ii

Made With Creative Commons

MADE
WITH
CREATIVE
COMMONSPAUL STACEY AND SARAH HINCHLIFF PEARSON

Made With Creative Commonsiii

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
Denmarkwww.cadb.dk
hey@cadb.dk
Printer:
Drukarnia POZKAL Spółka z o.o. Spółka komandytowa
88-100 Inowrocław,
ul. Cegielna 10/12,
PolandThis 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 thesame 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 andbackers of our crowdfunding-campaign on the Kickstarter.com platform.

iv

Made With Creative Commons

“I don’t know a whole lot about nonfiction journalism. . . The way that I
think about these things, and in termsof what I can do is. . . essays like this areoccasions 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.”- DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Made With Creative Commonsvvi

Made With Creative Commons

CONTENTS
Foreword .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . xi
Introduction .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . xv

PART 1: THE BIG PICTURE
1 The New World of Digital Commons by Paul Stacey .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 3The Commons, the Market, and the State  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  4
The Four Aspects of a Resource .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  5
A Short History of the Commons  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  7
The Digital Revolution  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 10
The Birth of Creative Commons .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  10
The Changing Market .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  11
Benefits of the Digital Commons  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  13
Our Case Studies .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 14
2 How to Be Made with Creative Commons by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 19
Problem Zero: Getting Discovered  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 22
Making Money .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  26
Making Human Connections  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 30
3 The Creative Commons Licenses  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 39

PART 2: THE CASE STUDIES
Arduino .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  47
Ártica .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  51
Blender Institute  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 55
Cards Against Humanity  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  59
The Conversation .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  63
Cory Doctorow  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 67
Figshare  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 71
Figure.nz  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  75
Knowledge Unlatched  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 79
Lumen Learning .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  83
Jonathan Mann  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 87

Made With Creative Commonsvii

Noun Project .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  91
Open Data Institute .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  95
Opendesk  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 99
OpenStax .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 105
Amanda Palmer .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 109
PLOS (Public Library of Science) .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 113
Rijksmuseum  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 117
Shareable  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 121
Siyavula .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 125
SparkFun .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 131
TeachAIDS .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 135
Tribe of Noise .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 139
Wikimedia Foundation  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 143
Bibliography .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 147
Acknowledgments  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 151

viii

Made With Creative CommonsMade With Creative Commonsix

xMade With Creative Commons

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 asa 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 haveulterior motives, as Paul Stacey explains in thisbook: “Regardless of legal status, they all havea 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, notthe end itself.”
In the case study about Cory Doctorow, Sarah Hinchliff Pearson cites Cory’s words fromhis book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free:“Entering the arts because you want to get richis like buying lottery tickets because you wantto 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 withstories of those who take much greater risks
than the two dollars we pay for a lottery ticket,
and instead reap the rewards that come frompursuing their passions and living their values.
So it’s not about the money. Also: it is. Finding the means to continue to create and shareoften requires some amount of income. Max
Temkin of Cards Against Humanity says it best

Made With Creative Commonsin their case study: “We don’t make jokes andgames to make money—we make money so
we can make more jokes and games.”
Creative Commons’ focus is on building avibrant, 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, theproject 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 theinequality and scarcity that today define theworst parts of capitalism. He is driven by thepower of human connections between communities of creators. He takes a longer viewthan most, and it’s made him a better educator, an insightful researcher, and also a skilledgardener. He has a calm, cool voice that conveys a passion that inspires his colleagues andcommunity.
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 frominvesting so much into a political campaignthat didn’t end as she’d hoped. Today, she’s
more determined than ever to live with hervalues right out on her sleeve. I can always
count on Sarah to push Creative Commons tofocus 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.

xi

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 forwhat goes into building the commons andsharing 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 thatis insightful, honest, and useful.
From the beginning, CC wanted to develop
this project with the principles and values ofopen 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 withattribution. It is, in itself, an example of anopen 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 bookprojects on Kickstarter, smashing throughtwo stretch goals and engaging over 1,600 donors—the majority of them new supporters ofCreative Commons.
Paul and Sarah worked openly throughout
the project, publishing the plans, drafts, casestudies, and analysis, early and often, andthey 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 keepthem separate in the final product. Working inthis way requires both humility and self-confidence, and without question it has made Madewith Creative Commons a better project.
Those who work and share in the commons are not typical creators. They are part ofsomething greater than themselves, and what
they offer us all is a profound gift. What theyreceive in return is gratitude and a community.

xii

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 tooffer himself up as a Kickstarter benefit), he
agreed immediately. Why would he agree todo that? Because the commons has collaboration at its core, and community as a key value,and because the CC licenses have helped somany to share in the ways that they choosewith a global audience.
Sarah writes, “Endeavors that are Madewith Creative Commons thrive when community is built around what they do. This may
mean a community collaborating together tocreate something new, or it may simply be acollection of like-minded people who get toknow 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-mindedothers 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 ofvalue to them.”

This is not a typical business book. For thoselooking for a recipe or a roadmap, you might
be disappointed. But for those looking to pursue a social end, to build something greatthrough 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 “TheZones 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

Made With Creative Commons

some, they experience more. They experience
this not as isolated individuals, playing somehigh tech computer game; they experience itin 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 andlike. 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 Madewith Creative Commons.
Ryan Merkley
CEO, Creative Commons

Made With Creative Commons

xiii

xiv

Made With Creative CommonsINTRODUCTION
This book shows the world how sharing can begood 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 aformula for business models that use Creative
Commons but instead gather fresh ideas anddynamic examples that spark new, innovativemodels and help others follow suit by building on what already works. At the onset, we
framed our investigation in familiar businessterms. We created a blank “open businessmodel canvas,” an interactive online tool thatwould help people design and analyze theirbusiness model.
Through the generous funding of Kickstarter backers, we set about this project first byidentifying 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 anddug 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 tomaximize 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 tosustain the operation.

Made With Creative Commons

They often didn’t like hearing what they dodescribed as an open business model. Theirendeavor was something more than that.
Something different. Something that generates not just economic value but social andcultural value. Something that involves humanconnection. Being Made with Creative Commons is not “business as usual.”
We had to rethink the way we conceived ofthis 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 andanalysis with our Kickstarter cocreators, whoprovided invaluable edits, feedback, and advice. Our thinking changed dramatically overthe course of a year and a half.
Throughout the process, the two of us haveoften had very different ways of understanding and describing what we were learning.
Learning from each other has been one of thegreat joys of this work, and, we hope, something that has made the final product muchricher than it ever could have been if either of
us undertook this project alone. We have preserved our voices throughout, and you’ll beable to sense our different but complementary approaches as you read through our different sections.
While we recommend that you read thebook 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 abig-picture framework written by Paul. He provides some historical context for the digitalcommons, describing the three ways society

xvhas managed resources and shared wealth—
the commons, the market, and the state. He
advocates for thinking beyond business andmarket terms and eloquently makes the casefor 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 andthe kind of human connections that makesharing 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—theones 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, andorganizations 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 bookavailable 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

xvi

Made With Creative Commons

Part 1
THE BIG PICTURE

Made With Creative Commons1

2

Made With Creative Commons

THE NEWWORLD OFDIGITALCOMMONS

1

PAUL STACEY
Jonathan Rowe eloquently describes the commons as “the air and oceans, the web of species, wilderness and flowing water—all areparts of the commons. So are language andknowledge, 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 humanendeavor. 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, digitalcommons. The individuals, organizations, andbusinesses we profile in our case studies use

Made With Creative Commons

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 theresource into the commons—is a verb.2 The
creators, organizations, and businesses we
profile are all engaged with commoning. Theiruse of Creative Commons involves them in thesocial practice of commoning, managing resources in a collective manner with a community of users.3 Commoning is guided by a set ofvalues and norms that balance the costs andbenefits of the enterprise with those of thecommunity. Special regard is given to equitable access, use, and sustainability.

3The Commons, the Market, andthe State

Historically, there have been three ways tomanage resources and share wealth: the commons (managed collectively), the state (i.e., thegovernment), and the market—with the lasttwo being the dominant forms today.4
The organizations and businesses in ourcase studies are unique in the way they participate in the commons while still engaging
with the market and/or state. The extent ofengagement 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 normsof the commons with those of the market orstate.
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 thosecase studies would show the state sphere astiny or even absent. Other case studies are primarily market-based with only a small engagement with the commons. A depiction of thosecase studies would show the market sphere aslarge and the commons sphere as small. The
extent to which an enterprise sees itself as being primarily of one type or another affects thebalance of norms by which they operate.
All our case studies generate money as ameans of livelihood and sustainability. Moneyis primarily of the market. Finding ways to generate revenue while holding true to the corevalues of the commons (usually expressed in
mission statements) is challenging. To manage interaction and engagement between
the commons and the market requires a defttouch, a strong sense of values, and the ability
to blend the best of both.
The state has an important role to play infostering 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 financecan all be designed to foster the commons.

Fig. 1. Enterprise engagement with commons, state, and market.

4

Made With Creative 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 businessesor governmental organizations who want toengage in and use the commons, knowing how
the commons operates will help them understand how best to do so. Participating in andusing the commons the same way you do themarket or state is not a strategy for success.

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 acommons.6 Her framework considered things
like the biophysical characteristics of common
resources, the community’s actors and theinteractions that take place between them,rules-in-use, and outcomes. That frameworkhas been simplified and generalized to apply
to the commons, the market, and the state forthis chapter.
To compare and contrast the ways in which
the commons, market, and state work, let’s
consider four aspects of resource manage-

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Made With Creative CommonsLS

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ment: 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 outcomesof that use (see Fig. 2).
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 usuallyrequire them to engage with the market.
Physical resources are depletable, exclusive, and rivalrous. Digital resources, on theother hand, are nondepletable, nonexclusive,and nonrivalrous. If I share a digital resourcewith 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 ofdigital 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 thepossibility of being made into a physical resource. The digital file of a book can be print-

5

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 resourceson 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 anddepartments staffed with public servants set
budgets, implement programs, and manage

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resources based on government priorities andprocedures.
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 thebasis of a cash transaction.
In contrast to the state and market, resources in a commons are managed more directlyby the people involved.7 Creators of human
produced resources can put them in the commons by personal choice. No permission fromstate or market is required. Anyone can participate in the commons and determine forthemselves 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 ofdecision 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 behinda resource makes the commons less anonymous and more personal.

P

ed on paper and made into a physical book.
A computer-rendered design for furniture canbe 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 thatprovide value to state citizens. The commonssees resources as common goods, providing
a common wealth extending beyond stateboundaries, to be passed on in undiminishedor enhanced form to future generations.

Fig. 3. How the market, commons, and state conceive of resources.

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Made With Creative Commons

Norms and rules
The social interactions between people, andthe processes used by the state, market, andcommons, 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, andlaws. The state influences the norms and rulesof 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 arelargely defined by the community. They weighindividual 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
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 thenbecomes maximizing total monetary value inthe economy.10 Units consumed translates tosales, 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 withthe 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

Made With Creative Commons

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 measuresuccess by looking at how many people accessand 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 commonswith 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.

A Short History of the Commons

Using the commons to manage resources ispart of a long historical continuum. However,in contemporary society, the market and thestate 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 theworld are indications of a grassroots movetoward the commons. The commons is making a resurgence. To understand the resilienceof 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 acommons 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.)

7

LONG AGO:

Fig. 4. In preindustrialized society.

This is followed by a long history of the state(a monarchy or ruler) taking over the commonsfor their own purposes. This is called enclosureof the commons.12 In olden days, “commoners”
were evicted from the land, fences and hedges erected, laws passed, and security set up toforbid access.13 Gradually, resources became
the property of the state and the state became the primary means by which resourceswere 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 readyaccess to market produced goods resulted in arising standard of living, improved health, andeducation. Fig. 6 shows how today the market

STATE TAKEOVER OF THE COMMONS:

Fig. 5. The commons is gradually superseded by the state.

