long as attribution is given to the creator.
There are six licenses in the CC license suite that build on that basic
set of permissions, ranging from the most restrictive (allowing only
those basic permissions to share unmodified copies for noncommercial
purposes) to the most permissive (reusers can do anything they want with
the work, even for commercial purposes, as long as they give the creator
credit). The licenses are built on copyright and do not cover other
types of rights that creators might have in their works, like patents or
trademarks.

Here are the six licenses:

The Attribution license (CC BY) lets others distribute, remix, tweak,
and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you
for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses
offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed
materials.

The Attribution-Share-Alike license (CC BY-SA) lets others remix, tweak,
and build upon your work, even for commercial purposes, as long as they
credit you and license their new creations under identical terms. This
license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software
licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so
any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

The Attribution-NoDerivs license (CC BY-ND) allows for redistribution,
commercial and noncommercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged
with credit to you.

The Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC) lets others remix,
tweak, and build upon your work noncommercially. Although their new
works must also acknowledge you, they don’t have to license their
derivative works on the same terms.

The Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA) lets
others remix, tweak, and build upon your work noncommercially, as long
as they credit you and license their new creations under the same terms.

The Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license (CC BY-NC-ND) is the most
restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download
your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but
they can’t change them or use them commercially.

In addition to these six licenses, Creative Commons has two
public-domain tools—one for creators and the other for those who manage
collections of existing works by authors whose terms of copyright have
expired:

CC0 enables authors and copyright owners to dedicate their works to the
worldwide public domain (“no rights reserved”).

The Creative Commons Public Domain Mark facilitates the labeling and
discovery of works that are already free of known copyright
restrictions.

In our case studies, some use just one Creative Commons license, others
use several. Attribution (found in thirteen case studies) and
Attribution-ShareAlike (found in eight studies) were the most common,
with the other licenses coming up in four or so case studies, including
the public-domain tool CC0. Some of the organizations we profiled offer
both digital content and software: by using open-source-software
licenses for the software code and Creative Commons licenses for digital
content, they amplify their involvement with and commitment to sharing.

There is a popular misconception that the three NonCommercial licenses
offered by CC are the only options for those who want to make money off
their work. As we hope this book makes clear, there are many ways to
make endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons sustainable.
Reserving commercial rights is only one of those ways. It is certainly
true that a license that allows others to make commercial use of your
work (CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC BY-ND) forecloses some traditional revenue
streams. If you apply an Attribution (CC BY) license to your book, you
can’t force a film company to pay you royalties if they turn your book
into a feature-length film, or prevent another company from selling
physical copies of your work.

The decision to choose a NonCommercial and/or NoDerivs license comes
down to how much you need to retain control over the creative work. The
NonCommercial and NoDerivs licenses are ways of reserving some
significant portion of the exclusive bundle of rights that copyright
grants to creators. In some cases, reserving those rights is important
to how you bring in revenue. In other cases, creators use a
NonCommercial or NoDerivs license because they can’t give up on the
dream of hitting the creative jackpot. The music platform Tribe of Noise
told us the NonCommercial licenses were popular among their users
because people still held out the dream of having a major record label
discover their work.

Other times the decision to use a more restrictive license is due to a
concern about the integrity of the work. For example, the nonprofit
TeachAIDS uses a NoDerivs license for its educational materials because
the medical subject matter is particularly important to get right.

There is no one right way. The NonCommercial and NoDerivs restrictions
reflect the values and preferences of creators about how their creative
work should be reused, just as the ShareAlike license reflects a
different set of values, one that is less about controlling access to
their own work and more about ensuring that whatever gets created with
their work is available to all on the same terms. Since the beginning of
the commons, people have been setting up structures that helped regulate
the way in which shared resources were used. The CC licenses are an
attempt to standardize norms across all domains.

Note

For more about the licenses including examples and tips on sharing your
work in the digital commons, start with the Creative Commons page called
“Share Your Work” at

creativecommons.org/share-your-work/.

Part 2

The Case Studies

The twenty-four case studies in this section were chosen from hundreds
of nominations received from Kickstarter backers, Creative Commons
staff, and the global Creative Commons community. We selected eighty
potential candidates that represented a mix of industries, content
types, revenue streams, and parts of the world. Twelve of the case
studies were selected from that group based on votes cast by Kickstarter
backers, and the other twelve were selected by us.

We did background research and conducted interviews for each case study,
based on the same set of basic questions about the endeavor. The idea
for each case study is to tell the story about the endeavor and the role
sharing plays within it, largely the way in which it was told to us by
those we interviewed.

Arduino

Arduino is a for-profit open-source electronics platform and computer
hardware and software company. Founded in 2005 in Italy.

www.arduino.cc

Revenue model: charging for physical copies (sales of boards, modules,
shields, and kits), licensing a trademark (fees paid by those who want
to sell Arduino products using their name)

Interview date: February 4, 2016

Interviewees: David Cuartielles and Tom Igoe, cofounders

Profile written by Paul Stacey

In 2005, at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in northern Italy,
teachers and students needed an easy way to use electronics and
programming to quickly prototype design ideas. As musicians, artists,
and designers, they needed a platform that didn’t require engineering
expertise. A group of teachers and students, including Massimo Banzi,
David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino, and David Mellis, built a
platform that combined different open technologies. They called it
Arduino. The platform integrated software, hardware, microcontrollers,
and electronics. All aspects of the platform were openly licensed:
hardware designs and documentation with the Attribution-Share-Alike
license (CC BY-SA), and software with the GNU General Public License.

Arduino boards are able to read inputs—light on a sensor, a finger on a
button, or a Twitter message—and turn it into outputs—activating a
motor, turning on an LED, publishing something online. You send a set of
instructions to the microcontroller on the board by using the Arduino
programming language and Arduino software (based on a piece of
open-source software called Processing, a programming tool used to make
visual art).

“The reasons for making Arduino open source are complicated,” Tom says.
Partly it was about supporting flexibility. The open-source nature of
Arduino empowers users to modify it and create a lot of different
variations, adding on top of what the founders build. David says this
“ended up strengthening the platform far beyond what we had even thought
of building.”

For Tom another factor was the impending closure of the Ivrea design
school. He’d seen other organizations close their doors and all their
work and research just disappear. Open-sourcing ensured that Arduino
would outlive the Ivrea closure. Persistence is one thing Tom really
likes about open source. If key people leave, or a company shuts down,
an open-source product lives on. In Tom’s view, “Open sourcing makes it
easier to trust a
product.”

With the school closing, David and some of the other Arduino founders
started a consulting firm and multidisciplinary design studio they
called Tinker, in London. Tinker designed products and services that
bridged the digital and the physical, and they taught people how to use
new technologies in creative ways. Revenue from Tinker was invested in
sustaining and enhancing Arduino.

For Tom, part of Arduino’s success is because the founders made
themselves the first customer of their product. They made products they
themselves personally wanted. It was a matter of “I need this thing,”
not “If we make this, we’ll make a lot of money.” Tom notes that being
your own first customer makes you more confident and convincing at
selling your product.

Arduino’s business model has evolved over time—and Tom says model is a
grandiose term for it. Originally, they just wanted to make a few boards
and get them out into the world. They started out with two hundred
boards, sold them, and made a little profit. They used that to make
another thousand, which generated enough revenue to make five thousand.
In the early days, they simply tried to generate enough funding to keep
the venture going day to day. When they hit the ten thousand mark, they
started to think about Arduino as a company. By then it was clear you
can open-source the design but still manufacture the physical product.
As long as it’s a quality product and sold at a reasonable price, people
will buy it.

Arduino now has a worldwide community of makers—students, hobbyists,
artists, programmers, and professionals. Arduino provides a wiki called
Playground (a wiki is where all users can edit and add pages,
contributing to and benefiting from collective research). People share
code, circuit diagrams, tutorials, DIY instructions, and tips and
tricks, and show off their projects. In addition, there’s a
multilanguage discussion forum where users can get help using Arduino,
discuss topics like robotics, and make suggestions for new Arduino
product designs. As of January 2017, 324,928 members had made 2,989,489
posts on 379,044 topics. The worldwide community of makers has
contributed an incredible amount of accessible knowledge helpful to
novices and experts alike.

Transitioning Arduino from a project to a company was a big step. Other
businesses who made boards were charging a lot of money for them.
Arduino wanted to make theirs available at a low price to people across
a wide range of industries. As with any business, pricing was key. They
wanted prices that would get lots of customers but were also high enough
to sustain the business.

For a business, getting to the end of the year and not being in the red
is a success. Arduino may have an open-licensing strategy, but they are
still a business, and all the things needed to successfully run one
still apply. David says, “If you do those other things well, sharing
things in an open-source way can only help you.”

While openly licensing the designs, documentation, and software ensures
longevity, it does have risks. There’s a possibility that others will
create knockoffs, clones, and copies. The CC BY-SA license means anyone
can produce copies of their boards, redesign them, and even sell boards
that copy the design. They don’t have to pay a license fee to Arduino or
even ask permission. However, if they republish the design of the board,
they have to give attribution to Arduino. If they change the design,
they must release the new design using the same Creative Commons license
to ensure that the new version is equally free and open.

Tom and David say that a lot of people have built companies off of
Arduino, with dozens of Arduino derivatives out there. But in contrast
to closed business models that can wring money out of the system over
many years because there is no competition, Arduino founders saw
competition as keeping them honest, and aimed for an environment of
collaboration. A benefit of open over closed is the many new ideas and
designs others have contributed back to the Arduino ecosystem, ideas and
designs that Arduino and the Arduino community use and incorporate into
new products.

Over time, the range of Arduino products has diversified, changing and
adapting to new needs and challenges. In addition to simple entry level
boards, new products have been added ranging from enhanced boards that
provide advanced functionality and faster performance, to boards for
creating Internet of Things applications, wearables, and 3-D printing.
The full range of official Arduino products includes boards, modules (a
smaller form-factor of classic boards), shields (elements that can be
plugged onto a board to give it extra features), and kits.1

Arduino’s focus is on high-quality boards, well-designed support
materials, and the building of community; this focus is one of the keys
to their success. And being open lets you build a real community. David
says Arduino’s community is a big strength and something that really
does matter—in his words, “It’s good business.” When they started, the
Arduino team had almost entirely no idea how to build a community. They
started by conducting numerous workshops, working directly with people
using the platform to make sure the hardware and software worked the way
it was meant to work and solved people’s problems. The community grew
organically from there.

A key decision for Arduino was trademarking the name. The founders
needed a way to guarantee to people that they were buying a quality
product from a company committed to open-source values and knowledge
sharing. Trademarking the Arduino name and logo expresses that guarantee
and helps customers easily identify their products, and the products
sanctioned by them. If others want to sell boards using the Arduino name
and logo, they have to pay a small fee to Arduino. This allows Arduino
to scale up manufacturing and distribution while at the same time
ensuring the Arduino brand isn’t hurt by low-quality copies.

Current official manufacturers are Smart Projects in Italy, SparkFun in
the United States, and Dog Hunter in Taiwan/China. These are the only
manufacturers that are allowed to use the Arduino logo on their boards.
Trademarking their brand provided the founders with a way to protect
Arduino, build it out further, and fund software and tutorial
development. The trademark-licensing fee for the brand became Arduino’s
revenue-generating model.

How far to open things up wasn’t always something the founders perfectly
agreed on. David, who was always one to advocate for opening things up
more, had some fears about protecting the Arduino name, thinking people
would be mad if they policed their brand. There was some early backlash
with a project called Freeduino, but overall, trademarking and branding
has been a critical tool for Arduino.

David encourages people and businesses to start by sharing everything as
a default strategy, and then think about whether there is anything that
really needs to be protected and why. There are lots of good reasons to
not open up certain elements. This strategy of sharing everything is
certainly the complete opposite of how today’s world operates, where
nothing is shared. Tom suggests a business formalize which elements are
based on open sharing and which are closed. An Arduino blog post from
2013 entitled “Send In the Clones,” by one of the founders Massimo
Banzi, does a great job of explaining the full complexities of how
trademarking their brand has played out, distinguishing between official
boards and those that are clones, derivatives, compatibles, and
counterfeits.2

For David, an exciting aspect of Arduino is the way lots of people can
use it to adapt technology in many different ways. Technology is always
making more things possible but doesn’t always focus on making it easy
to use and adapt. This is where Arduino steps in. Arduino’s goal is
“making things that help other people make things.”

Arduino has been hugely successful in making technology and electronics
reach a larger audience. For Tom, Arduino has been about “the
democratization of technology.” Tom sees Arduino’s open-source strategy
as helping the world get over the idea that technology has to be
protected. Tom says, “Technology is a literacy everyone should learn.”

Ultimately, for Arduino, going open has been good business—good for
product development, good for distribution, good for pricing, and good
for manufacturing.

Web links

1.  www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Products
2.  blog.arduino.cc/2013/07/10/send-in-the-clones/

Ártica

Ártica provides online courses and consulting services focused on how to
use digital technology to share knowledge and enable collaboration in
arts and culture. Founded in 2011 in Uruguay.

www.articaonline.com

Revenue model: charging for custom services

Interview date: March 9, 2016

Interviewees: Mariana Fossatti and Jorge Gemetto, cofounders

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

The story of Mariana Fossatti and Jorge Gemetto’s business, Ártica, is
the ultimate example of DIY. Not only are they successful entrepreneurs,
the niche in which their small business operates is essentially one they
built themselves.

Their dream jobs didn’t exist, so they created them.

In 2011, Mariana was a sociologist working for an international
organization to develop research and online education about
rural-development issues. Jorge was a psychologist, also working in
online education. Both were bloggers and heavy users of social media,
and both had a passion for arts and culture. They decided to take their
skills in digital technology and online learning and apply them to a
topic area they loved. They launched Ártica, an online business that
provides education and consulting for people and institutions creating
artistic and cultural projects on the Internet.

Ártica feels like a uniquely twenty-first century business. The small
company has a global online presence with no physical offices. Jorge and
Mariana live in Uruguay, and the other two full-time employees, who
Jorge and Mariana have never actually met in person, live in Spain. They
started by creating a MOOC (massive open online course) about remix
culture and collaboration in the arts, which gave them a direct way to
reach an international audience, attracting students from across Latin
America and Spain. In other words, it is the classic Internet story of
being able to directly tap into an audience without relying upon
gatekeepers or intermediaries.

Ártica offers personalized education and consulting services, and helps
clients implement projects. All of these services are customized. They
call it an “artisan” process because of the time and effort it takes to
adapt their work for the particular needs of students and clients. “Each
student or client is paying for a specific solution to his or her
problems and questions,” Mariana said. Rather than sell access to their
content, they provide it for free and charge for the personalized
services.

When they started, they offered a smaller number of courses designed to
attract large audiences. “Over the years, we realized that online
communities are more specific than we thought,” Mariana said. Ártica now
provides more options for classes and has lower enrollment in each
course. This means they can provide more attention to individual
students and offer classes on more specialized topics.

Online courses are their biggest revenue stream, but they also do more
than a dozen consulting projects each year, ranging from digitization to
event planning to marketing campaigns. Some are significant in scope,
particularly when they work with cultural institutions, and some are
smaller projects commissioned by individual artists.

Ártica also seeks out public and private funding for specific projects.
Sometimes, even if they are unsuccessful in subsidizing a project like a
new course or e-book, they will go ahead because they believe in it.
They take the stance that every new project leads them to something new,
every new resource they create opens new doors.

Ártica relies heavily on their free Creative Commons–licensed content to
attract new students and clients. Everything they create—online
education, blog posts, videos—is published under an
Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA). “We use a ShareAlike license
because we want to give the greatest freedom to our students and
readers, and we also want that freedom to be viral,” Jorge said. For
them, giving others the right to reuse and remix their content is a
fundamental value. “How can you offer an online educational service
without giving permission to download, make and keep copies, or print
the educational resources?” Jorge said. “If we want to do the best for
our students—those who trust in us to the point that they are willing to
pay online without face-to-face contact—we have to offer them a fair and
ethical agreement.”

They also believe sharing their ideas and expertise openly helps them
build their reputation and visibility. People often share and cite their
work. A few years ago, a publisher even picked up one of their e-books
and distributed printed copies. Ártica views reuse of their work as a
way to open up new opportunities for their business.

This belief that openness creates new opportunities reflects another
belief—in serendipity. When describing their process for creating
content, they spoke of all of the spontaneous and organic ways they find
inspiration. “Sometimes, the collaborative process starts with a
conversation between us, or with friends from other projects,” Jorge
said. “That can be the first step for a new blog post or another simple
piece of content, which can evolve to a more complex product in the
future, like a course or a book.”

Rather than planning their work in advance, they let their creative
process be dynamic. “This doesn’t mean that we don’t need to work hard
in order to get good professional results, but the design process is
more flexible,” Jorge said. They share early and often, and they adjust
based on what they learn, always exploring and testing new ideas and
ways of operating. In many ways, for them, the process is just as
important as the final product.

People and relationships are also just as important, sometimes more. “In
the educational and cultural business, it is more important to pay
attention to people and process, rather than content or specific formats
or materials,” Mariana said. “Materials and content are fluid. The
important thing is the relationships.”

Ártica believes in the power of the network. They seek to make
connections with people and institutions across the globe so they can
learn from them and share their knowledge.

At the core of everything Ártica does is a set of values. “Good content
is not enough,” Jorge said. “We also think that it is very important to
take a stand for some things in the cultural sector.” Mariana and Jorge
are activists. They defend free culture (the movement promoting the
freedom to modify and distribute creative work) and work to demonstrate
the intersection between free culture and other social-justice
movements. Their efforts to involve people in their work and enable
artists and cultural institutions to better use technology are all tied
closely to their belief system. Ultimately, what drives their work is a
mission to democratize art and culture.

Of course, Ártica also has to make enough money to cover its expenses.
Human resources are, by far, their biggest expense. They tap a network
of collaborators on a case-by-case basis and hire contractors for
specific projects. Whenever possible, they draw from artistic and
cultural resources in the commons, and they rely on free software. Their
operation is small, efficient, and sustainable, and because of that, it
is a success.

“There are lots of people offering online courses,” Jorge said. “But it
is easy to differentiate us. We have an approach that is very specific
and personal.” Ártica’s model is rooted in the personal at every level.
For Mariana and Jorge, success means doing what brings them personal
meaning and purpose, and doing it sustainably and collaboratively.

In their work with younger artists, Mariana and Jorge try to emphasize
that this model of success is just as valuable as the picture of success
we get from the media. “If they seek only the traditional type of
success, they will get frustrated,” Mariana said. “We try to show them
another image of what it looks like.”

Blender Institute

The Blender Institute is an animation studio that creates 3-D films
using Blender software. Founded in 2006 in the Netherlands.

www.blender.org

Revenue model: crowdfunding (subscription-based), charging for physical
copies, selling merchandise

Interview date: March 8, 2016

Interviewee: Francesco Siddi, production coordinator

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

For Ton Roosendaal, the creator of Blender software and its related
entities, sharing is practical. Making their 3-D content creation
software available under a free software license has been integral to
its development and popularity. Using that software to make movies that
were licensed with Creative Commons pushed that development even
further. Sharing enables people to participate and to interact with and
build upon the technology and content they create in a way that benefits
Blender and its community in concrete ways.

Each open-movie project Blender runs produces a host of openly licensed
outputs, not just the final film itself but all of the source material
as well. The creative process also enhances the development of the
Blender software because the technical team responds directly to the
needs of the film production team, creating tools and features that make
their lives easier. And, of course, each project involves a long,
rewarding process for the creative and technical community working
together.

Rather than just talking about the theoretical benefits of sharing and
free culture, Ton is very much about doing and making free culture.
Blender’s production coordinator Francesco Siddi told us, “Ton believes
if you don’t make content using your tools, then you’re not doing
anything.”

Blender’s history begins in the late 1990s, when Ton created the Blender
software. Originally, the software was an in-house resource for his
animation studio based in the Netherlands. Investors became interested
in the software, so he began marketing the software to the public,
offering a free version in addition to a paid version. Sales were
disappointing, and his investors gave up on the endeavor in the early
2000s. He made a deal with investors—if he could raise enough money, he
could then make the Blender software available under the GNU General
Public License.

This was long before Kickstarter and other online crowdfunding sites
existed, but Ton ran his own version of a crowdfunding campaign and
quickly raised the money he needed. The Blender software became freely
available for anyone to use. Simply applying the General Public License
to the software, however, was not enough to create a thriving community
around it. Francesco told us, “Software of this complexity relies on
people and their vision of how people work together. Ton is a fantastic
community builder and manager, and he put a lot of work into fostering a
community of developers so that the project could live.”

Like any successful free and open-source software project, Blender
developed quickly because the community could make fixes and
improvements. “Software should be free and open to hack,” Francesco
said. “Otherwise, everyone is doing the same thing in the dark for ten
years.” Ton set up the Blender Foundation to oversee and steward the
software development and maintenance.

After a few years, Ton began looking for new ways to push development of
the software. He came up with the idea of creating CC-licensed films
using the Blender software. Ton put a call online for all interested and
skilled artists. Francesco said the idea was to get the best artists
available, put them in a building together with the best developers, and
have them work together. They would not only produce high-quality openly
licensed content, they would improve the Blender software in the
process.

They turned to crowdfunding to subsidize the costs of the project. They
had about twenty people working full-time for six to ten months, so the
costs were significant. Francesco said that when their crowdfunding
campaign succeeded, people were astounded. “The idea that making money
was possible by producing CC-licensed material was mind-blowing to
people,” he said. “They were like, ‘I have to see it to believe it.’”

The first film, which was released in 2006, was an experiment. It was so
successful that Ton decided to set up the Blender Institute, an entity
dedicated to hosting open-movie projects. The Blender Institute’s next
project was an even bigger success. The film, Big Buck Bunny, went
viral, and its animated characters were picked up by marketers.

Francesco said that, over time, the Blender Institute projects have
gotten bigger and more prominent. That means the filmmaking process has
become more complex, combining technical experts and artists who focus
on storytelling. Francesco says the process is almost on an industrial
scale because of the number of moving parts. This requires a lot of
specialized assistance, but the Blender Institute has no problem finding
the talent it needs to help on projects. “Blender hardly does any
recruiting for film projects because the talent emerges naturally,”
Francesco said. “So many people want to work with us, and we can’t
always hire them because of budget constraints.”

Blender has had a lot of success raising money from its community over
the years. In many ways, the pitch has gotten easier to make. Not only
is crowdfunding simply more familiar to the public, but people know and
trust Blender to deliver, and Ton has developed a reputation as an
effective community leader and visionary for their work. “There is a
whole community who sees and understands the benefit of these projects,”
Francesco said.

While these benefits of each open-movie project make a compelling pitch
for crowdfunding campaigns, Francesco told us the Blender Institute has
found some limitations in the standard crowdfunding model where you
propose a specific project and ask for funding. “Once a project is over,
everyone goes home,” he said. “It is great fun, but then it ends. That
is a problem.”

To make their work more sustainable, they needed a way to receive
ongoing support rather than on a project-by-project basis. Their
solution is Blender Cloud, a subscription-style crowdfunding model akin
to the online crowdfunding platform, Patreon. For about ten euros each
month, subscribers get access to download everything the Blender
Institute produces—software, art, training, and more. All of the assets
are available under an Attribution license (CC BY) or placed in the
public domain (CC0), but they are initially made available only to
subscribers. Blender Cloud enables subscribers to follow Blender’s movie
projects as they develop, sharing detailed information and content used
in the creative process. Blender Cloud also has extensive training
materials and libraries of characters and other assets used in various
projects.

The continuous financial support provided by Blender Cloud subsidizes
five to six full-time employees at the Blender Institute. Francesco says
their goal is to grow their subscriber base. “This is our freedom,” he
told us, “and for artists, freedom is everything.”

Blender Cloud is the primary revenue stream of the Blender Institute.
The Blender Foundation is funded primarily by donations, and that money
goes toward software development and maintenance. The revenue streams of
the Institute and Foundation are deliberately kept separate. Blender
also has other revenue streams, such as the Blender Store, where people
can purchase DVDs, T-shirts, and other Blender products.

Ton has worked on projects relating to his Blender software for nearly
twenty years. Throughout most of that time, he has been committed to
making the software and the content produced with the software free and
open. Selling a license has never been part of the business model.

Since 2006, he has been making films available along with all of their
source material. He says he has hardly ever seen people stepping into
Blender’s shoes and trying to make money off of their content. Ton
believes this is because the true value of what they do is in the
creative and production process. “Even when you share everything, all
your original sources, it still takes a lot of talent, skills, time, and
budget to reproduce what you did,” Ton said.

For Ton and Blender, it all comes back to doing.

Cards Against Humanity

Cards Against Humanity is a private, for-profit company that makes a
popular party game by the same name. Founded in 2011 in the U.S.

www.cardsagainsthumanity.com

Revenue model: charging for physical copies

Interview date: February 3, 2016

Interviewee: Max Temkin, cofounder

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

If you ask cofounder Max Temkin, there is nothing particularly
interesting about the Cards Against Humanity business model. “We make a
product. We sell it for money. Then we spend less money than we make,”
Max said.

He is right. Cards Against Humanity is a simple party game, modeled
after the game Apples to Apples. To play, one player asks a question or
fill-in-the-blank statement from a black card, and the other players
submit their funniest white card in response. The catch is that all of
the cards are filled with crude, gruesome, and otherwise awful things.
For the right kind of people (“horrible people,” according to Cards
Against Humanity advertising), this makes for a hilarious and fun game.

The revenue model is simple. Physical copies of the game are sold for a
profit. And it works. At the time of this writing, Cards Against
Humanity is the number-one best-selling item out of all toys and games
on Amazon. There are official expansion packs available, and several
official themed packs and international editions as well.

But Cards Against Humanity is also available for free. Anyone can
download a digital version of the game on the Cards Against Humanity
website. More than one million people have downloaded the game since the
company began tracking the numbers.

The game is available under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
license (CC BY-NC-SA). That means, in addition to copying the game,
anyone can create new versions of the game as long as they make it
available under the same noncommercial terms. The ability to adapt the
game is like an entire new game unto itself.

All together, these factors—the crass tone of the game and company, the
free download, the
openness to fans remixing the game—give
the game a massive cult following.

Their success is not the result of a grand plan. Instead, Cards Against
Humanity was the last in a long line of games and comedy projects that
Max Temkin and his friends put together for their own amusement. As Max
tells the story, they made the game so they could play it themselves on
New Year’s Eve because they were too nerdy to be invited to other
parties. The game was a hit, so they decided to put it up online as a
free PDF. People started asking if they could pay to have the game
printed for them, and eventually they decided to run a Kickstarter to
fund the printing. They set their Kickstarter goal at \$4,000—and raised
\$15,000. The game was officially released in May 2011.

The game caught on quickly, and it has only grown more popular over
time. Max says the eight founders never had a meeting where they decided
to make it an ongoing business. “It kind of just happened,” he said.

But this tale of a “happy accident” belies marketing genius. Just like
the game, the Cards Against Humanity brand is irreverent and memorable.
It is hard to forget a company that calls the FAQ on their website “Your
dumb questions.”

Like most quality satire, however, there is more to the joke than
vulgarity and shock value. The company’s marketing efforts around Black
Friday illustrate this particularly well. For those outside the United
States, Black Friday is the term for the day after the Thanksgiving
holiday, the biggest shopping day of the year. It is an incredibly
important day for Cards Against Humanity, like it is for all U.S.
retailers. Max said they struggled with what to do on Black Friday
because they didn’t want to support what he called the “orgy of
consumerism” the day has become, particularly since it follows a day
that is about being grateful for what you have. In 2013, after
deliberating, they decided to have an Everything Costs \$5 More sale.

“We sweated it out the night before Black Friday, wondering if our fans
were going to hate us for it,” he said. “But it made us laugh so we went
with it. People totally caught the joke.”

This sort of bold transparency delights the media, but more importantly,
it engages their fans. “One of the most surprising things you can do in
capitalism is just be honest with people,” Max said. “It shocks people
that there is transparency about what you are doing.”

Max also likened it to a grand improv scene. “If we do something a
little subversive and unexpected, the public wants to be a part of the
joke.” One year they did a Give Cards Against Humanity \$5 event, where
people literally paid them five dollars for no reason. Their fans wanted
to make the joke funnier by making it successful. They made \$70,000 in
a single day.

This remarkable trust they have in their customers is what inspired
their decision to apply a Creative Commons license to the game. Trusting
your customers to reuse and remix your work requires a leap of faith.
Cards Against Humanity obviously isn’t afraid of doing the unexpected,
but there are lines even they do not want to cross. Before applying the
license, Max said they worried that some fans would adapt the game to
include all of the jokes they intentionally never made because they
crossed that line. “It happened, and the world didn’t end,” Max said.
“If that is the worst cost of using CC, I’d pay that a hundred times
over because there are so many benefits.”

