Professor Giorgos Cheliotis, National University of Singapore

Organizational Partner:

Creative Commons

Digital technologies have reshaped our culture and have empowered people to create, disseminate, and collaborate without the barriers of space and time. This is a time of unprecedented growth and innovation of information, thanks, in part, to free access. Creative Commons (CC) is the organization that enables this information exchange to take place easily and effectively by providing the free legal and technical tools necessary for sharing and re-use to be truly possible. While the CC licensing infrastructure enables existing alternative or community media systems to impact communities, public discourse, or democratic processes, there is a significant lack of a reliable and accurate metrics system for tracking and assessing the magnitude of this impact. 

Initiatives like CC are spreading so rapidly and at a such a truly global scale that it is becoming increasingly challenging for Creative Commons and other civil society organizations promoting open access to content, to know how the licenses are being used, by whom, and to what effect.  We must develop better, actionable accounts of the role of CC-enabled 'new media' in people's lives. These accounts will prove crucial as the infiltration of 'new media' continues to spread. We believe that a culture of openness, sharing, adaptation, and improvement will become the norm, and closed or proprietary systems will have to be justified on a case by case basis; thus, better metrics that will enable social scientists, CC, and all other stakeholders to track this phenomenon must be developed now. The regular monitoring and reporting of metrics and related analyses on the course of the global free culture movement is also a key task that requires additional support.

Creative Commons will work together with Prof. Giorgos Cheliotis of the National University of Singapore, who is researching the ways in which the transforming media landscape is affecting people's lives and has already made several contributions towards a better understanding of the use of CC licenses. Specifically, the project will produce and disseminate a research and advocacy report on the global patterns of CC license use, with basic charts and more advanced metrics which the project will develop, showing penetration and impact of open licensing, per jurisdiction and globally. There is growing interest in this area, and support for a more comprehensive approach to the needed metrics and analyses would pay significant dividends in helping academics, practitioners, and policy makers to better understand these phenomena. It will also serve to help Creative Commons as an organization, in attaining a better understanding of the needs of our global user base and thus be able to serve them better.

Contact:  

Melissa Reeder, Development Manager
melissa@creativecommons.org