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Made With Creative Commons

is the primary means by which resources aremanaged.
However, the world today is going throughturbulent times. The benefits of the market
have been offset by unequal distribution andoverexploitation.
Overexploitation was the topic of Garrett
Hardin’s influential essay “The Tragedy of theCommons,” published in Science in 1968. Hardin argues that everyone in a commons seeks
to maximize personal gain and will continue todo so even when the limits of the commonsare reached. The commons is then tragicallydepleted 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; sherecognized 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 andrules that help people work collectively andensure 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 abundanceworks.15 The emergence of information technology and the Internet has led to an explosion
in digital resources and new means of sharing

TODAY:

Fig. 6. How the market, the state, and the commons look today.

Made With Creative Commons9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 artificiallyscarce 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 nojustification for artificial scarcity. The norm forstate funded digital works should be that they
are freely and openly available to the publicthat paid for them.

The Digital Revolution

In the early days of computing, programmersand developers learned from each other bysharing 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 sourcecode 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 yourmodified versions to others.16
These principles and freedoms constitute a setof norms and rules that typify a digital commons.
In the late 1990s, to make the sharing ofsource code and collaboration more appealing to companies, the open-source-software
initiative converted these principles into licenses and standards for managing accessto and distribution of software. The benefitsof 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 and10

open-source software also generated a network effect where the value of a product orservice increases with the number of peopleusing 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 acommons, many businesses and markets didbuild up around it. Business models basedon the licenses and standards of open-source
software evolved alongside organizations thatmanaged software code on principles of abundance rather than scarcity. Eric Raymond’s essay “The Magic Cauldron” does a great job ofanalyzing the economics and business models
associated with open-source software.18 Thesemodels can provide examples of sustainableapproaches for those Made with Creative
Commons.
It isn’t just about an abundant availabilityof digital assets but also about abundance ofparticipation. 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 formsof 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 propertyof 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 wedefine 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

The Birth of Creative Commons

In 2001, Creative Commons was created as anonprofit to support all those who wanted toshare digital content. A suite of Creative Commons licenses was modeled on those of opensource software but for use with digital con-Made With Creative Commons

tent 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 commonsdeed, expressing the permissions in plain language, which regular people can read andquickly 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, thesethree 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, inthirty-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, partic-

Made With Creative Commons

ipation 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. Thisethos of free exchange in a commons aligns
the free-culture movement with the free andopen-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 casehas been to democratize participation andshare 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 tobecome more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens. Since then, it has grown fromeight participating countries to seventy.22 In allthese 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.

The Changing Market

Today’s market is largely driven by global capitalism. Law and financial systems are structured to support extraction, privatization, andcorporate growth. A perception that the market is more efficient than the state has led tocontinual privatization of many public natural
resources, utilities, services, and infrastructures.23 While this system has been highly efficient at generating consumerism and thegrowth 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,

11deterioration of our natural environment, andbreakdowns 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 besocially 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 resurgenceof 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 careand 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 aplatform for ride sharing. However, Airbnb andUber are still largely operating under the usual
norms and rules of the market, making themless like a commons and more like a traditional business seeking financial gain. Much of the
sharing economy is not about the commonsor 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 Commonscase studies differ from those of the sharing economy is their focus on digital resources. Digital resources function under different

12

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 goingup, 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 uniqueinherent characteristics of digital resources, including lowering costs. The use of digital-rights-management technologies in theform of locks, passwords, and controls toprevent digital goods from being accessed,changed, replicated, and distributed is minimal
or nonexistent. Instead, Creative Commons licenses are used to put digital content out inthe commons, taking advantage of the uniqueeconomics associated with being digital. The
aim is to see digital resources used as widelyand 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 amarket 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 newlandscape, 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 operatinglargely as a business within the existing rules
and norms of the market. And still others arelooking to change the norms and rules bywhich 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 formsof business are emerging. There are benefit
corporations and social enterprises, which

Made With Creative Commons

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 overnine years using an “open process” involving
470 coauthors from forty-five countries, it isuseful as a framework for talking about business models.33
It contains a “business model canvas,” which
conceives of a business model as having ninebuilding 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 “typeof open environment that the business fits in.” 35This 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 termbusiness model suggested primarily being
situated in the market. Where you sit on thecommons-to-market spectrum affects the extent to which you see yourself as a business inthe 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 somethe process has been experimental, emergent,and organic rather than carefully planned using a predefined model.

Made With Creative Commons

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 goeson and on. (Initial description of how to earnrevenue available through reference note. For
latest thinking see How to Bring In Money inthe next section.) 36 There is no single magicbullet, and each endeavor has devised waysthat work for them. Most make use of morethan one way. Diversifying revenue streams
lowers risk and provides multiple paths to sustainability.

Benefits of the Digital Commons

While it may be clear why commons-based organizations want to interact and engage withthe 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 freeflow of resources in the commons offers tremendous economies of scale. Distribution isdecentralized, with all those in the commons
empowered to share the resources they haveaccess to. Those that are Made with Creative
Commons have a reduced need for sales ormarketing. 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 ofdigital rights management (DRM) to manage
resources. Not using DRM frees them of thecosts of acquiring DRM technology and staff
resources to engage in the punitive practices
associated with restricting access. The way thecommons provides access to everyone levels
the playing field and promotes inclusiveness,
equity, and fairness.

13

The commons maximizes participation. Resources in the commons can be used and contributed to by everyone. Using the resourcesof others, contributing your own, and mixing
yours with others to create new works are all
dynamic forms of participation made possibleby the commons. Being Made with Creative
Commons means you’re engaging as many users with your resources as possible. Users arealso authoring, editing, remixing, curating, localizing, translating, and distributing. The commons makes it possible for people to directly
participate in culture, knowledge building, andeven democracy, and many other socially beneficial practices.
The commons spurs innovation. Resources in
the hands of more people who can use themleads 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 thecommunity.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 ofothers, and steward the resources and the relationship with the community.
The commons boosts reach and impact. The
digital commons is global. Resources may becreated for a local or regional need, but they go
far and wide generating a global impact. In thedigital 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 andbuild on their work both locally and globally.
The commons is generative. Instead of extracting value, the commons adds value. Dig-

14

itized resources persist without becoming
depleted, and through use are improved, personalized, and localized. Each use adds value.
The market focuses on generating value forthe 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 commonsmeans 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 overallvalue of the commons.
The commons brings people together for acommon cause. The commons vests people
directly with the responsibility to manage theresources for the common good. The costs
and benefits for the individual are balancedwith the costs and benefits for the community and for future generations. Resources are
not anonymous or mass produced. Their provenance is known and acknowledged throughattribution and other means. Those that are
Made with Creative Commons generateawareness 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, thecommons unifies people.
The benefits of the commons are many.
When these benefits align with the goals of
individuals, communities, businesses in themarket, or state enterprises, choosing to manage resources as a commons ought to be theoption of choice.

Our Case Studies

The creators, organizations, and businesses in our case studies operate as nonprofits,
for-profits, and social enterprises. Regardlessof legal status, they all have a social mission.
Their primary reason for being is to make theworld a better place, not to profit. Money is a

Made With Creative Commons

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 measureof success and sustainability, they emphasized
their mission, practices, and means by which
they measure success. Metrics of success area blend of how social goals are being met andhow sustainable the enterprise is.
Our case studies are diverse, ranging frompublishing to education and manufacturing. Allof the organizations, businesses, and creatorsin 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 ofphysical 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 monetarymeans.
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 thisglobal 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 andacquiring financial means. Over and over weheard in our interviews how success and sustainability are tied to a set of beliefs, values,
and principles that underlie their actions:

Made With Creative Commons

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 relationshipand community. Be transparent. Defend thecommons.
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 andstate systems. The commons generates benefits neither the market nor state can achieveon their own. Rather than the market or state
dominating as primary means of resource
management, a more balanced alternative ispossible.
Enterprise use of Creative Commons has
only just begun. The case studies in this bookare 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 digitalcommons. The remaining sections go deeper
providing further guidance and insights on
how it works.

15

Notes1

Jonathan Rowe, Our Common Wealth (SanFrancisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2013), 14.

12 Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 55–78.

2

David Bollier, Think Like a Commoner: A
Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society,2014), 176.

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.

3Ibid., 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, Crisesof Power: Capitalism, Creativity and theCommons (New York: Zed Books, 2014),
93.

8

Cole, “Learning from Lin,” in Frischmann,
Madison, and Strandburg, Governing
Knowledge Commons, 59.

9Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 175.

10 Joshua Farley and Ida Kubiszewski, “TheEconomics 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; andHeather Menzies, Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoirand Manifesto (Gabriola Island, BC: New
Society, 2014), 42–43.

16

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 ofInformation,” 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: Musingson 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/.

Made With Creative Commons

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 theCare and Regeneration of Urban Commons,trans. LabGov (LABoratory for the GOVernance of Commons) (Bologna, Italy: Cityof 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.
39 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.

Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution: Democratizing Wealth and Buildinga Community-Sustaining Economy fromthe 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 thebook is available at strategyzer.com/books/business-model-generation.
34 This business model canvas is available todownload 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 findthe 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 atmedium.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 Profitingfrom Technology (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2006), 31–44.

31 Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do?

Made With Creative Commons

17

18

Made With Creative Commons

HOW
TO BE
MADE WITH
CREATIVE
COMMONS

2

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 helpof our Kickstarter backers, we chose twenty-four endeavors from all around the worldthat are Made with Creative Commons. The
mix is diverse, from an individual musician to auniversity-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

Made With Creative Commonsuse the licenses, these endeavors share theirwork—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 eachendeavor. 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 waythat meaningfully incorporated the impact ofCreative Commons. In our interviews, we dug
into the motivations, the role of CC licenses,
modes of revenue generation, definitions ofsuccess.

19

In fairly short order, we realized the book
we set out to write was quite different fromthe 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 partof their livelihood or business could replicate.
What we didn’t realize was just how misguided
it would be to write a book about being Madewith 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 aboutsharing 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 scrappedthat as our guiding rubric for the book.
Admittedly, it took me a long time to getthere. When Paul and I divided up our writing
after finishing the research, my charge wasto distill everything we learned from the casestudies and write up the practical lessons andtakeaways. I spent months trying to jam what
we learned into the business-model box, convinced there must be some formula for theway 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 among20

the creators, organizations, and businesses we
profiled, there was one constant. Being Madewith Creative Commons may be good forbusiness, but that is not why they do it. Sharing work with Creative Commons is, at its core,a moral decision. The commercial and otherself-interested benefits are secondary. Most
decided to use CC licenses first and found arevenue model later. This was our first hintthat writing a book solely about the impact ofsharing 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 clearthat it meant something more than using a
copyright license. It also represented a set ofvalues. 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 valueof Creative Commons. While there are manydifferent flavors of CC licenses and nearly infinite ways to be Made with Creative Commons, the basic value system is rooted in afundamental 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 thatthe common good should always be part ofthe 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 symbolof how you want to interact with the people
who consume your work. Whenever you create something, “all rights reserved” undercopyright is automatic, so the copyright symbol (©) on the work does not necessarily comeacross as a marker of distrust or excessive
protectionism. But using a CC license can be asymbol of the opposite—of wanting a real human relationship, rather than an impersonal

Made With Creative Commons

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 successlooked 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 yourcreative 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 thatthe key question when creating something is“Do you as the creator want to use it? It has tohave 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 thelicenses can be the difference between legitimacy and hypocrisy. Noun Project co-founder
Edward Boatman told us they could not havestated their social mission of sharing with astraight face if they weren’t willing to show theworld 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 drivesocial 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, andproducing social good and human connection
are integral to success.

Made With Creative Commons

Even if profit isn’t the end goal, you have tobring in money to be successfully Made with
Creative Commons. At a bare minimum, youhave to make enough money to keep the lightson.
The costs of doing business vary widely for
those made with CC, but there is generally amuch lower threshold for sustainability thanthere used to be for any creative endeavor.
Digital technology has made it easier than everto 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 sameamount of advertising as its forebears at afraction of the price.”
Some creation costs are the same as they
always were. It takes the same amount of timeand money to write a peer-reviewed journal
article or paint a painting. Technology can’tchange that. But other costs are dramatically reduced by technology, particularly in
production-heavy domains like filmmaking.3
CC-licensed content and content in the publicdomain, 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 thereality that some content would be createdwhether or not the creator is paid because it isa labor of love.
Distributing content is almost universallycheaper 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 thanthey have been historically. And it is now mucheasier 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 marketingand promotion, and even expenses associatedwith the various ways money is being made,like touring or custom training.