Any successful product inspires its biggest fans to create remixes of
it, but unsanctioned adaptations are more likely to fly under the radar.
The Creative Commons license gives fans of Cards Against Humanity the
freedom to run with the game and copy, adapt, and promote their
creations openly. Today there are thousands of fan expansions of the
game.

Max said, “CC was a no-brainer for us because it gets the most people
involved. Making the game free and available under a CC license led to
the unbelievable situation where we are one of the best-marketed games
in the world, and we have never spent a dime on marketing.”

Of course, there are limits to what the company allows its customers to
do with the game. They chose the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
license because it restricts people from using the game to make money.
It also requires that adaptations of the game be made available under
the same licensing terms if they are shared publicly. Cards Against
Humanity also polices its brand. “We feel like we’re the only ones who
can use our brand and our game and make money off of it,” Max said.
About 99.9 percent of the time, they just send an email to those making
commercial use of the game, and that is the end of it. There have only
been a handful of instances where they had to get a lawyer involved.

Just as there is more than meets the eye to the Cards Against Humanity
business model, the same can be said of the game itself. To be playable,
every white card has to work syntactically with enough black cards. The
eight creators invest an incredible amount of work into creating new
cards for the game. “We have daylong arguments about commas,” Max said.
“The slacker tone of the cards gives people the impression that it is
easy to write them, but it is actually a lot of work and quibbling.”

That means cocreation with their fans really doesn’t work. The company
has a submission mechanism on their website, and they get thousands of
suggestions, but it is very rare that a submitted card is adopted.
Instead, the eight initial creators remain the primary authors of
expansion decks and other new products released by the company.
Interestingly, the creativity of their customer base is really only an
asset to the company once their original work is created and published
when people make their own adaptations of the game.

For all of their success, the creators of Cards Against Humanity are
only partially motivated by money. Max says they have always been
interested in the Walt Disney philosophy of financial success. “We don’t
make jokes and games to make money—we make money so we can make more
jokes and games,” he said.

In fact, the company has given more than \$4 million to various
charities and causes. “Cards is not our life plan,” Max said. “We all
have other interests and hobbies. We are passionate about other things
going on in our lives. A lot of the activism we have done comes out of
us taking things from the rest of our lives and channeling some of the
excitement from the game into it.”

Seeing money as fuel rather than the ultimate goal is what has enabled
them to embrace Creative Commons licensing without reservation. CC
licensing ended up being a savvy marketing move for the company, but
nonetheless, giving up exclusive control of your work necessarily means
giving up some opportunities to extract more money from customers.

“It’s not right for everyone to release everything under CC licensing,”
Max said. “If your only goal is to make a lot of money, then CC is not
best strategy. This kind of business model, though, speaks to your
values, and who you are and why you’re making things.”

The Conversation

The Conversation is an independent source of news, sourced from the
academic and research community and delivered direct to the public over
the Internet. Founded in 2011 in Australia.

theconversation.com

Revenue model: charging content creators (universities pay membership
fees to have their faculties serve as writers), grant funding

Interview date: February 4, 2016

Interviewee: Andrew Jaspan, founder

Profile written by Paul Stacey

Andrew Jaspan spent years as an editor of major newspapers including the
Observer in London, the Sunday Herald in Glasgow, and the Age in
Melbourne, Australia. He experienced firsthand the decline of
newspapers, including the collapse of revenues, layoffs, and the
constant pressure to reduce costs. After he left the Age in 2005, his
concern for the future journalism didn’t go away. Andrew made a
commitment to come up with an alternative model.

Around the time he left his job as editor of the Melbourne Age, Andrew
wondered where citizens would get news grounded in fact and evidence
rather than opinion or ideology. He believed there was still an appetite
for journalism with depth and substance but was concerned about the
increasing focus on the sensational and sexy.

While at the Age, he’d become friends with a vice-chancellor of a
university in Melbourne who encouraged him to talk to smart people
across campus—an astrophysicist, a Nobel laureate, earth scientists,
economists . . . These were the kind of smart people he wished were more
involved in informing the world about what is going on and correcting
the errors that appear in media. However, they were reluctant to engage
with mass media. Often, journalists didn’t understand what they said, or
unilaterally chose what aspect of a story to tell, putting out a version
that these people felt was wrong or mischaracterized. Newspapers want to
attract a mass audience. Scholars want to communicate serious news,
findings, and insights. It’s not a perfect match. Universities are
massive repositories of knowledge, research, wisdom, and expertise. But
a lot of that stays behind a wall of their own making—there are the
walled garden and ivory tower metaphors, and in more literal terms, the
paywall. Broadly speaking, universities are part of society but
disconnected from it. They are an enormous public resource but not that
good at presenting their expertise to the wider public.

Andrew believed he could to help connect academics back into the public
arena, and maybe help society find solutions to big problems. He thought
about pairing professional editors with university and research experts,
working one-on-one to refine everything from story structure to
headline, captions, and quotes. The editors could help turn something
that is academic into something understandable and readable. And this
would be a key difference from traditional journalism—the subject matter
expert would get a chance to check the article and give final approval
before it is published. Compare this with reporters just picking and
choosing the quotes and writing whatever they want.

The people he spoke to liked this idea, and Andrew embarked on raising
money and support with the help of the Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the University of Melbourne,
Monash University, the University of Technology Sydney, and the
University of Western Australia. These founding partners saw the value
of an independent information channel that would also showcase the
talent and knowledge of the university and research sector. With their
help, in 2011, the Conversation, was launched as an independent news
site in Australia. Everything published in the Conversation is openly
licensed with Creative Commons.

The Conversation is founded on the belief that underpinning a
functioning democracy is access to independent, high-quality,
informative journalism. The Conversation’s aim is for people to have a
better understanding of current affairs and complex issues—and hopefully
a better quality of public discourse. The Conversation sees itself as a
source of trusted information dedicated to the public good. Their core
mission is simple: to provide readers with a reliable source of
evidence-based information.

Andrew worked hard to reinvent a methodology for creating reliable,
credible content. He introduced strict new working practices, a charter,
and codes of conduct.1 These include fully disclosing who every author
is (with their relevant expertise); who is funding their research; and
if there are any potential or real conflicts of interest. Also important
is where the content originates, and even though it comes from the
university and research community, it still needs to be fully disclosed.
The Conversation does not sit behind a paywall. Andrew believes access
to information is an issue of equality—everyone should have access, like
access to clean water. The Conversation is committed to an open and free
Internet. Everyone should have free access to their content, and be able
to share it or republish it.

Creative Commons help with these goals; articles are published with the
Attribution-
NoDerivs license (CC BY-ND). They’re freely available for others to
republish elsewhere as long as attribution is given and the content is
not edited. Over five years, more than twenty-two thousand sites have
republished their content. The Conversation website gets about 2.9
million unique views per month, but through republication they have
thirty-five million readers. This couldn’t have been done without the
Creative Commons license, and in Andrew’s view, Creative Commons is
central to everything the Conversation does.

When readers come across the Conversation, they seem to like what they
find and recommend it to their friends, peers, and networks. Readership
has grown primarily through word of mouth. While they don’t have sales
and marketing, they do promote their work through social media
(including Twitter and Facebook), and by being an accredited supplier to
Google News.

It’s usual for the founders of any company to ask themselves what kind
of company it should be. It quickly became clear to the founders of the
Conversation that they wanted to create a public good rather than make
money off of information. Most media companies are working to aggregate
as many eyeballs as possible and sell ads. The Conversation founders
didn’t want this model. It takes no advertising and is a not-for-profit
venture.

There are now different editions of the Conversation for Africa, the
United Kingdom, France, and the United States, in addition to the one
for Australia. All five editions have their own editorial mastheads,
advisory boards, and content. The Conversation’s global virtual newsroom
has roughly ninety staff working with thirty-five thousand academics
from over sixteen hundred universities around the world. The
Conversation would like to be working with university scholars from even
more parts of the world.

Additionally, each edition has its own set of founding partners,
strategic partners, and funders. They’ve received funding from
foundations, corporates, institutions, and individual donations, but the
Conversation is shifting toward paid memberships by universities and
research institutions to sustain operations. This would safeguard the
current service and help improve coverage and features.

When professors from member universities write an article, there is some
branding of the university associated with the article. On the
Conversation website, paying university members are listed as “members
and funders.” Early participants may be designated as “founding
members,” with seats on the editorial advisory board.

Academics are not paid for their contributions, but they get free
editing from a professional (four to five hours per piece, on average).
They also get access to a large audience. Every author and member
university has access to a special analytics dashboard where they can
check the reach of an article. The metrics include what people are
tweeting, the comments, countries the readership represents, where the
article is being republished, and the number of readers per article.

The Conversation plans to expand the dashboard to show not just reach
but impact. This tracks activities, behaviors, and events that occurred
as a result of publication, including things like a scholar being asked
to go on a show to discuss their piece, give a talk at a conference,
collaborate, submit a journal paper, and consult a company on a topic.

These reach and impact metrics show the benefits of membership. With the
Conversation, universities can engage with the public and show why
they’re of value.

With its tagline, “Academic Rigor, Journalistic Flair,” the Conversation
represents a new form of journalism that contributes to a more informed
citizenry and improved democracy around the world. Its open business
model and use of Creative Commons show how it’s possible to generate
both a public good and operational revenue at the same time.

Web link

1.  theconversation.com/us/charter

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, activist, blogger, and
journalist. Based in the U.S.

craphound.com and boingboing.net

Revenue model: charging for physical copies (book sales),
pay-what-you-want, selling translation rights to books

Interview date: January 12, 2016

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

Cory Doctorow hates the term “business model,” and he is adamant that he
is not a brand. “To me, branding is the idea that you can take a thing
that has certain qualities, remove the qualities, and go on selling it,”
he said. “I’m not out there trying to figure out how to be a brand. I’m
doing this thing that animates me to work crazy insane hours because
it’s the most important thing I know how to do.”

Cory calls himself an entrepreneur. He likes to say his success came
from making stuff people happened to like and then getting out of the
way of them sharing it.

He is a science fiction writer, activist, blogger, and journalist.
Beginning with his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, in
2003, his work has been published under a Creative Commons license. Cory
is coeditor of the popular CC-licensed site Boing Boing, where he writes
about technology, politics, and intellectual property. He has also
written several nonfiction books, including the most recent Information
Doesn’t Want to Be Free, about the ways in which creators can make a
living in the Internet age.

Cory primarily makes money by selling physical books, but he also takes
on paid speaking gigs and is experimenting with pay-what-you-want models
for his work.

While Cory’s extensive body of fiction work has a large following, he is
just as well known for his activism. He is an outspoken opponent of
restrictive copyright and digital-rights-management (DRM) technology
used to lock up content because he thinks both undermine creators and
the public interest. He is currently a special adviser at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, where he is involved in a lawsuit challenging the
U.S. law that protects DRM. Cory says his political work doesn’t
directly make him money, but if he gave it up, he thinks he would lose
credibility and, more importantly, lose the drive that propels him to
create. “My political work is a different expression of the same
artistic-political urge,” he said. “I have this suspicion that if I gave
up the things that didn’t make me money, the genuineness would leach out
of what I do, and the quality that causes people to like what I do would
be gone.”

Cory has been financially successful, but money is not his primary
motivation. At the start of his book Information Doesn’t Want to Be
Free, he stresses how important it is not to become an artist if your
goal is to get rich. “Entering the arts because you want to get rich is
like buying lottery tickets because you want to get rich,” he wrote. “It
might work, but it almost certainly won’t. Though, of course, someone
always wins the lottery.” He acknowledges that he is one of the lucky
few to “make it,” but he says he would be writing no matter what. “I am
compelled to write,” he wrote. “Long before I wrote to keep myself fed
and sheltered, I was writing to keep myself sane.”

Just as money is not his primary motivation to create, money is not his
primary motivation to share. For Cory, sharing his work with Creative
Commons is a moral imperative. “It felt morally right,” he said of his
decision to adopt Creative Commons licenses. “I felt like I wasn’t
contributing to the culture of surveillance and censorship that has been
created to try to stop copying.” In other words, using CC licenses
symbolizes his worldview.

He also feels like there is a solid commercial basis for licensing his
work with Creative Commons. While he acknowledges he hasn’t been able to
do a controlled experiment to compare the commercial benefits of
licensing with CC against reserving all rights, he thinks he has sold
more books using a CC license than he would have without it. Cory says
his goal is to convince people they should pay him for his work. “I
started by not calling them thieves,” he said.

Cory started using CC licenses soon after they were first created. At
the time his first novel came out, he says the science fiction genre was
overrun with people scanning and downloading books without permission.
When he and his publisher took a closer look at who was doing that sort
of thing online, they realized it looked a lot like book promotion. “I
knew there was a relationship between having enthusiastic readers and
having a successful career as a writer,” he said. “At the time, it took
eighty hours to OCR a book, which is a big effort. I decided to spare
them the time and energy, and give them the book for free in a format
destined to spread.”

Cory admits the stakes were pretty low for him when he first adopted
Creative Commons licenses. He only had to sell two thousand copies of
his book to break even. People often said he was only able to use CC
licenses successfully at that time because he was just starting out. Now
they say he can only do it because he is an established author.

The bottom line, Cory says, is that no one has found a way to prevent
people from copying the stuff they like. Rather than fighting the tide,
Cory makes his work intrinsically shareable. “Getting the hell out of
the way for people who want to share their love of you with other people
sounds obvious, but it’s remarkable how many people don’t do it,” he
said.

Making his work available under Creative Commons licenses enables him to
view his biggest fans as his ambassadors. “Being open to fan activity
makes you part of the conversation about what fans do with your work and
how they interact with it,” he said. Cory’s own website routinely
highlights cool things his audience has done with his work. Unlike
corporations like Disney that tend to have a hands-off relationship with
their fan activity, he has a symbiotic relationship with his audience.
“Engaging with your audience can’t guarantee you success,” he said. “And
Disney is an example of being able to remain aloof and still being the
most successful company in the creative industry in history. But I
figure my likelihood of being Disney is pretty slim, so I should take
all the help I can get.”

His first book was published under the most restrictive Creative Commons
license, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND). It allows
only verbatim copying for noncommercial purposes. His later work is
published under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (CC
BY-NC-SA), which gives people the right to adapt his work for
noncommercial purposes but only if they share it back under the same
license terms. Before releasing his work under a CC license that allows
adaptations, he always sells the right to translate the book to other
languages to a commercial publisher first. He wants to reach new
potential buyers in other parts of the world, and he thinks it is more
difficult to get people to pay for translations if there are fan
translations already available for free.

In his book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, Cory likens his
philosophy to thinking like a dandelion. Dandelions produce thousands of
seeds each spring, and they are blown into the air going in every
direction. The strategy is to maximize the number of blind chances the
dandelion has for continuing its genetic line. Similarly, he says there
are lots of people out there who may want to buy creative work or
compensate authors for it in some other way. “The more places your work
can find itself, the greater the likelihood that it will find one of
those would-be customers in some unsuspected crack in the metaphorical
pavement,” he wrote. “The copies that others make of my work cost me
nothing, and present the possibility that I’ll get something.”

Applying a CC license to his work increases the chances it will be
shared more widely around the Web. He avoids DRM—and openly opposes the
practice—for similar reasons. DRM has the effect of tying a work to a
particular platform. This digital lock, in turn, strips the authors of
control over their own work and hands that control over to the platform.
He calls it Cory’s First Law: “Anytime someone puts a lock on something
that belongs to you and won’t give you the key, that lock isn’t there
for your benefit.”

Cory operates under the premise that artists benefit when there are
more, rather than fewer, places where people can access their work. The
Internet has opened up those avenues, but DRM is designed to limit them.
“On the one hand, we can credibly make our work available to a widely
dispersed audience,” he said. “On the other hand, the intermediaries we
historically sold to are making it harder to go around them.” Cory
continually looks for ways to reach his audience without relying upon
major platforms that will try to take control over his work.

Cory says his e-book sales have been lower than those of his
competitors, and he attributes some of that to the CC license making the
work available for free. But he believes people are willing to pay for
content they like, even when it is available for free, as long as it is
easy to do. He was extremely successful using Humble Bundle, a platform
that allows people to pay what they want for DRM-free versions of a
bundle of a particular creator’s work. He is planning to try his own
pay-what-you-want experiment soon.

Fans are particularly willing to pay when they feel personally connected
to the artist. Cory works hard to create that personal connection. One
way he does this is by personally answering every single email he gets.
“If you look at the history of artists, most die in penury,” he said.
“That reality means that for artists, we have to find ways to support
ourselves when public tastes shift, when copyright stops producing.
Future-proofing your artistic career in many ways means figuring out how
to stay connected to those people who have been touched by your work.”

Cory’s realism about the difficulty of making a living in the arts does
not reflect pessimism about the Internet age. Instead, he says the fact
that it is hard to make a living as an artist is nothing new. What is
new, he writes in his book, “is how many ways there are to make things,
and to get them into other people’s hands and minds.”

It has never been easier to think like a dandelion.

Figshare

Figshare is a for-profit company offering an online repository where
researchers can preserve and share the output of their research,
including figures, data sets, images, and videos. Founded in 2011 in the
UK.

figshare.com

Revenue model: platform providing paid services to creators

Interview date: January 28, 2016

Interviewee: Mark Hahnel, founder

Profile written by Paul Stacey

Figshare’s mission is to change the face of academic publishing through
improved dissemination, discoverability, and reusability of scholarly
research. Figshare is a repository where users can make all the output
of their research available—from posters and presentations to data sets
and code—in a way that’s easy to discover, cite, and share. Users can
upload any file format, which can then be previewed in a Web browser.
Research output is disseminated in a way that the current
scholarly-publishing model does not allow.

Figshare founder Mark Hahnel often gets asked: How do you make money?
How do we know you’ll be here in five years? Can you, as a for-profit
venture, be trusted? Answers have evolved over time.

Mark traces the origins of Figshare back to when he was a graduate
student getting his PhD in stem cell biology. His research involved
working with videos of stem cells in motion. However, when he went to
publish his research, there was no way for him to also publish the
videos, figures, graphs, and data sets. This was frustrating. Mark
believed publishing his complete research would lead to more citations
and be better for his career.

Mark does not consider himself an advanced software programmer.
Fortunately, things like cloud-based computing and wikis had become
mainstream, and he believed it ought to be possible to put all his
research online and share it with anyone. So he began working on a
solution.

There were two key needs: licenses to make the data citable, and
persistent identifiers— URL links that always point back to the original
object ensuring the research is citable for the long term.

Mark chose Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to meet the need for a
persistent identifier. In the DOI system, an object’s metadata is stored
as a series of numbers in the DOI name. Referring to an object by its
DOI is more stable than referring to it by its URL, because the location
of an object (the web page or URL) can often change. Mark partnered with
DataCite for the provision of DOIs for research data.

As for licenses, Mark chose Creative Commons. The open-access and
open-science communities were already using and recommending Creative
Commons. Based on what was happening in those communities and Mark’s
dialogue with peers, he went with CC0 (in the public domain) for data
sets and CC BY (Attribution) for figures, videos, and data sets.

So Mark began using DOIs and Creative Commons for his own research work.
He had a science blog where he wrote about it and made all his data
open. People started commenting on his blog that they wanted to do the
same. So he opened it up for them to use, too.

People liked the interface and simple upload process. People started
asking if they could also share theses, grant proposals, and code.
Inclusion of code raised new licensing issues, as Creative Commons
licenses are not used for software. To allow the sharing of software
code, Mark chose the MIT license, but GNU and Apache licenses can also
be used.

Mark sought investment to make this into a scalable product. After a few
unsuccessful funding pitches, UK-based Digital Science expressed
interest but insisted on a more viable business model. They made an
initial investment, and together they came up with a freemium-like
business model.

Under the freemium model, academics upload their research to Figshare
for storage and sharing for free. Each research object is licensed with
Creative Commons and receives a DOI link. The premium option charges
researchers a fee for gigabytes of private storage space, and for
private online space designed for a set number of research
collaborators, which is ideal for larger teams and geographically
dispersed research groups. Figshare sums up its value proposition to
researchers as “You retain ownership. You license it. You get credit. We
just make sure it persists.”

In January 2012, Figshare was launched. (The fig in Figshare stands for
figures.) Using investment funds, Mark made significant improvements to
Figshare. For example, researchers could quickly preview their research
files within a browser without having to download them first or require
third-party software. Journals who were still largely publishing
articles as static noninteractive PDFs became interested in having
Figshare provide that functionality for them.

Figshare diversified its business model to include services for
journals. Figshare began hosting large amounts of data for the journals’
online articles. This additional data improved the quality of the
articles. Outsourcing this service to Figshare freed publishers from
having to develop this functionality as part of their own
infrastructure. Figshare-hosted data also provides a link back to the
article, generating additional click-through and readership—a benefit to
both journal publishers and researchers. Figshare now provides
research-data infrastructure for a wide variety of publishers including
Wiley, Springer Nature, PLOS, and Taylor and Francis, to name a few, and
has convinced them to use Creative Commons licenses for the data.

Governments allocate significant public funds to research. In parallel
with the launch of Figshare, governments around the world began
requesting the research they fund be open and accessible. They mandated
that researchers and academic institutions better manage and disseminate
their research outputs. Institutions looking to comply with this new
mandate became interested in Figshare. Figshare once again diversified
its business model, adding services for institutions.

Figshare now offers a range of fee-based services to institutions,
including their own minibranded Figshare space (called Figshare for
Institutions) that securely hosts research data of institutions in the
cloud. Services include not just hosting but data metrics, data
dissemination, and user-group administration. Figshare’s workflow, and
the services they offer for institutions, take into account the needs of
librarians and administrators, as well as of the researchers.

As with researchers and publishers, Fig-share encouraged institutions to
share their research with CC BY (Attribution) and their data with CC0
(into the public domain). Funders who require researchers and
institutions to use open licensing believe in the social
responsibilities and benefits of making research accessible to all.
Publishing research in this open way has come to be called open access.
But not all funders specify CC BY; some institutions want to offer their
researchers a choice, including less permissive licenses like CC BY-NC
(Attribution-NonCommercial), CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike), or CC
BY-ND (Attribution-NoDerivs).

For Mark this created a conflict. On the one hand, the principles and
benefits of open science are at the heart of Figshare, and Mark believes
CC BY is the best license for this. On the other hand, institutions were
saying they wouldn’t use Figshare unless it offered a choice in
licenses. He initially refused to offer anything beyond CC0 and CC BY,
but after seeing an open-source CERN project offer all Creative Commons
licenses without any negative repercussions, he decided to follow suit.

Mark is thinking of doing a Figshare study that tracks research
dissemination according to Creative Commons license, and gathering
metrics on views, citations, and downloads. You could see which license
generates the biggest impact. If the data showed that CC BY is more
impactful, Mark believes more and more researchers and institutions will
make it their license of choice.

Figshare has an Application Programming Interface (API) that makes it
possible for data to be pulled from Figshare and used in other
applications. As an example, Mark shared a Figshare data set showing the
journal subscriptions that higher-education institutions in the United
Kingdom paid to ten major publishers.1 Figshare’s API enables that data
to be pulled into an app developed by a completely different researcher
that converts the data into a visually interesting graph, which any
viewer can alter by changing any of the variables.2

The free version of Figshare has built a community of academics, who
through word of mouth and presentations have promoted and spread
awareness of Figshare. To amplify and reward the community, Figshare
established an Advisor program, providing those who promoted Figshare
with hoodies and T-shirts, early access to new features, and travel
expenses when they gave presentations outside of their area. These
Advisors also helped Mark on what license to use for software code and
whether to offer universities an option of using Creative Commons
licenses.

Mark says his success is partly about being in the right place at the
right time. He also believes that the diversification of Figshare’s
model over time has been key to success. Figshare now offers a
comprehensive set of services to researchers, publishers, and
institutions.3 If he had relied solely on revenue from premium
subscriptions, he believes Figshare would have struggled. In Figshare’s
early days, their primary users were early-career and late-career
academics. It has only been because funders mandated open licensing that
Figshare is now being used by the mainstream.

Today Figshare has 26 million–plus page views, 7.5 million–plus
downloads, 800,000–plus user uploads, 2 million–plus articles,
500,000-plus collections, and 5,000–plus projects. Sixty percent of
their traffic comes from Google. A sister company called Altmetric
tracks the use of Figshare by others, including Wikipedia and news
sources.

Figshare uses the revenue it generates from the premium subscribers,
journal publishers, and institutions to fund and expand what it can
offer to researchers for free. Figshare has publicly stuck to its
principles—keeping the free service free and requiring the use of CC BY
and CC0 from the start—and from Mark’s perspective, this is why people
trust Figshare. Mark sees new competitors coming forward who are just in
it for money. If Figshare was only in it for the money, they wouldn’t
care about offering a free version. Figshare’s principles and advocacy
for openness are a key differentiator. Going forward, Mark sees Figshare
not only as supporting open access to research but also enabling people
to collaborate and make new discoveries.

Web links

1.  figshare.com/articles/Journal\_subscription\_costs\_FOIs\_to\_UK\_universities/1186832
2.  retr0.shinyapps.io/journal\_costs/?year=2014&inst=19,22,38,42,59,64,80,95,136
3.  figshare.com/features

Figure.NZ

Figure.NZ is a nonprofit charity that makes an online data platform
designed to make data reusable and easy to understand. Founded in 2012
in New Zealand.

figure.nz

Revenue model: platform providing paid services to creators, donations,
sponsorships

Interview date: May 3, 2016

Interviewee: Lillian Grace, founder

Profile written by Paul Stacey

In the paper Harnessing the Economic and Social Power of Data presented
at the New Zealand Data Futures Forum in 2014,1 Figure.NZ founder
Lillian Grace said there are thousands of valuable and relevant data
sets freely available to us right now, but most people don’t use them.
She used to think this meant people didn’t care about being informed,
but she’s come to see that she was wrong. Almost everyone wants to be
informed about issues that matter—not only to them, but also to their
families, their communities, their businesses, and their country. But
there’s a big difference between availability and accessibility of
information. Data is spread across thousands of sites and is held within
databases and spreadsheets that require both time and skill to engage
with. To use data when making a decision, you have to know what specific
question to ask, identify a source that has collected the data, and
manipulate complex tools to extract and visualize the information within
the data set. Lillian established Figure.NZ to make data truly
accessible to all, with a specific focus on New Zealand.

Lillian had the idea for Figure.NZ in February 2012 while working for
the New Zealand Institute, a think tank concerned with improving
economic prosperity, social well-being, environmental quality, and
environmental productivity for New Zealand and New Zealanders. While
giving talks to community and business groups, Lillian realized “every
single issue we addressed would have been easier to deal with if more
people understood the basic facts.” But understanding the basic facts
sometimes requires data and research that you often have to pay for.

Lillian began to imagine a website that lifted data up to a visual form
that could be easily understood and freely accessed. Initially launched
as Wiki New Zealand, the original idea was that people could contribute
their data and visuals via a wiki. However, few people had graphs that
could be used and shared, and there were no standards or consistency
around the data and the visuals. Realizing the wiki model wasn’t
working, Lillian brought the process of data aggregation, curation, and
visual presentation in-house, and invested in the technology to help
automate some of it. Wiki New Zealand became Figure.NZ, and efforts were
reoriented toward providing services to those wanting to open their data
and present it visually.

Here’s how it works. Figure.NZ sources data from other organizations,
including corporations, public repositories, government departments, and
academics. Figure.NZ imports and extracts that data, and then validates
and standardizes it—all with a strong eye on what will be best for
users. They then make the data available in a series of standardized
forms, both human- and machine-readable, with rich metadata about the
sources, the licenses, and data types. Figure.NZ has a chart-designing
tool that makes simple bar, line, and area graphs from any data source.
The graphs are posted to the Figure.NZ website, and they can also be
exported in a variety of formats for print or online use. Figure.NZ
makes its data and graphs available using the Attribution (CC BY)
license. This allows others to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute
Figure.NZ data and graphs as long as they give attribution to the
original source and to Figure.NZ.

Lillian characterizes the initial decision to use Creative Commons as
naively fortunate. It was first recommended to her by a colleague.
Lillian spent time looking at what Creative Commons offered and thought
it looked good, was clear, and made common sense. It was easy to use and
easy for others to understand. Over time, she’s come to realize just how
fortunate and important that decision turned out to be. New Zealand’s
government has an open-access and licensing framework called NZGOAL,
which provides guidance for agencies when they release copyrighted and
noncopyrighted work and material.2 It aims to standardize the licensing
of works with government copyright and how they can be reused, and it
does this with Creative Commons licenses. As a result, 98 percent of all
government-agency data is Creative Commons licensed, fitting in nicely
with Figure.NZ’s decision.

