The same people who had spent the entire day in earnest discussion about copyright and the music industry, the moment the event wrapped up, threw open the yard next door and fired up a grill to give our foreign guests a proper Korean BBQ experience — laying on the meat and kimchi with the ease of people who’d done it a thousand times. In that moment, I knew something for certain. These people are something else.

That was 2009. CC Korea had just set up its first formal office, and I heard they were planning their very first event, a seminar called “How to Open Business.” I had barely been part of the community a week before I found myself handling interpretation and translation for an international event. I happened to be a translator, so I was useful, and before I’d figured out what was really going on, I was already in the middle of it. And that evening, standing in front of that grill, I think I lost my heart to this community.

The truth is, I’d first come across CC a little before that, after watching Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk. As someone who made a living from translation, I had long wrestled with the contradictions and paradoxes of copyright. Does purely original creation even exist? Why should someone’s creative work be so completely locked away? And yet, shouldn’t creators be celebrated and respected? In the middle of all those tangled questions, CC wasn’t a place that declared “this is the absolute truth.” It was a place that modeled an attitude: finding reasonable answers together, in a world that keeps changing. That’s what CC was to me — not a manifesto, but an attitude.

So it felt only natural to end up translating books together with other CC Korea volunteers. Busy people with their own livelihoods to manage, gathering every weekend, pushing each other along, complaining, doing peer reviews, and somehow getting it done. That’s how two books found their way into Korean: Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma’s Open Government, and the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce’s ENGAGE: Getting on with Government 2.0. As a professional translator used to working alone, it was an unfamiliar experience, different perspectives colliding and blending together, and I loved it. That experience planted a seed, and a few years later I found myself translating David Bollier’s Think Like a Commoner on my own. A book about the Commons, something I’d been turning over in my mind for years. Looking back now, I wish I’d done it better, but it’s still the translation I feel most attached to.

Then in 2010, the CC Asia Summit came to Seoul. People arrived from across Asia, and watching old friends embrace each other after so long apart, I felt it clearly: this was no ordinary network. I hadn’t known much about the early iCommons days, but something in those hugs told me everything. Asia in particular had always struggled with connection, language barriers, small and scattered communities, and yet here everyone was, back together in Seoul, visibly drawing strength from simply being in the same room.

Bassel’s arrival is something I’ll never forget. We’d been on edge right up until the end, not knowing whether he’d be able to make it from Syria. When he finally walked through the door, visibly worn out from a long and roundabout journey but with eyes that still somehow sparkled, the sight of the CC Asia crowd surging toward him, hugging him, overcome with relief and joy and laughter, is still vivid to me now.

All of those experiences led me, from 2013, to serve as CC’s Asia Pacific Regional Coordinator. From a small community in Korea, to Asia, to the whole world. CC was the passage that kept expanding the world I got to be part of, a lens through which I came to see things differently.

I’ve since moved on from CC. But the attitude it left in me, the one that seeped in somewhere along the way, is still with me, in the translation and creative work I continue today. An openness of eye, an openness of heart. And the affection for this community that I first discovered standing in front of that backyard grill.