21

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 theassistance of the industry-dominating megacompanies, now you have hundreds of ways to
do it without them.”5 Previously, distributionof creative work involved the costs associatedwith sustaining a monolithic entity, now creators can do the work themselves. That means
the financial needs of creative endeavors canbe a lot more modest.
Whether for an individual creator or a larger endeavor, it usually isn’t enough to breakeven 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, innearly all cases for those Made with Creative
Commons, the definition of “enough money”
looks a lot different than it does in the worldof 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 arestill very much at an experimental stage. The
creators, organizations, and businesses we
profile in this book are blazing the trail andadapting 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

22

predictable ways. The first is how it helps solve“problem zero.”

Problem Zero: Getting Discovered

Once you create or collect your content, thenext 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 iscertainly no formula. Your work has to connect
with people and offer them some artistic and/or utilitarian value. In some ways, this is easierthan 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 forevery particular niche. As Anderson wrote,“We are all different, with different wants andneeds, and the Internet now has a place for allof them in the way that physical markets didnot.” 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 apractical matter it can still be difficult to actually get noticed. The Internet is a firehoseof content, one that only grows larger by theminute. As a content creator, not only are youcompeting 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 restof 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 thestart, you are often restricting access to yourwork before there is even any demand for it. In

Made With Creative Commons

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 ofzero.11 That doesn’t mean it is wrong to charge
money for your content. It simply means youneed to recognize the effect that doing so will
have on demand. The same principle applies
to restricting access to copy the work. If yourproblem is how to get discovered and find“your people,” prohibiting people from copying your work and sharing it with others iscounterproductive.
Of course, it’s not that being discovered bypeople 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 theircontent, 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 thisdecision has generated an immense amountof goodwill within the community.
It is not just that restricting access to yourwork 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 withothers. 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’tfeel like stealing a loaf of bread. And, of course,that’s because it isn’t. Sharing a creative work

Made With Creative Commons

has no impact on anyone else’s ability to makeuse of it.
If you take some amount of copying andsharing your work as a given, you can invest
your time and resources elsewhere, rather
than wasting them on playing a cat and mousegame with people who want to copy and shareyour work. Lizzy Jongma from the Rijksmuseum said, “We could spend a lot of money
trying to protect works, but people are goingto 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 themavailable 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 Commonsmeans 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 ofyour content to your advantage. As my friendand 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 tostop people from copying their hardware, sothey decided not to even try and instead look
for the benefits of being open. For them, theresult is one of the most ubiquitous pieces of
hardware in the world, with a thriving online
community of tinkerers and innovators thathave done things with their work they never
could have done otherwise.
There are all kinds of way to leverage thepower of sharing and remix to your benefit.
Here are a few.

23

Use CC to grow a larger audience
Putting a Creative Commons license on yourcontent won’t make it automatically go viral,
but eliminating legal barriers to copying thework certainly can’t hurt the chances that yourwork 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 thework—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 within-depth articles written by academics who areexperts 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 ofthe value to their academic authors who want
to reach as many readers as possible.
The idea that more eyeballs equates withmore success is a form of the max strategy,
adopted by Google and other technology companies. According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, theidea 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 sincemarginal cost of distribution is free, you might
as well put things everywhere.”16 This strategy is what often motivates companies to maketheir 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 andlikely to spread.
If you are successful in reaching moreusers, readers, listeners, or other consumersof your work, you can start to benefit from the
bandwagon effect. The simple fact that there
are other people consuming or following yourwork 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

24

Use CC to get attribution and namerecognition
Every Creative Commons license requires thatcredit be given to the author, and that reusers supply a link back to the original sourceof the material. CC0, not a license but a tool
used to put work in the public domain, does
not make attribution a legal requirement, butmany communities still give credit as a matterof 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 atlarge.19 CC licenses reflect a set of wishes on
the part of creators, and in the vast majorityof circumstances, people are naturally inclined
to follow those wishes. This is particularly thecase for something as straightforward andconsistent with basic notions of fairness asproviding credit.
The fact that the name of the creator follows a CC-licensed work makes the licenses animportant means to develop a reputation or, in
corporate speak, a brand. The drive to associate your name with your work is not just basedon 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 UnitedStates. The CEO, Frances Pinter, says that theCreative 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 mostpeople see and cite your work.
Attribution can be about more than justreceiving credit. It can also be about establishing provenance. People naturally want toknow where content came from—the sourceof 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 de-Made With Creative Commons

signs into real-life furniture. The fact that I, sitting in the middle of the United States, can pickout a design created by a designer in Tokyoand then use a maker within my own community to transform the design into somethingtangible is part of the power of their platform.
The provenance of the design is a special partof the product.
Knowing the source of a work is also criticalto ensuring its credibility. Just as a trademark
is designed to give consumers a way to identify
the source and quality of a particular good andservice, 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.
Use CC-licensed content as a marketingtool
As we will cover in more detail later, many endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons make money by providing a productor service other than the CC-licensed work.
Sometimes that other product or service iscompletely unrelated to the CC content. Other
times it’s a physical copy or live performanceof the CC content. In all cases, the CC content
can attract people to your other product orservice.
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 physicalgoods with the image. Abundant copies of thecontent often entice more demand, not blunt
it. Another example came with the advent of
the radio. Although the music industry did notsee it coming (and fought it!), free music on theradio functioned as advertising for the paidversion people bought in music stores.20 Free
can be a form of promotion.

Made With Creative Commons

In some cases, endeavors that are Madewith 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 thebest-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 physicalcopies, which makes them much more attractive to students who then demand them fromtheir 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).
Use CC to enable hands-on engagementwith your work
The great promise of Creative Commons licensing is that it signifies an embrace of remix
culture. Indeed, this is the great promise ofdigital technology. The Internet opened up awhole new world of possibilities for public participation in creative work.
Four of the six CC licenses enable reusers totake apart, build upon, or otherwise adapt thework. 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 insome 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 aphoto 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 consume25

them.”22 If even the tiny act of volition of paying one penny for something changes ourperception of that thing, then surely the actof 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 thatanyone who has absentmindedly scrolled
through their social-media feeds for an hourknows 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 toyour content can get people more deeply tied
to your work.
Use CC to differentiate yourself
Operating under a traditional copyright regime
usually means operating under the rules of
establishment players in the media. Businessstrategies 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 fromOpenStax 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 rulesof engagement.”

Making Money

Like any moneymaking endeavor, those thatare Made with Creative Commons have togenerate some type of value for their audience or customers. Sometimes that value issubsidized by funders who are not actually
beneficiaries of that value. Funders, whether

26

philanthropic institutions, governments, orconcerned individuals, provide money to theorganization 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 Madewith Creative Commons are directly tied to
the value they generate, where the recipientis paying for the value they receive like any
standard market transaction. In still othercases, rather than the quid pro quo exchangeof money for value that typically drives market
transactions, the recipient gives money out ofa 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 forcontent 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 thevarious revenue-generating mechanisms usedby 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 muchabout what we learned. Nonetheless, zooming
out and viewing things from a higher level ofabstraction can be instructive.
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, thecontent you provide is available for free andnot 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,

Made With Creative CommonsMade With Creative Commons

MARKET-BASEDFor content creators and distributors, there
are nearly infinite ways to provide value to theconsumers 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 orservice.
Here are the most common high-level
categories.
MARKET-BASED

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 competingwith free versions of your own content, whether you condone it or not.32 If people can easily find your content for free, getting people tobuy 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 intoeither 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 findsome 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.

Providing a custom service to consumers of your work
In this age of information abundance, we
don’t lack for content. The trick is finding content that matches our needs andwants, 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 beanything from the artistic and cultural
consulting services provided by Ártica to
the custom-song business of Jonathan“Song-A-Day” Mann.
Charging for the physical copy
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 andatoms refer to a physical object).35 This isparticularly successful in domains where
the digital version of the content isn’t asvaluable as the analog version, like bookpublishing where a significant subset ofpeople 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 thephysical version together for them. Someendeavors squeeze even more out of thisrevenue stream by using a Creative Commons license that only allows noncommercial uses, which means no one else
can sell physical copies of their work incompetition with them. This strategy ofreserving commercial rights can be particularly important for items like books,

27

Charging your content creators
Another type of multisided platform iswhere 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 wellknown version of this model is the “author-processing charge” of open-accessjournals like those published by the Public Library of Science, but there are othervariations. The Conversation is primarily funded by a university-membershipmodel, where universities pay to havetheir faculties participate as writers of
the content on the Conversation website.

MARKET-BASED

MARKET-BASED

MARKET-BASED

MARKET-BASED

Charging advertisers or sponsors
The traditional model of subsidizing freecontent is advertising. In this version ofmulti-sided platforms, advertisers pay
for the opportunity to reach the set ofeyeballs 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 formany 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.

Charging a transaction fee
This is a version of a traditional businessmodel based on brokering transactions
between parties.39 Curation is an important element of this model. Platforms likethe 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 makeCharging for the in-person version
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 substitutefor face-to-face interaction, CC-licensed
content can actually create demand forthe in-person version of experience. You
can see this effect when people go view
original art in person or pay to attend atalk or training course.
Selling merchandise
In many cases, people who like your work
will pay for products demonstrating aconnection to your work. As a child of
the 1980s, I can personally attest to thepower of a good concert T-shirt. This canalso be an important revenue stream formuseums 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, thefree content is being subsidized by an entirely
different category of people or businesses. Often, those people or businesses are paying toaccess your main audience. The fact that thecontent 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 toyour audience isn’t the only thing people are28

willing to pay for—there are other services you
can provide as well.
MARKET-BASED

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, theprovider of the physical goods can compete with other providers of the sameworks based on quality, service, or othertraditional business principles.

Made With Creative Commons

transactions with customers. Other platforms make money when service providers transact with their customers; forexample, Opendesk makes money every
time someone on their site pays a maker to make furniture based on one of thedesigns on the platform.
MARKET-BASED

Providing a service to your creators
As mentioned above, endeavors canmake money by providing customized
services to their users. Platforms can undertake a variation of this service model
directed at the creators that provide thecontent they feature. The data platforms
Figure.NZ and Figshare both capitalizeon this model by providing paid tools to
help their users make the data they contribute to the platform more discoverable and reusable.

Reciprocity-based revenue streams
Even if we set aside grant funding, we foundthat the traditional economic framework ofunderstanding the market failed to fully capture the ways the endeavors we analyzed weremaking 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,

Made With Creative Commons

RECIPROCITY-BASED

MARKET-BASED

Licensing a trademark
Finally, some that are Made with Creative Commons make money by selling use of their trademarks. Well known
brands that consumers associate withquality, credibility, or even an ethos canlicense that trademark to companies thatwant to take advantage of that goodwill.
By definition, trademarks are scarce because they represent a particular sourceof a good or service. Charging for theability to use that trademark is a way ofderiving revenue from something scarce
while taking advantage of the abundanceof CC content.

building a relationship, and then eventuallyfinding some money that flows back out of asense of reciprocity. While some look like traditional nonprofit funding models, they aren’tcharity. The endeavor exchange value withpeople, just not necessarily synchronously or in a way that requires that those values
be equal. As David Bollier wrote in Think Likea Commoner, “There is no self-serving calculation of whether the value given and received isstrictly equal.”This should be a familiar dynamic—it is theway 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 andevolve.”What is rare is to incorporate this sort of relationship into an endeavor that also engages withthe market.40 We almost can’t help but think ofrelationships in the market as being centered onan even-steven exchange of value.41
Memberships and individual
donations
While memberships and donations are
traditional nonprofit funding models, inthe Made with Creative Commons context, they are directly tied to the reciprocal relationship that is cultivated with thebeneficiaries of their work. The bigger
the pool of those receiving value fromthe 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 thewheels for content to reach more people,
this strategy can be more effective forendeavors that are Made with Creative
Commons. The greater the argumentthat the content is a public good or thatthe entire endeavor is furthering a social
mission, the more likely this strategy is to
succeed.