Lillian thinks current ideas of what a business is are relatively new,
only a hundred years old or so. She’s convinced that twenty years from
now, we will see new and different models for business. Figure.NZ is set
up as a nonprofit charity. It is purpose-driven but also strives to pay
people well and thinks like a business. Lillian sees the
charity-nonprofit status as an essential element for the mission and
purpose of Figure.NZ. She believes Wikipedia would not work if it were
for profit, and similarly, Figure.NZ’s nonprofit status assures people
who have data and people who want to use it that they can rely on
Figure.NZ’s motives. People see them as a trusted wrangler and source.

Although Figure.NZ is a social enterprise that openly licenses their
data and graphs for everyone to use for free, they have taken care not
to be perceived as a free service all around the table. Lillian believes
hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by the government and
organizations to collect data. However, very little money is spent on
taking that data and making it accessible, understandable, and useful
for decision making. Government uses some of the data for policy, but
Lillian believes that it is underutilized and the potential value is
much larger. Figure.NZ is focused on solving that problem. They believe
a portion of money allocated to collecting data should go into making
sure that data is useful and generates value. If the government wants
citizens to understand why certain decisions are being made and to be
more aware about what the government is doing, why not transform the
data it collects into easily understood visuals? It could even become a
way for a government or any organization to differentiate, market, and
brand itself.

Figure.NZ spends a lot of time seeking to understand the motivations of
data collectors and to identify the channels where it can provide value.
Every part of their business model has been focused on who is going to
get value from the data and visuals.

Figure.NZ has multiple lines of business. They provide commercial
services to organizations that want their data publicly available and
want to use Figure.NZ as their publishing platform. People who want to
publish open data appreciate Figure.NZ’s ability to do it faster, more
easily, and better than they can. Customers are encouraged to help their
users find, use, and make things from the data they make available on
Figure.NZ’s website. Customers control what is released and the license
terms (although Figure.NZ encourages Creative Commons licensing).
Figure.NZ also serves customers who want a specific collection of charts
created—for example, for their website or annual report. Charging the
organizations that want to make their data available enables Figure.NZ
to provide their site free to all users, to truly democratize data.

Lillian notes that the current state of most data is terrible and often
not well understood by the people who have it. This sometimes makes it
difficult for customers and Figure.NZ to figure out what it would cost
to import, standardize, and display that data in a useful way. To deal
with this, Figure.NZ uses “high-trust contracts,” where customers
allocate a certain budget to the task that Figure.NZ is then free to
draw from, as long as Figure.NZ frequently reports on what they’ve
produced so the customer can determine the value for money. This
strategy has helped build trust and transparency about the level of
effort associated with doing work that has never been done before.

A second line of business is what Figure.NZ calls partners. ASB Bank and
Statistics New Zealand are partners who back Figure.NZ’s efforts. As one
example, with their support Figure.NZ has been able to create Business
Figures, a special way for businesses to find useful data without having
to know what questions to ask.3

Figure.NZ also has patrons.4 Patrons donate to topic areas they care
about, directly enabling Figure.NZ to get data together to flesh out
those areas. Patrons do not direct what data is included or excluded.

Figure.NZ also accepts philanthropic donations, which are used to
provide more content, extend technology, and improve services, or are
targeted to fund a specific effort or provide in-kind support. As a
charity, donations are tax deductible.

Figure.NZ has morphed and grown over time. With data aggregation,
curation, and visualizing services all in-house, Figure.NZ has developed
a deep expertise in taking random styles of data, standardizing it, and
making it useful. Lillian realized that Figure.NZ could easily become a
warehouse of seventy people doing data. But for Lillian, growth isn’t
always good. In her view, bigger often means less effective. Lillian set
artificial constraints on growth, forcing the organization to think
differently and be more efficient. Rather than in-house growth, they are
growing and building external relationships.

Figure.NZ’s website displays visuals and data associated with a wide
range of categories including crime, economy, education, employment,
energy, environment, health, information and communications technology,
industry, tourism, and many others. A search function helps users find
tables and graphs. Figure.NZ does not provide analysis or interpretation
of the data or visuals. Their goal is to teach people how to think, not
think for them. Figure.NZ wants to create intuitive experiences, not
user manuals.

Figure.NZ believes data and visuals should be useful. They provide their
customers with a data collection template and teach them why it’s
important and how to use it. They’ve begun putting more emphasis on
tracking what users of their website want. They also get requests from
social media and through email for them to share data for a specific
topic—for example, can you share data for water quality? If they have
the data, they respond quickly; if they don’t, they try and identify the
organizations that would have that data and forge a relationship so they
can be included on Figure.NZ’s site. Overall, Figure.NZ is seeking to
provide a place for people to be curious about, access, and interpret
data on topics they are interested in.

Lillian has a deep and profound vision for Figure.NZ that goes well
beyond simply providing open-data services. She says things are
different now. “We used to live in a world where it was really hard to
share information widely. And in that world, the best future was created
by having a few great leaders who essentially had access to the
information and made decisions on behalf of others, whether it was on
behalf of a country or companies.

“But now we live in a world where it’s really easy to share information
widely and also to communicate widely. In the world we live in now, the
best future is the one where everyone can make well-informed decisions.

“The use of numbers and data as a way of making well-informed decisions
is one of the areas where there is the biggest gaps. We don’t really use
numbers as a part of our thinking and part of our understanding yet.

“Part of the reason is the way data is spread across hundreds of sites.
In addition, for the most part, deep thinking based on data is
constrained to experts because most people don’t have data literacy.
There once was a time when many citizens in society couldn’t read or
write. However, as a society, we’ve now come to believe that reading and
writing skills should be something all citizens have. We haven’t yet
adopted a similar belief around numbers and data literacy. We largely
still believe that only a few specially trained people can analyze and
think with numbers.

“Figure.NZ may be the first organization to assert that everyone can use
numbers in their thinking, and it’s built a technological platform along
with trust and a network of relationships to make that possible. What
you can see on Figure.NZ are tens of thousands of graphs, maps, and
data.

“Figure.NZ sees this as a new kind of alphabet that can help people
analyze what they see around them. A way to be thoughtful and informed
about society. A means of engaging in conversation and shaping decision
making that transcends personal experience. The long-term value and
impact is almost impossible to measure, but the goal is to help citizens
gain understanding and work together in more informed ways to shape the
future.”

Lillian sees Figure.NZ’s model as having global potential. But for now,
their focus is completely on making Figure.NZ work in New Zealand and to
get the “network effect”—
users dramatically increasing value for themselves and for others
through use of their service. Creative Commons is core to making the
network effect possible.

Web links

1.  www.nzdatafutures.org.nz/sites/default/files/NZDFF\_harness-the-power.pdf
2.  www.ict.govt.nz/guidance-and-resources/open-government/new-zealand-government-open-access-and-licensing-nzgoal-framework/
3.  figure.nz/business/
4.  figure.nz/patrons/

Knowledge Unlatched

Knowledge Unlatched is a not-for-profit community interest company that
brings libraries together to pool funds to publish open-access books.
Founded in 2012 in the UK.

knowledgeunlatched.org

Revenue model: crowdfunding (specialized)

Interview date: February 26, 2016

Interviewee: Frances Pinter, founder

Profile written by Paul Stacey

The serial entrepreneur Dr. Frances Pinter has been at the forefront of
innovation in the publishing industry for nearly forty years. She
founded the UK-based Knowledge Unlatched with a mission to enable open
access to scholarly books. For Frances, the current scholarly-
book-publishing system is not working for anyone, and especially not for
monographs in the humanities and social sciences. Knowledge Unlatched is
committed to changing this and has been working with libraries to create
a sustainable alternative model for publishing scholarly books, sharing
the cost of making monographs (released under a Creative Commons
license) and savings costs over the long term. Since its launch,
Knowledge Unlatched has received several awards, including the
IFLA/Brill Open Access award in 2014 and a Curtin University Commercial
Innovation Award for Innovation in Education in 2015.

Dr. Pinter has been in academic publishing most of her career. About ten
years ago, she became acquainted with the Creative Commons founder
Lawrence Lessig and got interested in Creative Commons as a tool for
both protecting content online and distributing it free to users.

Not long after, she ran a project in Africa convincing publishers in
Uganda and South Africa to put some of their content online for free
using a Creative Commons license and to see what happened to print
sales. Sales went up, not down.

In 2008, Bloomsbury Academic, a new imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in
the United Kingdom, appointed her its founding publisher in London. As
part of the launch, Frances convinced Bloomsbury to differentiate
themselves by putting out monographs for free online under a Creative
Commons license (BY-NC or BY-NC-ND, i.e., Attribution-NonCommercial or
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs). This was seen as risky, as the
biggest cost for publishers is getting a book to the stage where it can
be printed. If everyone read the online book for free, there would be no
print-book sales at all, and the costs associated with getting the book
to print would be lost. Surprisingly, Bloomsbury found that sales of the
print versions of these books were 10 to 20 percent higher than normal.
Frances found it intriguing that the Creative Commons–licensed free
online book acts as a marketing vehicle for the print format.

Frances began to look at customer interest in the three forms of the
book: 1) the Creative Commons–licensed free online book in PDF form, 2)
the printed book, and 3) a digital version of the book on an aggregator
platform with enhanced features. She thought of this as the “ice cream
model”: the free PDF was vanilla ice cream, the printed book was an ice
cream cone, and the enhanced e-book was an ice cream sundae.

After a while, Frances had an epiphany—what if there was a way to get
libraries to underwrite the costs of making these books up until they’re
ready be printed, in other words, cover the fixed costs of getting to
the first digital copy? Then you could either bring down the cost of the
printed book, or do a whole bunch of interesting things with the printed
book and e-book—the ice cream cone or sundae part of the model.

This idea is similar to the article-processing charge some open-access
journals charge researchers to cover publishing costs. Frances began to
imagine a coalition of libraries paying for the prepress costs—a
“book-processing charge”—and providing everyone in the world with an
open-access version of the books released under a Creative Commons
license.

This idea really took hold in her mind. She didn’t really have a name
for it but began talking about it and making presentations to see if
there was interest. The more she talked about it, the more people agreed
it had appeal. She offered a bottle of champagne to anyone who could
come up with a good name for the idea. Her husband came up with
Knowledge Unlatched, and after two years of generating interest, she
decided to move forward and launch a community interest company (a UK
term for not-for-profit social enterprises) in 2012.

She describes the business model in a paper called Knowledge Unlatched:
Toward an Open and Networked Future for Academic Publishing:

1.  Publishers offer titles for sale reflecting origination costs only
    via Knowledge Unlatched.
2.  Individual libraries select titles either as individual titles or as
    collections (as they do from library suppliers now).
3.  Their selections are sent to Knowledge Unlatched specifying the
    titles to be purchased at the stated price(s).
4.  The price, called a Title Fee (set by publishers and negotiated by
    Knowledge Unlatched), is paid to publishers to cover the fixed costs
    of publishing each of the titles that were selected by a minimum
    number of libraries to cover the Title Fee.
5.  Publishers make the selected titles available Open Access (on a
    Creative Commons or similar open license) and are then paid the
    Title Fee which is the total collected from the libraries.
6.  Publishers make print copies, e-Pub, and other digital versions of
    selected titles available to member libraries at a discount that
    reflects their contribution to the Title Fee and incentivizes
    membership.1

The first round of this model resulted in a collection of twenty-eight
current titles from thirteen recognized scholarly publishers being
unlatched. The target was to have two hundred libraries participate. The
cost of the package per library was capped at \$1,680, which was an
average price of sixty dollars per book, but in the end they had nearly
three hundred libraries sharing the costs, and the price per book came
in at just under forty-three dollars.

The open-access, Creative Commons versions of these twenty-eight books
are still available online.4 Most books have been licensed with CC BY-NC
or CC BY-NC-ND. Authors are the copyright holder, not the publisher, and
negotiate choice of license as part of the publishing agreement. Frances
has found that most authors want to retain control over the commercial
and remix use of their work. Publishers list the book in their catalogs,
and the noncommercial restriction in the Creative Commons license
ensures authors continue to get royalties on sales of physical copies.

There are three cost variables to consider for each round: the overall
cost incurred by the publishers, total cost for each library to acquire
all the books, and the individual price per book. The fee publishers
charge for each title is a fixed charge, and Knowledge Unlatched
calculates the total amount for all the books being unlatched at a time.
The cost of an order for each library is capped at a maximum based on a
minimum number of libraries participating. If the number of
participating libraries exceeds the minimum, then the cost of the order
and the price per book go down for each library.

The second round, recently completed, unlatched seventy-eight books from
twenty-six publishers. For this round, Frances was experimenting with
the size and shape of the offerings. Books were being bundled into eight
small packages separated by subject (including Anthropology, History,
Literature, Media and Communications, and Politics), of around ten books
per package. Three hundred libraries around the world have to commit to
at least six of the eight packages to enable unlatching. The average
cost per book was just under fifty dollars. The unlatching process took
roughly ten months. It started with a call to publishers for titles,
followed by having a library task force select the titles, getting
authors’ permissions, getting the libraries to pledge, billing the
libraries, and finally, unlatching.

The longest part of the whole process is getting libraries to pledge and
commit funds. It takes about five months, as library buy-in has to fit
within acquisition cycles, budget cycles, and library-committee
meetings.

Knowledge Unlatched informs and recruits libraries through social media,
mailing lists, listservs, and library associations. Of the three hundred
libraries that participated in the first round, 80 percent are also
participating in the second round, and there are an additional eighty
new libraries taking part. Knowledge Unlatched is also working not just
with individual libraries but also library consortia, which has been
getting even more libraries involved.

Knowledge Unlatched is scaling up, offering 150 new titles in the second
half of 2016. It will also offer backlist titles, and in 2017 will start
to make journals open access too.

Knowledge Unlatched deliberately chose monographs as the initial type of
book to unlatch. Monographs are foundational and important, but also
problematic to keep going in the standard closed publishing model.

The cost for the publisher to get to a first digital copy of a monograph
is \$5,000 to \$50,000. A good one costs in the \$10,000 to \$15,000
range. Monographs typically don’t sell a lot of copies. A publisher who
in the past sold three thousand copies now typically sells only three
hundred. That makes unlatching monographs a low risk for publishers. For
the first round, it took five months to get thirteen publishers. For the
second round, it took one month to get twenty-six.

Authors don’t generally make a lot of royalties from monographs.
Royalties range from zero dollars to 5 to 10 percent of receipts. The
value to the author is the awareness it brings to them; when their book
is being read, it increases their reputation. Open access through
unlatching generates many more downloads and therefore awareness. (On
the Knowledge Unlatched website, you can find interviews with the
twenty-eight round-one authors describing their experience and the
benefits of taking part.)5

Library budgets are constantly being squeezed, partly due to the
inflation of journal subscriptions. But even without budget constraints,
academic libraries are moving away from buying physical copies. An
academic library catalog entry is typically a URL to wherever the book
is hosted. Or if they have enough electronic storage space, they may
download the digital file into their digital repository. Only
secondarily do they consider getting a print book, and if they do, they
buy it separately from the digital version.

Knowledge Unlatched offers libraries a compelling economic argument.
Many of the participating libraries would have bought a copy of the
monograph anyway, but instead of paying \$95 for a print copy or \$150
for a digital multiple-use copy, they pay \$50 to unlatch. It costs them
less, and it opens the book to not just the participating libraries, but
to the world.

Not only do the economics make sense, but there is very strong alignment
with library mandates. The participating libraries pay less than they
would have in the closed model, and the open-access book is available to
all libraries. While this means nonparticipating libraries could be seen
as free riders, in the library world, wealthy libraries are used to
paying more than poor libraries and accept that part of their money
should be spent to support open access. “Free ride” is more like
community responsibility. By the end of March 2016, the round-one books
had been downloaded nearly eighty thousand times in 175 countries.

For publishers, authors, and librarians, the Knowledge Unlatched model
for monographs is a win-win-win.

In the first round, Knowledge Unlatched’s overheads were covered by
grants. In the second round, they aim to demonstrate the model is
sustainable. Libraries and publishers will each pay a 7.5 percent
service charge that will go toward Knowledge Unlatched’s running costs.
With plans to scale up in future rounds, Frances figures they can fully
recover costs when they are unlatching two hundred books at a time.
Moving forward, Knowledge Unlatched is making investments in technology
and processes. Future plans include unlatching journals and older books.

Frances believes that Knowledge Unlatched is tapping into new ways of
valuing academic content. It’s about considering how many people can
find, access, and use your content without pay barriers. Knowledge
Unlatched taps into the new possibilities and behaviors of the digital
world. In the Knowledge Unlatched model, the content-creation process is
exactly the same as it always has been, but the economics are different.
For Frances, Knowledge Unlatched is connected to the past but moving
into the future, an evolution rather than a revolution.

Web links

1.  www.pinter.org.uk/pdfs/Toward\_an\_Open.pdf
2.  www.oapen.org
3.  www.hathitrust.org
4.  collections.knowledgeunlatched.org/collection-availability-1/
5.  www.knowledgeunlatched.org/featured-authors-section/

Lumen Learning

Lumen Learning is a for-profit company helping educational institutions
use open educational resources (OER). Founded in 2013 in the U.S.

lumenlearning.com

Revenue model: charging for custom services, grant funding

Interview date: December 21, 2015

Interviewees: David Wiley and Kim Thanos, cofounders

Profile written by Paul Stacey

Cofounded by open education visionary Dr. David Wiley and
education-technology strategist Kim Thanos, Lumen Learning is dedicated
to improving student success, bringing new ideas to pedagogy, and making
education more affordable by facilitating adoption of open educational
resources. In 2012, David and Kim partnered on a grant-funded project
called the Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative.1 It involved a set of
fully open general-education courses across eight colleges predominantly
serving at-risk students, with goals to dramatically reduce textbook
costs and collaborate to improve the courses to help students succeed.
David and Kim exceeded those goals: the cost of the required textbooks,
replaced with OER, decreased to zero dollars, and average
student-success rates improved by 5 to 10 percent when compared with
previous years. After a second round of funding, a total of more than
twenty-five institutions participated in and benefited from this
project. It was career changing for David and Kim to see the impact this
initiative had on low-income students. David and Kim sought further
funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who asked them to
define a plan to scale their work in a financially sustainable way. That
is when they decided to create Lumen Learning.

David and Kim went back and forth on whether it should be a nonprofit or
for-
profit. A nonprofit would make it a more comfortable fit with the
education sector but meant they’d be constantly fund-raising and seeking
grants from philanthropies. Also, grants usually require money to be
used in certain ways for specific deliverables. If you learn things
along the way that change how you think the grant money should be used,
there often isn’t a lot of flexibility to do so.

But as a for-profit, they’d have to convince educational institutions to
pay for what Lumen had to offer. On the positive side, they’d have more
control over what to do with the revenue and investment money; they
could make decisions to invest the funds or use them differently based
on the situation and shifting opportunities. In the end, they chose the
for-profit status, with its different model for and approach to
sustainability.

Right from the start, David and Kim positioned Lumen Learning as a way
to help institutions engage in open educational resources, or OER. OER
are teaching, learning, and research materials, in all different media,
that reside in the public domain or are released under an open license
that permits free use and repurposing by others.

Originally, Lumen did custom contracts for each institution. This was
complicated and challenging to manage. However, through that process
patterns emerged which allowed them to generalize a set of approaches
and offerings. Today they don’t customize as much as they used to, and
instead they tend to work with customers who can use their off-the-shelf
options. Lumen finds that institutions and faculty are generally very
good at seeing the value Lumen brings and are willing to pay for it.
Serving disadvantaged learner populations has led Lumen to be very
pragmatic; they describe what they offer in quantitative terms—with
facts and figures—and in a way that is very student-focused. Lumen
Learning helps colleges and universities—

-   replace expensive textbooks in high-enrollment courses with OER;
-   provide enrolled students day one access to Lumen’s fully
    customizable OER course materials through the institution’s
    learning-management system;
-   measure improvements in student success with metrics like passing
    rates, persistence, and course completion; and
-   collaborate with faculty to make ongoing improvements to OER based
    on student success research.

Lumen has developed a suite of open, Creative Commons–licensed
courseware in more than sixty-five subjects. All courses are freely and
publicly available right off their website. They can be copied and used
by others as long as they provide attribution to Lumen Learning
following the terms of the Creative Commons license.

Then there are three types of bundled services that cost money. One
option, which Lumen calls Candela courseware, offers integration with
the institution’s learning-management system, technical and pedagogical
support, and tracking of effectiveness. Candela courseware costs
institutions ten dollars per enrolled student.

A second option is Waymaker, which offers the services of Candela but
adds personalized learning technologies, such as study plans, automated
messages, and assessments, and helps instructors find and support the
students who need it most. Waymaker courses cost twenty-five dollars per
enrolled student.

The third and emerging line of business for Lumen is providing guidance
and support for institutions and state systems that are pursuing the
development of complete OER degrees. Often called Z-Degrees, these
programs eliminate textbook costs for students in all courses that make
up the degree (both required and elective) by replacing commercial
textbooks and other expensive resources with OER.

Lumen generates revenue by charging for their value-added tools and
services on top of their free courses, just as solar-power companies
provide the tools and services that help people use a free
resource—sunlight. And Lumen’s business model focuses on getting the
institutions to pay, not the students. With projects they did prior to
Lumen, David and Kim learned that students who have access to all course
materials from day one have greater success. If students had to pay,
Lumen would have to restrict access to those who paid. Right from the
start, their stance was that they would not put their content behind a
paywall. Lumen invests zero dollars in technologies and processes for
restricting access—no digital rights management, no time bombs. While
this has been a challenge from a business-model perspective, from an
open-access perspective, it has generated immense goodwill in the
community.

In most cases, development of their courses is funded by the institution
Lumen has a contract with. When creating new courses, Lumen typically
works with the faculty who are teaching the new course. They’re often
part of the institution paying Lumen, but sometimes Lumen has to expand
the team and contract faculty from other institutions. First, the
faculty identifies all of the course’s learning outcomes. Lumen then
searches for, aggregates, and curates the best OER they can find that
addresses those learning needs, which the faculty reviews.

Sometimes faculty like the existing OER but not the way it is presented.
The open licensing of existing OER allows Lumen to pick and choose from
images, videos, and other media to adapt and customize the course. Lumen
creates new content as they discover gaps in existing OER. Test-bank
items and feedback for students on their progress are areas where new
content is frequently needed. Once a course is created, Lumen puts it on
their platform with all the attributions and links to the original
sources intact, and any of Lumen’s new content is given an Attribution
(CC BY) license.

Using only OER made them experience firsthand how complex it could be to
mix differently licensed work together. A common strategy with OER is to
place the Creative Commons license and attribution information in the
website’s footer, which stays the same for all pages. This doesn’t quite
work, however, when mixing different OER together.

Remixing OER often results in multiple attributions on every page of
every course—text from one place, images from another, and videos from
yet another. Some are licensed as Attribution (CC BY), others as
Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA). If this information is put within the
text of the course, faculty members sometimes try to edit it and
students find it a distraction. Lumen dealt with this challenge by
capturing the license and attribution information as metadata, and
getting it to show up at the end of each page.

Lumen’s commitment to open licensing and helping low-income students has
led to strong relationships with institutions, open-education
enthusiasts, and grant funders. People in their network generously
increase the visibility of Lumen through presentations, word of mouth,
and referrals. Sometimes the number of general inquiries exceed Lumen’s
sales
capacity.

To manage demand and ensure the success of projects, their strategy is
to be proactive and focus on what’s going on in higher education in
different regions of the United States, watching out for things
happening at the system level in a way that fits with what Lumen offers.
A great example is the Virginia community college system, which is
building out Z-Degrees. David and Kim say there are nine other U.S.
states with similar system-level activity where Lumen is strategically
focusing its efforts. Where there are projects that would require a lot
of resources on Lumen’s part, they prioritize the ones that would impact
the largest number of students.

As a business, Lumen is committed to openness. There are two core
nonnegotiables: Lumen’s use of CC BY, the most permissive of the
Creative Commons licenses, for all the materials it creates; and day-one
access for students. Having clear nonnegotiables allows them to then
engage with the education community to solve for other challenges and
work with institutions to identify new business models that achieve
institution goals, while keeping Lumen healthy.

Openness also means that Lumen’s OER must necessarily be nonexclusive
and nonrivalrous. This represents several big challenges for the
business model: Why should you invest in creating something that people
will be reluctant to pay for? How do you ensure that the investment the
diverse education community makes in OER is not exploited? Lumen thinks
we all need to be clear about how we are benefiting from and
contributing to the open
community.

In the OER sector, there are examples of corporations, and even
institutions, acting as free riders. Some simply take and use open
resources without paying anything or contributing anything back. Others
give back the minimum amount so they can save face. Sustainability will
require those using open resources to give back an amount that seems
fair or even give back something that is generous.

Lumen does track institutions accessing and using their free content.
They proactively contact those institutions, with an estimate of how
much their students are saving and encouraging them to switch to a paid
model. Lumen explains the advantages of the paid model: a more
interactive relationship with Lumen; integration with the institution’s
learning-management system; a guarantee of support for faculty and
students; and future sustainability with funding supporting the
evolution and improvement of the OER they are using.

Lumen works hard to be a good corporate citizen in the OER community.
For David and Kim, a good corporate citizen gives more than they take,
adds unique value, and is very transparent about what they are taking
from community, what they are giving back, and what they are monetizing.
Lumen believes these are the building blocks of a sustainable model and
strives for a correct balance of all these factors.

Licensing all the content they produce with CC BY is a key part of
giving more value than they take. They’ve also worked hard at finding
the right structure for their value-add and how to package it in a way
that is understandable and repeatable.

As of the fall 2016 term, Lumen had eighty-six different open courses,
working relationships with ninety-two institutions, and more than
seventy-five thousand student enrollments. Lumen received early start-up
funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Hewlett
Foundation, and the Shuttleworth Foundation. Since then, Lumen has also
attracted investment funding. Over the last three years, Lumen has been
roughly 60 percent grant funded, 20 percent revenue earned, and 20
percent funded with angel capital. Going forward, their strategy is to
replace grant funding with revenue.

In creating Lumen Learning, David and Kim say they’ve landed on
solutions they never imagined, and there is still a lot of learning
taking place. For them, open business models are an emerging field where
we are all learning through sharing. Their biggest recommendations for
others wanting to pursue the open model are to make your commitment to
open resources public, let people know where you stand, and don’t back
away from it. It really is about trust.

Web link

1.  lumenlearning.com/innovative-projects/

Jonathan Mann

Jonathan Mann is a singer and songwriter who is most well known as the
“Song A Day” guy. Based in the U.S.

jonathanmann.net and

jonathanmann.bandcamp.com

Revenue model: charging for custom services, pay-what-you-want,
crowdfunding (subscription-based), charging for in-person version
(speaking engagements and musical performances)

Interview date: February 22, 2016

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

Jonathan Mann thinks of his business model as “hustling”—seizing nearly
every opportunity he sees to make money. The bulk of his income comes
from writing songs under commission for people and companies, but he has
a wide variety of income sources. He has supporters on the crowdfunding
site Patreon. He gets advertising revenue from YouTube and Bandcamp,
where he posts all of his music. He gives paid speaking engagements
about creativity and motivation. He has been hired by major conferences
to write songs summarizing what speakers have said in the conference
sessions.

His entrepreneurial spirit is coupled with a willingness to take action
quickly. A perfect illustration of his ability to act fast happened in
2010, when he read that Apple was having a conference the following day
to address a snafu related to the iPhone 4. He decided to write and post
a song about the iPhone 4 that day, and the next day he got a call from
the public relations people at Apple wanting to use and promote his
video at the Apple conference. The song then went viral, and the
experience landed him in Time magazine.

Jonathan’s successful “hustling” is also about old-fashioned
persistence. He is currently in his eighth straight year of writing one
song each day. He holds the Guinness World Record for consecutive daily
songwriting, and he is widely known as the “song-a-day guy.”

He fell into this role by, naturally, seizing a random opportunity a
friend alerted him to seven years ago—an event called Fun-A-Day, where
people are supposed to create a piece of art every day for thirty-one
days straight. He was in need of a new project, so he decided to give it
a try by writing and posting a song each day. He added a video component
to the songs because he knew people were more likely to watch video
online than simply listening to audio files.

He had a really good time doing the thirty-one-day challenge, so he
decided to see if he could continue it for one year. He never stopped.
He has written and posted a new song literally every day, seven days a
week, since he began the project in 2009. When he isn’t writing songs
that he is hired to write by clients, he writes songs about whatever is
on his mind that day. His songs are catchy and mostly lighthearted, but
they often contain at least an undercurrent of a deeper theme or
meaning. Occasionally, they are extremely personal, like the song he
cowrote with his exgirlfriend announcing their breakup. Rain or shine,
in sickness or health, Jonathan posts and writes a song every day. If he
is on a flight or otherwise incapable of getting Internet access in time
to meet the deadline, he will prepare ahead and have someone else post
the song for him.

