Creative Commons' New Strategy for a Collaborative Organizational Structure - Shareable

"A major focal point of the event was a discussion about how the organization as a whole could drastically reconfigure itself. Until now, Creative Commons has had a much more top-down structure: A central hub overseeing the overall operations of the organization, while a global network of 'country affiliates' all working on the usability and adoption of the licenses in their respective countries and regions. The main critique was that this configuration was not conducive to collaboration among the affiliates, nor with other organizational and institutional partners.

To build a new path forward, Creative Commons went through an intensive process with a core strategy team to consult its international network and create a plan that could address these challenges. What resulted was its Global Network Strategy. The general framework is this: There would be country-level teams to work on policies and projects at the national level, 'platforms' for people to come together to collaborate on various issues, and a governance system to administer staff and allocate resources for those country teams and platforms.

Since Creative Commons strives to embody openness through its very function, the strategy is still broad and flexible, so that the community itself could define this framework from the bottom up. The purpose of this new platform model is for the organization to more formally support activities that its affiliates were already doing. For example, to support its members' work on open educational resources that make academic texts more available to people globally. Creative Commons affiliates are also poised to create a platform to fight trade agreements and other international instruments that further restrict the public domain and access to culture through the expansion of copyright."