+<span id="anchor"></span>Made
+
+<span id="anchor-1"></span>with
+
+<span id="anchor-2"></span>Creative
+
+<span id="anchor-3"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-4"></span>“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.”
+
+<span id="anchor-5"></span>
+
+<span id="anchor-6"></span>- David Foster Wallace
+
+<span id="anchor-7"></span>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*
+
+<span id="anchor-8"></span>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 *
+
+<span id="anchor-9"></span>Part 1
+
+<span id="anchor-10"></span>The Big Picture
+
+<span id="anchor-11"></span>The New
+
+<span id="anchor-12"></span>World of
+
+<span id="anchor-13"></span>Digital
+
+<span id="anchor-14"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-15"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-16"></span>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).
+
+<span id="anchor-17"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-18"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-19"></span>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
+
+<span id="anchor-20"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-21"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-22"></span>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
+
+<span id="anchor-23"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-24"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-25"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-26"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-27"></span>How
+
+<span id="anchor-28"></span>to Be
+
+<span id="anchor-29"></span>Made with
+
+<span id="anchor-30"></span>Creative
+
+<span id="anchor-31"></span>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.”
+
+<span id="anchor-32"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-33"></span>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
+
+<span id="anchor-34"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-35"></span>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).
+
+<span id="anchor-36"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-37"></span>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.”
+
+<span id="anchor-38"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-39"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-40"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-41"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-42"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-43"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-44"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-45"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-46"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-47"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-48"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-49"></span>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
+
+<span id="anchor-50"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-51"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-52"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-53"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-54"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-55"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-56"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-57"></span>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
+
+<span id="anchor-58"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-59"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-60"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-61"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-62"></span>The
+
+<span id="anchor-63"></span>Creative
+
+<span id="anchor-64"></span>Commons
+
+<span id="anchor-65"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-66"></span>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/.
+
+<span id="anchor-67"></span>Part 2
+
+<span id="anchor-68"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-69"></span>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/
+
+<span id="anchor-70"></span>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.”
+
+<span id="anchor-71"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-72"></span>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.”
+
+<span id="anchor-73"></span>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
+
+<span id="anchor-74"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-75"></span>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
+
+<span id="anchor-76"></span>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/
+
+<span id="anchor-77"></span>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/
+
+<span id="anchor-78"></span>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/
+
+<span id="anchor-79"></span>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.”
+
+<span id="anchor-80"></span>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/
+
+<span id="anchor-81"></span>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
+
+<span id="anchor-82"></span>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
+
+<span id="anchor-83"></span>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
+
+<span id="anchor-84"></span>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
+
+<span id="anchor-85"></span>PLOS
+
+<span id="anchor-86"></span>(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
+
+<span id="anchor-87"></span>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
+
+<span id="anchor-88"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-89"></span>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
+
+<span id="anchor-90"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-91"></span>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.
+
+<span id="anchor-92"></span>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
+
+<span id="anchor-93"></span>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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+
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+
+<span id="anchor-95"></span>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,
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+Chandler, Zak Zebrowski, Zane Amiralis and Joshua de Haan, ZeMarmot Open
+Movie
+
+
projects / text-madewithcc.git / commitdiff