29

RECIPROCITY-BASEDRECIPROCITY-BASED30

The pay-what-you-want model
In the pay-what-you-want model, thebeneficiary of Creative Commons content is invited to give—at any amountthey can and feel is appropriate, basedon 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. Thesemodels capitalize on the fact that weare naturally inclined to give money forthings we value in the marketplace, evenin situations where we could find a way
to get it for free.
Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding models are based on recouping the costs of creating and distributing content before the content iscreated. 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 thanjust receiving the work. They have towant you to succeed. Amanda Palmer
credits the success of her crowdfundingon Kickstarter and Patreon to the years
she spent building her community andcreating a connection with her fans. She
wrote in The Art of Asking, “Good art ismade, good art is shared, help is offered,ears are bent, emotions are exchanged,
the compost of real, deep connection issprayed 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 moreout of a sense of commitment to the library community and to the idea of open
access generally.

Making Human Connections

Regardless of how they made money, in ourinterviews, 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 toconvince 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 forthe services they provide in connection with
their CC-licensed educational content. It isn’ta cease-and-desist letter; it’s an invitation to
pay because it’s the right thing to do. This sortof behavior toward what could be considered
nonpaying customers is largely unheard of in
the traditional marketplace. But it seems to bepart of the fabric of being Made with Creative
Commons.
Nearly every endeavor we profiled relied, atleast in part, on people being invested in what
they do. The closer the Creative Commonscontent 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 thisavoidance of thinking about what they do inpure market terms was deeply tied to being
Made with Creative Commons.
I came to the research with preconceived
notions about what Creative Commons is andwhat 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

Made With Creative Commons

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 yourvalues, 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 toeach other. To remind us what sharing really
looks like.
Be human
Humans are social animals, which means weare 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

Made With Creative Commons

pouring their lives out on the page. For others, it means showing their creative process,giving a glimpse into how they do what theydo. As writer Austin Kleon wrote, “Our work
doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want toknow where things came from, how they were
made, and who made them. The stories you
tell about the work you do have a huge effecton how people feel and what they understandabout your work, and how people feel andwhat 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 withthem. You’re too preoccupied with the task ofimpressing them.” Not everyone is suited tolive 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 fakebeing human.
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 thegood and the bad. As Amanda Palmer wrote,“You can fix almost anything by authenticallycommunicating.”45 It isn’t about trying to satis-31

fy everyone or trying to sugarcoat mistakes or
bad news, but instead about explaining yourrationale and then being prepared to defend it
when people are critical.46
Being accountable does not mean operatingon consensus. According to James Surowiecki, consensus-driven groups tend to resort tolowest-common-denominator solutions andavoid the sort of candid exchange of ideas thatcultivates healthy collaboration.47 Instead, it
can be as simple as asking for input and thengiving context and explanation about decisions you make, even if soliciting feedback andinviting discourse is time-consuming. If you
don’t go through the effort to actually respondto 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.
Design for the good actors
Traditional economics assumes people makedecisions 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 rangeof 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” inan economic sense. As Knowledge Unlatched’s
Pinter told us, “It is best to ignore people who
try to scare you about free riding. That fearis 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 work32

together better than neoclassical economics
would predict.”51 When we acknowledge thatpeople 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 overpeople’s behavior, this mode of operating requires a certain level of trust. We might notrealize 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 makesure that its managers and workers live up to
their obligation.” Instead, we largely trust thatpeople—mostly strangers—will do what they
are supposed to do.52 And most often, they do.
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 withusers.
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 mistakeof 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 importantto find ways to acknowledge and pay back theMade With Creative Commons

value that contributors generate. That does notmean 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
State your principles and stick to themBeing 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 toyour work. Sometimes people will be drawn toendeavors 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 connectedwith an endeavor’s separate social mission.
Often both.
The expression of your values doesn’t haveto be implicit. In fact, many of the people weinterviewed talked about how important it is
to state your guiding principles up front. Lumen Learning attributes a lot of their successto having been outspoken about the fundamental values that guide what they do. As afor-profit company, they think their expressedcommitment to low-income students andopen 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 thattranscends your own self-interest.57 It attracts
committed employees, motivates contributors, and builds trust.
Build a community
Endeavors that are Made with Creative Commons thrive when community is built aroundwhat they do. This may mean a community collaborating together to create something new,Made With Creative Commons

or it may simply be a collection of like-mindedpeople who get to know each other and rally around common interests or beliefs.58 To acertain extent, simply being Made with Creative Commons automatically brings with itsome element of community, by helping connect you to like-minded others who recognize
and are drawn to the values symbolized byusing CC.
To be sustainable, though, you have to workto nurture community. People have to care—about you and each other. One critical piece tothis 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, thatmeans 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 kindsof participative communities that drive openorganizations.”60
Communities that collaborate together
take deliberate planning. Surowiecki wrote, “Ittakes 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 themembers 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 thecommunity the power to create or influence
the rules that govern the community.62 If therules are created and imposed in a top-downmanner, people feel like they don’t have avoice, which in turn leads to disengagement.
Community takes work, but working together, or even simply being connected aroundcommon interests or values, is in many ways
what sharing is about.

33

Give more to the commons than you take
Conventional wisdom in the marketplace dictates that people should try to extract as muchmoney as possible from resources. This is essentially what defines so much of the so-calledsharing 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 transactions 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 thesame product multiple times, by selling accessrather than ownership.64 That is not sharing.
Sharing requires adding as much or morevalue to the ecosystem than you take. You
can’t simply treat open content as a free poolof resources from which to extract value. Partof 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 usergenerated content and limited trolling.65
Opendesk contributes to its community bycommitting to help its designers make money,in part by actively curating and displaying theirwork 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 createdby 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.
Involve people in what you do
Thanks to the Internet, we can tap into thetalents and expertise of people around the34

globe. Chris Anderson calls it the Long Tailof 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 tofind satisfaction from being involved.67 Thisis 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 timecommitment.68
As the success of Wikipedia demonstrates,
editing an online encyclopedia is exactly thesort of activity that is perfect for massive cocreation because small, incremental edits
made by a diverse range of people acting
on their own are immensely valuable in theaggregate. Those same sorts of small contributions would be less useful for many othertypes of creative work, and people are inherently less motivated to contribute when
it doesn’t appear that their efforts will makemuch 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 awide range of circumstances—perhaps more
often than not—community cocreation is notpart 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 thisdynamic. Rather than tapping the community to help cocreate their college textbooks,
they invest a significant amount of time andmoney to develop professional content. For
individual creators, where the creative work isthe basis for what they do, community cocreation is only rarely a part of the picture. Evenmusician Amanda Palmer, who is famous forher openness and involvement with her fans,said, “The only department where I wasn’t

Made With Creative Commons

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 inyour 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 inpublic” opens the door to letting people feel
more invested in your creative work.72 And it
shows a nonterritorial approach to ideas andinformation. Stephen Covey (of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame) calls thisthe abundance mentality—treating ideas likesomething plentiful—and it can create an environment where collaboration flourishes.73
There is no one way to involve people inwhat you do. They key is finding a way for people to contribute on their terms, compelled bytheir own motivations.74 What that looks likevaries 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

Made With Creative Commons

35

Notes14

Anderson, Free, 86.

15Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be
Free, 144.

16

Anderson, Free, 123.

Cory Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want
to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age (SanFrancisco, CA: McSweeney’s, 2014) 68.

17

Ibid., 132.

18

Ibid., 70.

3Ibid., 55.

19

4

Chris Anderson, Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something
for Nothing, reprint with new preface(New York: Hyperion, 2010), 224.

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.”5

Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be
Free, 44.

20

Anderson, Free, 44.

21

6

Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking: Or
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let
People Help (New York: Grand Central,2014), 121.

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, andBarbara 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.

1

2

7

8

Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation (Hoboken, NJ: John
Wiley and Sons, 2010), 14. A preview ofthe book is available at strategyzer.com/books/business-model-generation.

Chris Anderson, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (New York: Signal, 2012),
64.
David Bollier, Think Like a Commoner: A
Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society,2014), 70.

9Anderson, Makers, 66.

10Bryan Kramer, Shareology: How Sharing Is
Powering the Human Economy (New York:Morgan James, 2016), 10.

11

Anderson, Free, 62.

12Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be
Free, 38.

13

Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 68.

36

Made With Creative Commons

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.

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, 2nded. (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media,
2012), 36.

59Palmer, 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 Futureof 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.

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 toShare Your Creativity and Get Discovered(New York: Workman, 2014), 93.

44

Kramer, Shareology, 76.

45Palmer, Art of Asking, 252.

46

Whitehurst, Open Organization, 145.

47

Surowiecki, Wisdom of Crowds, 203.

48

Whitehurst, Open Organization, 80.

66

Anderson, Makers, 148.

49

Bollier, Think Like a Commoner, 25.

67

Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, 164.

Made With Creative Commons

37

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.

74Whitehurst, 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.

38

Made With Creative Commons

THE
CREATIVE
COMMONS
LICENSES
All of the Creative Commons licenses grant abasic set of permissions. At a minimum, a CClicensed work can be copied and shared in its
original form for noncommercial purposes solong as attribution is given to the creator. There
are six licenses in the CC license suite thatbuild on that basic set of permissions, ranging
from the most restrictive (allowing only thosebasic permissions to share unmodified copies for noncommercial purposes) to the mostpermissive (reusers can do anything they wantwith the work, even for commercial purposes,
as long as they give the creator credit). The licenses are built on copyright and do not coverother types of rights that creators might havein 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 ofMade With Creative Commons3

licenses offered. Recommended for maximum
dissemination and use of licensed materials.
The Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BYSA) lets others remix,
tweak, and build upon your work, even forcommercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations underidentical 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 itis passed along unchanged with credit to you.

39

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-ShareAlikelicense (CC BY-NC-SA)
lets others remix, tweak, and build upon yourwork noncommercially, as long as they credit
you and license their new creations under thesame terms.
The
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
license (CC BY-NC-ND) isthe most restrictive of our six main licenses,
only allowing others to download your works
and share them with others as long as theycredit 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 forcreators and the other for those who manage
collections of existing works by authors whoseterms 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 anddiscovery of works that are already free ofknown copyright restrictions.
In our case studies, some use just one Creative Commons license, others use several. Attribution (found in thirteen case studies) andAttribution-ShareAlike (found in eight studies) were the most common, with the other40

licenses coming up in four or so case studies,including the public-domain tool CC0. Some ofthe organizations we profiled offer both digitalcontent and software: by using open-sourcesoftware licenses for the software code andCreative Commons licenses for digital content,
they amplify their involvement with and commitment to sharing.
There is a popular misconception that thethree NonCommercial licenses offered by CC
are the only options for those who want tomake money off their work. As we hope thisbook makes clear, there are many ways tomake 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 makecommercial use of your work (CC BY, CC BY-SA,
and CC BY-ND) forecloses some traditional revenue streams. If you apply an Attribution (CCBY) license to your book, you can’t force a film
company to pay you royalties if they turn yourbook into a feature-length film, or prevent another company from selling physical copies ofyour work.
The decision to choose a NonCommercial
and/or NoDerivs license comes down to howmuch 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 thatcopyright 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 thecreative 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 forits educational materials because the medical
subject matter is particularly important to getright.

Made With Creative Commons

There is no one right way. The NonCommercial and NoDerivs restrictions reflect thevalues and preferences of creators about how
their creative work should be reused, just as
the ShareAlike license reflects a different setof values, one that is less about controlling access to their own work and more about ensuring that whatever gets created with their workis available to all on the same terms. Since thebeginning of the commons, people have been
setting up structures that helped regulate theway in which shared resources were used.
The CC licenses are an attempt to standardize
norms across all domains.
Note
For more about the licenses including examples and tips on sharing your work in thedigital commons, start with the Creative
Commons page called “Share Your Work” atcreativecommons.org/share-your-work/.