Over time, the song-a-day gig became the basis of his livelihood. In the
beginning, he made money one of two ways. The first was by entering a
wide variety of contests and winning a handful. The second was by having
the occasional song and video go some varying degree of viral, which
would bring more eyeballs and mean that there were more people wanting
him to write songs for them. Today he earns most of his money this way.

His website explains his gig as “taking any message, from the super
simple to the totally complicated, and conveying that message through a
heartfelt, fun and quirky song.” He charges \$500 to create a produced
song and \$300 for an acoustic song. He has been hired for product
launches, weddings, conferences, and even Kickstarter campaigns like the
one that funded the production of this book.

Jonathan can’t recall when exactly he first learned about Creative
Commons, but he began applying CC licenses to his songs and videos as
soon as he discovered the option. “CC seems like such a no-brainer,”
Jonathan said. “I don’t understand how anything else would make sense.
It seems like such an obvious thing that you would want your work to be
able to be shared.”

His songs are essentially marketing for his services, so obviously the
further his songs spread, the better. Using CC licenses helps grease the
wheels, letting people know that Jonathan allows and encourages them to
copy, interact with, and remix his music. “If you let someone cover your
song or remix it or use parts of it, that’s how music is supposed to
work,” Jonathan said. “That is how music has worked since the beginning
of time. Our me-me, mine-mine culture has undermined that.”

There are some people who cover his songs fairly regularly, and he would
never shut that down. But he acknowledges there is a lot more he could
do to build community. “There is all of this conventional wisdom about
how to build an audience online, and I generally think I don’t do any of
that,” Jonathan said.

He does have a fan community he cultivates on Bandcamp, but it isn’t his
major focus. “I do have a core audience that has stuck around for a
really long time, some even longer than I’ve been doing song-a-day,” he
said. “There is also a transitional aspect that drop in and get what
they need and then move on.” Focusing less on community building than
other artists makes sense given Jonathan’s primary income source of
writing custom songs for clients.

Jonathan recognizes what comes naturally to him and leverages those
skills. Through the practice of daily songwriting, he realized he has a
gift for distilling complicated subjects into simple concepts and
putting them to music. In his song “How to Choose a Master Password,”
Jonathan explained the process of creating a secure password in a silly,
simple song. He was hired to write the song by a client who handed him a
long technical blog post from which to draw the information. Like a good
(and rare) journalist, he translated the technical concepts into
something understandable.

When he is hired by a client to write a song, he first asks them to send
a list of talking points and other information they want to include in
the song. He puts all of that into a text file and starts moving things
around, cutting and pasting until the message starts to come together.
The first thing he tries to do is grok the core message and develop the
chorus. Then he looks for connections or parts he can make rhyme. The
entire process really does resemble good journalism, but of course the
final product of his work is a song rather than news. “There is
something about being challenged and forced to take information that
doesn’t seem like it should be sung about
or doesn’t seem like it lends itself to a song,” he said. “I find that
creative challenge really satisfying. I enjoy getting lost in that
process.”

Jonathan admits that in an ideal world, he would exclusively write the
music he wanted to write, rather than what clients hire him to write.
But his business model is about capitalizing on his strengths as a
songwriter, and he has found a way to keep it interesting for
himself.

Jonathan uses nearly every tool possible to make money from his art, but
he does have lines he won’t cross. He won’t write songs about things he
fundamentally does not believe in, and there are times he has turned
down jobs on principle. He also won’t stray too much from his natural
style. “My style is silly, so I can’t really accommodate people who want
something super serious,” Jonathan said. “I do what I do very easily,
and it’s part of who I am.” Jonathan hasn’t gotten into writing
commercials for the same reasons; he is best at using his own unique
style rather than mimicking others.

Jonathan’s song-a-day commitment exemplifies the power of habit and
grit. Conventional wisdom about creative productivity, including advice
in books like the best-seller The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp,
routinely emphasizes the importance of ritual and action. No amount of
planning can replace the value of simple practice and just doing.
Jonathan Mann’s work is a living embodiment of these principles.

When he speaks about his work, he talks about how much the song-a-day
process has changed him. Rather than seeing any given piece of work as
precious and getting stuck on trying to make it perfect, he has become
comfortable with just doing. If today’s song is a bust, tomorrow’s song
might be better.

Jonathan seems to have this mentality about his career more generally.
He is constantly experimenting with ways to make a living while sharing
his work as widely as possible, seeing what sticks. While he has major
accomplishments he is proud of, like being in the Guinness World Records
or having his song used by Steve Jobs, he says he never truly feels
successful.

“Success feels like it’s over,” he said. “To a certain extent, a
creative person is not ever going to feel completely satisfied because
then so much of what drives you would be gone.”

Noun Project

The Noun Project is a for-profit company offering an online platform to
display visual icons from a global network of designers. Founded in 2010
in the U.S.

thenounproject.com

Revenue model: charging a transaction fee, charging for custom services

Interview date: October 6, 2015

Interviewee: Edward Boatman, cofounder

Profile written by Paul Stacey

The Noun Project creates and shares visual language. There are millions
who use Noun Project symbols to simplify communication across borders,
languages, and cultures.

The original idea for the Noun Project came to cofounder Edward Boatman
while he was a student in architecture design school. He’d always done a
lot of sketches and started to draw what used to fascinate him as a
child, like trains, sequoias, and bulldozers. He began thinking how
great it would be if he had a simple image or small icon of every single
object or concept on the planet.

When Edward went on to work at an architecture firm, he had to make a
lot of presentation boards for clients. But finding high-quality sources
for symbols and icons was difficult. He couldn’t find any website that
could provide them. Perhaps his idea for creating a library of icons
could actually help people in similar situations.

With his partner, Sofya Polyakov, he began collecting symbols for a
website and writing a business plan. Inspiration came from the book
Professor and the Madman, which chronicles the use of crowdsourcing to
create the Oxford English Dictionary in 1870. Edward began to imagine
crowdsourcing icons and symbols from volunteer designers around the
world.

Then Edward got laid off during the recession, which turned out to be a
huge catalyst. He decided to give his idea a go, and in 2010 Edward and
Sofya launched the Noun Project with a Kickstarter campaign, back when
Kickstarter was in its infancy.1 They thought it’d be a good way to
introduce the global web community to their idea. Their goal was to
raise \$1,500, but in twenty days they got over \$14,000. They realized
their idea had the potential to be something much bigger.

They created a platform where symbols and icons could be uploaded, and
Edward began recruiting talented designers to contribute their designs,
a process he describes as a relatively easy sell. Lots of designers have
old drawings just gathering “digital dust” on their hard drives. It’s
easy to convince them to finally share them with the world.

The Noun Project currently has about seven thousand designers from
around the world. But not all submissions are accepted. The Noun
Project’s quality-review process means that only the best works become
part of its collection. They make sure to provide encouraging,
constructive feedback whenever they reject a piece of work, which
maintains and builds the relationship they have with their global
community of designers.

Creative Commons is an integral part of the Noun Project’s business
model; this decision was inspired by Chris Anderson’s book Free: The
Future of Radical Price, which introduced Edward to the idea that you
could build a business model around free content.

Edward knew he wanted to offer a free visual language while still
providing some protection and reward for its contributors. There is a
tension between those two goals, but for Edward, Creative Commons
licenses bring this idealism and business opportunity together
elegantly. He chose the Attribution (CC BY) license, which means people
can download the icons for free and modify them and even use them
commercially. The requirement to give attribution to the original
creator ensures that the creator can build a reputation and get global
recognition for their work. And if they simply want to offer an icon
that people can use without having to give credit, they can use CC0 to
put the work into the public domain.

Noun Project’s business model and means of generating revenue have
evolved significantly over time. Their initial plan was to sell T-shirts
with the icons on it, which in retrospect Edward says was a horrible
idea. They did get a lot of email from people saying they loved the
icons but asking if they could pay a fee instead of giving attribution.
Ad agencies (among others) wanted to keep marketing and presentation
materials clean and free of attribution statements. For Edward, “That’s
when our lightbulb went off.”

They asked their global network of designers whether they’d be open to
receiving modest remuneration instead of attribution. Designers saw it
as a win-win. The idea that you could offer your designs for free and
have a global audience and maybe even make some money was pretty
exciting for most designers.

The Noun Project first adopted a model whereby using an icon without
giving attribution would cost \$1.99 per icon. The model’s second
iteration added a subscription component, where there would be a monthly
fee to access a certain number of icons—ten, fifty, a hundred, or five
hundred. However, users didn’t like these hard-count options. They
preferred to try out many similar icons to see which worked best before
eventually choosing the one they wanted to use. So the Noun Project
moved to an unlimited model, whereby users have unlimited access to the
whole library for a flat monthly fee. This service is called NounPro and
costs \$9.99 per month. Edward says this model is working well—good for
customers, good for creators, and good for the platform.

Customers then began asking for an application-programming interface
(API), which would allow Noun Project icons and symbols to be directly
accessed from within other applications. Edward knew that the icons and
symbols would be valuable in a lot of different contexts and that they
couldn’t possibly know all of them in advance, so they built an API with
a lot of flexibility. Knowing that most API applications would want to
use the icons without giving attribution, the API was built with the aim
of charging for its use. You can use what’s called the “Playground API”
for free to test how it integrates with your application, but full
implementation will require you to purchase the API Pro version.

The Noun Project shares revenue with its international designers. For
one-off purchases, the revenue is split 70 percent to the designer and
30 percent to Noun Project.

The revenue from premium purchases (the subscription and API options) is
split a little differently. At the end of each month, the total revenue
from subscriptions is divided by Noun Project’s total number of
downloads, resulting in a rate per download—for example, it could be
\$0.13 per download for that month. For each download, the revenue is
split 40 percent to the designer and 60 percent to the Noun Project.
(For API usage, it’s per use instead of per download.) Noun Project’s
share is higher this time as it’s providing more service to the user.

The Noun Project tries to be completely transparent about their royalty
structure.2 They tend to over communicate with creators about it because
building trust is the top
priority.

For most creators, contributing to the Noun Project is not a full-time
job but something they do on the side. Edward categorizes monthly
earnings for creators into three broad categories: enough money to buy
beer; enough to pay the bills; and most successful of all, enough to pay
the rent.

Recently the Noun Project launched a new app called Lingo. Designers can
use Lingo to organize not just their Noun Project icons and symbols but
also their photos, illustrations, UX designs, et cetera. You simply drag
any visual item directly into Lingo to save it. Lingo also works for
teams so people can share visuals with each other and search across
their combined collections. Lingo is free for personal use. A pro
version for \$9.99 per month lets you add guests. A team version for
\$49.95 per month allows up to twenty-five team members to collaborate,
and to view, use, edit, and add new assets to each other’s collections.
And if you subscribe to NounPro, you can access Noun Project from within
Lingo.

The Noun Project gives a ton of value away for free. A very large
percentage of their roughly one million members have a free account, but
there are still lots of paid accounts coming from digital designers,
advertising and design agencies, educators, and others who need to
communicate ideas visually.

For Edward, “creating, sharing, and celebrating the world’s visual
language” is the most important aspect of what they do; it’s their
stated mission. It differentiates them from others who offer graphics,
icons, or clip art.

Noun Project creators agree. When surveyed on why they participate in
the Noun Project, this is how designers rank their reasons: 1) to
support the Noun Project mission, 2) to promote their own personal
brand, and 3) to generate money. It’s striking to see that money comes
third, and mission, first. If you want to engage a global network of
contributors, it’s important to have a mission beyond making money.

In Edward’s view, Creative Commons is central to their mission of
sharing and social good. Using Creative Commons makes the Noun Project’s
mission genuine and has generated a lot of their initial traction and
credibility. CC comes with a built-in community of users and fans.

Edward told us, “Don’t underestimate the power of a passionate community
around your product or your business. They are going to go to bat for
you when you’re getting ripped in the media. If you go down the road of
choosing to work with Creative Commons, you’re taking the first step to
building a great community and tapping into a really awesome community
that comes with it. But you need to continue to foster that community
through other initiatives and continue to nurture it.”

The Noun Project nurtures their creators’ second motivation—promoting a
personal brand—by connecting every icon and symbol to the creator’s name
and profile page; each profile features their full collection. Users can
also search the icons by the creator’s name.

The Noun Project also builds community through Iconathons—hackathons for
icons.2 In partnership with a sponsoring organization, the Noun Project
comes up with a theme (e.g., sustainable energy, food bank, guerrilla
gardening, human rights) and a list of icons that are needed, which
designers are invited to create at the event. The results are
vectorized, and added to the Noun Project using CC0 so they can be used
by anyone for free.

Providing a free version of their product that satisfies a lot of their
customers’ needs has actually enabled the Noun Project to build the paid
version, using a service-oriented model. The Noun Project’s success lies
in creating services and content that are a strategic mix of free and
paid while staying true to their mission—creating, sharing, and
celebrating the world’s visual language. Integrating Creative Commons
into their model has been key to that goal.

Web links

1.  www.kickstarter.com/projects/tnp/building-a-free-collection-of-our-worlds-visual-sy/description
2.  thenounproject.com/handbook/royalties/\#getting\_paid
3.  thenounproject.com/iconathon/

Open Data Institute

The Open Data Institute is an independent nonprofit that connects,
equips, and inspires people around the world to innovate with data.
Founded in 2012 in the UK.

theodi.org

Revenue model: grant and government funding, charging for custom
services, donations

Interview date: November 11, 2015

Interviewee: Jeni Tennison, technical director

Profile written by Paul Stacey

Cofounded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt in 2012, the
London-based Open Data Institute (ODI) offers data-related training,
events, consulting services, and research. For ODI, Creative Commons
licenses are central to making their own business model and their
customers’ open. CC BY (Attribution), CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike),
and CC0 (placed in the public domain) all play a critical role in ODI’s
mission to help people around the world innovate with data.

Data underpins planning and decision making across all aspects of
society. Weather data helps farmers know when to plant their crops,
flight time data from airplane companies helps us plan our travel, data
on local housing informs city planning. When this data is not only
accurate and timely, but open and accessible, it opens up new
possibilities. Open data can be a resource businesses use to build new
products and services. It can help governments measure progress, improve
efficiency, and target investments. It can help citizens improve their
lives by better understanding what is happening around them.

The Open Data Institute’s 2012–17 business plan starts out by describing
its vision to establish itself as a world-leading center and to research
and be innovative with the opportunities created by the UK government’s
open data policy. (The government was an early pioneer in open policy
and open-data initiatives.) It goes on to say that the ODI wants to—

-   demonstrate the commercial value of open government data and how
    open-data policies affect this;
-   develop the economic benefits case and business models for open
    data;
-   help UK businesses use open data; and
-   show how open data can improve public services.1

ODI is very explicit about how it wants to make open business models,
and defining what this means. Jeni Tennison, ODI’s technical director,
puts it this way: “There is a whole ecosystem of open—open-source
software, open government, open-access research—and a whole ecosystem of
data. ODI’s work cuts across both, with an emphasis on where they
overlap—with open data.” ODI’s particular focus is to show open data’s
potential for revenue.

As an independent nonprofit, ODI secured £10 million over five years
from the UK government via Innovate UK, an agency that promotes
innovation in science and technology. For this funding, ODI has to
secure matching funds from other sources, some of which were met through
a \$4.75-million investment from the Omidyar Network.

Jeni started out as a developer and technical architect for data.gov.uk,
the UK government’s pioneering open-data initiative. She helped make
data sets from government departments available as open data. She joined
ODI in 2012 when it was just starting up, as one of six people. It now
has a staff of about sixty.

ODI strives to have half its annual budget come from the core UK
government and Omidyar grants, and the other half from project-based
research and commercial work. In Jeni’s view, having this balance of
revenue sources establishes some stability, but also keeps them
motivated to go out and generate these matching funds in response to
market needs.

On the commercial side, ODI generates funding through memberships,
training, and advisory services.

You can join the ODI as an individual or commercial member. Individual
membership is pay-what-you-can, with options ranging from £1 to £100.
Members receive a newsletter and related communications and a discount
on ODI training courses and the annual summit, and they can display an
ODI-supporter badge on their website. Commercial membership is divided
into two tiers: small to medium size enterprises and nonprofits at £720
a year, and corporations and government organizations at £2,200 a year.
Commercial members have greater opportunities to connect and
collaborate, explore the benefits of open data, and unlock new business
opportunities. (All members are listed on their website.)2

ODI provides standardized open data training courses in which anyone can
enroll. The initial idea was to offer an intensive and academically
oriented diploma in open data, but it quickly became clear there was no
market for that. Instead, they offered a five-day-long public training
course, which has subsequently been reduced to three days; now the most
popular course is one day long. The fee, in addition to the time
commitment, can be a barrier for participation. Jeni says, “Most of the
people who would be able to pay don’t know they need it. Most who know
they need it can’t pay.” Public-sector organizations sometimes give
vouchers to their employees so they can attend as a form of professional
development.

ODI customizes training for clients as well, for which there is more
demand. Custom training usually emerges through an established
relationship with an organization. The training program is based on a
definition of open-data knowledge as applicable to the organization and
on the skills needed by their high-level executives, management, and
technical staff. The training tends to generate high interest and
commitment.

Education about open data is also a part of ODI’s annual summit event,
where curated presentations and speakers showcase the work of ODI and
its members across the entire ecosystem. Tickets to the summit are
available to the public, and hundreds of people and organizations attend
and participate. In 2014, there were four thematic tracks and over 750
attendees.

In addition to memberships and training, ODI provides advisory services
to help with technical-data support, technology development, change
management, policies, and other areas. ODI has advised large commercial
organizations, small businesses, and international governments; the
focus at the moment is on government, but ODI is working to shift more
toward commercial organizations.

On the commercial side, the following value propositions seem to
resonate:

-   Data-driven insights. Businesses need data from outside their
    business to get more insight. Businesses can generate value and more
    effectively pursue their own goals if they open up their own
    data too. Big data is a hot topic.
-   Open innovation. Many large-scale enterprises are aware they don’t
    innovate very well. One way they can innovate is to open up
    their data. ODI encourages them to do so even if it exposes problems
    and challenges. The key is to invite other people to help while
    still maintaining organizational autonomy.
-   Corporate social responsibility. While this resonates with
    businesses, ODI cautions against having it be the sole reason for
    making data open. If a business is just thinking about open data as
    a way to be transparent and accountable, they can miss out on
    efficiencies and opportunities.

During their early years, ODI wanted to focus solely on the United
Kingdom. But in their first year, large delegations of government
visitors from over fifty countries wanted to learn more about the UK
government’s open-data practices and how ODI saw that translating into
economic value. They were contracted as a service provider to
international governments, which prompted a need to set up international
ODI “nodes.”

Nodes are franchises of the ODI at a regional or city level. Hosted by
existing (for-profit or not-for-profit) organizations, they operate
locally but are part of the global network. Each ODI node adopts the
charter, a set of guiding principles and rules under which ODI operates.
They develop and deliver training, connect people and businesses through
membership and events, and communicate open-data stories from their part
of the world. There are twenty-seven different nodes across nineteen
countries. ODI nodes are charged a small fee to be part of the network
and to use the brand.

ODI also runs programs to help start-ups in the UK and across Europe
develop a sustainable business around open data, offering mentoring,
advice, training, and even office space.3

A big part of ODI’s business model revolves around community building.
Memberships, training, summits, consulting services, nodes, and start-up
programs create an ever-growing network of open-data users and leaders.
(In fact, ODI even operates something called an Open Data Leaders
Network.) For ODI, community is key to success. They devote significant
time and effort to build it, not just online but through face-to-face
events.

ODI has created an online tool that organizations can use to assess the
legal, practical, technical, and social aspects of their open data. If
it is of high quality, the organization can earn ODI’s Open Data
Certificate, a globally recognized mark that signals that their open
data is useful, reliable, accessible, discoverable, and supported.4

Separate from commercial activities, the ODI generates funding through
research grants. Research includes looking at evidence on the impact of
open data, development of open-data tools and standards, and how to
deploy open data at scale.

Creative Commons 4.0 licenses cover database rights and ODI recommends
CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC0 for data releases. ODI encourages publishers of
data to use Creative Commons licenses rather than creating new “open
licenses” of their own.

For ODI, open is at the heart of what they do. They also release any
software code they produce under open-source-software licenses, and
publications and reports under CC BY or CC BY-SA licenses. ODI’s mission
is to connect and equip people around the world so they can innovate
with data. Disseminating stories, research, guidance, and code under an
open license is essential for achieving that mission. It also
demonstrates that it is perfectly possible to generate sustainable
revenue streams that do not rely on restrictive licensing of content,
data, or code. People pay to have ODI experts provide training to them,
not for the content of the training; people pay for the advice ODI gives
them, not for the methodologies they use. Producing open content, data,
and source code helps establish credibility and creates leads for the
paid services that they offer. According to Jeni, “The biggest lesson we
have learned is that it is completely possible to be open, get
customers, and make money.”

To serve as evidence of a successful open business model and return on
investment, ODI has a public dashboard of key performance indicators.
Here are a few metrics as of April 27, 2016:

-   Total amount of cash investments unlocked in direct investments in
    ODI, competition funding, direct contracts, and partnerships, and
    income that ODI nodes and ODI start-ups have generated since joining
    the ODI program: £44.5 million
-   Total number of active members and nodes across the globe: 1,350
-   Total sales since ODI began: £7.44 million
-   Total number of unique people reached since ODI began, in person and
    online: 2.2 million
-   Total Open Data Certificates created: 151,000
-   Total number of people trained by ODI and its nodes since ODI began:
    5,0805

Web links

1.  e642e8368e3bf8d5526e-464b4b70b4554c1a79566214d402739e.r6.cf3.rackcdn.com/odi-business-plan-may-release.pdf
2.  directory.theodi.org/members
3.  theodi.org/odi-startup-programme;
    theodi.org/open-data-incubator-for-europe
4.  certificates.theodi.org
5.  dashboards.theodi.org/company/all

OpenDesk

Opendesk is a for-profit company offering an online platform that
connects furniture designers around the world with customers and local
makers who bring the designs to life. Founded in 2014 in the UK.

www.opendesk.cc

Revenue model: charging a transaction fee

Interview date: November 4, 2015

Interviewees: Nick Ierodiaconou and Joni Steiner, cofounders

Profile written by Paul Stacey

Opendesk is an online platform that connects furniture designers around
the world not just with customers but also with local registered makers
who bring the designs to life. Opendesk and the designer receive a
portion of every sale that is made by a maker.

Cofounders Nick Ierodiaconou and Joni Steiner studied and worked as
architects together. They also made goods. Their first client was Mint
Digital, who had an interest in open licensing. Nick and Joni were
exploring digital fabrication, and Mint’s interest in open licensing got
them to thinking how the open-source world may interact and apply to
physical goods. They sought to design something for their client that
was also reproducible. As they put it, they decided to “ship the recipe,
but not the goods.” They created the design using software, put it under
an open license, and had it manufactured locally near the client. This
was the start of the idea for Opendesk. The idea for Wikihouse—another
open project dedicated to accessible housing for all—started as
discussions around the same table. The two projects ultimately went on
separate paths, with Wikihouse becoming a nonprofit foundation and
Opendesk a for-profit company.

When Nick and Joni set out to create Opendesk, there were a lot of
questions about the viability of distributed manufacturing. No one was
doing it in a way that was even close to realistic or competitive. The
design community had the intent, but fulfilling this vision was still a
long way away.

And now this sector is emerging, and Nick and Joni are highly interested
in the commercialization aspects of it. As part of coming up with a
business model, they began investigating intellectual property and
licensing options. It was a thorny space, especially for designs. Just
what aspect of a design is copyrightable? What is patentable? How can
allowing for digital sharing and distribution be balanced against the
designer’s desire to still hold ownership? In the end, they decided
there was no need to reinvent the wheel and settled on using Creative
Commons.

When designing the Opendesk system, they had two goals. They wanted
anyone, anywhere in the world, to be able to download designs so that
they could be made locally, and they wanted a viable model that
benefited designers when their designs were sold. Coming up with a
business model was going to be complex.

They gave a lot of thought to three angles—the potential for social
sharing, allowing designers to choose their license, and the impact
these choices would have on the business model.

In support of social sharing, Opendesk actively advocates for (but
doesn’t demand) open licensing. And Nick and Joni are agnostic about
which Creative Commons license is used; it’s up to the designer. They
can be proprietary or choose from the full suite of Creative Commons
licenses, deciding for themselves how open or closed they want to be.

For the most part, designers love the idea of sharing content. They
understand that you get positive feedback when you’re attributed, what
Nick and Joni called “reputational glow.” And Opendesk does an awesome
job profiling the designers.1

While designers are largely OK with personal sharing, there is a concern
that someone will take the design and manufacture the furniture in bulk,
with the designer not getting any benefits. So most Opendesk designers
choose the Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC).

Anyone can download a design and make it themselves, provided it’s for
noncommercial use — and there have been many, many downloads. Or users
can buy the product from Opendesk, or from a registered maker in
Opendesk’s network, for on-demand personal fabrication. The network of
Opendesk makers currently is made up of those who do digital fabrication
using a computer-controlled CNC (Computer Numeric Control) machining
device that cuts shapes out of wooden sheets according to the
specifications in the design file.

Makers benefit from being part of Opendesk’s network. Making furniture
for local customers is paid work, and Opendesk generates business for
them. Joni said, “Finding a whole network and community of makers was
pretty easy because we built a site where people could write in about
their capabilities. Building the community by learning from the maker
community is how we have moved forward.” Opendesk now has relationships
with hundreds of makers in countries all around the world.2

The makers are a critical part of the Opendesk business model. Their
model builds off the makers’ quotes. Here’s how it’s expressed on
Opendesk’s website:

When customers buy an Opendesk product directly from a registered maker,
they pay:

-   the manufacturing cost as set by the maker (this covers material and
    labour costs for the product to be manufactured and any extra
    assembly costs charged by the maker)
-   a design fee for the designer (a design fee that is paid to the
    designer every time their design is used)
-   a percentage fee to the Opendesk platform (this supports the
    infrastructure and ongoing development of the platform that helps us
    build out our marketplace)
-   a percentage fee to the channel through which the sale is made (at
    the moment this is Opendesk, but in the future we aim to open this
    up to third-party sellers who can sell Opendesk products through
    their own channels—this covers sales and marketing fees for the
    relevant channel)
-   a local delivery service charge (the delivery is typically charged
    by the maker, but in some cases may be paid to a third-party
    delivery partner)
-   charges for any additional services the customer chooses, such as
    on-site assembly (additional services are discretionary—in many
    cases makers will be happy to quote for assembly on-site and
    designers may offer bespoke design options)
-   local sales taxes (variable by customer and maker location)3

They then go into detail how makers’ quotes are created:

When a customer wants to buy an Opendesk . . . they are provided with a
transparent breakdown of fees including the manufacturing cost, design
fee, Opendesk platform fee and channel fees. If a customer opts to buy
by getting in touch directly with a registered local maker using a
downloaded Opendesk file, the maker is responsible for ensuring the
design fee, Opendesk platform fee and channel fees are included in any
quote at the time of sale. Percentage fees are always based on the
underlying manufacturing cost and are typically apportioned as follows:

-   manufacturing cost: fabrication, finishing and any other costs as
    set by the maker (excluding any services like delivery or
    on-site assembly)
-   design fee: 8 percent of the manufacturing cost
-   platform fee: 12 percent of the manufacturing cost
-   channel fee: 18 percent of the manufacturing cost
-   sales tax: as applicable (depends on product and location)

Opendesk shares revenue with their community of designers. According to
Nick and Joni, a typical designer fee is around 2.5 percent, so
Opendesk’s 8 percent is more generous, and providing a higher value to
the designer.

The Opendesk website features stories of designers and makers. Denis
Fuzii published the design for the Valovi Chair from his studio in São
Paulo. His designs have been downloaded over five thousand times in
ninety-five countries. I.J. CNC Services is Ian Jinks, a professional
maker based in the United Kingdom. Opendesk now makes up a large
proportion of his business.

To manage resources and remain effective, Opendesk has so far focused on
a very narrow niche—primarily office furniture of a certain simple
aesthetic, which uses only one type of material and one manufacturing
technique. This allows them to be more strategic and more disruptive in
the market, by getting things to market quickly with competitive prices.
It also reflects their vision of creating reproducible and functional
pieces.

On their website, Opendesk describes what they do as “open making”:
“Designers get a global distribution channel. Makers get profitable jobs
and new customers. You get designer products without the designer price
tag, a more social, eco-friendly alternative to mass-production and an
affordable way to buy custom-made products.”

Nick and Joni say that customers like the fact that the furniture has a
known provenance. People really like that their furniture was designed
by a certain international designer but was made by a maker in their
local community; it’s a great story to tell. It certainly sets apart
Opendesk furniture from the usual mass-produced items from a store.

