I first became aware of Creative Commons as a going concern in 2004, when I was a lecturer in biological sciences at Duke University and the assistant director of Duke’s Academic Resource Center, where we sought to build cross-disciplinary pedagogical expertise (especially in science and math) and help students navigate the complexities of a liberal arts education. In the course of my own work, and in collaboration with fellow researchers in other fields, I had the all-too-common experience of lacking awareness of and access to datasets that might be pertinent to my research interests. In discussions with other scholars at Duke (such as James Boyle) and elsewhere, I learned about the thinking behind ‘some rights reserved’ and the establishment of Creative Commons as a free-standing organization to build and support the infrastructure for ‘openness’. It seemed to me that the same sort of thinking could be applied to any number of disciplinary areas, including education, where the promise of ‘open educational resources’ (OER) and the rights for further sharing, adaptation, and reuse felt potentially revolutionary, especially when viewed with an international lens.

When the opportunity to help launch ccLearn, a dedicated division of CC for education, arose, I didn’t hesitate to pursue it. I was hired as the inaugural executive director for ccLearn in mid-2007, with a subset of the CC board assigned as the steering committee, following a similar model to the establishment of Science Commons a few years earlier. In addition to the new job and a relocation from North Carolina to California, my wife and I had recently welcomed our second child, so it was a busy time. One of the first ‘official’ events I was able to attend was a meeting in Cape Town, co-organized by the Shuttleworth Foundation and the Open Society Institute, where we collectively drafted the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. At that meeting, I met many of the key people associated with CCi, iCommons, and with open education generally, many of whom remain good colleagues today. I like to think that I also helped assuage concerns some people had about the role CC intended to play in the education world and was able to clarify that our primary focus would be on the legal and technical infrastructure and associated processes pertaining to OER. I also have a vivid memory of a small group of us taking an afternoon to visit Cape Point, about 60 kilometers out of town. The scenery was fantastic, but it reminded me of the landscape in northern California, so I was in the middle of saying something to that effect when an ostrich ran across the road! It was an awesome and jarring reminder that I was indeed on a different continent on the other side of the world.

What followed was a whirlwind of convenings and conferences, white papers and journal articles, and some deep dives into the actual mechanics of improving educational access and outcomes via OER. We garnered financial and political support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the MacArthur Foundation, and others. There was enormous demand for targeted activism and localization of our work in various jurisdictions around the world, so we sought ways to advocate for regional convenings and to underwrite the associated costs. In Europe, participants were especially interested in the legal and technical aspects of growing and sustaining OER. In Asia, most of my conversations connected back to the OECD (which had released some seminal reports on the growth and promise of OER) and the potential impacts on economic activities and opportunities. In Latin America, the primary throughline focused on educational access, indigenous rights, and historical inequities, whether by policy or inertia. It seemed important to acknowledge and support these different motivations and maintain an emphasis on advancing our common cause in a manner that could accommodate the diversification on the ground.

These activities, along with similar insights and demands coming from other domains, provided much of the impetus for a number of CC projects that came to fruition around this time. For example, the process of ‘porting’ the CC licenses to be valid in each and every jurisdiction around the world was key to building a global community, but it also was fundamentally at odds with the intention to have a globally interoperable suite of legal instruments that would eliminate (as much as reasonably possible) friction to knowledge-sharing and adaptation. Thus, a project to build the universally compatible ‘v4.0’ license suite became a priority issue for the organization. That project concluded after I left the organization in 2010. On a different front, responding to some pressure from the broader community, CC decided to launch a more formal solution for dedicating any work to the public domain. I recall being in the conference room in the SF office when there was some debate about what to call this new thing. I pointed out that the existing licenses were distinguished by the specific rights that remained reserved (e.g., attribution, or no commercial use, etc). By extension of that logic, it made sense to me to call the new option ‘CC-Zero’ since, by definition, nothing was being reserved. Apparently that made sense to Lawrence Lessig as well because that’s where things ended up!