Made With Creative Commons

41

42

Made With Creative Commons

Part 2
THE
CASE STUDIES
Made With Creative Commons

43

44

Made With Creative Commons

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, andparts of the world. Twelve of the case studies
were selected from that group based on votes
cast by Kickstarter backers, and the othertwelve were selected by us.
We did background research and conducted interviews for each case study, based on
the same set of basic questions about theendeavor. The idea for each case study is totell 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.

Made With Creative Commons

45

46

Made With Creative Commons

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 neededa 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 anddocumentation with the Attribution-ShareAlike 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, publish-

Made With Creative Commonsing something online. You send a set of instructions to the microcontroller on the board byusing the Arduino programming language andArduino software (based on a piece of opensource 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 opensource 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 eventhought of building.”
For Tom another factor was the impending closure of the Ivrea design school. He’dseen 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

47

thing Tom really likes about open source. If
key people leave, or a company shuts down,
an open-source product lives on. In Tom’sview, “Open sourcing makes it easier to trust a
product.”

With the school closing, David and some of theother Arduino founders started a consulting
firm and multidisciplinary design studio theycalled Tinker, in London. Tinker designed products and services that bridged the digital andthe 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 thefirst customer of their product. They madeproducts 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 overtime—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 usedthat to make another thousand, which generated enough revenue to make five thousand.
In the early days, they simply tried to generateenough 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 physicalproduct. As long as it’s a quality product andsold at a reasonable price, people will buy it.
Arduino now has a worldwide communityof makers—students, hobbyists, artists, programmers, and professionals. Arduino pro-48

vides 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 ofmakers has contributed an incredible amountof accessible knowledge helpful to novices andexperts alike.
Transitioning Arduino from a project to acompany 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 getlots of customers but were also high enoughto 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 tosuccessfully run one still apply. David says, “If
you do those other things well, sharing thingsin 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 canproduce 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 haveto give attribution to Arduino. If they change
the design, they must release the new designusing the same Creative Commons license toensure that the new version is equally free andopen.
Tom and David say that a lot of people havebuilt companies off of Arduino, with dozens ofMade With Creative Commons

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, andaimed for an environment of collaboration. A
benefit of open over closed is the many newideas 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 newneeds and challenges. In addition to simple
entry level boards, new products have been
added ranging from enhanced boards thatprovide advanced functionality and faster performance, to boards for creating Internet ofThings 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 thatcan be plugged onto a board to give it extra
features), and kits.1

THE OPEN-SOURCE NATURE OFARDUINO EMPOWERS USERS
TO MODIFY IT AND CREATE A
LOT OF DIFFERENT VARIATIONS,STRENGTHENING THE
PLATFORM FAR BEYOND WHATTHE FOUNDERS THOUGHT OFBUILDING.

Arduino’s focus is on high-quality boards,
well-designed support materials, and theMade With Creative Commonsbuilding of community; this focus is one of thekeys to their success. And being open lets you
build a real community. David says Arduino’s
community is a big strength and somethingthat really does matter—in his words, “It’sgood business.” When they started, the Arduino team had almost entirely no idea how tobuild a community. They started by conducting numerous workshops, working directlywith people using the platform to make surethe hardware and software worked the way it
was meant to work and solved people’s problems. The community grew organically fromthere.

A key decision for Arduino was trademarking the name. The founders needed a way toguarantee to people that they were buying aquality product from a company committed toopen-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 sellboards 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 theArduino 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 away 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 theirbrand. There was some early backlash with49

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, wherenothing is shared. Tom suggests a businessformalize 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, doesa great job of explaining the full complexities
of how trademarking their brand has playedout, 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

50

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 otherpeople 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 theworld get over the idea that technology has tobe 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/

Made With Creative CommonsÁRTICAÁrtica 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, andboth 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 andconsulting for people and institutions creating
artistic and cultural projects on the Internet.

Made With Creative CommonsÁrtica 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 othertwo 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 thema 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 orintermediaries.
Ártica offers personalized education andconsulting 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

51

IN THE EDUCATIONAL AND
CULTURAL BUSINESS, IT IS MORE
IMPORTANT TO PAY ATTENTION
TO PEOPLE AND PROCESS, RATHER
THAN CONTENT OR SPECIFICFORMATS OR MATERIALS.
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 freeand 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 thatonline communities are more specific than wethought,” 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 andoffer 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 fromdigitization 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 goahead because they believe in it. They take thestance that every new project leads them tosomething new, every new resource they create opens new doors.

Ártica relies heavily on their free Creative
Commons–licensed content to attract new52

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 wantthat freedom to be viral,” Jorge said. For them,giving others the right to reuse and remix theircontent is a fundamental value. “How can you
offer an online educational service without giving permission to download, make and keepcopies, or print the educational resources?”
Jorge said. “If we want to do the best for ourstudents—those who trust in us to the pointthat they are willing to pay online without faceto-face contact—we have to offer them a fairand 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 evenpicked up one of their e-books and distributed printed copies. Ártica views reuse of theirwork 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 forcreating content, they spoke of all of the spontaneous and organic ways they find inspiration. “Sometimes, the collaborative process
starts with a conversation between us, orwith friends from other projects,” Jorge said.
“That can be the first step for a new blog postor another simple piece of content, which canevolve 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 justas important as the final product.

Made With Creative Commons

People and relationships are also just as important, sometimes more. “In the educationaland 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 canlearn from them and share their knowledge.

At the core of everything Ártica does is a setof values. “Good content is not enough,” Jorge
said. “We also think that it is very importantto 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 creativework) 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 tiedclosely to their belief system. Ultimately, what
drives their work is a mission to democratize
art and culture.

Made With Creative Commons

Of course, Ártica also has to make enoughmoney to cover its expenses. Human resources are, by far, their biggest expense. They tap
a network of collaborators on a case-by-casebasis and hire contractors for specific projects.
Whenever possible, they draw from artistic
and cultural resources in the commons, andthey rely on free software. Their operation issmall, efficient, and sustainable, and becauseof 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 andJorge, 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 ofsuccess 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.”

53

54

Made With Creative Commons

BLENDER
INSTITUTE
The Blender Institute is an animation studiothat creates 3-D films using Blender software.
Founded in 2006 in the Netherlands.

Revenue model: crowdfunding (subscription-based), charging for physical copies,
selling merchandisewww.blender.org

Interview date: March 8, 2016
Interviewee: Francesco Siddi, production coordinator
Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

For Ton Roosendaal, the creator of Blendersoftware and its related entities, sharing ispractical. 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 makemovies that were licensed with Creative Commons pushed that development even further.
Sharing enables people to participate and tointeract 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, notjust the final film itself but all of the source material as well. The creative process also enhances the development of the Blender software

Made With Creative Commons

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 along, rewarding process for the creative andtechnical 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 notdoing anything.”

55

Blender’s history begins in the late 1990s,
when Ton created the Blender software. Originally, the software was an in-house resourcefor 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 toa paid version. Sales were disappointing, andhis investors gave up on the endeavor in theearly 2000s. He made a deal with investors—if
he could raise enough money, he could thenmake 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 foranyone to use. Simply applying the General
Public License to the software, however, wasnot enough to create a thriving community
around it. Francesco told us, “Software of thiscomplexity 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 andimprovements. “Software should be free andopen to hack,” Francesco said. “Otherwise, everyone is doing the same thing in the dark forten 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 acall online for all interested and skilled artists.
Francesco said the idea was to get the bestartists available, put them in a building together with the best developers, and have themwork together. They would not only produce
high-quality openly licensed content, theywould improve the Blender software in theprocess.

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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 ideathat making money was possible by producing
CC-licensed material was mind-blowing to people,” he said. “They were like, ‘I have to see it tobelieve it.’”
The first film, which was released in 2006,
was an experiment. It was so successful thatTon 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 numberof 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 hirethem 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 tothe public, but people know and trust Blenderto 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 ofthese projects,” Francesco said.
While these benefits of each open-movie
project make a compelling pitch for crowd-

Made With Creative Commons

TON BELIEVES IF YOU DON’T
MAKE CONTENT USING YOUR

nue streams, such as the Blender Store, where
people can purchase DVDs, T-shirts, and other
Blender products.

TOOLS, THEN YOU’RE NOT DOINGANYTHING.
funding campaigns, Francesco told us theBlender Institute has found some limitations inthe 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. Thatis a problem.”
To make their work more sustainable, theyneeded a way to receive ongoing support rather than on a project-by-project basis. Theirsolution 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 asthey develop, sharing detailed information andcontent 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 streamsof the Institute and Foundation are deliberately kept separate. Blender also has other reve-

Made With Creative Commons

Ton has worked on projects relating to his
Blender software for nearly twenty years.
Throughout most of that time, he has beencommitted to making the software and thecontent produced with the software free andopen. Selling a license has never been part ofthe 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 thecreative 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 todoing.

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CARDS AGAINSTHUMANITY
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 makea 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 gameApples to Apples. To play, one player asks aquestion or fill-in-the-blank statement from a
black card, and the other players submit their
funniest white card in response. The catch isthat all of the cards are filled with crude, gruesome, and otherwise awful things. For theright 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

Made With Creative Commons

Humanity is the number-one best-selling itemout 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 gameunto itself.

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All together, these factors—the crass tone of
the game and company, the free download, theopenness 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 lastin a long line of games and comedy projects
that Max Temkin and his friends put together for their own amusement. As Max tells thestory, they made the game so they could playit 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 onlygrown more popular over time. Max says theeight 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 andmemorable. It is hard to forget a company
that calls the FAQ on their website “Your dumb
questions.”
Like most quality satire, however, there ismore to the joke than vulgarity and shock value. The company’s marketing efforts aroundBlack 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” theday has become, particularly since it follows a
day that is about being grateful for what you

60

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 tohate us for it,” he said. “But it made us laughso we went with it. People totally caught thejoke.”
This sort of bold transparency delights themedia, but more importantly, it engages theirfans. “One of the most surprising things you
can do in capitalism is just be honest with people,” Max said. “It shocks people that there istransparency 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 thejoke.” One year they did a Give Cards Against
Humanity $5 event, where people literally paid
them five dollars for no reason. Their fanswanted to make the joke funnier by making it
successful. They made $70,000 in a single day.
This remarkable trust they have in theircustomers is what inspired their decision
to apply a Creative Commons license to thegame. Trusting your customers to reuse andremix 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 thelicense, Max said they worried that some fanswould 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 costof using CC, I’d pay that a hundred times overbecause 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 fansof 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.

Made With Creative Commons

Max said, “CC was a no-brainer for us because
it gets the most people involved. Making thegame free and available under a CC license led
to the unbelievable situation where we are oneof the best-marketed games in the world, andwe have never spent a dime on marketing.”
Of course, there are limits to what thecompany allows its customers to do with thegame. 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 gamebe 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 brandand our game and make money off of it,” Maxsaid. About 99.9 percent of the time, they justsend an email to those making commercial useof 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 beplayable, every white card has to work syntactically with enough black cards. The eight creators invest an incredible amount of work intocreating new cards for the game. “We havedaylong arguments about commas,” Max said.
“The slacker tone of the cards gives people theimpression 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 rarethat a submitted card is adopted. Instead, theeight 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.

Made With Creative Commons

CC WAS A NO-BRAINER FOR
US BECAUSE IT GETS THE MOSTPEOPLE INVOLVED. MAKINGTHE 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.

For all of their success, the creators of Cards
Against Humanity are only partially motivatedby money. Max says they have always beeninterested in the Walt Disney philosophy offinancial success. “We don’t make jokes andgames 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 haveother 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 andchanneling some of the excitement from thegame 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 asavvy marketing move for the company, butnonetheless, giving up exclusive control ofyour work necessarily means giving up some
opportunities to extract more money from
customers.

61

“It’s not right for everyone to release everything under CC licensing,” Max said. “If youronly 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.”