Nick and Joni are taking a community-based approach to define and evolve
Opendesk and the “open making” business model. They’re engaging thought
leaders and practitioners to define this new movement. They have a
separate Open Making site, which includes a manifesto, a field guide,
and an invitation to get involved in the Open Making community.4 People
can submit ideas and discuss the principles and business practices
they’d like to see used.

Nick and Joni talked a lot with us about intellectual property (IP) and
commercialization. Many of their designers fear the idea that someone
could take one of their design files and make and sell infinite number
of pieces of furniture with it. As a consequence, most Opendesk
designers choose the Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC).

Opendesk established a set of principles for what their community
considers commercial and noncommercial use. Their website states:

It is unambiguously commercial use when anyone:

-   charges a fee or makes a profit when making an Opendesk
-   sells (or bases a commercial service on) an Opendesk

It follows from this that noncommercial use is when you make an Opendesk
yourself, with no intention to gain commercial advantage or monetary
compensation. For example, these qualify as noncommercial:

-   you are an individual with your own CNC machine, or access to a
    shared CNC machine, and will personally cut and make a few pieces of
    furniture yourself
-   you are a student (or teacher) and you use the design files for
    educational purposes or training (and do not intend to sell the
    resulting pieces)
-   you work for a charity and get furniture cut by volunteers, or by
    employees at a fab lab or maker space

Whether or not people technically are doing things that implicate IP,
Nick and Joni have found that people tend to comply with the wishes of
creators out of a sense of fairness. They have found that behavioral
economics can replace some of the thorny legal issues. In their business
model, Nick and Joni are trying to suspend the focus on IP and build an
open business model that works for all stakeholders—designers, channels,
manufacturers, and customers. For them, the value Opendesk generates
hangs off “open,” not IP.

The mission of Opendesk is about relocalizing manufacturing, which
changes the way we think about how goods are made. Commercialization is
integral to their mission, and they’ve begun to focus on success metrics
that track how many makers and designers are engaged through Opendesk in
revenue-making work.

As a global platform for local making, Opendesk’s business model has
been built on honesty, transparency, and inclusivity. As Nick and Joni
describe it, they put ideas out there that get traction and then have
faith in people.

Web links

1.  www.opendesk.cc/designers
2.  www.opendesk.cc/open-making/makers/
3.  www.opendesk.cc/open-making/join
4.  openmaking.is

OpenStax

OpenStax is a nonprofit that provides free, openly licensed textbooks
for high-enrollment introductory college courses and Advanced Placement
courses. Founded in 2012 in the U.S.

www.openstaxcollege.org

Revenue model: grant funding, charging for custom services, charging for
physical copies (textbook sales)

Interview date: December 16, 2015

Interviewee: David Harris, editor-in-chief

Profile written by Paul Stacey

OpenStax is an extension of a program called Connexions, which was
started in 1999 by Dr. Richard Baraniuk, the Victor E. Cameron Professor
of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in Houston,
Texas. Frustrated by the limitations of traditional textbooks and
courses, Dr. Baraniuk wanted to provide authors and learners a way to
share and freely adapt educational materials such as courses, books, and
reports. Today, Connexions (now called OpenStax CNX) is one of the
world’s best libraries of customizable educational materials, all
licensed with Creative Commons and available to anyone, anywhere,
anytime—for free.

In 2008, while in a senior leadership role at WebAssign and looking at
ways to reduce the risk that came with relying on publishers, David
Harris began investigating open educational resources (OER) and
discovered Connexions. A year and a half later, Connexions received a
grant to help grow the use of OER so that it could meet the needs of
students who couldn’t afford textbooks. David came on board to spearhead
this effort. Connexions became OpenStax CNX; the program to create open
textbooks became OpenStax College, now simply called OpenStax.

David brought with him a deep understanding of the best practices of
publishing along with where publishers have inefficiencies. In David’s
view, peer review and high standards for quality are critically
important if you want to scale easily. Books have to have logical scope
and sequence, they have to exist as a whole and not in pieces, and they
have to be easy to find. The working hypothesis for the launch of
OpenStax was to professionally produce a turnkey textbook by investing
effort up front, with the expectation that this would lead to rapid
growth through easy downstream adoptions by faculty and students.

In 2012, OpenStax College launched as a nonprofit with the aim of
producing high-quality, peer-reviewed full-color textbooks that would be
available for free for the twenty-five most heavily attended college
courses in the nation. Today they are fast approaching that number.
There is data that proves the success of their original hypothesis on
how many students they could help and how much money they could help
save.1 Professionally produced content scales rapidly. All with no sales
force!

OpenStax textbooks are all Attribution (CC BY) licensed, and each
textbook is available as a PDF, an e-book, or web pages. Those who want
a physical copy can buy one for an affordable price. Given the cost of
education and student debt in North America, free or very low-cost
textbooks are very appealing. OpenStax encourages students to talk to
their professor and librarians about these textbooks and to advocate for
their use.

Teachers are invited to try out a single chapter from one of the
textbooks with students. If that goes well, they’re encouraged to adopt
the entire book. They can simply paste a URL into their course syllabus,
for free and unlimited access. And with the CC BY license, teachers are
free to delete chapters, make changes, and customize any book to fit
their needs.

Any teacher can post corrections, suggest examples for difficult
concepts, or volunteer as an editor or author. As many teachers also
want supplemental material to accompany a textbook, OpenStax also
provides slide presentations, test banks, answer keys, and so on.

Institutions can stand out by offering students a lower-cost education
through the use of OpenStax textbooks; there’s even a textbook-savings
calculator they can use to see how much students would save. OpenStax
keeps a running list of institutions that have adopted their textbooks.2

Unlike traditional publishers’ monolithic approach of controlling
intellectual property, distribution, and so many other aspects, OpenStax
has adopted a model that embraces open licensing and relies on an
extensive network of partners.

Up-front funding of a professionally produced all-color turnkey textbook
is expensive. For this part of their model, OpenStax relies on
philanthropy. They have initially been funded by the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, the 20 Million Minds Foundation, the Maxfield
Foundation, the Calvin K. Kazanjian Foundation, and Rice University. To
develop additional titles and supporting technology is probably still
going to require philanthropic investment.

However, ongoing operations will not rely on foundation grants but
instead on funds received through an ecosystem of over forty partners,
whereby a partner takes core content from OpenStax and adds features
that it can create revenue from. For example, WebAssign, an online
homework and assessment tool, takes the physics book and adds
algorithmically generated physics problems, with problem-specific
feedback, detailed solutions, and tutorial support. WebAssign resources
are available to students for a fee.

Another example is Odigia, who has turned OpenStax books into
interactive learning experiences and created additional tools to measure
and promote student engagement. Odigia licenses its learning platform to
institutions. Partners like Odigia and WebAssign give a percentage of
the revenue they earn back to OpenStax, as mission-support fees.
OpenStax has already published revisions of their titles, such as
Introduction to Sociology 2e, using these funds.

In David’s view, this approach lets the market operate at peak
efficiency. OpenStax’s partners don’t have to worry about developing
textbook content, freeing them up from those development costs and
letting them focus on what they do best. With OpenStax textbooks
available at no cost, they can provide their services at a lower
cost—not free, but still saving students money. OpenStax benefits not
only by receiving mission-support fees but through free publicity and
marketing. OpenStax doesn’t have a sales force; partners are out there
showcasing their materials.

OpenStax’s cost of sales to acquire a single student is very, very low
and is a fraction of what traditional players in the market face. This
year, Tyton Partners is actually evaluating the costs of sales for an
OER effort like OpenStax in comparison with incumbents. David looks
forward to sharing these findings with the community.

While OpenStax books are available online for free, many students still
want a print copy. Through a partnership with a print and courier
company, OpenStax offers a complete solution that scales. OpenStax sells
tens of thousands of print books. The price of an OpenStax sociology
textbook is about twenty-eight dollars, a fraction of what sociology
textbooks usually cost. OpenStax keeps the prices low but does aim to
earn a small margin on each book sold, which also contributes to ongoing
operations.

Campus-based bookstores are part of the OpenStax solution. OpenStax
collaborates with NACSCORP (the National Association of College Stores
Corporation) to provide print versions of their textbooks in the stores.
While the overall cost of the textbook is significantly less than a
traditional textbook, bookstores can still make a profit on sales.
Sometimes students take the savings they have from the lower-priced book
and use it to buy other things in the bookstore. And OpenStax is trying
to break the expensive behavior of excessive returns by having a
no-returns policy. This is working well, since the sell-through of their
print titles is virtually a hundred percent.

David thinks of the OpenStax model as “OER 2.0.” So what is OER 1.0?
Historically in the OER field, many OER initiatives have been locally
funded by institutions or government ministries. In David’s view, this
results in content that has high local value but is infrequently adopted
nationally. It’s therefore difficult to show payback over a time scale
that is reasonable.

OER 2.0 is about OER intended to be used and adopted on a national level
right from the start. This requires a bigger investment up front but
pays off through wide geographic adoption. The OER 2.0 process for
OpenStax involves two development models. The first is what David calls
the acquisition model, where OpenStax purchases the rights from a
publisher or author for an already published book and then extensively
revises it. The OpenStax physics textbook, for example, was licensed
from an author after the publisher released the rights back to the
authors. The second model is to develop a book from scratch, a good
example being their biology book.

The process is similar for both models. First they look at the scope and
sequence of existing textbooks. They ask questions like what does the
customer need? Where are students having challenges? Then they identify
potential authors and put them through a rigorous evaluation—only one in
ten authors make it through. OpenStax selects a team of authors who come
together to develop a template for a chapter and collectively write the
first draft (or revise it, in the acquisitions model). (OpenStax doesn’t
do books with just a single author as David says it risks the project
going longer than scheduled.) The draft is peer-reviewed with no less
than three reviewers per chapter. A second draft is generated, with
artists producing illustrations and visuals to go along with the text.
The book is then copyedited to ensure grammatical correctness and a
singular voice. Finally, it goes into production and through a final
proofread. The whole process is very time-consuming.

All the people involved in this process are paid. OpenStax does not rely
on volunteers. Writers, reviewers, illustrators, and editors are all
paid an up-front fee—OpenStax does not use a royalty model. A
best-selling author might make more money under the traditional
publishing model, but that is only maybe 5 percent of all authors. From
David’s perspective, 95 percent of all authors do better under the OER
2.0 model, as there is no risk to them and they earn all the money up
front.

David thinks of the Attribution license (CC BY) as the “innovation
license.” It’s core to the mission of OpenStax, letting people use their
textbooks in innovative ways without having to ask for permission. It
frees up the whole market and has been central to OpenStax being able to
bring on partners. OpenStax sees a lot of customization of their
materials. By enabling frictionless remixing, CC BY gives teachers
control and academic freedom.

Using CC BY is also a good example of using strategies that traditional
publishers can’t. Traditional publishers rely on copyright to prevent
others from making copies and heavily invest in digital rights
management to ensure their books aren’t shared. By using CC BY, OpenStax
avoids having to deal with digital rights management and its costs.
OpenStax books can be copied and shared over and over again. CC BY
changes the rules of engagement and takes advantage of traditional
market inefficiencies.

As of September 16, 2016, OpenStax has achieved some impressive results.
From the OpenStax at a Glance fact sheet from their recent press kit:

-   Books published: 23
-   Students who have used OpenStax: 1.6 million
-   Money saved for students: \$155 million
-   Money saved for students in the 2016/17 academic year: \$77 million
-   Schools that have used OpenStax: 2,668 (This number reflects all
    institutions using at least one OpenStax textbook. Out of 2,668
    schools, 517 are two-year colleges, 835 four-year colleges and
    universities, and 344 colleges and universities outside the U.S.)

While OpenStax has to date been focused on the United States, there is
overseas adoption especially in the science, technology, engineering,
and math (STEM) fields. Large scale adoption in the United States is
seen as a necessary precursor to international interest.

OpenStax has primarily focused on introductory-level college courses
where there is high enrollment, but they are starting to think about
verticals—a broad offering for a specific group or need. David thinks it
would be terrific if OpenStax could provide access to free textbooks
through the entire curriculum of a nursing degree, for example.

Finally, for OpenStax success is not just about the adoption of their
textbooks and student savings. There is a human aspect to the work that
is hard to quantify but incredibly important. They get emails from
students saying how OpenStax saved them from making difficult choices
like buying food or a textbook. OpenStax would also like to assess the
impact their books have on learning efficiency, persistence, and
completion. By building an open business model based on Creative
Commons, OpenStax is making it possible for every student who wants
access to education to get it.

Web links

1.  news.rice.edu/files/2016/01/0119-OPENSTAX-2016Infographic-lg-1tahxiu.jpg
2.  openstax.org/adopters

Amanda Palmer

Amanda Palmer is a musician, artist, and writer. Based in the U.S.

amandapalmer.net

Revenue model: crowdfunding (subscription-based), pay-what-you-want,
charging for physical copies (book and album sales), charg-ing for
in-person version (performances), selling merchandise

Interview date: December 15, 2015

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

Since the beginning of her career, Amanda Palmer has been on what she
calls a “journey with no roadmap,” continually experimenting to find new
ways to sustain her creative work. 1

In her best-selling book, The Art of Asking, Amanda articulates exactly
what she has been and continues to strive for—“the ideal sweet spot . .
. in which the artist can share freely and directly feel the
reverberations of their artistic gifts to the community, and make a
living doing that.”

While she seems to have successfully found that sweet spot for herself,
Amanda is the first to acknowledge there is no silver bullet. She thinks
the digital age is both an exciting and frustrating time for creators.
“On the one hand, we have this beautiful shareability,” Amanda said. “On
the other, you’ve got a bunch of confused artists wondering how to make
money to buy food so we can make more art.”

Amanda began her artistic career as a street performer. She would dress
up in an antique wedding gown, paint her face white, stand on a stack of
milk crates, and hand out flowers to strangers as part of a silent
dramatic performance. She collected money in a hat. Most people walked
by her without stopping, but an essential few stopped to watch and drop
some money into her hat to show their appreciation. Rather than dwelling
on the majority of people who ignored her, she felt thankful for those
who stopped. “All I needed was . . . some people,” she wrote in her
book. “Enough people. Enough to make it worth coming back the next day,
enough people to help me make rent and put food on the table. Enough so
I could keep making art.”

Amanda has come a long way from her street-performing days, but her
career remains dominated by that same sentiment—finding ways to reach
“her crowd” and feeling gratitude when she does. With her band the
Dresden Dolls, Amanda tried the traditional path of signing with a
record label. It didn’t take for a variety of reasons, but one of them
was that the label had absolutely no interest in Amanda’s view of
success. They wanted hits, but making music for the masses was never
what Amanda and the Dresden Dolls set out to do.

After leaving the record label in 2008, she began experimenting with
different ways to make a living. She released music directly to the
public without involving a middle man, releasing digital files on a “pay
what you want” basis and selling CDs and vinyl. She also made money from
live performances and merchandise sales. Eventually, in 2012 she decided
to try her hand at the sort of crowdfunding we know so well today. Her
Kickstarter project started with a goal of \$100,000, and she made \$1.2
million. It remains one of the most successful Kickstarter projects of
all time.

Today, Amanda has switched gears away from crowdfunding for specific
projects to instead getting consistent financial support from her fan
base on Patreon, a crowdfunding site that allows artists to get
recurring donations from fans. More than eight thousand people have
signed up to support her so she can create music, art, and any other
creative “thing” that she is inspired to make. The recurring pledges are
made on a “per thing” basis. All of the content she makes is made freely
available under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (CC
BY-NC-SA).

Making her music and art available under Creative Commons licensing
undoubtedly limits her options for how she makes a living. But sharing
her work has been part of her model since the beginning of her career,
even before she discovered Creative Commons. Amanda says the Dresden
Dolls used to get ten emails per week from fans asking if they could use
their music for different projects. They said yes to all of the
requests, as long as it wasn’t for a completely for-profit venture. At
the time, they used a short-form agreement written by Amanda herself. “I
made everyone sign that contract so at least I wouldn’t be leaving the
band vulnerable to someone later going on and putting our music in a
Camel cigarette ad,” Amanda said. Once she discovered Creative Commons,
adopting the licenses was an easy decision because it gave them a more
formal, standardized way of doing what they had been doing all along.
The NonCommercial licenses were a natural fit.

Amanda embraces the way her fans share and build upon her music. In The
Art of Asking, she wrote that some of her fans’ unofficial videos using
her music surpass the official videos in number of views on YouTube.
Rather than seeing this sort of thing as competition, Amanda celebrates
it. “We got into this because we wanted to share the joy of music,” she
said.

This is symbolic of how nearly everything she does in her career is
motivated by a desire to connect with her fans. At the start of her
career, she and the band would throw concerts at house parties. As the
gatherings grew, the line between fans and friends was completely
blurred. “Not only did most our early fans know where I lived and where
we practiced, but most of them had also been in my kitchen,” Amanda
wrote in The Art of Asking.

Even though her fan base is now huge and global, she continues to seek
this sort of human connection with her fans. She seeks out face-to-face
contact with her fans every chance she can get. Her hugely successful
Kickstarter featured fifty concerts at house parties for backers. She
spends hours in the signing line after shows. It helps that Amanda has
the kind of dynamic, engaging personality that instantly draws people to
her, but a big component of her ability to connect with people is her
willingness to listen. “Listening fast and caring immediately is a skill
unto itself,” Amanda wrote.

Another part of the connection fans feel with Amanda is how much they
know about her life. Rather than trying to craft a public persona or
image, she essentially lives her life as an open book. She has written
openly about incredibly personal events in her life, and she isn’t
afraid to be vulnerable. Having that kind of trust in her fans—the trust
it takes to be truly honest—begets trust from her fans in return. When
she meets fans for the first time after a show, they can legitimately
feel like they know her.

“With social media, we’re so concerned with the picture looking
palatable and consumable that we forget that being human and showing the
flaws and exposing the vulnerability actually create a deeper connection
than just looking fantastic,” Amanda said. “Everything in our culture is
telling us otherwise. But my experience has shown me that the risk of
making yourself vulnerable is almost always worth it.”

Not only does she disclose intimate details of her life to them, she
sleeps on their couches, listens to their stories, cries with them. In
short, she treats her fans like friends in nearly every possible way,
even when they are complete strangers. This mentality—that fans are
friends—is completely intertwined with Amanda’s success as an artist. It
is also intertwined with her use of Creative Commons licenses. Because
that is what you do with your friends—you share.

After years of investing time and energy into building trust with her
fans, she has a strong enough relationship with them to ask for
support—through pay-what-you-want donations, Kickstarter, Patreon, or
even asking them to lend a hand at a concert. As Amanda explains it,
crowdfunding (which is really what all of these different things are) is
about asking for support from people who know and trust you. People who
feel personally invested in your success.

“When you openly, radically trust people, they not only take care of
you, they become your allies, your family,” she wrote. There really is a
feeling of solidarity within her core fan base. From the beginning,
Amanda and her band encouraged people to dress up for their shows. They
consciously cultivated a feeling of belonging to their “weird little
family.”

This sort of intimacy with fans is not possible or even desirable for
every creator. “I don’t take for granted that I happen to be the type of
person who loves cavorting with strangers,” Amanda said. “I recognize
that it’s not necessarily everyone’s idea of a good time. Everyone does
it differently. Replicating what I have done won’t work for others if it
isn’t joyful to them. It’s about finding a way to channel energy in a
way that is joyful to you.”

Yet while Amanda joyfully interacts with her fans and involves them in
her work as much as possible, she does keep one job primarily to
herself—writing the music. She loves the creativity with which her fans
use and adapt her work, but she intentionally does not involve them at
the first stage of creating her artistic work. And, of course, the songs
and music are what initially draw people to Amanda Palmer. It is only
once she has connected to people through her music that she can then
begin to build ties with them on a more personal level, both in person
and online. In her book, Amanda describes it as casting a net. It starts
with the art and then the bond strengthens with human connection.

For Amanda, the entire point of being an artist is to establish and
maintain this connection. “It sounds so corny,” she said, “but my
experience in forty years on this planet has pointed me to an obvious
truth—that connection with human beings feels so much better and more
fulfilling than approaching art through a capitalist lens. There is no
more satisfying end goal than having someone tell you that what you do
is genuinely of value to them.”

As she explains it, when a fan gives her a ten-dollar bill, usually what
they are saying is that the money symbolizes some deeper value the music
provided them. For Amanda, art is not just a product; it’s a
relationship. Viewed from this lens, what Amanda does today is not that
different from what she did as a young street performer. She shares her
music and other artistic gifts. She shares herself. And then rather than
forcing people to help her, she lets them.

Web link

1.  http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2015/04/16/amanda-palmer-uncut-the-kickstarter-queen-on-spotify-patreon-and-taylor-swift/\#44e20ce46d67

PLOS

(Public Library of Science)

PLOS (Public Library of Science) is a nonprofit that publishes a library
of academic journals and other scientific literature. Founded in 2000 in
the U.S.

plos.org

Revenue model: charging content creators an author processing charge to
be featured in the journal

Interview date: March 7, 2016

Interviewee: Louise Page, publisher

Profile written by Paul Stacey

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) began in 2000 when three leading
scientists—Harold E. Varmus, Patrick O. Brown, and Michael Eisen—started
an online petition. They were calling for scientists to stop submitting
papers to journals that didn’t make the full text of their papers freely
available immediately or within six months. Although tens of thousands
signed the petition, most did not follow through. In August 2001,
Patrick and Michael announced that they would start their own nonprofit
publishing operation to do just what the petition promised. With
start-up grant support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, PLOS
was launched to provide new open-access journals for biomedicine, with
research articles being released under Attribution (CC BY) licenses.

Traditionally, academic publishing begins with an author submitting a
manuscript to a publisher. After in-house technical and ethical
considerations, the article is then peer-reviewed to determine if the
quality of the work is acceptable for publishing. Once accepted, the
publisher takes the article through the process of copyediting,
typesetting, and eventual publishing in a print or online publication.
Traditional journal publishers recover costs and earn profit by charging
a subscription fee to libraries or an access fee to users wanting to
read the journal or article.

For Louise Page, the current publisher of PLOS, this traditional model
results in inequity. Access is restricted to those who can pay. Most
research is funded through government-appointed agencies, that is, with
public funds. It’s unjust that the public who funded the research would
be required to pay again to access the results. Not everyone can afford
the ever-escalating subscription fees publishers charge, especially when
library budgets are being reduced. Restricting access to the results of
scientific research slows the dissemination of this research and
advancement of the field. It was time for a new model.

That new model became known as open access. That is, free and open
availability on the Internet. Open-access research articles are not
behind a paywall and do not require a login. A key benefit of open
access is that it allows people to freely use, copy, and distribute the
articles, as they are primarily published under an Attribution (CC BY)
license (which only requires the user to provide appropriate
attribution). And more importantly, policy makers, clinicians,
entrepreneurs, educators, and students around the world have free and
timely access to the latest research immediately on publication.

However, open access requires rethinking the business model of research
publication. Rather than charge a subscription fee to access the
journal, PLOS decided to turn the model on its head and charge a
publication fee, known as an article-processing charge. This up-front
fee, generally paid by the funder of the research or the author’s
institution, covers the expenses such as editorial oversight,
peer-review management, journal production, online hosting, and support
for discovery. Fees are per article and are billed upon acceptance for
publishing. There are no additional charges based on word length,
figures, or other elements.

Calculating the article-processing charge involves taking all the costs
associated with publishing the journal and determining a cost per
article that collectively recovers costs. For PLOS’s journals in
biology, medicine, genetics, computational biology, neglected tropical
diseases, and pathogens, the article-processing charge ranges from
\$2,250 to \$2,900. Article-publication charges for PLOS ONE, a journal
started in 2006, are just under \$1,500.

PLOS believes that lack of funds should not be a barrier to publication.
Since its inception, PLOS has provided fee support for individuals and
institutions to help authors who can’t afford the article-processing
charges.

Louise identifies marketing as one area of big difference between PLOS
and traditional journal publishers. Traditional journals have to invest
heavily in staff, buildings, and infrastructure to market their journal
and convince customers to subscribe. Restricting access to subscribers
means that tools for managing access control are necessary. They spend
millions of dollars on access-control systems, staff to manage them, and
sales staff. With PLOS’s open-access publishing, there’s no need for
these massive expenses; the articles are free, open, and accessible to
all upon publication. Additionally, traditional publishers tend to spend
more on marketing to libraries, who ultimately pay the subscription
fees. PLOS provides a better service for authors by promoting their
research directly to the research community and giving the authors
exposure. And this encourages other authors to submit their work for
publication.

For Louise, PLOS would not exist without the Attribution license (CC
BY). This makes it very clear what rights are associated with the
content and provides a safe way for researchers to make their work
available while ensuring they get recognition (appropriate attribution).
For PLOS, all of this aligns with how they think research content should
be published and disseminated.

PLOS also has a broad open-data policy. To get their research paper
published, PLOS authors must also make their data available in a public
repository and provide a data-availability statement.

Business-operation costs associated with the open-access model still
largely follow the existing publishing model. PLOS journals are online
only, but the editorial, peer-review, production, typesetting, and
publishing stages are all the same as for a traditional publisher. The
editorial teams must be top notch. PLOS has to function as well as or
better than other premier journals, as researchers have a choice about
where to publish.

Researchers are influenced by journal rankings, which reflect the place
of a journal within its field, the relative difficulty of being
published in that journal, and the prestige associated with it. PLOS
journals rank high, even though they are relatively new.

The promotion and tenure of researchers are partially based how many
times other researchers cite their articles. Louise says when
researchers want to discover and read the work of others in their field,
they go to an online aggregator or search engine, and not typically to a
particular journal. The CC BY licensing of PLOS research articles
ensures easy access for readers and generates more discovery and
citations for authors.

Louise believes that open access has been a huge success, progressing
from a movement led by a small cadre of researchers to something that is
now widespread and used in some form by every journal publisher. PLOS
has had a big impact. In 2012 to 2014, they published more open-access
articles than BioMed Central, the original open-access publisher, or
anyone else.

PLOS further disrupted the traditional journal-publishing model by
pioneering the concept of a megajournal. The PLOS ONE megajournal,
launched in 2006, is an open-access peer-reviewed academic journal that
is much larger than a traditional journal, publishing thousands of
articles per year and benefiting from economies of scale. PLOS ONE has a
broad scope, covering science and medicine as well as social sciences
and the humanities. The review and editorial process is less subjective.
Articles are accepted for publication based on whether they are
technically sound rather than perceived importance or relevance. This is
very important in the current debate about the integrity and
reproducibility of research because negative or null results can then be
published as well, which are generally rejected by traditional journals.
PLOS ONE, like all the PLOS journals, is online only with no print
version. PLOS passes on the financial savings accrued through economies
of scale to researchers and the public by lowering the
article-processing charges, which are below that of other journals. PLOS
ONE is the biggest journal in the world and has really set the bar for
publishing academic journal articles on a large scale. Other publishers
see the value of the PLOS ONE model and are now offering their own
multidisciplinary forums for publishing all sound science.

Louise outlined some other aspects of the research-journal business
model PLOS is experimenting with, describing each as a kind of slider
that could be adjusted to change current practice.

One slider is time to publication. Time to publication may shorten as
journals get better at providing quicker decisions to authors. However,
there is always a trade-off with scale, as the bigger the volume of
articles, the more time the approval process inevitably takes.

Peer review is another part of the process that could change. It’s
possible to redefine what peer review actually is, when to review, and
what constitutes the final article for publication. Louise talked about
the potential to shift to an open-review process, placing the emphasis
on transparency rather than double-blind reviews. Louise thinks we’re
moving into a direction where it’s actually beneficial for an author to
know who is reviewing their paper and for the reviewer to know their
review will be public. An open-review process can also ensure everyone
gets credit; right now, credit is limited to the publisher and author.

Louise says research with negative outcomes is almost as important as
positive results. If journals published more research with negative
outcomes, we’d learn from what didn’t work. It could also reduce how
much the research wheel gets reinvented around the world.

Another adjustable practice is the sharing of articles at early preprint
stages. Publication of research in a peer-reviewed journal can take a
long time because articles must undergo extensive peer review. The need
to quickly circulate current results within a scientific community has
led to a practice of distributing pre-print documents that have not yet
undergone peer review. Preprints broaden the peer-review process,
allowing authors to receive early feedback from a wide group of peers,
which can help revise and prepare the article for submission. Offsetting
the advantages of preprints are author concerns over ensuring their
primacy of being first to come up with findings based on their research.
Other researches may see findings the preprint author has not yet
thought of. However, preprints help researchers get their discoveries
out early and establish precedence. A big challenge is that researchers
don’t have a lot of time to comment on preprints.