I was also one of the primary advocates for CC to dissolve the domain-specific organizations (e.g., Science Commons and ccLearn) in favor of having a single organization that could maintain a focus on any number of discipline-specific opportunities or areas of concern but could also benefit from cross-fertilization and collaboration. It seemed to me that was the sort of structure that best represented what CC was all about. I left the organization while much of that reorganization effort was in process. I don’t have a clear sense of how those types of changes affected the organization, but the fact that Creative Commons continues to evolve and thrive seems like a good sign.

There were a number of pretty memorable moments over the course of the three or so years I was a part of the organization. For example, the ccLearn division helped to organize a regional convening for Latin America in Santiago, Chile, graciously hosted by Claudio Ruiz (CC Chile affiliate at that time) and other Latin American affiliates. The meeting itself served its primary purpose of bringing people together to share concerns, brainstorm ideas, and pursue new collaborative opportunities. There were plenty of differences of opinion to navigate, including the structure and format of the meeting itself, all of which I took as a good sign of the level of investment and passion people brought to this work. More memorable was a field trip I took to Valparaíso with Werner Westerman (Director Ejecutivo, ONG Corporación Educalibre), Catharina Maracke (Director, CCi), and Grace Armstrong, an intern at CC. Werner showed us some of the hidden gems and lovely neighborhoods within the bluffs of Valparaíso. He and Grace had to leave midday, so Catharina and I stayed to explore a bit more on our own. Later that afternoon, as we were walking down a street from a viewpoint over the harbor, two young men held us up at gunpoint and snatched Catharina’s purse. They immediately took off running into the maze of streets and alleys that extend into the upper neighborhoods of the city. After a moment’s shock, Catharina exclaimed that her passport was in her purse. For some reason, that seemed like an especially big problem to me, so I ran after the thieves, yelling at them to give back the purse, or at least the passport. After several minutes of chasing them in and out of different streets and alleyways, one of them paused long enough to root through the purse and fling Catharina’s passport to the ground. I went and picked it up and decided I had what I had been chasing them for, so I stopped my chase. After reuniting with Catharina, some policemen came by and took a report. They expressed sympathy and some alarm at the presence of the gun, but as expected said there wasn’t any realistic chance of getting anything else back. Needless to say, it wasn’t the best way to end an otherwise enjoyable day in Valparaíso, but it was also a reminder for me that some dangers are pretty universal. I recall specifically feeling like our work on OER and international exchange was one small aspect of trying to make the world a slightly better place.

I also found the 2008 iSummit in Sapporo, Japan, to be quite memorable. There was the ‘sushi remix’ event at the olympics park, along with ski jumpers giving demonstrations of the sport (in summertime!). There was also a pretty incredible meal at a tiny Italian place with a Japanese chef that Juan Carlos de Martin (CC Italy) somehow found and raved about, and indeed exceeded expectations! After that conference, I had an extra day or two to explore Tokyo and managed to get completely lost one evening. These were the days before modern smartphones; I suspect people don’t really get lost like that any more.

But most of my memories are of my time at the SF office on 2nd Street, where our small team dared to dream of a future where the Internet remained a virtually wall-less space, where creativity flourished and knowledge was shared freely, and where the very processes of education, art, science, and nearly any endeavor were unbounded by legacy constraints from the analog world. I was especially proud of my team — Lila Bailey, Jane Park, Alex Kozak, and others — who collectively pursued our mission with passion, looking to tangibly improve educational outcomes in the United States and abroad. We tackled some pretty thorny problems and had some robust debates about how to get the outcomes we wanted to see. Our work ranged from testing and evaluating new practices in student journalism, to better tools for OER discovery, to guiding documents for better understanding and managing the various intersecting legal and technical issues — beyond copyright law — that also needed to be considered in educational practice. The Internet we have today — and the companies that largely control it — isn’t what we strived for, but there’s still a robust global community that keeps finding ways to do interesting things together, and which refuses to let those dreams die. Many of my colleagues from that time are still involved in the effort, and I’m glad I’ve had cause to keep collaborating and stay in touch with many of them.