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Made With Creative Commons

THE
CONVERSATIONThe Conversation is an independent source ofnews, sourced from the academic and research community and delivered direct to the
public over the Internet. Founded in 2011 inAustralia.

theconversation.com
Revenue model: charging content creators(universities pay membership fees to havetheir 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 Agein Melbourne, Australia. He experienced firsthand the decline of newspapers, including thecollapse of revenues, layoffs, and the constantpressure to reduce costs. After he left the Agein 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

Made With Creative Commonswith depth and substance but was concerned
about the increasing focus on the sensationaland sexy.
While at the Age, he’d become friends witha 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 weremore involved in informing the world about
what is going on and correcting the errors thatappear 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, puttingout a version that these people felt was wrong
or mischaracterized. Newspapers want to attract a mass audience. Scholars want to com-63

municate serious news, findings, and insights.
It’s not a perfect match.
Universities are massive repositories ofknowledge, research, wisdom, and expertise.
But a lot of that stays behind a wall of theirown making—there are the walled garden andivory tower metaphors, and in more literal
terms, the paywall. Broadly speaking, universities are part of society but disconnected fromit. 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, andmaybe 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 fromstory structure to headline, captions, andquotes. The editors could help turn somethingthat 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 checkthe article and give final approval before it ispublished. Compare this with reporters justpicking and choosing the quotes and writing
whatever they want.
The people he spoke to liked this idea, andAndrew 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 theuniversity 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 is64

access to independent, high-quality, informative journalism. The Conversation’s aim is forpeople 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, acharter, and codes of conduct.1 These include
fully disclosing who every author is (with theirrelevant expertise); who is funding their research; and if there are any potential or real
conflicts of interest. Also important is where

ACCESS TO INFORMATION IS AN
ISSUE OF EQUALITY—EVERYONESHOULD HAVE ACCESS, LIKEACCESS TO CLEAN WATER.
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 haveaccess, like access to clean water. The Conversation is committed to an open and free Internet. Everyone should have free access to theircontent, and be able to share it or republish it.
Creative Commons help with these goals;
articles are published with the AttributionNoDerivs license (CC BY-ND). They’re freely
available for others to republish elsewhereas long as attribution is given and the content is not edited. Over five years, more thantwenty-two thousand sites have republishedtheir content. The Conversation website gets
about 2.9 million unique views per month,

Made With Creative Commons

but through republication they have thirty-fivemillion 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 andrecommend it to their friends, peers, andnetworks. Readership has grown primarily
through word of mouth. While they don’t havesales and marketing, they do promote theirwork through social media (including Twitterand 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 shouldbe. It quickly became clear to the founders of
the Conversation that they wanted to createa public good rather than make money off ofinformation. 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 theConversation 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, advisoryboards, and content. The Conversation’s global virtual newsroom has roughly ninety staff
working with thirty-five thousand academics
from over sixteen hundred universities aroundthe world. The Conversation would like to beworking with university scholars from evenmore parts of the world.
Additionally, each edition has its own set
of founding partners, strategic partners, andfunders. They’ve received funding from foundations, corporates, institutions, and individual donations, but the Conversation is shifting
toward paid memberships by universities andresearch institutions to sustain operations.
This would safeguard the current service andhelp improve coverage and features.

Made With Creative Commons

When professors from member universities
write an article, there is some branding of theuniversity associated with the article. On theConversation website, paying university members are listed as “members and funders.” Early
participants may be designated as “founding
members,” with seats on the editorial advisoryboard.
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 accessto 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 thenumber 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 ashow 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 thebenefits 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 newform of journalism that contributes to a more
informed citizenry and improved democracyaround the world. Its open business modeland use of Creative Commons show how it’s
possible to generate both a public good andoperational revenue at the same time.
Web link
1 theconversation.com/us/charter

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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 takea thing that has certain qualities, remove thequalities, and go on selling it,” he said. “I’mnot out there trying to figure out how to be abrand. I’m doing this thing that animates me towork crazy insane hours because it’s the mostimportant 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 outof 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

Made With Creative Commons

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 theways in which creators can make a living in theInternet age.
Cory primarily makes money by selling physical books, but he also takes on paid speaking
gigs and is experimenting with pay-what-youwant 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 opponentof 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

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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 expressionof the same artistic-political urge,” he said. “Ihave this suspicion that if I gave up the things
that didn’t make me money, the genuinenesswould leach out of what I do, and the qualitythat causes people to like what I do would begone.”

Cory has been financially successful, but money is not his primary motivation. At the startof 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 thearts 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 amcompelled 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 andcensorship 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 beenable 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 hewould have without it. Cory says his goal is to68

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 heand his publisher took a closer look at who wasdoing 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 asa 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 Commonslicenses. 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 heis 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 thetide, Cory makes his work intrinsically shareable. “Getting the hell out of the way for people who want to share their love of you withother 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. “En-Made With Creative Commons

gaging 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 mostrestrictive Creative Commons license, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND).
It allows only verbatim copying for noncommercial purposes. His later work is publishedunder 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 hethinks 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 likea dandelion. Dandelions produce thousandsof seeds each spring, and they are blown into
the air going in every direction. The strategy is
to maximize the number of blind chances thedandelion has for continuing its genetic line.
Similarly, he says there are lots of people out
there who may want to buy creative work orcompensate authors for it in some other way.

GETTING THE HELL OUT OF THE
WAY FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TOSHARE THEIR LOVE OF YOU WITH
OTHER PEOPLE SOUNDS OBVIOUS,
BUT IT’S REMARKABLE HOWMANY PEOPLE DON’T DO IT.
Made With Creative Commons“The more places your work can find itself,
the greater the likelihood that it will find oneof those would-be customers in some unsuspected crack in the metaphorical pavement,”
he wrote. “The copies that others make of mywork 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 widelyaround 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 workand 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 thanfewer, places where people can access theirwork. 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,” hesaid. “On the other hand, the intermediaries
we historically sold to are making it harder togo around them.” Cory continually looks forways 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 iseasy to do. He was extremely successful using
Humble Bundle, a platform that allows people
to pay what they want for DRM-free versionsof a bundle of a particular creator’s work. He
is planning to try his own pay-what-you-wantexperiment soon.

69

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 personallyanswering 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 havebeen touched by your work.”

70

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.

Made With Creative Commons

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 whereusers can make all the output of their researchavailable—from posters and presentations todata 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 weknow you’ll be here in five years? Can you, asa for-profit venture, be trusted? Answers have
evolved over time.

Mark traces the origins of Figshare back towhen 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 re-Made With Creative Commonssearch, there was no way for him to also publish the videos, figures, graphs, and data sets.
This was frustrating. Mark believed publishinghis 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 makethe data citable, and persistent identifiers—
URL links that always point back to the original
object ensuring the research is citable for thelong 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 thanreferring to it by its URL, because the locationof an object (the web page or URL) can often

71

CHANGE THE FACE OF ACADEMIC PUBLISHING THROUGH
IMPROVED DISSEMINATION,DISCOVERABILITY, AND REUSABILITY OF SCHOLARLYRESEARCH.
change. Mark partnered with DataCite for theprovision 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 andMark’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 hada science blog where he wrote about it andmade all his data open. People started commenting on his blog that they wanted to do thesame. 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, andcode. Inclusion of code raised new licensing
issues, as Creative Commons licenses are notused 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 viablebusiness model. They made an initial investment, and together they came up with a freemium-like business model.

72

Under the freemium model, academics
upload their research to Figshare for storage
and sharing for free. Each research object islicensed 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. Figsharesums 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. (Thefig 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 themfirst or require third-party software. Journals
who were still largely publishing articles asstatic noninteractive PDFs became interested
in having Figshare provide that functionality
for them.
Figshare diversified its business model toinclude 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 fromhaving to develop this functionality as partof 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 varietyof 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

Made With Creative Commons

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. Figshareonce 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 Figsharefor Institutions) that securely hosts researchdata 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 needsof librarians and administrators, as well as of
the researchers.
As with researchers and publishers, Figshare encouraged institutions to share
their research with CC BY (Attribution) andtheir data with CC0 (into the public domain).
Funders who require researchers and institutions to use open licensing believe in thesocial responsibilities and benefits of making
research accessible to all. Publishing researchin this open way has come to be called open
access. But not all funders specify CC BY; someinstitutions want to offer their researchers achoice, 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 Markbelieves CC BY is the best license for this.
On the other hand, institutions were saying
they wouldn’t use Figshare unless it offered achoice 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.

Made With Creative Commons

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 theirlicense of choice.

Figshare has an Application Programming Interface (API) that makes it possible for data
to be pulled from Figshare and used in otherapplications. 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 canalter 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 andspread awareness of Figshare. To amplify andreward the community, Figshare establishedan 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 theirarea. 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 toresearchers, publishers, and institutions.3 If he
had relied solely on revenue from premium
subscriptions, he believes Figshare would havestruggled. 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.

73

Today Figshare has 26 million–plus page views,
7.5 million–plus downloads, 800,000–plususer uploads, 2 million–plus articles, 500,000plus collections, and 5,000–plus projects. Sixty
percent of their traffic comes from Google. A
sister company called Altmetric tracks the useof Figshare by others, including Wikipedia andnews sources.
Figshare uses the revenue it generates fromthe 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 thefree 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 wasonly in it for the money, they wouldn’t careabout offering a free version. Figshare’s principles and advocacy for openness are a key differentiator. Going forward, Mark sees Figsharenot only as supporting open access to research
but also enabling people to collaborate andmake 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

74

Made With Creative Commons

FIGURE.NZ
Figure.NZ is a nonprofit charity that makes anonline data platform designed to make datareusable and easy to understand. Founded in2012 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 thousandsof 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 thatmatter—not only to them, but also to theirfamilies, their communities, their businesses,
and their country. But there’s a big difference
between availability and accessibility of information. Data is spread across thousands ofsites 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 thedata, and manipulate complex tools to extract
and visualize the information within the data
set. Lillian established Figure.NZ to make data

Made With Creative Commons

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 andbusiness groups, Lillian realized “every single
issue we addressed would have been easier todeal with if more people understood the basic facts.” But understanding the basic facts
sometimes requires data and research thatyou 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. Initiallylaunched as Wiki New Zealand, the originalidea was that people could contribute their75

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 thewiki model wasn’t working, Lillian brought theprocess 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 andpresent it visually.
Here’s how it works. Figure.NZ sources datafrom other organizations, including corporations, public repositories, government departments, and academics. Figure.NZ imports
and extracts that data, and then validates andstandardizes 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, withrich metadata about the sources, the licenses,
and data types. Figure.NZ has a chart-designing tool that makes simple bar, line, and areagraphs from any data source. The graphs areposted to the Figure.NZ website, and they canalso be exported in a variety of formats forprint or online use. Figure.NZ makes its dataand graphs available using the Attribution (CCBY) license. This allows others to reuse, revise,
remix, and redistribute Figure.NZ data andgraphs as long as they give attribution to theoriginal 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, wasclear, and made common sense. It was easy to
use and easy for others to understand. Overtime, 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 thelicensing of works with government copyright76

and how they can be reused, and it does thiswith 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 businessis are relatively new, only a hundred years oldor so. She’s convinced that twenty years fromnow, we will see new and different models forbusiness. 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 purposeof Figure.NZ. She believes Wikipedia would
not work if it were for profit, and similarly, Figure.NZ’s nonprofit status assures people whohave data and people who want to use it thatthey can rely on Figure.NZ’s motives. People
see them as a trusted wrangler and source.
Although Figure.NZ is a social enterprisethat openly licenses their data and graphs foreveryone to use for free, they have taken care
not to be perceived as a free service all aroundthe table. Lillian believes hundreds of millionsof 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 ofthe data for policy, but Lillian believes that it isunderutilized and the potential value is muchlarger. Figure.NZ is focused on solving thatproblem. 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 understandwhy certain decisions are being made and to
be more aware about what the government isdoing, why not transform the data it collects
into easily understood visuals? It could evenbecome a way for a government or any organization to differentiate, market, and branditself.