What constitutes a journal article could also change. The idea of a
research article as printed, bound, and in a library stack is outdated.
Digital and online open up new possibilities, such as a living document
evolving over time, inclusion of audio and video, and interactivity,
like discussion and recommendations. Even the size of what gets
published could change. With these changes the current form factor for
what constitutes a research article would undergo transformation.

As journals scale up, and new journals are introduced, more and more
information is being pushed out to readers, making the experience feel
like drinking from a fire hose. To help mitigate this, PLOS aggregates
and curates content from PLOS journals and their network of blogs.1 It
also offers something called Article-Level Metrics, which helps users
assess research most relevant to the field itself, based on indicators
like usage, citations, social bookmarking and dissemination activity,
media and blog coverage, discussions, and ratings.2 Louise believes that
the journal model could evolve to provide a more friendly and
interactive user experience, including a way for readers to communicate
with authors.

The big picture for PLOS going forward is to combine and adjust these
experimental practices in ways that continue to improve accessibility
and dissemination of research, while ensuring its integrity and
reliability. The ways they interlink are complex. The process of change
and adjustment is not linear. PLOS sees itself as a very flexible
publisher interested in exploring all the permutations
research-publishing can take, with authors and readers who are open to
experimentation.

For PLOS, success is not about revenue. Success is about proving that
scientific research can be communicated rapidly and economically at
scale, for the benefit of researchers and society. The CC BY license
makes it possible for PLOS to publish in a way that is unfettered, open,
and fast, while ensuring that the authors get credit for their work.
More than two million scientists, scholars, and clinicians visit PLOS
every month, with more than 135,000 quality articles to peruse for free.

Ultimately, for PLOS, its authors, and its readers, success is about
making research discoverable, available, and reproducible for the
advancement of science.

Web links

1.  collections.plos.org
2.  plos.org/article-level-metrics

Rijksmuseum

The Rijksmuseum is a Dutch national museum dedicated to art and history.
Founded in 1800 in the Netherlands

www.rijksmuseum.nl

Revenue model: grants and government funding, charging for in-person
version

(museum admission), selling merchandise

Interview date: December 11, 2015

Interviewee: Lizzy Jongma, the data manager of the collections
information department

Profile written by Paul Stacey

The Rijksmuseum, a national museum in the Netherlands dedicated to art
and history, has been housed in its current building since 1885. The
monumental building enjoyed more than 125 years of intensive use before
needing a thorough overhaul. In 2003, the museum was closed for
renovations. Asbestos was found in the roof, and although the museum was
scheduled to be closed for only three to four years, renovations ended
up taking ten years. During this time, the collection was moved to a
different part of Amsterdam, which created a physical distance with the
curators. Out of necessity, they started digitally photographing the
collection and creating metadata (information about each object to put
into a database). With the renovations going on for so long, the museum
became largely forgotten by the public. Out of these circumstances
emerged a new and more open model for the museum.

By the time Lizzy Jongma joined the Rijksmuseum in 2011 as a data
manager, staff were fed up with the situation the museum was in. They
also realized that even with the new and larger space, it still wouldn’t
be able to show very much of the whole collection—eight thousand of over
one million works representing just 1 percent. Staff began exploring
ways to express themselves, to have something to show for all of the
work they had been doing. The Rijksmuseum is primarily funded by Dutch
taxpayers, so was there a way for the museum provide benefit to the
public while it was closed? They began thinking about sharing
Rijksmuseum’s collection using information technology. And they put up a
card-catalog like database of the entire collection online.

It was effective but a bit boring. It was just data. A hackathon they
were invited to got them to start talking about events like that as
having potential. They liked the idea of inviting people to do cool
stuff with their collection. What about giving online access to digital
representations of the one hundred most important pieces in the
Rijksmuseum collection? That eventually led to why not put the whole
collection online?

Then, Lizzy says, Europeana came along. Europeana is Europe’s digital
library, museum, and archive for cultural heritage.1 As an online portal
to museum collections all across Europe, Europeana had become an
important online platform. In October 2010 Creative Commons released CC0
and its public-domain mark as tools people could use to identify works
as free of known copyright. Europeana was the first major adopter, using
CC0 to release metadata about their collection and the public domain
mark for millions of digital works in their collection. Lizzy says the
Rijksmuseum initially found this change in business practice a bit
scary, but at the same time it stimulated even more discussion on
whether the Rijksmuseum should follow suit.

They realized that they don’t “own” the collection and couldn’t
realistically monitor and enforce compliance with the restrictive
licensing terms they currently had in place. For example, many copies
and versions of Vermeer’s Milkmaid (part of their collection) were
already online, many of them of very poor quality. They could spend time
and money policing its use, but it would probably be futile and wouldn’t
make people stop using their images online. They ended up thinking it’s
an utter waste of time to hunt down people who use the Rijksmuseum
collection. And anyway, restricting access meant the people they were
frustrating the most were schoolkids.

In 2011 the Rijksmuseum began making their digital photos of works known
to be free of copyright available online, using Creative Commons CC0 to
place works in the public domain. A medium-resolution image was offered
for free, but a high-resolution version cost forty euros. People started
paying, but Lizzy says getting the money was frequently a nightmare,
especially from overseas customers. The administrative costs often
offset revenue, and income above costs was relatively low. In addition,
having to pay for an image of a work in the public domain from a
collection owned by the Dutch government (i.e., paid for by the public)
was contentious and frustrating for some. Lizzy says they had lots of
fierce debates about what to do.

In 2013 the Rijksmuseum changed its business model. They Creative
Commons licensed their highest-quality images and released them online
for free. Digitization still cost money, however; they decided to define
discrete digitization projects and find sponsors willing to fund each
project. This turned out to be a successful strategy, generating high
interest from sponsors and lower administrative effort for the
Rijksmuseum. They started out making 150,000 high-quality images of
their collection available, with the goal to eventually have the entire
collection online.

Releasing these high-quality images for free reduced the number of
poor-quality images that were proliferating. The high-quality image of
Vermeer’s Milkmaid, for example, is downloaded two to three thousand
times a month. On the Internet, images from a source like the
Rijksmuseum are more trusted, and releasing them with a Creative Commons
CC0 means they can easily be found in other platforms. For example,
Rijksmuseum images are now used in thousands of Wikipedia articles,
receiving ten to eleven million views per month. This extends
Rijksmuseum’s reach far beyond the scope of its website. Sharing these
images online creates what Lizzy calls the “Mona Lisa effect,” where a
work of art becomes so famous that people want to see it in real life by
visiting the actual museum.

Every museum tends to be driven by the number of physical visitors. The
Rijksmuseum is primarily publicly funded, receiving roughly 70 percent
of its operating budget from the government. But like many museums, it
must generate the rest of the funding through other means. The admission
fee has long been a way to generate revenue generation, including for
the Rijksmuseum.

As museums create a digital presence for themselves and put up digital
representations of their collection online, there’s frequently a worry
that it will lead to a drop in actual physical visits. For the
Rijksmuseum, this has not turned out to be the case. Lizzy told us the
Rijksmuseum used to get about one million visitors a year before closing
and now gets more than two million a year. Making the collection
available online has generated publicity and acts as a form of
marketing. The Creative Commons mark encourages reuse as well. When the
image is found on protest leaflets, milk cartons, and children’s toys,
people also see what museum the image comes from and this increases the
museum’s visibility.

In 2011 the Rijksmuseum received €1 million from the Dutch lottery to
create a new web presence that would be different from any other
museum’s. In addition to redesigning their main website to be mobile
friendly and responsive to devices like the iPad, the Rijksmuseum also
created the Rijksstudio, where users and artists could use and do
various things with the Rijksmuseum collection.2

The Rijksstudio gives users access to over two hundred thousand
high-quality digital representations of masterworks from the collection.
Users can zoom in to any work and even clip small parts of images they
like. Rijksstudio is a bit like Pinterest. You can “like” works and
compile your personal favorites, and you can share them with friends or
download them free of charge. All the images in the Rijksstudio are
copyright and royalty free, and users are encouraged to use them as they
like, for private or even commercial purposes.

Users have created over 276,000 Rijksstudios, generating their own
themed virtual exhibitions on a wide variety of topics ranging from
tapestries to ugly babies and birds. Sets of images have also been
created for educational purposes including use for school exams.

Some contemporary artists who have works in the Rijksmuseum collection
contacted them to ask why their works were not included in the
Rijksstudio. The answer was that contemporary artists’ works are still
bound by copyright. The Rijksmuseum does encourage contemporary artists
to use a Creative Commons license for their works, usually a CC BY-SA
license
(Attribution-ShareAlike), or a CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial) if
they want to preclude commercial use. That way, their works can be made
available to the public, but within limits the artists have specified.

The Rijksmuseum believes that art stimulates entrepreneurial activity.
The line between creative and commercial can be blurry. As Lizzy says,
even Rembrandt was commercial, making his livelihood from selling his
paintings. The Rijksmuseum encourages entrepreneurial commercial use of
the images in Rijksstudio. They’ve even partnered with the DIY
marketplace Etsy to inspire people to sell their creations. One great
example you can find on Etsy is a kimono designed by Angie Johnson, who
used an image of an elaborate cabinet along with an oil painting by Jan
Asselijn called The Threatened Swan.3

In 2013 the Rijksmuseum organized their first high-profile design
competition, known as the Rijksstudio Award.4 With the call to action
Make Your Own Masterpiece, the competition invites the public to use
Rijksstudio images to make new creative designs. A jury of renowned
designers and curators selects ten finalists and three winners. The
final award comes with a prize of €10,000. The second edition in 2015
attracted a staggering 892 top-class entries. Some award winners end up
with their work sold through the Rijksmuseum store, such as the 2014
entry featuring makeup based on a specific color scheme of a work of
art.5 The Rijksmuseum has been thrilled with the results. Entries range
from the fun to the weird to the inspirational. The third international
edition of the Rijksstudio Award started in September 2016.

For the next iteration of the Rijksstudio, the Rijksmuseum is
considering an upload tool, for people to upload their own works of art,
and enhanced social elements so users can interact with each other more.

Going with a more open business model generated lots of publicity for
the Rijksmuseum. They were one of the first museums to open up their
collection (that is, give free access) with high-quality images. This
strategy, along with the many improvements to the Rijksmuseum’s website,
dramatically increased visits to their website from thirty-five thousand
visits per month to three hundred thousand.

The Rijksmuseum has been experimenting with other ways to invite the
public to look at and interact with their collection. On an
international day celebrating animals, they ran a successful bird-themed
event. The museum put together a showing of two thousand works that
featured birds and invited bird-watchers to identify the birds depicted.
Lizzy notes that while museum curators know a lot about the works in
their collections, they may not know about certain details in the
paintings such as bird species. Over eight hundred different birds were
identified, including a specific species of crane bird that was unknown
to the scientific community at the time of the painting.

For the Rijksmuseum, adopting an open business model was scary. They
came up with many worst-case scenarios, imagining all kinds of awful
things people might do with the museum’s works. But Lizzy says those
fears did not come true because “ninety-nine percent of people have
respect for great art.” Many museums think they can make a lot of money
by selling things related to their collection. But in Lizzy’s
experience, museums are usually bad at selling things, and sometimes
efforts to generate a small amount of money block something much
bigger—the real value that the collection has. For Lizzy, clinging to
small amounts of revenue is being penny-wise but pound-foolish. For the
Rijksmuseum, a key lesson has been to never lose sight of its vision for
the collection. Allowing access to and use of their collection has
generated great promotional value—far more than the previous practice of
charging fees for access and use. Lizzy sums up their experience: “Give
away; get something in return. Generosity makes people happy to join you
and help out.”

Web links

1.  www.europeana.eu/portal/en
2.  www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio
3.  www.etsy.com/ca/listing/175696771/fringe-kimono-silk-kimono-kimono-robe
4.  www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio-award; the 2014 award:
    www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio-award-2014; the 2015 award:
    www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio-award-2015
5.  www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/rijksstudio/142328--nominees-rijksstudio-award/creaties/ba595afe-452d-46bd-9c8c-48dcbdd7f0a4

Shareable

Shareable is an online magazine about sharing. Founded in 2009 in the
U.S.

www.shareable.net

Revenue model: grant funding, crowdfunding (project-based), donations,
sponsorships

Interview date: February 24, 2016

Interviewee: Neal Gorenflo, cofounder and executive editor

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

In 2013, Shareable faced an impasse. The nonprofit online publication
had helped start a sharing movement four years prior, but over time,
they watched one part of the movement stray from its ideals. As giants
like Uber and Airbnb gained ground, attention began to center on the
“sharing economy” we know now—profit-driven, transactional, and loaded
with venture-capital money. Leaders of corporate start-ups in this
domain invited Shareable to advocate for them. The magazine faced a
choice: ride the wave or stand on principle.

As an organization, Shareable decided to draw a line in the sand. In
2013, the cofounder and executive editor Neal Gorenflo wrote an opinion
piece in the PandoDaily that charted Shareable’s new critical stance on
the Silicon Valley version of the sharing economy, while contrasting it
with aspects of the real sharing economy like open-source software,
participatory budgeting (where citizens decide how a public budget is
spent), cooperatives, and more. He wrote, “It’s not so much that
collaborative consumption is dead, it’s more that it risks dying as it
gets absorbed by the ‘Borg.’”

Neal said their public critique of the corporate sharing economy defined
what Shareable was and is. He does not think the magazine would still be
around had they chosen differently. “We would have gotten another type
of audience, but it would have spelled the end of us,” he said. “We are
a small, mission-driven organization. We would never have been able to
weather the criticism that Airbnb and Uber are getting now.”

Interestingly, impassioned supporters are only a small sliver of
Shareable’s total audience. Most are casual readers who come across a
Shareable story because it happens to align with a project or interest
they have. But choosing principles over the possibility of riding the
coattails of the major corporate players in the sharing space saved
Shareable’s credibility. Although they became detached from the
corporate sharing economy, the online magazine became the voice of the
“real sharing economy” and continued to grow their audience.

Shareable is a magazine, but the content they publish is a means to
furthering their role as a leader and catalyst of a movement. Shareable
became a leader in the movement in 2009. “At that time, there was a
sharing movement bubbling beneath the surface, but no one was connecting
the dots,” Neal said. “We decided to step into that space and take on
that role.” The small team behind the nonprofit publication truly
believed sharing could be central to solving some of the major problems
human beings face—resource inequality, social isolation, and global
warming.

They have worked hard to find ways to tell stories that show different
metrics for success. “We wanted to change the notion of what constitutes
the good life,” Neal said. While they started out with a very broad
focus on sharing generally, today they emphasize stories about the
physical commons like “sharing cities” (i.e., urban areas managed in a
sustainable, cooperative way), as well as digital platforms that are run
democratically. They particularly focus on how-to content that help
their readers make changes in their own lives and communities.

More than half of Shareable’s stories are written by paid journalists
that are contracted by the magazine. “Particularly in content areas that
are a priority for us, we really want to go deep and control the
quality,” Neal said. The rest of the content is either contributed by
guest writers, often for free, or written by other publications from
their network of content publishers. Shareable is a member of the Post
Growth Alliance, which facilitates the sharing of content and audiences
among a large and growing group of mostly nonprofits. Each organization
gets a chance to present stories to the group, and the organizations can
use and promote each other’s stories. Much of the content created by the
network is licensed with Creative Commons.

All of Shareable’s original content is published under the Attribution
license (CC BY), meaning it can be used for any purpose as long as
credit is given to Shareable. Creative Commons licensing is aligned with
Shareable’s vision, mission, and identity. That alone explains the
organization’s embrace of the licenses for their content, but Neal also
believes CC licensing helps them increase their reach. “By using CC
licensing,” he said, “we realized we could reach far more people through
a formal and informal network of republishers or affiliates. That has
definitely been the case. It’s hard for us to measure the reach of other
media properties, but most of the outlets who republish our work have
much bigger audiences than we do.”

In addition to their regular news and commentary online, Shareable has
also experimented with book publishing. In 2012, they worked with a
traditional publisher to release Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost
Generation in an Age of Crisis. The CC-licensed book was available in
print form for purchase or online for free. To this day, the book—along
with their CC-licensed guide Policies for Shareable Cities—are two of
the biggest generators of traffic on their website.

In 2016, Shareable self-published a book of curated Shareable stories
called How to: Share, Save Money and Have Fun. The book was available
for sale, but a PDF version of the book was available for free.
Shareable plans to offer the book in upcoming fund-raising campaigns.

This recent book is one of many fund-raising experiments Shareable has
conducted in recent years. Currently, Shareable is primarily funded by
grants from foundations, but they are actively moving toward a more
diversified model. They have organizational sponsors and are working to
expand their base of individual donors. Ideally, they will eventually be
a hundred percent funded by their audience. Neal believes being fully
community-supported will better represent their vision of the world.

For Shareable, success is very much about their impact on the world.
This is true for Neal, but also for everyone who works for Shareable.
“We attract passionate people,” Neal said. At times, that means
employees work so hard they burn out. Neal tries to stress to the
Shareable team that another part of success is having fun and taking
care of yourself while you do something you love. “A central part of
human beings is that we long to be on a great adventure with people we
love,” he said. “We are a species who look over the horizon and imagine
and create new worlds, but we also seek the comfort of hearth and home.”

In 2013, Shareable ran its first crowdfunding campaign to launch their
Sharing Cities Network. Neal said at first they were on pace to fail
spectacularly. They called in their advisers in a panic and asked for
help. The advice they received was simple—“Sit your ass in a chair and
start making calls.” That’s exactly what they did, and they ended up
reaching their \$50,000 goal. Neal said the campaign helped them reach
new people, but the vast majority of backers were people in their
existing base.

For Neal, this symbolized how so much of success comes down to
relationships. Over time, Shareable has invested time and energy into
the relationships they have forged with their readers and supporters.
They have also invested resources into building relationships between
their readers and supporters.

Shareable began hosting events in 2010. These events were designed to
bring the sharing community together. But over time they realized they
could reach far more people if they helped their readers to host their
own events. “If we wanted to go big on a conference, there was a huge
risk and huge staffing needs, plus only a fraction of our community
could travel to the event,” Neal said. Enabling others to create their
own events around the globe allowed them to scale up their work more
effectively and reach far more people. Shareable has catalyzed three
hundred different events reaching over twenty thousand people since
implementing this strategy three years ago. Going forward, Shareable is
focusing the network on creating and distributing content meant to spur
local action. For instance, Shareable will publish a new CC-licensed
book in 2017 filled with ideas for their network to implement.

Neal says Shareable stumbled upon this strategy, but it seems to
perfectly encapsulate just how the commons is supposed to work. Rather
than a one-size-fits-all approach, Shareable puts the tools out there
for people take the ideas and adapt them to their own communities.

Siyavula

Siyavula is a for-profit educational-technology company that creates
textbooks and integrated learning experiences. Founded in 2012 in South
Africa.

www.siyavula.com

Revenue model: charging for custom services, sponsorships

Interview date: April 5, 2016

Interviewee: Mark Horner, CEO

Profile written by Paul Stacey

Openness is a key principle for Siyavula. They believe that every
learner and teacher should have access to high-quality educational
resources, as this forms the basis for long-term growth and development.
Siyavula has been a pioneer in creating high-quality open textbooks on
mathematics and science subjects for grades 4 to 12 in South Africa.

In terms of creating an open business model that involves Creative
Commons, Siyavula—and its founder, Mark Horner—have been around the
block a few times. Siyavula has significantly shifted directions and
strategies to survive and prosper. Mark says it’s been very organic.

It all started in 2002, when Mark and several other colleagues at the
University of Cape Town in South Africa founded the Free High School
Science Texts project. Most students in South Africa high schools didn’t
have access to high-quality, comprehensive science and math textbooks,
so Mark and his colleagues set out to write them and make them freely
available.

As physicists, Mark and his colleagues were advocates of open-source
software. To make the books open and free, they adopted the Free
Software Foundation’s GNU Free Documentation License.1 They chose LaTeX,
a typesetting program used to publish scientific documents, to author
the books. Over a period of five years, the Free High School Science
Texts project produced math and physical-science textbooks for grades 10
to 12.

In 2007, the Shuttleworth Foundation offered funding support to make the
textbooks available for trial use at more schools. Surveys before and
after the textbooks were adopted showed there were no substantial
criticisms of the textbooks’ pedagogical content. This pleased both the
authors and Shuttleworth; Mark remains incredibly proud of this
accomplishment.

But the development of new textbooks froze at this stage. Mark shifted
his focus to rural schools, which didn’t have textbooks at all, and
looked into the printing and distribution options. A few sponsors came
on board but not enough to meet the need.

In 2007, Shuttleworth and the Open Society Institute convened a group of
open-education activists for a small but lively meeting in Cape Town.
One result was the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, a statement of
principles, strategies, and commitment to help the open-education
movement grow.2 Shuttleworth also invited Mark to run a project writing
open content for all subjects for K–12 in English. That project became
Siyavula.

They wrote six original textbooks. A small publishing company offered
Shuttleworth the option to buy out the publisher’s existing K–9 content
for every subject in South African schools in both English and
Afrikaans. A deal was struck, and all the acquired content was licensed
with Creative Commons, significantly expanding the collection beyond the
six original books.

Mark wanted to build out the remaining curricula collaboratively through
communities of practice—that is, with fellow educators and writers.
Although sharing is fundamental to teaching, there can be a few
challenges when you create educational resources collectively. One
concern is legal. It is standard practice in education to copy diagrams
and snippets of text, but of course this doesn’t always comply with
copyright law. Another concern is transparency. Sharing what you’ve
authored means everyone can see it and opens you up to criticism. To
alleviate these concerns, Mark adopted a team-based approach to
authoring and insisted the curricula be based entirely on resources with
Creative Commons licenses, thereby ensuring they were safe to share and
free from legal repercussions.

Not only did Mark want the resources to be shareable, he wanted all
teachers to be able to remix and edit the content. Mark and his team had
to come up with an open editable format and provide tools for editing.
They ended up putting all the books they’d acquired and authored on a
platform called Connexions.3 Siyavula trained many teachers to use
Connexions, but it proved to be too complex and the textbooks were
rarely edited.

Then the Shuttleworth Foundation decided to completely restructure its
work as a foundation into a fellowship model (for reasons completely
unrelated to Siyavula). As part of that transition in 2009–10, Mark
inherited Siyavula as an independent entity and took ownership over it
as a Shuttleworth fellow.

Mark and his team experimented with several different strategies. They
tried creating an authoring and hosting platform called Full Marks so
that teachers could share assessment items. They tried creating a
service called Open Press, where teachers could ask for open educational
resources to be aggregated into a package and printed for them. These
services never really panned out.

Then the South African government approached Siyavula with an interest
in printing out the original six Free High School Science Texts (math
and physical-science textbooks for grades 10 to 12) for all high school
students in South Africa. Although at this point Siyavula was a bit
discouraged by open educational resources, they saw this as a big
opportunity.

They began to conceive of the six books as having massive marketing
potential for Siyavula. Printing Siyavula books for every kid in South
Africa would give their brand huge exposure and could drive vast amounts
of traffic to their website. In addition to print books, Siyavula could
also make the books available on their website, making it possible for
learners to access them using any device—computer, tablet, or mobile
phone.

Mark and his team began imagining what they could develop beyond what
was in the textbooks as a service they charge for. One key thing you
can’t do well in a printed textbook is demonstrate solutions. Typically,
a one-line answer is given at the end of the book but nothing on the
process for arriving at that solution. Mark and his team developed
practice items and detailed solutions, giving learners plenty of
opportunity to test out what they’ve learned. Furthermore, an algorithm
could adapt these practice items to the individual needs of each
learner. They called this service Intelligent Practice and embedded
links to it in the open textbooks.

The costs for using Intelligent Practice were set very low, making it
accessible even to those with limited financial means. Siyavula was
going for large volumes and wide-scale use rather than an expensive
product targeting only the high end of the market.

The government distributed the books to 1.5 million students, but there
was an unexpected wrinkle: the books were delivered late. Rather than
wait, schools who could afford it provided students with a different
textbook. The Siyavula books were eventually distributed, but with
well-off schools mainly using a different book, the primary market for
Siyavula’s Intelligent Practice service inadvertently became low-income
learners.

Siyavula’s site did see a dramatic increase in traffic. They got five
hundred thousand visitors per month to their math site and the same
number to their science site. Two-fifths of the traffic was reading on a
“feature phone” (a nonsmartphone with no apps). People on basic phones
were reading math and science on a two-inch screen at all hours of the
day. To Mark, it was quite amazing and spoke to a need they were
servicing.

At first, the Intelligent Practice services could only be paid using a
credit card. This proved problematic, especially for those in the
low-income demographic, as credit cards were not prevalent. Mark says
Siyavula got a harsh business-model lesson early on. As he describes it,
it’s not just about product, but how you sell it, who the market is,
what the price is, and what the barriers to entry are.

Mark describes this as the first version of Siyavula’s business model:
open textbooks serving as marketing material and driving traffic to your
site, where you can offer a related service and convert some people into
a paid customer.

For Mark a key decision for Siyavula’s business was to focus on how they
can add value on top of their basic service. They’ll charge only if they
are adding unique value. The actual content of the textbook isn’t unique
at all, so Siyavula sees no value in locking it down and charging for
it. Mark contrasts this with traditional publishers who charge over and
over again for the same content without adding value.

Version two of Siyavula’s business model was a big, ambitious idea—scale
up. They also decided to sell the Intelligent Practice service to
schools directly. Schools can subscribe on a per-student, per-subject
basis. A single subscription gives a learner access to a single subject,
including practice content from every grade available for that subject.
Lower subscription rates are provided when there are over two hundred
students, and big schools have a price cap. A 40 percent discount is
offered to schools where both the science and math departments
subscribe.

Teachers get a dashboard that allows them to monitor the progress of an
entire class or view an individual learner’s results. They can see the
questions that learners are working on, identify areas of difficulty,
and be more strategic in their teaching. Students also have their own
personalized dashboard, where they can view the sections they’ve
practiced, how many points they’ve earned, and how their performance is
improving.

Based on the success of this effort, Siyavula decided to substantially
increase the production of open educational resources so they could
provide the Intelligent Practice service for a wider range of books.
Grades 10 to 12 math and science books were reworked each year, and new
books created for grades 4 to 6 and later grades 7 to 9.

In partnership with, and sponsored by, the Sasol Inzalo Foundation,
Siyavula produced a series of natural sciences and technology workbooks
for grades 4 to 6 called Thunderbolt Kids that uses a fun comic-book
style.4 It’s a complete curriculum that also comes with teacher’s guides
and other resources.

Through this experience, Siyavula learned they could get sponsors to
help fund openly licensed textbooks. It helped that Siyavula had by this
time nailed the production model. It cost roughly \$150,000 to produce a
book in two languages. Sponsors liked the social-benefit aspect of
textbooks unlocked via a Creative Commons license. They also liked the
exposure their brand got. For roughly \$150,000, their logo would be
visible on books distributed to over one million students.

The Siyavula books that are reviewed, approved, and branded by the
government are freely and openly available on Siyavula’s website under
an Attribution-NoDerivs license (CC BY-ND) —NoDerivs means that these
books cannot be modified. Non-government-branded books are available
under an Attribution license (CC BY), allowing others to modify and
redistribute the books.

Although the South African government paid to print and distribute hard
copies of the books to schoolkids, Siyavula itself received no funding
from the government. Siyavula initially tried to convince the government
to provide them with five rand per book (about US35¢). With those funds,
Mark says that Siyavula could have run its entire operation, built a
community-based model for producing more books, and provide Intelligent
Practice for free to every child in the country. But after a lengthy
negotiation, the government said no.

Using Siyavula books generated huge savings for the government.
Providing students with a traditionally published grade 12 science or
math textbook costs around 250 rand per book (about US\$18). Providing
the Siyavula version cost around 36 rand (about \$2.60), a savings of
over 200 rand per book. But none of those savings were passed on to
Siyavula. In retrospect, Mark thinks this may have turned out in their
favor as it allowed them to remain independent from the government.

Just as Siyavula was planning to scale up the production of open
textbooks even more, the South African government changed its textbook
policy. To save costs, the government declared there would be only one
authorized textbook for each grade and each subject. There was no
guarantee that Siyavula’s would be chosen. This scared away potential
sponsors.

Rather than producing more textbooks, Siyavula focused on improving its
Intelligent Practice technology for its existing books. Mark calls this
version three of Siyavula’s business model—focusing on the technology
that provides the revenue-generating service and generating more users
of this service. Version three got a significant boost in 2014 with an
investment by the Omidyar Network (the philanthropic venture started by
eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his spouse), and continues to be the
model Siyavula uses today.

Mark says sales are way up, and they are really nailing Intelligent
Practice. Schools continue to use their open textbooks. The
government-announced policy that there would be only one textbook per
subject turned out to be highly contentious and is in limbo.