Made With Creative CommonsFigure.NZ spends a lot of time seeking tounderstand 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 publishingplatform. 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 thelicense terms (although Figure.NZ encourages
Creative Commons licensing). Figure.NZ also
serves customers who want a specific collection of charts created—for example, for theirwebsite or annual report. Charging the organizations that want to make their data available
enables Figure.NZ to provide their site free toall users, to truly democratize data.
Lillian notes that the current state of mostdata is terrible and often not well understoodby 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 withdoing 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 tofind useful data without having to know whatquestions to ask.3

Made With Creative Commons

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, orare 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 stylesof data, standardizing it, and making it useful.
Lillian realized that Figure.NZ could easily become a warehouse of seventy people doingdata. 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.

IN THE WORLD WE LIVE IN NOW,THE BEST FUTURE IS THE ONE
WHERE EVERYONE CAN MAKE
WELL-INFORMED DECISIONS.
Figure.NZ’s website displays visuals anddata 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 searchfunction helps users find tables and graphs.
Figure.NZ does not provide analysis or interpretation of the data or visuals. Their goal is to77

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 adata collection template and teach them why
it’s important and how to use it. They’ve begun
putting more emphasis on tracking what usersof their website want. They also get requests
from social media and through email for themto 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’ssite. Overall, Figure.NZ is seeking to provide aplace 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 createdby having a few great leaders who essentially
had access to the information and made decisions on behalf of others, whether it was onbehalf 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 innow, the best future is the one where everyone can make well-informed decisions.
“The use of numbers and data as a way ofmaking well-informed decisions is one of theareas 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 themost part, deep thinking based on data isconstrained to experts because most people
don’t have data literacy. There once was a time

78

when many citizens in society couldn’t read or
write. However, as a society, we’ve now cometo believe that reading and writing skills should
be something all citizens have. We haven’t yet
adopted a similar belief around numbers anddata literacy. We largely still believe that only
a few specially trained people can analyze andthink with numbers.
“Figure.NZ may be the first organization toassert that everyone can use numbers in theirthinking, 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 andinformed 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 inmore informed ways to shape the future.”
Lillian sees Figure.NZ’s model as having
global potential. But for now, their focus iscompletely 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/

Made With Creative Commons

KNOWLEDGE
UNLATCHED
Knowledge Unlatched is a not-for-profit community interest company that brings libraries
together to pool funds to publish open-accessbooks. 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 Pinterhas been at the forefront of innovation in the
publishing industry for nearly forty years. She
founded the UK-based Knowledge Unlatchedwith a mission to enable open access to scholarly books. For Frances, the current scholarlybook-publishing system is not working for anyone, and especially not for monographs in thehumanities 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

Made With Creative CommonsCommercial Innovation Award for Innovationin Education in 2015.

Dr. Pinter has been in academic publishing
most of her career. About ten years ago, shebecame acquainted with the Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig and got interested in Creative Commons as a tool for bothprotecting 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 forfree using a Creative Commons license and tosee what happened to print sales. Sales wentup, not down.

79

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-booksales at all, and the costs associated with getting the book to print would be lost. Surprisingly, Bloomsbury found that sales of the printversions 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 interestin 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 creamcone, 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 thecost of the printed book, or do a whole bunchof interesting things with the printed book ande-book—the ice cream cone or sundae part ofthe 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 world80

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 theidea. Her husband came up with Knowledge
Unlatched, and after two years of generatinginterest, she decided to move forward andlaunch a community interest company (a UKterm for not-for-profit social enterprises) in2012.

She describes the business model in a paper
called Knowledge Unlatched: Toward an Openand 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 dofrom library suppliers now).

3

Their selections are sent to Knowledge
Unlatched specifying the titles to be purchased at the stated price(s).

4The 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 numberof 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 collectedfrom the libraries.

Made With Creative Commons

6

Publishers make print copies, e-Pub, andother digital versions of selected titles
available to member libraries at a discountthat reflects their contribution to the Title
Fee and incentivizes membership.1

The first round of this model resulted in acollection of twenty-eight current titles fromthirteen 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 perbook came in at just under forty-three dollars.
The open-access, Creative Commons versions of these twenty-eight books are stillavailable 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 ofthe publishing agreement. Frances has foundthat most authors want to retain control overthe commercial and remix use of their work.
Publishers list the book in their catalogs, andthe noncommercial restriction in the Creative
Commons license ensures authors continue toget 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 toacquire all the books, and the individual priceper 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 foreach 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 of-Made With Creative Commons

ferings. Books were being bundled into eightsmall packages separated by subject (including
Anthropology, History, Literature, Media andCommunications, and Politics), of around ten
books per package. Three hundred libraries
around the world have to commit to at leastsix 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 thelibraries, 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 threehundred libraries that participated in the firstround, 80 percent are also participating in thesecond round, and there are an additionaleighty 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 chosemonographs as the initial type of book to unlatch. Monographs are foundational and important, but also problematic to keep going inthe 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 of81copies. A publisher who in the past sold three
thousand copies now typically sells only threehundred. 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 fromzero 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 throughunlatching 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 oftaking 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 awayfrom buying physical copies. An academic library catalog entry is typically a URL to wherever the book is hosted. Or if they have enoughelectronic 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 separatelyfrom the digital version.
Knowledge Unlatched offers libraries acompelling economic argument. Many of theparticipating 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 notjust the participating libraries, but to the world.
Not only do the economics make sense,but there is very strong alignment with librarymandates. The participating libraries pay lessthan they would have in the closed model, andthe open-access book is available to all libraries. While this means nonparticipating libraries could be seen as free riders, in the libraryworld, wealthy libraries are used to paying
more than poor libraries and accept that part82of 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, theKnowledge 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 issustainable. Libraries and publishers will eachpay 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 atime. Moving forward, Knowledge Unlatchedis making investments in technology and processes. Future plans include unlatching journals and older books.
Frances believes that Knowledge Unlatchedis 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 Unlatchedtaps into the new possibilities and behaviors ofthe digital world. In the Knowledge Unlatchedmodel, 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/

Made With Creative Commons

LUMENLEARNING
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 adoptionof open educational resources. In 2012, David
and Kim partnered on a grant-funded projectcalled 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 todramatically 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, replacedwith OER, decreased to zero dollars, and average student-success rates improved by 5 to 10
percent when compared with previous years.

Made With Creative Commons

After a second round of funding, a total ofmore than twenty-five institutions participated in and benefited from this project. It was
career changing for David and Kim to see theimpact 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 theirwork in a financially sustainable way. That iswhen they decided to create Lumen Learning.
David and Kim went back and forth onwhether it should be a nonprofit or forprofit. 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 grant83money should be used, there often isn’t a lotof 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 havemore 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, andresearch materials, in all different media, that
reside in the public domain or are released under an open license that permits free use andrepurposing by others.

Originally, Lumen did custom contracts foreach institution. This was complicated andchallenging to manage. However, throughthat 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 theiroff-the-shelf options. Lumen finds that institutions and faculty are generally very good atseeing the value Lumen brings and are willingto 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—andin 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 accessto Lumen’s fully customizable OER course
materials through the institution’s learning-management system;84• measure improvements in student successwith 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 morethan sixty-five subjects. All courses are freely
and publicly available right off their website.
They can be copied and used by others as longas they provide attribution to Lumen Learning
following the terms of the Creative Commonslicense.
Then there are three types of bundledservices 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 perenrolled 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, andhelps 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 coursesthat make up the degree (both required andelective) by replacing commercial textbooks
and other expensive resources with OER.
Lumen generates revenue by charging fortheir 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 theinstitutions to pay, not the students. With projects they did prior to Lumen, David and Kim

Made With Creative Commons

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. Rightfrom 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 areteaching the new course. They’re often part ofthe 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 andchoose from images, videos, and other media
to adapt and customize the course. Lumencreates new content as they discover gaps inexisting 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 theoriginal 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 Commonslicense and attribution information in theMade With Creative Commons

website’s footer, which stays the same for all
pages. This doesn’t quite work, however, whenmixing different OER together.
Remixing OER often results in multiple attributions on every page of every course—text
from one place, images from another, andvideos from yet another. Some are licensed
as Attribution (CC BY), others as AttributionShareAlike (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 andhelping 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, wordof mouth, and referrals. Sometimes the number of general inquiries exceed Lumen’s sales
capacity.
To manage demand and ensure the successof 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 nineother 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 thelargest 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 the85Creative Commons licenses, for all the materials it creates; and day-one access for students.
Having clear nonnegotiables allows them tothen engage with the education community tosolve 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 theinvestment the diverse education community
makes in OER is not exploited? Lumen thinks
we all need to be clear about how we arebenefiting from and contributing to the open
community.
In the OER sector, there are examples ofcorporations, 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 evengive 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 forfaculty 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 andKim, a good corporate citizen gives more thanthey 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 model86

and strives for a correct balance of all thesefactors.
Licensing all the content they produce withCC BY is a key part of giving more value thanthey 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 thanseventy-five thousand student enrollments.
Lumen received early start-up funding fromthe Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, theHewlett 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 grantfunding with revenue.
In creating Lumen Learning, David and Kim
say they’ve landed on solutions they neverimagined, 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 openmodel 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/

Made With Creative Commons

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 andjonathanmann.bandcamp.com

Revenue model: charging for custom services, pay-what-you-want, crowdfunding(subscription-based), charging for in-person
version (speaking engagements and musicalperformances)

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 getsadvertising 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 awillingness to take action quickly. A perfect illustration of his ability to act fast happened inMade With Creative Commons

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 writeand 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 andpromote his video at the Apple conference.
The song then went viral, and the experiencelanded 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, andhe is widely known as the “song-a-day guy.”87

He fell into this role by, naturally, seizing arandom opportunity a friend alerted him toseven years ago—an event called Fun-A-Day,
where people are supposed to create a pieceof 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 thesongs 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 thirtyone-day challenge, so he decided to see if
he could continue it for one year. He neverstopped. He has written and posted a newsong 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 byclients, he writes songs about whatever is on
his mind that day. His songs are catchy andmostly lighthearted, but they often containat 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. Rainor shine, in sickness or health, Jonathan posts
and writes a song every day. If he is on a flightor otherwise incapable of getting Internet access in time to meet the deadline, he will prepare ahead and have someone else post thesong for him.
Over time, the song-a-day gig became thebasis of his livelihood. In the beginning, hemade money one of two ways. The first wasby entering a wide variety of contests and winning a handful. The second was by having theoccasional 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 heearns 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.” Hecharges $500 to create a produced song and$300 for an acoustic song. He has been hired
for product launches, weddings, conferences,88

and even Kickstarter campaigns like the onethat funded the production of this book.

Jonathan can’t recall when exactly he firstlearned about Creative Commons, but he began applying CC licenses to his songs and videos as soon as he discovered the option. “CCseems 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 beable 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 towork,” Jonathan said. “That is how music has
worked since the beginning of time. Our meme, 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 morehe 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 cultivateson Bandcamp, but it isn’t his major focus. “I dohave a core audience that has stuck around fora really long time, some even longer than I’ve
been doing song-a-day,” he said. “There is alsoa transitional aspect that drop in and get what
they need and then move on.” Focusing less oncommunity building than other artists makes
sense given Jonathan’s primary income sourceof writing custom songs for clients.
Jonathan recognizes what comes naturally
to him and leverages those skills. Through thepractice 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,”

Made With Creative Commons

IT SEEMS LIKE SUCH AN OBVIOUS
THING THAT YOU WOULD WANTYOUR WORK TO BE ABLE TO BE
SHARED.