Siyavula is exploring a range of enhancements to their business model.
These include charging a small amount for assessment services provided
over the phone, diversifying their market to all English-speaking
countries in Africa, and setting up a consortium that makes Intelligent
Practice free to all kids by selling the nonpersonal data Intelligent
Practice collects.

Siyavula is a for-profit business but one with a social mission. Their
shareholders’ agreement lists lots of requirements around openness for
Siyavula, including stipulations that content always be put under an
open license and that they can’t charge for something that people
volunteered to do for them. They believe each individual should have
access to the resources and support they need to achieve the education
they deserve. Having educational resources openly licensed with Creative
Commons means they can fulfill their social mission, on top of which
they can build revenue-generating services to sustain the ongoing
operation of Siyavula. In terms of open business models, Mark and
Siyavula may have been around the block a few times, but both he and the
company are stronger for it.

Web links

1.  www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl
2.  www.capetowndeclaration.org
3.  cnx.org
4.  www.siyavula.com/products-primary-school.html

Sparkfun

SparkFun is an online electronics retailer specializing in open
hardware. Founded in 2003 in the U.S.

www.sparkfun.com

Revenue model: charging for physical copies (electronics sales)

Interview date: February 29, 2016

Interviewee: Nathan Seidle, founder

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

SparkFun founder and former CEO Nathan Seidle has a picture of himself
holding up a clone of a SparkFun product in an electronics market in
China, with a huge grin on his face. He was traveling in China when he
came across their LilyPad wearable technology being made by someone
else. His reaction was glee.

“Being copied is the greatest earmark of flattery and success,” Nathan
said. “I thought it was so cool that they were selling to a market we
were never going to get access to otherwise. It was evidence of our
impact on the world.”

This worldview runs through everything SparkFun does. SparkFun is an
electronics manufacturer. The company sells its products directly to the
public online, and it bundles them with educational tools to sell to
schools and teachers. SparkFun applies Creative Commons licenses to all
of its schematics, images, tutorial content, and curricula, so anyone
can make their products on their own. Being copied is part of the
design.

Nathan believes open licensing is good for the world. “It touches on our
natural human instinct to share,” he said. But he also strongly believes
it makes SparkFun better at what they do. They encourage copying, and
their products are copied at a very fast rate, often within ten to
twelve weeks of release. This forces the company to compete on something
other than product design, or what most commonly consider their
intellectual property.

“We compete on business principles,” Nathan said. “Claiming your
territory with intellectual property allows you to get comfy and rest on
your laurels. It gives you a safety net. We took away that safety net.”

The result is an intense company-wide focus on product development and
improvement. “Our products are so much better than they were five years
ago,” Nathan said. “We used to just sell products. Now it’s a product
plus a video, a seventeen-page hookup guide, and example firmware on
three different platforms to get you up and running faster. We have
gotten better because we had to in order to compete. As painful as it is
for us, it’s better for the customers.”

SparkFun parts are available on eBay for lower prices. But people come
directly to SparkFun because SparkFun makes their lives easier. The
example code works; there is a service number to call; they ship
replacement parts the day they get a service call. They invest heavily
in service and support. “I don’t believe businesses should be competing
with IP \[intellectual property\] barriers,” Nathan said. “This is the
stuff they should be competing on.”

SparkFun’s company history began in Nathan’s college dorm room. He spent
a lot of time experimenting with and building electronics, and he
realized there was a void in the market. “If you wanted to place an
order for something,” he said, “you first had to search far and wide to
find it, and then you had to call or fax someone.” In 2003, during his
third year of college, he registered sparkfun.com and started reselling
products out of his bedroom. After he graduated, he started making and
selling his own products.

Once he started designing his own products, he began putting the
software and schematics online to help with technical support. After
doing some research on licensing options, he chose Creative Commons
licenses because he was drawn to the “human-readable deeds” that explain
the licensing terms in simple terms. SparkFun still uses CC licenses for
all of the schematics and firmware for the products they create.

The company has grown from a solo project to a corporation with 140
employees. In 2015, SparkFun earned \$33 million in revenue. Selling
components and widgets to hobbyists, professionals, and artists remains
a major part of SparkFun’s business. They sell their own products, but
they also partner with Arduino (also profiled in this book) by
manufacturing boards for resale using Arduino’s brand.

SparkFun also has an educational department dedicated to creating a
hands-on curriculum to teach students about electronics using
prototyping parts. Because SparkFun has always been dedicated to
enabling others to re-create and fix their products on their own, the
more recent focus on introducing young people to technology is a natural
extension of their core business.

“We have the burden and opportunity to educate the next generation of
technical citizens,” Nathan said. “Our goal is to affect the lives of
three hundred and fifty thousand high school students by 2020.”

The Creative Commons license underlying all of SparkFun’s products is
central to this mission. The license not only signals a willingness to
share, but it also expresses a desire for others to get in and tinker
with their products, both to learn and to make their products better.
SparkFun uses the Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA), which is a
“copyleft” license that allows people to do anything with the content as
long as they provide credit and make any adaptations available under the
same licensing terms.

From the beginning, Nathan has tried to create a work environment at
SparkFun that he himself would want to work in. The result is what
appears to be a pretty fun workplace. The U.S. company is based in
Boulder, Colorado. They have an eighty-thousand-square-foot facility
(approximately seventy-four-hundred square meters), where they design
and manufacture their products. They offer public tours of the space
several times a week, and they open their doors to the public for a
competition once a year.

The public event, called the Autonomous Vehicle Competition, brings in a
thousand to two thousand customers and other technology enthusiasts from
around the area to race their own self-created bots against each other,
participate in training workshops, and socialize. From a business
perspective, Nathan says it’s a terrible idea. But they don’t hold the
event for business reasons. “The reason we do it is because I get to
travel and have interactions with our customers all the time, but most
of our employees don’t,” he said. “This event gives our employees the
opportunity to get face-to-face contact with our customers.” The event
infuses their work with a human element, which makes it more meaningful.

Nathan has worked hard to imbue a deeper meaning into the work SparkFun
does. The company is, of course, focused on being fiscally responsible,
but they are ultimately driven by something other than money. “Profit is
not the goal; it is the outcome of a well-executed plan,” Nathan said.
“We focus on having a bigger impact on the world.” Nathan believes they
get some of the brightest and most amazing employees because they aren’t
singularly focused on the bottom line.

The company is committed to transparency and shares all of its
financials with its employees. They also generally strive to avoid being
another soulless corporation. They actively try to reveal the humans
behind the company, and they work to ensure people coming to their site
don’t find only unchanging content.

SparkFun’s customer base is largely made up of industrious electronics
enthusiasts. They have customers who are regularly involved in the
company’s customer support, independently responding to questions in
forums and product-comment sections. Customers also bring product ideas
to the company. SparkFun regularly sifts through suggestions from
customers and tries to build on them where they can. “From the
beginning, we have been listening to the community,” Nathan said.
“Customers would identify a pain point, and we would design something to
address it.”

However, this sort of customer engagement does not always translate to
people actively contributing to SparkFun’s projects. The company has a
public repository of software code for each of its devices online. On a
particularly active project, there will only be about two dozen people
contributing significant improvements. The vast majority of projects are
relatively untouched by the public. “There is a theory that if you
open-source it, they will come,” Nathan said. “That’s not really true.”

Rather than focusing on cocreation with their customers, SparkFun
instead focuses on enabling people to copy, tinker, and improve products
on their own. They heavily invest in tutorials and other material
designed to help people understand how the products work so they can fix
and improve things independently. “What gives me joy is when people take
open-source layouts and then build their own circuit boards from our
designs,” Nathan said.

Obviously, opening up the design of their products is a necessary step
if their goal is to empower the public. Nathan also firmly believes it
makes them more money because it requires them to focus on how to
provide maximum value. Rather than designing a new product and
protecting it in order to extract as much money as possible from it,
they release the keys necessary for others to build it themselves and
then spend company time and resources on innovation and service. From a
short-term perspective, SparkFun may lose a few dollars when others copy
their products. But in the long run, it makes them a more nimble,
innovative business. In other words, it makes them the kind of company
they set out to be.

TeachAIDS

TeachAIDS is a nonprofit that creates educational materials designed to
teach people around the world about HIV and AIDS. Founded in 2005 in the
U.S.

teachaids.org

Revenue model: sponsorships

Interview date: March 24, 2016

Interviewees: Piya Sorcar, the CEO, and Shuman Ghosemajumder, the chair

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

TeachAIDS is an unconventional media company with a conventional revenue
model. Like most media companies, they are subsidized by advertising.
Corporations pay to have their logos appear on the educational materials
TeachAIDS distributes.

But unlike most media companies, Teach-AIDS is a nonprofit organization
with a purely social mission. TeachAIDS is dedicated to educating the
global population about HIV and AIDS, particularly in parts of the world
where education efforts have been historically unsuccessful. Their
educational content is conveyed through interactive software, using
methods based on the latest research about how people learn. TeachAIDS
serves content in more than eighty countries around the world. In each
instance, the content is translated to the local language and adjusted
to conform to local norms and customs. All content is free and made
available under a Creative Commons license.

TeachAIDS is a labor of love for founder and CEO Piya Sorcar, who earns
a salary of one dollar per year from the nonprofit. The project grew out
of research she was doing while pursuing her doctorate at Stanford
University. She was reading reports about India, noting it would be the
next hot zone of people living with HIV. Despite international and
national entities pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars on
HIV-prevention efforts, the reports showed knowledge levels were still
low. People were unaware of whether the virus could be transmitted
through coughing and sneezing, for instance. Supported by an
interdisciplinary team of experts at Stanford, Piya conducted similar
studies, which corroborated the previous research. They found that the
primary cause of the limited understanding was that HIV, and issues
relating to it, were often considered too taboo to discuss
comprehensively. The other major problem was that most of the education
on this topic was being taught through television advertising,
billboards, and other mass-media campaigns, which meant people were only
receiving bits and pieces of information.

In late 2005, Piya and her team used research-based design to create new
educational materials and worked with local partners in India to help
distribute them. As soon as the animated software was posted online,
Piya’s team started receiving requests from individuals and governments
who were interested in bringing this model to more countries. “We
realized fairly quickly that educating large populations about a topic
that was considered taboo would be challenging. We began by identifying
optimal local partners and worked toward creating an effective,
culturally appropriate education,” Piya said.

Very shortly after the initial release, Piya’s team decided to spin the
endeavor into an independent nonprofit out of Stanford University. They
also decided to use Creative Commons licenses on the materials.

Given their educational mission, TeachAIDS had an obvious interest in
seeing the materials as widely shared as possible. But they also needed
to preserve the integrity of the medical information in the content.
They chose the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license (CC BY-NC-ND),
which essentially gives the public the right to distribute only verbatim
copies of the content, and for noncommercial purposes. “We wanted
attribution for TeachAIDS, and we couldn’t stand by derivatives without
vetting them,” the cofounder and chair Shuman Ghosemajumder said. “It
was almost a no-brainer to go with a CC license because it was a
plug-and-play solution to this exact problem. It has allowed us to scale
our materials safely and quickly worldwide while preserving our content
and protecting us at the same time.”

Choosing a license that does not allow adaptation of the content was an
outgrowth of the careful precision with which TeachAIDS crafts their
content. The organization invests heavily in research and testing to
determine the best method of conveying the information. “Creating
high-quality content is what matters most to us,” Piya said. “Research
drives everything we do.”

One important finding was that people accept the message best when it
comes from familiar voices they trust and admire. To achieve this,
TeachAIDS researches cultural icons that would best resonate with their
target audiences and recruits them to donate their likenesses and voices
for use in the animated software. The celebrities involved vary for each
localized version of the materials.

Localization is probably the single-most important aspect of the way
TeachAIDS creates its content. While each regional version builds from
the same core scientific materials, they pour a lot of resources into
customizing the content for a particular population. Because they use a
CC license that does not allow the public to adapt the content,
TeachAIDS retains careful control over the localization process. The
content is translated into the local language, but there are also
changes in substance and format to reflect cultural differences. This
process results in minor changes, like choosing different idioms based
on the local language, and significant changes, like creating gendered
versions for places where people are more likely to accept information
from someone of the same gender.

The localization process relies heavily on volunteers. Their volunteer
base is deeply committed to the cause, and the organization has had
better luck controlling the quality of the materials when they tap
volunteers instead of using paid translators. For quality control,
TeachAIDS has three separate volunteer teams translate the materials
from English to the local language and customize the content based on
local customs and norms. Those three versions are then analyzed and
combined into a single master translation. TeachAIDS has additional
teams of volunteers then translate that version back into English to see
how well it lines up with the original materials. They repeat this
process until they reach a translated version that meets their
standards. For the Tibetan version, they went through this cycle eleven
times.

TeachAIDS employs full-time employees, contractors, and volunteers, all
in different capacities and organizational configurations. They are
careful to use people from diverse backgrounds to create the materials,
including teachers, students, and doctors, as well as individuals
experienced in working in the NGO space. This diversity and breadth of
knowledge help ensure their materials resonate with people from all
walks of life. Additionally, TeachAIDS works closely with film writers
and directors to help keep the concepts entertaining and easy to
understand. The inclusive, but highly controlled, creative process is
undertaken entirely by people who are specifically brought on to help
with a particular project, rather than ongoing staff. The final product
they create is designed to require zero training for people to implement
in practice. “In our research, we found we can’t depend on people
passing on the information correctly, even if they have the best of
intentions,” Piya said. “We need materials where you can push play and
they will work.”

Piya’s team was able to produce all of these versions over several years
with a head count that never exceeded eight full-time employees. The
organization is able to reduce costs by relying heavily on volunteers
and in-kind donations. Nevertheless, the nonprofit needed a sustainable
revenue model to subsidize content creation and physical distribution of
the materials. Charging even a low price was simply not an option.
“Educators from various nonprofits around the world were just creating
their own materials using whatever they could find for free online,”
Shuman said. “The only way to persuade them to use our highly effective
model was to make it completely free.”

Like many content creators offering their work for free, they settled on
advertising as a funding model. But they were extremely careful not to
let the advertising compromise their credibility or undermine the heavy
investment they put into creating quality content. Sponsors of the
content have no ability to influence the substance of the content, and
they cannot even create advertising content. Sponsors only get the right
to have their logo appear before and after the educational content. All
of the content remains branded as TeachAIDS.

TeachAIDS is careful not to seek funding to cover the costs of a
specific project. Instead, sponsorships are structured as unrestricted
donations to the nonprofit. This gives the nonprofit more stability, but
even more importantly, it enables them to subsidize projects being
localized for an area with no sponsors. “If we just created versions
based on where we could get sponsorships, we would only have materials
for wealthier countries,” Shuman said.

As of 2016, TeachAIDS has dozens of sponsors. “When we go into a new
country, various companies hear about us and reach out to us,” Piya
said. “We don’t have to do much to find or attract them.” They believe
the sponsorships are easy to sell because they offer so much value to
sponsors. TeachAIDS sponsorships give corporations the chance to reach
new eyeballs with their brand, but at a much lower cost than other
advertising channels. The audience for TeachAIDS content also tends to
skew young, which is often a desirable demographic for brands. Unlike
traditional advertising, the content is not time-sensitive, so an
investment in a sponsorship can benefit a brand for many years to come.

Importantly, the value to corporate sponsors goes beyond commercial
considerations. As a nonprofit with a clearly articulated social
mission, corporate sponsorships are donations to a cause. “This is
something companies can be proud of internally,” Shuman said. Some
companies have even built publicity campaigns around the fact that they
have sponsored these initiatives.

The core mission of TeachAIDS—ensuring global access to life-saving
education—is at the root of everything the organization does. It
underpins the work; it motivates the funders. The CC license on the
materials they create furthers that mission, allowing them to safely and
quickly scale their materials worldwide. “The Creative Commons license
has been a game changer for TeachAIDS,” Piya said.

Tribe of Noise

Tribe of Noise is a for-profit online music platform serving the film,
TV, video, gaming, and in-store-media industries. Founded in 2008 in the
Netherlands.

www.tribeofnoise.com

Revenue model: charging a transaction fee

Interview date: January 26, 2016

Interviewee: Hessel van Oorschot, cofounder

Profile written by Paul Stacey

In the early 2000s, Hessel van Oorschot was an entrepreneur running a
business where he coached other midsize entrepreneurs how to create an
online business. He also coauthored a number of workbooks for small- to
medium-size enterprises to use to optimize their business for the Web.
Through this early work, Hessel became familiar with the principles of
open licensing, including the use of open-source software and Creative
Commons.

In 2005, Hessel and Sandra Brandenburg launched a niche video-production
initiative. Almost immediately, they ran into issues around finding and
licensing music tracks. All they could find was standard, cold
stock-music. They thought of looking up websites where you could license
music directly from the musician without going through record labels or
agents. But in 2005, the ability to directly license music from a rights
holder was not readily available.

They hired two lawyers to investigate further, and while they uncovered
five or six examples, Hessel found the business models lacking. The
lawyers expressed interest in being their legal team should they decide
to pursue this as an entrepreneurial opportunity. Hessel says, “When
lawyers are interested in a venture like this, you might have something
special.” So after some more research, in early 2008, Hessel and Sandra
decided to build a platform.

Building a platform posed a real chicken-and-egg problem. The platform
had to build an online community of music-rights holders and, at the
same time, provide the community with information and ideas about how
the new economy works. Community willingness to try new music business
models requires a trust relationship.

In July 2008, Tribe of Noise opened its virtual doors with a couple
hundred musicians willing to use the CC BY-SA license
(Attribution-ShareAlike) for a limited part of their repertoire. The two
entrepreneurs wanted to take the pain away for media makers who wanted
to license music and solve the problems the two had personally
experienced finding this music.

As they were growing the community, Hessel got a phone call from a
company that made in-store music playlists asking if they had enough
music licensed with Creative Commons that they could use. Stores need
quality, good-listening music but not necessarily hits, a bit like a
radio show without the DJ. This opened a new opportunity for Tribe of
Noise. They started their In-store Music Service, using music (licensed
with CC BY-SA) uploaded by the Tribe of Noise community of musicians.1

In most countries, artists, authors, and musicians join a collecting
society that manages the licensing and helps collect the royalties.
Copyright collecting societies in the European Union usually hold
monopolies in their respective national markets. In addition, they
require their members to transfer exclusive administration rights to
them of all of their works. This complicates the picture for Tribe of
Noise, who wants to represent artists, or at least a portion of their
repertoire. Hessel and his legal team reached out to collecting
societies, starting with those in the Netherlands. What would be the
best legal way forward that would respect the wishes of composers and
musicians who’d be interested in trying out new models like the In-store
Music Service? Collecting societies at first were hesitant and said no,
but Tribe of Noise persisted arguing that they primarily work with
unknown artists and provide them exposure in parts of the world where
they don’t get airtime normally and a source of revenue—and this
convinced them that it was OK. However, Hessel says, “We are still
fighting for a good cause every single day.”

Instead of building a large sales force, Tribe of Noise partnered with
big organizations who have lots of clients and can act as a kind of
Tribe of Noise reseller. The largest telecom network in the Netherlands,
for example, sells Tribe’s In-store Music Service subscriptions to their
business clients, which include fashion retailers and fitness centers.
They have a similar deal with the leading trade association representing
hotels and restaurants in the country. Hessel hopes to “copy and paste”
this service into other countries where collecting societies understand
what you can do with Creative Commons. Outside of the Netherlands, early
adoptions have happened in Scandinavia, Belgium, and the U.S.

Tribe of Noise doesn’t pay the musicians up front; they get paid when
their music ends up in Tribe of Noise’s in-store music channels. The
musicians’ share is 42.5 percent. It’s not uncommon in a traditional
model for the artist to get only 5 to 10 percent, so a share of over 40
percent is a significantly better deal. Here’s how they give an example
on their website:

A few of your songs \[licensed with CC BY-SA\], for example five in
total, are selected for a bespoke in-store music channel broadcasting at
a large retailer with 1,000 stores nationwide. In this case the overall
playlist contains 350 songs so the musician’s share is 5/350 = 1.43%.
The license fee agreed with this retailer is US\$12 per month per
play-out. So if 42.5% is shared with the Tribe musicians in this
playlist and your share is 1.43%, you end up with US\$12 \* 1000 stores
\* 0.425 \* 0.0143 = US\$73 per month.2

Tribe of Noise has another model that does not involve Creative Commons.
In a survey with members, most said they liked the exposure using
Creative Commons gets them and the way it lets them reach out to others
to share and remix. However, they had a bit of a mental struggle with
Creative Commons licenses being perpetual. A lot of musicians have the
mind-set that one day one of their songs may become an overnight hit. If
that happened the CC BY-SA license would preclude them getting rich off
the sale of that song.

Hessel’s legal team took this feedback and created a second model and
separate area of the platform called Tribe of Noise Pro. Songs uploaded
to Tribe of Noise Pro aren’t Creative Commons licensed; Tribe of Noise
has instead created a “nonexclusive exploitation” contract, similar to a
Creative Commons license but allowing musicians to opt out whenever they
want. When you opt out, Tribe of Noise agrees to take your music off the
Tribe of Noise platform within one to two months. This lets the musician
reuse their song for a better deal.

Tribe of Noise Pro is primarily geared toward media makers who are
looking for music. If they buy a license from this catalog, they don’t
have to state the name of the creator; they just license the song for a
specific amount. This is a big plus for media makers. And musicians can
pull their repertoire at any time. Hessel sees this as a more direct and
clean deal.

Lots of Tribe of Noise musicians upload songs to both Tribe of Noise Pro
and the community area of Tribe of Noises. There aren’t that many
artists who upload only to Tribe of Noise Pro, which has a smaller
repertoire of music than the community area.

Hessel sees the two as complementary. Both are needed for the model to
work. With a whole generation of musicians interested in the sharing
economy, the community area of Tribe of Noise is where they can build
trust, create exposure, and generate money. And after that, musicians
may become more interested in exploring other models like Tribe of Noise
Pro.

Every musician who joins Tribe of Noise gets their own home page and
free unlimited Web space to upload as much of their own music as they
like. Tribe of Noise is also a social network; fellow musicians and
professionals can vote for, comment on, and like your music. Community
managers interact with and support members, and music supervisors pick
and choose from the uploaded songs for in-store play or to promote them
to media producers. Members really like having people working for the
platform who truly engage with them.

Another way Tribe of Noise creates community and interest is with
contests, which are organized in partnership with Tribe of Noise
clients. The client specifies what they want, and any member can submit
a song. Contests usually involve prizes, exposure, and money. In
addition to building member engagement, contests help members learn how
to work with clients: listening to them, understanding what they want,
and creating a song to meet that need.

Tribe of Noise now has twenty-seven thousand members from 192 countries,
and many are exploring do-it-yourself models for generating revenue.
Some came from music labels and publishers, having gone through the
traditional way of music licensing and now seeing if this new model
makes sense for them. Others are young musicians, who grew up with a DIY
mentality and see little reason to sign with a third party or hand over
some of the control. Still a small but growing group of Tribe members
are pursuing a hybrid model by licensing some of their songs under CC
BY-SA and opting in others with collecting societies like
ASCAP or BMI.

It’s not uncommon for performance-rights organizations, record labels,
or music publishers to sign contracts with musicians based on
exclusivity. Such an arrangement prevents those musicians from uploading
their music to Tribe of Noise. In the United States, you can have a
collecting society handle only some of your tracks, whereas in many
countries in Europe, a collecting society prefers to represent your
entire repertoire (although the European Commission is making some
changes). Tribe of Noise deals with this issue all the time and gives
you a warning whenever you upload a song. If collecting societies are
willing to be open and flexible and do the most they can for their
members, then they can consider organizations like Tribe of Noise as a
nice add-on, generating more exposure and revenue for the musicians they
represent. So far, Tribe of Noise has been able to make all this work
without litigation.

For Hessel the key to Tribe of Noise’s success is trust. The fact that
Creative Commons licenses work the same way all over the world and have
been translated into all languages really helps build that trust. Tribe
of Noise believes in creating a model where they work together with
musicians. They can only do that if they have a live and kicking
community, with people who think that the Tribe of Noise team has their
best interests in mind. Creative Commons makes it possible to create a
new business model for music, a model that’s based on trust.

Web links

1.  www.instoremusicservice.com
2.  www.tribeofnoise.com/info\_instoremusic.php

Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that hosts
Wikipedia and its sister projects. Founded in 2003 in the U.S.

wikimediafoundation.org

Revenue model: donations

Interview date: December 18, 2015

Interviewees: Luis Villa, former Chief Officer of Community Engagement,
and Stephen LaPorte, legal counsel

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

Nearly every person with an online presence knows Wikipedia.

In many ways, it is the preeminent open project: The online encyclopedia
is created entirely by volunteers. Anyone in the world can edit the
articles. All of the content is available for free to anyone online. All
of the content is released under a Creative Commons license that enables
people to reuse and adapt it for any purpose.

As of December 2016, there were more than forty-two million articles in
the 295 language editions of the online encyclopedia, according to—what
else?—the Wikipedia article about Wikipedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that
owns the Wikipedia domain name and hosts the site, along with many other
related sites like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. The foundation
employs about two hundred and eighty people, who all work to support the
projects it hosts. But the true heart of Wikipedia and its sister
projects is its community. The numbers of people in the community are
variable, but about seventy-five thousand volunteers edit and improve
Wikipedia articles every month. Volunteers are organized in a variety of
ways across the globe, including formal Wikimedia chapters (mostly
national), groups focused on a particular theme, user groups, and many
thousands who are not connected to a particular organization.

As Wikimedia legal counsel Stephen LaPorte told us, “There is a common
saying that Wikipedia works in practice but not in theory.” While it
undoubtedly has its challenges and flaws, Wikipedia and its sister
projects are a striking testament to the power of human collaboration.

Because of its extraordinary breadth and scope, it does feel a bit like
a unicorn. Indeed, there is nothing else like Wikipedia. Still, much of
what makes the projects successful—community, transparency, a strong
mission, trust—are consistent with what it takes to be successfully Made
with Creative Commons more generally. With Wikipedia, everything just
happens at an unprecedented scale.

The story of Wikipedia has been told many times. For our purposes, it is
enough to know the experiment started in 2001 at a small scale, inspired
by the crazy notion that perhaps a truly open, collaborative project
could create something meaningful. At this point, Wikipedia is so
ubiquitous and ingrained in our digital lives that the fact of its
existence seems less remarkable. But outside of software, Wikipedia is
perhaps the single most stunning example of successful community
cocreation. Every day, seven thousand new articles are created on
Wikipedia, and nearly fifteen thousand edits are made every hour.

The nature of the content the community creates is ideal for
asynchronous cocreation. “An encyclopedia is something where incremental
community improvement really works,” Luis Villa, former Chief Officer of
Community Engagement, told us. The rules and processes that govern
cocreation on Wikipedia and its sister projects are all community-driven
and vary by language edition. There are entire books written on the
intricacies of their systems, but generally speaking, there are very few
exceptions to the rule that anyone can edit any article, even without an
account on their system. The extensive peer-review process includes
elaborate systems to resolve disputes, methods for managing particularly
controversial subject areas, talk pages explaining decisions, and much,
much more. The Wikimedia Foundation’s decision to leave governance of
the projects to the community is very deliberate. “We look at the things
that the community can do well, and we want to let them do those
things,” Stephen told us. Instead, the foundation focuses its time and
resources on what the community cannot do as effectively, like the
software engineering that supports the technical infrastructure of the
sites. In 2015-16, about half of the foundation’s budget went to direct
support for the Wikimedia sites.

Some of that is directed at servers and general IT support, but the
foundation also invests a significant amount on architecture designed to
help the site function as effectively as possible. “There is a
constantly evolving system to keep the balance in place to avoid
Wikipedia becoming the world’s biggest graffiti wall,” Luis said.
Depending on how you measure it, somewhere between 90 to 98 percent of
edits to Wikipedia are positive. Some portion of that success is
attributable to the tools Wikimedia has in place to try to incentivize
good actors. “The secret to having any healthy community is bringing
back the right people,” Luis said. “Vandals tend to get bored and go
away. That is partially our model working, and partially just human
nature.” Most of the time, people want to do the right thing.

Wikipedia not only relies on good behavior within its community and on
its sites, but also by everyone else once the content leaves Wikipedia.
All of the text of Wikipedia is available under an
Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA), which means it can be used
for any purpose and modified so long as credit is given and anything new
is shared back with the public under the same license. In theory, that
means anyone can copy the content and start a new Wikipedia. But as
Stephen explained, “Being open has only made Wikipedia bigger and
stronger. The desire to protect is not always what is best for
everyone.”

Of course, the primary reason no one has successfully co-opted Wikipedia
is that copycat efforts do not have the Wikipedia community to sustain
what they do. Wikipedia is not simply a source of up-to-the-minute
content on every given topic—it is also a global patchwork of humans
working together in a million different ways, in a million different
capacities, for a million different reasons. While many have tried to
guess what makes Wikipedia work as well it does, the fact is there is no
single explanation. “In a movement as large as ours, there is an
incredible diversity of motivations,” Stephen said. For example, there
is one editor of the English Wikipedia edition who has corrected a
single grammatical error in articles more than forty-eight thousand
times.1 Only a fraction of Wikipedia users are also editors. But editing
is not the only way to contribute to Wikipedia. “Some donate text, some
donate images, some donate financially,” Stephen told us. “They are all
contributors.”

But the vast majority of us who use Wikipedia are not contributors; we
are passive readers. The Wikimedia Foundation survives primarily on
individual donations, with about \$15 as the average. Because Wikipedia
is one of the ten most popular websites in terms of total page views,
donations from a small portion of that audience can translate into a lot
of money. In the 2015-16 fiscal year, they received more than \$77
million from more than five million donors.

The foundation has a fund-raising team that works year-round to raise
money, but the bulk of their revenue comes in during the December
campaign in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom,
and the United States. They engage in extensive user testing and
research to maximize the reach of their fund-raising campaigns. Their
basic fund-raising message is simple: We provide our readers and the
world immense value, so give back. Every little bit helps. With enough
eyeballs, they are right.

The vision of the Wikimedia Foundation is a world in which every single
human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. They work to
realize this vision by empowering people around the globe to create
educational content made freely available under an open license or in
the public domain. Stephen and Luis said the mission, which is rooted in
the same philosophy behind Creative Commons, drives everything the
foundation does.

The philosophy behind the endeavor also enables the foundation to be
financially sustainable. It instills trust in their readership, which is
critical for a revenue strategy that relies on reader donations. It also
instills trust in their community.

Any given edit on Wikipedia could be motivated by nearly an infinite
number of reasons. But the social mission of the project is what binds
the global community together. “Wikipedia is an example of how a mission
can motivate an entire movement,” Stephen told us.

Of course, what results from that movement is one of the Internet’s
great public resources. “The Internet has a lot of businesses and
stores, but it is missing the digital equivalent of parks and open
public spaces,” Stephen said. “Wikipedia has found a way to be that open
public space.”

Web link

1.  gimletmedia.com/episode/14-the-art-of-making-and-fixing-mistakes/

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Acknowledgments

We extend special thanks to Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley, the
Creative Commons Board, and all of our Creative Commons colleagues for
enthusiastically supporting our work. Special gratitude to the William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation for the initial seed funding that got us
started on this project.

Huge appreciation to all the Made with Creative Commons interviewees for
sharing their stories with us. You make the commons come alive. Thanks
for the inspiration.

We interviewed more than the twenty-four organizations profiled in this
book. We extend special thanks to Gooru, OERu, Sage Bionetworks, and
Medium for sharing their stories with us. While not featured as case
studies in this book, you all are equally interesting, and we encourage
our readers to visit your sites and explore your work.

This book was made possible by the generous support of 1,687 Kickstarter
backers listed below. We especially acknowledge our many Kickstarter
co-editors who read early drafts of our work and provided invaluable
feedback. Heartfelt thanks to all of you.

Co-editor Kickstarter backers (alphabetically by first name): Abraham
Taherivand, Alan Graham, Alfredo Louro, Anatoly Volynets, Aurora
Thornton, Austin Tolentino, Ben Sheridan, Benedikt Foit, Benjamin
Costantini, Bernd Nurnberger, Bernhard Seefeld, Bethanye Blount,
Bradford Benn, Bryan Mock, Carmen Garcia Wiedenhoeft, Carolyn Hinchliff,
Casey Milford, Cat Cooper, Chip McIntosh, Chris Thorne, Chris Weber,
Chutika Udomsinn, Claire Wardle, Claudia Cristiani, Cody Allard, Colleen
Cressman, Craig Thomler, Creative Commons Uruguay, Curt McNamara, Dan
Parson, Daniel Dominguez, Daniel Morado, Darius Irvin, Dave Taillefer,
David Lewis, David Mikula, David Varnes, David Wiley, Deborah Nas,
Diderik van Wingerden, Dirk Kiefer, Dom Lane, Domi Enders, Douglas Van
Houweling, Dylan Field, Einar Joergensen, Elad Wieder, Elie Calhoun,
Erika Reid, Evtim Papushev, Fauxton Software, Felix Maximiliano Obes,
Ferdies Food Lab, Gatien de Broucker, Gaurav Kapil, Gavin Romig-Koch,
George Baier IV, George De Bruin, Gianpaolo Rando, Glenn Otis Brown,
Govindarajan Umakanthan, Graham Bird, Graham Freeman, Hamish MacEwan,
Harry Kaczka, Humble Daisy, Ian Capstick, Iris Brest, James Cloos, Jamie
Stevens, Jamil Khatib, Jane Finette, Jason Blasso, Jason E. Barkeloo,
Jay M Williams, Jean-Philippe Turcotte, Jeanette Frey, Jeff De Cagna,
Jérôme Mizeret, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, Jessy Kate Schingler, Jim
O’Flaherty, Jim Pellegrini, Jiří Marek, Jo Allum, Joachim von Goetz,
Johan Adda, John Benfield, John Bevan, Jonas Öberg, Jonathan Lin, JP
Rangaswami, Juan Carlos Belair, Justin Christian, Justin Szlasa, Kate
Chapman, Kate Stewart, Kellie Higginbottom, Kendra Byrne, Kevin Coates,
Kristina Popova, Kristoffer Steen, Kyle Simpson, Laurie Racine, Leonardo
Bueno Postacchini, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Livia Leskovec, Louis-David
Benyayer, Maik Schmalstich, Mairi Thomson, Marcia Hofmann, Maria
Liberman, Marino Hernandez, Mario R. Hemsley, MD, Mark Cohen, Mark
Mullen, Mary Ellen Davis, Mathias Bavay, Matt Black, Matt Hall, Max van
Balgooy, Médéric Droz-dit-Busset, Melissa Aho, Menachem Goldstein,
Michael Harries, Michael Lewis, Michael Weiss, Miha Batic, Mike Stop
Continues, Mike Stringer, Mustafa K Calik, MD, Neal Stimler, Niall
McDonagh, Niall Twohig, Nicholas Norfolk, Nick Coghlan, Nicole Hickman,
Nikki Thompson, Norrie Mailer, Omar Kaminski, OpenBuilds, Papp István
Péter, Pat Sticks, Patricia Brennan, Paul and Iris Brest, Paul Elosegui,
Penny Pearson, Peter Mengelers, Playground Inc., Pomax, Rafaela Kunz,
Rajiv Jhangiani, Rayna Stamboliyska, Rob Berkley, Rob Bertholf, Robert
Jones, Robert Thompson, Ronald van den Hoff, Rusi Popov, Ryan Merkley, S
Searle, Salomon Riedo, Samuel A. Rebelsky, Samuel Tait, Sarah McGovern,
Scott Gillespie, Seb Schmoller, Sharon Clapp, Sheona Thomson, Siena
Oristaglio, Simon Law, Solomon Simon, Stefano Guidotti, Subhendu Ghosh,
Susan Chun, Suzie Wiley, Sylvain Carle, Theresa Bernardo, Thomas
Hartman, Thomas Kent, Timothée Planté, Timothy Hinchliff, Traci Long
DeForge, Trevor Hogue, Tumuult, Vickie Goode, Vikas Shah, Virginia
Kopelman, Wayne Mackintosh, William Peter Nash, Winie Evers, Wolfgang
Renninger, Xavier Antoviaque, Yancey Strickler

All other Kickstarter backers (alphabetically by first name): A. Lee,
Aaron C. Rathbun, Aaron Stubbs, Aaron Suggs, Abdul Razak Manaf, Abraham
Taherivand, Adam Croom, Adam Finer, Adam Hansen, Adam Morris, Adam
Procter, Adam Quirk, Adam Rory Porter, Adam Simmons, Adam Tinworth, Adam
Zimmerman, Adrian Ho, Adrian Smith, Adriane Ruzak, Adriano Loconte, Al
Sweigart, Alain Imbaud, Alan Graham, Alan M. Ford, Alan Swithenbank,
Alan Vonlanthen, Albert O’Connor, Alec Foster, Alejandro Suarez Cebrian,
Aleks Degtyarev, Alex Blood, Alex C. Ion, Alex Ross Shaw, Alexander
Bartl, Alexander Brown, Alexander Brunner, Alexander Eliesen, Alexander
Hawson, Alexander Klar, Alexander Neumann, Alexander Plaum, Alexander
Wendland, Alexandre Rafalovitch, Alexey Volkow, Alexi Wheeler, Alexis
Sevault, Alfredo Louro, Ali Sternburg, Alicia Gibb & Lunchbox
Electronics, Alison Link, Alison Pentecost, Alistair Boettiger, Alistair
Walder, Alix Bernier, Allan Callaghan, Allen Riddell, Allison Breland
Crotwell, Allison Jane Smith, Álvaro Justen, Amanda Palmer, Amanda
Wetherhold, Amit Bagree, Amit Tikare, Amos Blanton, Amy Sept, Anatoly
Volynets, Anders Ericsson, Andi Popp, André Bose Do Amaral, Andre
Dickson, André Koot, André Ricardo, Andre van Rooyen, Andre Wallace,
Andrea Bagnacani, Andrea Pepe, Andrea Pigato, Andreas Jagelund, Andres
Gomez Casanova, Andrew A. Farke, Andrew Berhow, Andrew Hearse, Andrew
Matangi, Andrew R McHugh, Andrew Tam, Andrew Turvey, Andrew Walsh,
Andrew Wilson, Andrey Novoseltsev, Andy McGhee, Andy Reeve, Andy Woods,
Angela Brett, Angeliki Kapoglou, Angus Keenan, Anne-Marie Scott, Antero
Garcia, Antoine Authier, Antoine Michard, Anton Kurkin, Anton Porsche,
Antònia Folguera, António Ornelas, Antonis Triantafyllakis, aois21
publishing, April Johnson, Aria F. Chernik, Ariane Allan, Ariel Katz,
Arithmomaniac, Arnaud Tessier, Arnim Sommer, Ashima Bawa, Ashley Elsdon,
Athanassios Diacakis, Aurora Thornton, Aurore Chavet Henry, Austin
Hartzheim, Austin Tolentino, Avner Shanan, Axel Pettersson, Axel
Stieglbauer, Ay Okpokam, Barb Bartkowiak, Barbara Lindsey, Barry Dayton,
Bastian Hougaard, Ben Chad, Ben Doherty, Ben Hansen, Ben Nuttall, Ben
Rosenthal, Ben Sheridan, Benedikt Foit, Benita Tsao, Benjamin
Costantini, Benjamin Daemon, Benjamin Keele, Benjamin Pflanz, Berglind
Ósk Bergsdóttir, Bernardo Miguel Antunes, Bernd Nurnberger, Bernhard
Seefeld, Beth Gis, Beth Tillinghast, Bethanye Blount, Bill Bonwitt, Bill
Browne, Bill Keaggy, Bill Maiden, Bill Rafferty, Bill Scanlon, Bill
Shields, Bill Slankard, BJ Becker, Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Bjørn Otto
Wallevik, BK Bitner, Bo Ilsøe Hansen, Bo Sprotte Kofod, Bob Doran, Bob
Recny, Bob Stuart, Bonnie Chiu, Boris Mindzak, Boriss Lariushin, Borjan
Tchakaloff, Brad Kik, Braden Hassett, Bradford Benn, Bradley Keyes,
Bradley L’Herrou, Brady Forrest, Brandon McGaha, Branka Tokic, Brant
Anderson, Brenda Sullivan, Brendan O’Brien, Brendan Schlagel, Brett
Abbott, Brett Gaylor, Brian Dysart, Brian Lampl, Brian Lipscomb, Brian
S. Weis, Brian Schrader, Brian Walsh, Brian Walsh, Brooke Dukes, Brooke
Schreier Ganz, Bruce Lerner, Bruce Wilson, Bruno Boutot, Bruno Girin,
Bryan Mock, Bryant Durrell, Bryce Barbato, Buzz Technology Limited,
Byung-Geun Jeon, C. Glen Williams, C. L. Couch, Cable Green, Callum
Gare, Cameron Callahan, Cameron Colby Thomson, Cameron Mulder, Camille
Bissuel / Nylnook, Candace Robertson, Carl Morris, Carl Perry, Carl
Rigney, Carles Mateu, Carlos Correa Loyola, Carlos Solis, Carmen Garcia
Wiedenhoeft, Carol Long, Carol marquardsen, Caroline Calomme, Caroline
Mailloux, Carolyn Hinchliff, Carolyn Rude, Carrie Cousins, Carrie
Watkins, Casey Hunt, Casey Milford, Casey Powell Shorthouse, Cat Cooper,
Cecilie Maria, Cedric Howe, Cefn Hoile,
@ShrimpingIt, Celia Muller, Ces Keller, Chad Anderson, Charles Butler,
Charles Carstensen, Charles Chi Thoi Le, Charles Kobbe, Charles S.
Tritt, Charles Stanhope, Charlotte Ong-Wisener, Chealsye Bowley, Chelle
Destefano, Chenpang Chou, Cheryl Corte, Cheryl Todd, Chip Dickerson,
Chip McIntosh, Chris Bannister, Chris Betcher, Chris Coleman, Chris
Conway, Chris Foote (Spike), Chris Hurst, Chris Mitchell, Chris Muscat
Azzopardi, Chris Niewiarowski, Chris Opperwall, Chris Stieha, Chris
Thorne, Chris Weber, Chris Woolfrey, Chris Zabriskie, Christi Reid,
Christian Holzberger, Christian Schubert, Christian Sheehy, Christian
Thibault, Christian Villum, Christian Wachter, Christina Bennett,
Christine Henry, Christine Rico, Christopher Burrows, Christopher Chan,
Christopher Clay, Christopher Harris, Christopher Opiah, Christopher
Swenson, Christos Keramitsis, Chuck Roslof, Chutika Udomsinn, Claire
Wardle, Clare Forrest, Claudia Cristiani, Claudio Gallo, Claudio Ruiz,
Clayton Dewey, Clement Delort, Cliff Church, Clint Lalonde, Clint
O’Connor, Cody Allard, Cody Taylor, Colin Ayer, Colin Campbell, Colin
Dean, Colin Mutchler, Colleen Cressman, Comfy Nomad, Connie Roberts,
Connor Bär, Connor Merkley, Constantin Graf, Corbett Messa, Cory
Chapman, Cosmic Wombat Games, Craig Engler, Craig Heath, Craig Maloney,
Craig Thomler, Creative Commons Uruguay, Crina Kienle, Cristiano
Gozzini, Curt McNamara, D C Petty, D. Moonfire, D. Rohhyn, D. Schulz,
Dacian Herbei, Dagmar M. Meyer, Dan Mcalister, Dan Mohr, Dan Parson,
Dana Freeman, Dana Ospina, Dani Leviss, Daniel Bustamante, Daniel
Demmel, Daniel Dominguez, Daniel Dultz, Daniel Gallant, Daniel Kossmann,
Daniel Kruse, Daniel Morado, Daniel Morgan, Daniel Pimley, Daniel Sabo,
Daniel Sobey, Daniel Stein, Daniel Wildt, Daniele Prati, Danielle Moss,
Danny Mendoza, Dario Taraborelli, Darius Irvin, Darius Whelan, Darla
Anderson, Dasha Brezinova, Dave Ainscough, Dave Bull, Dave Crosby, Dave
Eagle, Dave Moskovitz, Dave Neeteson, Dave Taillefer, Dave Witzel, David
Bailey, David Cheung, David Eriksson, David Gallagher, David H. Bronke,
David Hartley, David Hellam, David Hood, David Hunter, David jlaietta,
David Lewis, David Mason, David Mcconville, David Mikula, David Nelson,
David Orban, David Parry, David Spira, David T. Kindler, David Varnes,
David Wiley, David Wormley, Deborah Nas, Denis Jean, dennis straub,
Dennis Whittle, Denver Gingerich, Derek Slater, Devon Cooke, Diana
Pasek-Atkinson, Diane Johnston Graves, Diane K. Kovacs, Diane Trout,
Diderik van Wingerden, Diego Cuevas, Diego De La Cruz, Dimitrie
Grigorescu, Dina Marie Rodriguez, Dinah Fabela, Dirk Haun, Dirk Kiefer,
Dirk Loop, DJ Fusion - FuseBox Radio Broadcast, Dom jurkewitz, Dom Lane,
Domi Enders, Domingo Gallardo, Dominic de Haas, Dominique Karadjian,
Dongpo Deng, Donnovan Knight, Door de Flines, Doug Fitzpatrick, Doug
Hoover, Douglas Craver, Douglas Van Camp, Douglas Van Houweling, Dr.
Braddlee, Drew Spencer, Duncan
Sample, Durand D’souza, Dylan Field, E C Humphries, Eamon Caddigan,
Earleen Smith, Eden Sarid, Eden Spodek, Eduardo Belinchon, Eduardo
Castro, Edwin Vandam, Einar Joergensen, Ejnar Brendsdal, Elad Wieder,
Elar Haljas, Elena Valhalla, Eli Doran, Elias Bouchi, Elie Calhoun,
Elizabeth Holloway, Ellen Buecher, Ellen Kaye-
Cheveldayoff, Elli Verhulst, Elroy Fernandes, Emery Hurst Mikel, Emily
Catedral, Enrique Mandujano R., Eric Astor, Eric Axelrod, Eric Celeste,
Eric Finkenbiner, Eric Hellman, Eric Steuer, Erica Fletcher, Erik
Hedman, Erik Lindholm Bundgaard, Erika Reid, Erin Hawley, Erin McKean of
Wordnik, Ernest Risner, Erwan Bousse, Erwin Bell, Ethan Celery, Étienne
Gilli, Eugeen Sablin, Evan Tangman, Evonne Okafor, Evtim Papushev,
Fabien Cambi, Fabio Natali, Fauxton Software, Felix Deierlein, Felix
Gebauer, Felix Maximiliano Obes, Felix Schmidt, Felix Zephyr Hsiao,
Ferdies Food Lab, Fernand Deschambault, Filipe Rodrigues, Filippo Toso,
Fiona MacAlister, fiona.mac.uk, Floor Scheffer, Florent Darrault,
Florian Hähnel, Florian Schneider, Floyd Wilde, Foxtrot Games, Francis
Clarke, Francisco Rivas-Portillo, Francois Dechery, Francois Grey,
François Gros, François Pelletier, Fred Benenson, Frédéric Abella,
Frédéric Schütz, Fredrik Ekelund, Fumi Yamazaki, Gabor Sooki-Toth,
Gabriel Staples, Gabriel Véjar Valenzuela, Gal Buki, Gareth Jordan,
Garrett Heath, Gary Anson, Gary Forster, Gatien de Broucker, Gaurav
Kapil, Gauthier de Valensart, Gavin Gray, Gavin Romig-Koch, Geoff Wood,
Geoffrey Lehr, George Baier IV, George De Bruin, George Lawie, George
Strakhov, Gerard Gorman, Geronimo de la Lama, Gianpaolo Rando, Gil
Stendig, Gino Cingolani Trucco, Giovanna Sala, Glen Moffat, Glenn D.
Jones, Glenn Otis Brown, Global Lives Project, Gorm Lai, Govindarajan
Umakanthan, Graham Bird, Graham Freeman, Graham Heath, Graham Jones,
Graham Smith-Gordon, Graham Vowles, Greg Brodsky, Greg Malone, Grégoire
Detrez, Gregory Chevalley, Gregory Flynn, Grit Matthias, Gui Louback,
Guillaume Rischard, Gustavo Vaz de Carvalho Gonçalves, Gustin Johnson,
Gwen Franck, Gwilym Lucas, Haggen So, Håkon T Sønderland, Hamid Larbi,
Hamish MacEwan, Hannes Leo, Hans Bickhofe, Hans de Raad, Hans Vd Horst,
Harold van Ingen, Harold Watson, Harry Chapman, Harry Kaczka, Harry
Torque, Hayden Glass, Hayley Rosenblum, Heather Leson, Helen Crisp,
Helen
Michaud, Helen Qubain, Helle Rekdal Schønemann, Henrique Flach Latorre
Moreno, Henry Finn, Henry Kaiser, Henry Lahore, Henry Steingieser,
Hermann Paar, Hillary Miller, Hironori Kuriaki, Holly Dykes, Holly Lyne,
Hubert Gertis, Hugh Geenen, Humble Daisy, Hüppe Keith, Iain Davidson,
Ian Capstick, Ian Johnson, Ian Upton, Icaro Ferracini, Igor Lesko, Imran
Haider, Inma de la Torre, Iris Brest, Irwin Madriaga, Isaac Sandaljian,
Isaiah Tanenbaum, Ivan F. Villanueva B., J P Cleverdon, Jaakko Tammela
Jr, Jacek Darken Gołębiowski, Jack Hart, Jacky Hood, Jacob Dante
Leffler, Jaime Perla, Jaime Woo, Jake Campbell, Jake Loeterman, Jakes
Rawlinson, James Allenspach, James Chesky, James Cloos, James Docherty,
James Ellars, James K Wood, James Tyler, Jamie Finlay, Jamie Stevens,
Jamil Khatib, Jan E Ellison, Jan Gondol, Jan Sepp, Jan Zuppinger, Jane
Finette, jane Lofton, Jane Mason, Jane Park, Janos Kovacs, Jasmina
Bricic, Jason Blasso, Jason Chu, Jason Cole, Jason E. Barkeloo, Jason
Hibbets, Jason Owen, Jason Sigal, Jay M Williams, Jazzy Bear Brown, JC
Lara, Jean-Baptiste Carré, Jean-Philippe Dufraigne, Jean-Philippe
Turcotte, Jean-Yves Hemlin, Jeanette Frey, Jeff Atwood, Jeff De Cagna,
Jeff Donoghue, Jeff Edwards, Jeff Hilnbrand, Jeff Lowe, Jeff Rasalla,
Jeff Ski Kinsey, Jeff Smith, Jeffrey L Tucker, Jeffrey Meyer, Jen
Garcia, Jens Erat, Jeppe Bager Skjerning, Jeremy Dudet, Jeremy Russell,
Jeremy Sabo, Jeremy Zauder, Jerko Grubisic, Jerome Glacken, Jérôme
Mizeret, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, Jessica Litman, Jessica Mackay,
Jessy Kate Schingler, Jesús Longás Gamarra, Jesus Marin, Jim Matt, Jim
Meloy, Jim O’Flaherty, Jim Pellegrini, Jim Tittsler, Jimmy Alenius, Jiří
Marek, Jo Allum, Joachim Brandon LeBlanc, Joachim Pileborg, Joachim von
Goetz, Joakim Bang Larsen, Joan Rieu, Joanna Penn, João Almeida, Jochen
Muetsch, Jodi Sandfort, Joe Cardillo, Joe Carpita, Joe Moross, Joerg
Fricke, Johan Adda, Johan Meeusen, Johannes Förstner, Johannes
Visintini, John Benfield, John Bevan, John C Patterson, John Crumrine,
John Dimatos, John Feyler, John Huntsman, John Manoogian III, John
Muller, John Ober, John Paul Blodgett, John Pearce, John Shale, John
Sharp, John Simpson, John Sumser, John Weeks, John Wilbanks, John
Worland, Johnny Mayall, Jollean Matsen, Jon Alberdi, Jon Andersen, Jon
Cohrs, Jon Gotlin, Jon Schull, Jon Selmer Friborg, Jon Smith, Jonas
Öberg, Jonas Weitzmann, Jonathan Campbell, Jonathan Deamer, Jonathan
Holst, Jonathan Lin, Jonathan Schmid, Jonathan Yao, Jordon Kalilich,
Jörg Schwarz, Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez, Joseph Mcarthur, Joseph
Noll, Joseph Sullivan, Joseph Tucker, Josh Bernhard, Josh Tong, Joshua
Tobkin, JP Rangaswami, Juan Carlos Belair, Juan Irming, Juan Pablo
Carbajal, Juan Pablo Marin Diaz, Judith Newman, Judy Tuan, Jukka Hellén,
Julia Benson-Slaughter, Julia Devonshire, Julian Fietkau, Julie Harboe,
Julien Brossoit, Julien Leroy, Juliet Chen, Julio Terra, Julius Mikkelä,
Justin Christian, Justin Grimes, Justin Jones, Justin Szlasa, Justin
Walsh, JustinChung.com, K. J. Przybylski, Kaloyan Raev, Kamil Śliwowski,
Kaniska Padhi, Kara Malenfant, Kara Monroe, Karen Pe, Karl Jahn, Karl
Jonsson, Karl Nelson, Kasia Zygmuntowicz, Kat Lim, Kate Chapman, Kate
Stewart, Kathleen Beck, Kathleen Hanrahan, Kathryn Abuzzahab, Kathryn
Deiss, Kathryn Rose, Kathy Payne, Katie Lynn Daniels, Katie Meek, Katie
Teague, Katrina Hennessy, Katriona Main, Kavan Antani, Keith Adams,
Keith Berndtson, MD, Keith Luebke, Kellie Higginbottom, Ken Friis
Larsen, Ken Haase, Ken Torbeck, Kendel Ratley, Kendra Byrne, Kerry
Hicks, Kevin Brown, Kevin Coates, Kevin Flynn, Kevin Rumon, Kevin
Shannon, Kevin Taylor, Kevin Tostado, Kewhyun Kelly-Yuoh, Kiane l’Azin,
Kianosh Pourian, Kiran Kadekoppa, Kit Walsh, Klaus Mickus, Konrad
Rennert, Kris Kasianovitz, Kristian Lundquist, Kristin Buxton, Kristina
Popova, Kristofer Bratt, Kristoffer Steen, Kumar McMillan, Kurt
Whittemore, Kyle Pinches, Kyle Simpson, L Eaton, Lalo Martins, Lane
Rasberry, Larry Garfield, Larry Singer, Lars Josephsen, Lars Klaeboe,
Laura Anne Brown, Laura Billings, Laura Ferejohn, Lauren Pedersen,
Laurence Gonsalves, Laurent Muchacho, Laurie Racine, Laurie Reynolds,
Lawrence M. Schoen, Leandro Pangilinan, Leigh Verlandson, Lenka
Gondolova, Leonardo Bueno Postacchini, leonardo menegola, Lesley
Mitchell, Leslie Krumholz, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Levi Bostian, Leyla
Acaroglu, Liisa Ummelas, Lilly Kashmir Marques, Lior Mazliah, Lisa
Bjerke, Lisa Brewster, Lisa Canning, Lisa Cronin, Lisa Di Valentino,
Lisandro Gaertner, Livia Leskovec, Liynn Worldlaw, Liz Berg, Liz White,
Logan Cox, Loki Carbis, Lora Lynn, Lorna Prescott, Lou Yufan, Louie
Amphlett, Louis-David Benyayer, Louise Denman, Luca Corsato, Luca
Lesinigo, Luca Palli, Luca Pianigiani, Luca S.G. de Marinis, Lucas
Lopez, Lukas Mathis, Luke Chamberlin, Luke Chesser, Luke Woodbury, Lulu
Tang, Lydia Pintscher, M Alexander Jurkat, Maarten Sander, Macie J
Klosowski, Magnus Adamsson, Magnus Killingberg, Mahmoud Abu-Wardeh, Maik
Schmalstich, Maiken Håvarstein, Maira Sutton, Mairi Thomson, Mandy
Wultsch, Manickkavasakam Rajasekar, Marc Bogonovich, Marc Harpster, Marc
Martí, Marc Olivier Bastien, Marc Stober, Marc-André Martin, Marcel de
Leeuwe, Marcel Hill, Marcia Hofmann, Marcin Olender, Marco Massarotto,
Marco Montanari, Marco Morales, Marcos Medionegro, Marcus Bitzl, Marcus
Norrgren, Margaret Gary, Mari Moreshead, Maria Liberman, Marielle Hsu,
Marino Hernandez, Mario Lurig, Mario R. Hemsley, MD, Marissa Demers,
Mark Chandler, Mark Cohen, Mark De Solla Price, Mark Gabby, Mark Gray,
Mark Koudritsky, Mark Kupfer, Mark Lednor, Mark McGuire, Mark Moleda,
Mark Mullen, Mark Murphy, Mark Perot, Mark Reeder, Mark Spickett, Mark
Vincent Adams, Mark Waks, Mark Zuccarell II, Markus Deimann, Markus
Jaritz, Markus Luethi, Marshal Miller, Marshall Warner, Martijn Arets,
Martin Beaudoin, Martin Decky, Martin DeMello, Martin Humpolec, Martin
Mayr, Martin Peck, Martin Sanchez, Martino Loco, Martti Remmelgas,
Martyn Eggleton, Martyn Lewis, Mary Ellen Davis, Mary Heacock, Mary
Hess, Mary Mi, Masahiro Takagi, Mason Du, Massimo V.A. Manzari, Mathias
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