Jonathan explained the process of creating asecure 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 toinclude in the song. He puts all of that into atext file and starts moving things around, cutting and pasting until the message starts tocome together. The first thing he tries to do isgrok 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 informationthat doesn’t seem like it should be sung aboutor doesn’t seem like it lends itself to a song,”
he said. “I find that creative challenge reallysatisfying. I enjoy getting lost in that process.”
Jonathan admits that in an ideal world, hewould 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, andhe 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 havelines 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

Made With Creative Commons

too much from his natural style. “My style issilly, so I can’t really accommodate people whowant 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 theimportance of ritual and action. No amount ofplanning can replace the value of simple practice and just doing. Jonathan Mann’s work is aliving embodiment of these principles.
When he speaks about his work, he talks
about how much the song-a-day process haschanged him. Rather than seeing any given
piece of work as precious and getting stuckon trying to make it perfect, he has become
comfortable with just doing. If today’s song is abust, 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 SteveJobs, he says he never truly feels successful.
“Success feels like it’s over,” he said. “To acertain extent, a creative person is not evergoing to feel completely satisfied because thenso much of what drives you would be gone.”

89

90

Made With Creative Commons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 visuallanguage. 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 wasa student in architecture design school. He’dalways 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

Made With Creative Commons

couldn’t find any website that could provide
them. Perhaps his idea for creating a libraryof icons could actually help people in similar
situations.
With his partner, Sofya Polyakov, he begancollecting symbols for a website and writing abusiness 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 when91

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 toraise $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 arelatively 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 seventhousand designers from around the world.
But not all submissions are accepted. The
Noun Project’s quality-review process meansthat only the best works become part of its
collection. They make sure to provide encouraging, constructive feedback whenever theyreject a piece of work, which maintains andbuilds the relationship they have with theirglobal community of designers.

Creative Commons is an integral part of theNoun 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 visuallanguage 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, whichmeans people can download the icons for free
and modify them and even use them commercially. The requirement to give attribution tothe original creator ensures that the creatorcan build a reputation and get global recognition for their work. And if they simply want tooffer an icon that people can use without hav-92

ing to give credit, they can use CC0 to put thework into the public domain.

Noun Project’s business model and means ofgenerating revenue have evolved significantly
over time. Their initial plan was to sell T-shirtswith 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 ofgiving attribution. Ad agencies (among others)
wanted to keep marketing and presentationmaterials 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 somemoney 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 iscalled NounPro and costs $9.99 per month.
Edward says this model is working well—goodfor customers, good for creators, and good forthe 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 andsymbols would be valuable in a lot of different

Made With Creative Commons

contexts and that they couldn’t possibly know
all of them in advance, so they built an API witha lot of flexibility. Knowing that most API applications would want to use the icons without
giving attribution, the API was built with theaim 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 NOUN PROJECT’S SUCCESS
LIES IN CREATING SERVICES
AND CONTENT THAT ARE A
STRATEGIC MIX OF FREE AND PAID
WHILE STAYING TRUE TO THEIRMISSION—CREATING, SHARING,
AND CELEBRATING THE WORLD’S
VISUAL LANGUAGE.
The revenue from premium purchases (thesubscription 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 ofper download.) Noun Project’s share is higher

Made With Creative Commons

this time as it’s providing more service to theuser.
The Noun Project tries to be completelytransparent 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 threebroad categories: enough money to buy beer;
enough to pay the bills; and most successful ofall, enough to pay the rent.

Recently the Noun Project launched a new
app called Lingo. Designers can use Lingo toorganize not just their Noun Project icons andsymbols 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 visualswith 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 monthallows 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 comingfrom digital designers, advertising and design
agencies, educators, and others who need tocommunicate 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.

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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 thatmoney 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 andfans.
Edward told us, “Don’t underestimate thepower of a passionate community aroundyour 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 roadof 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 needto continue to foster that community throughother initiatives and continue to nurture it.”
The Noun Project nurtures their creators’
second motivation—promoting a personalbrand—by connecting every icon and symbol
to the creator’s name and profile page; eachprofile features their full collection. Users canalso 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 thatare needed, which designers are invited tocreate at the event. The results are vectorized,
and added to the Noun Project using CC0 sothey can be used by anyone for free.
Providing a free version of their productthat satisfies a lot of their customers’ needs
has actually enabled the Noun Project to build
the paid version, using a service-oriented

94

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-worldsvisual-sy/description
2 thenounproject.com/handbook/royalties/#getting_paid
3 thenounproject.com/iconathon/

Made With Creative Commons

OPEN DATAINSTITUTE
The Open Data Institute is an independent
nonprofit that connects, equips, and inspires
people around the world to innovate withdata. 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, andresearch. For ODI, Creative Commons licenses are central to making their own businessmodel and their customers’ open. CC BY (Attribution), CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike),and CC0 (placed in the public domain) all playa 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 theircrops, flight time data from airplane companies helps us plan our travel, data on local
housing informs city planning. When this data

Made With Creative Commonsis not only accurate and timely, but open andaccessible, it opens up new possibilities. Opendata 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 businessplan starts out by describing its vision to establish itself as a world-leading center and toresearch 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—95• demonstrate the commercial value of open
government data and how open-data policies affect this;• develop the economic benefits case andbusiness 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 tomake open business models, and defining
what this means. Jeni Tennison, ODI’s technical director, puts it this way: “There is a wholeecosystem 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 forrevenue.
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 matchingfunds from other sources, some of which were
met through a $4.75-million investment fromthe Omidyar Network.

Jeni started out as a developer and technicalarchitect 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 ofsix people. It now has a staff of about sixty.
ODI strives to have half its annual budget come from the core UK government andOmidyar 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

96

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 andrelated 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 isdivided into two tiers: small to medium size
enterprises and nonprofits at £720 a year, andcorporations and government organizationsat £2,200 a year. Commercial members havegreater opportunities to connect and collaborate, explore the benefits of open data, andunlock 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-longpublic training course, which has subsequently been reduced to three days; now the mostpopular course is one day long. The fee, in addition to the time commitment, can be a barrier for participation. Jeni says, “Most of thepeople who would be able to pay don’t know
they need it. Most who know they need it can’tpay.” 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 establishedrelationship with an organization. The training
program is based on a definition of open-dataknowledge as applicable to the organizationand on the skills needed by their high-level
executives, management, and technical staff.

Made With Creative Commons

The training tends to generate high interest
and commitment.
Education about open data is also a partof ODI’s annual summit event, where curated presentations and speakers showcase thework 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 withtechnical-data support, technology development, change management, policies, and other areas. ODI has advised large commercialorganizations, 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 datafrom outside their business to get moreinsight. Businesses can generate value andmore effectively pursue their own goals ifthey 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 doso even if it exposes problems and challenges. The key is to invite other people tohelp while still maintaining organizational
autonomy.
• Corporate social responsibility. While thisresonates with businesses, ODI cautions
against having it be the sole reason formaking data open. If a business is justthinking about open data as a way to betransparent and accountable, they canmiss out on efficiencies and opportunities.

Made With Creative Commons

IT IS PERFECTLY POSSIBLE
TO GENERATE SUSTAINABLE
REVENUE STREAMS THAT DO NOTRELY ON RESTRICTIVE LICENSING
OF CONTENT, DATA, OR CODE.
During their early years, ODI wanted to focus
solely on the United Kingdom. But in their firstyear, large delegations of government visitorsfrom 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. EachODI 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-datastories from their part of the world. There aretwenty-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. (Infact, 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.

97

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 isuseful, reliable, accessible, discoverable, andsupported.4
Separate from commercial activities, theODI 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 databaserights and ODI recommends CC BY, CC BY-SA,
and CC0 for data releases. ODI encourages
publishers of data to use Creative Commonslicenses 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 theyuse. Producing open content, data, and sourcecode helps establish credibility and createsleads for the paid services that they offer. According to Jeni, “The biggest lesson we havelearned is that it is completely possible to beopen, 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 in-98

dicators. 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 andnodes across the globe: 1,350• Total sales since ODI began: £7.44 million• Total number of unique people reachedsince 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

Made With Creative Commons

OPENDESK
Opendesk is a for-profit company offering an
online platform that connects furniture designers around the world with customers andlocal 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 notjust with customers but also with local registered makers who bring the designs to life.
Opendesk and the designer receive a portionof 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 physicalgoods. They sought to design something fortheir 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

Made With Creative Commonsthe 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, withWikihouse 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 wasdoing it in a way that was even close to realistic
or competitive. The design community had theintent, but fulfilling this vision was still a longway away.
And now this sector is emerging, and Nickand Joni are highly interested in the commercialization aspects of it. As part of coming up

99

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 noneed 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, andthey wanted a viable model that benefited
designers when their designs were sold. Coming up with a business model was going to becomplex.
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 businessmodel.
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 proprietaryor 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 ideaof 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 profilingthe designers.1
While designers are largely OK with personal sharing, there is a concern that someone willtake the design and manufacture the furniturein bulk, with the designer not getting any benefits. So most Opendesk designers choose the
Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BYNC).
Anyone can download a design and makeit themselves, provided it’s for noncommercial use — and there have been many, many
downloads. Or users can buy the product100

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 ofOpendesk’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 withhundreds of makers in countries all aroundthe 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 forthe product to be manufactured and any
extra assembly costs charged by the maker)• a design fee for the designer (a design feethat is paid to the designer every time theirdesign 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)

Made With Creative Commons• a percentage fee to the channel throughwhich the sale is made (at the moment thisis Opendesk, but in the future we aim toopen this up to third-party sellers who cansell 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 insome 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 andmaker 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 manufacturingcost, design fee, Opendesk platform fee andchannel fees. If a customer opts to buy by getting in touch directly with a registered local
maker using a downloaded Opendesk file, themaker is responsible for ensuring the designfee, 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 typicallyapportioned as follows:• manufacturing cost: fabrication, finishing
and any other costs as set by the maker(excluding any services like delivery or onsite assembly)• 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, andproviding a higher value to the designer.
The Opendesk website features stories ofdesigners and makers. Denis Fuzii publishedthe design for the Valovi Chair from his studioin São Paulo. His designs have been downloaded over five thousand times in ninety-fivecountries. 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 pricetag, a more social, eco-friendly alternative tomass-production and an affordable way to
buy custom-made products.”• design fee: 8 percent of the manufacturing
cost

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101

Nick and Joni say that customers like thefact 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 usualmass-produced items from a store.

YOU GET DESIGNER PRODUCTSWITHOUT THE DESIGNER PRICE
TAG, A MORE SOCIAL, ECOFRIENDLY ALTERNATIVE TOMASSPRODUCTION, AND AN
AFFORDABLE WAY TO BUYCUSTOM-MADE PRODUCTS.
Nick and Joni are taking a community-based
approach to define and evolve Opendesk andthe “open making” business model. They’reengaging thought leaders and practitioners
to define this new movement. They have aseparate Open Making site, which includes amanifesto, 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 ideathat someone could take one of their design
files and make and sell infinite number ofpieces of furniture with it. As a consequence,
most Opendesk designers choose the Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC).

102

Opendesk established a set of principles forwhat 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 iswhen you make an Opendesk yourself, withno intention to gain commercial advantage ormonetary compensation. For example, thesequalify 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 purposesor 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 havefound that people tend to comply with thewishes 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, andcustomers. For them, the value Opendesk generates hangs off “open,” not IP.

Made With Creative Commons

The mission of Opendesk is about relocalizing manufacturing, which changes the way wethink 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 onhonesty, transparency, and inclusivity. As Nickand Joni describe it, they put ideas out therethat 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

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103

104

Made With Creative Commons

OPENSTAXOpenStax 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 forcustom 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 shareand freely adapt educational materials suchas 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 roleat 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 Con-

Made With Creative Commons

nexions. 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 cameon 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 alongwith where publishers have inefficiencies. In
David’s view, peer review and high standards
for quality are critically important if you wantto scale easily. Books have to have logical scopeand sequence, they have to exist as a wholeand not in pieces, and they have to be easy tofind. The working hypothesis for the launchof OpenStax was to professionally produce aturnkey textbook by investing effort up front,with the expectation that this would lead to105

rapid growth through easy downstream adoptions by faculty and students.
In 2012, OpenStax College launched as anonprofit with the aim of producing high-quality, peer-reviewed full-color textbooks thatwould be available for free for the twenty-five
most heavily attended college courses in thenation. Today they are fast approaching that
number. There is data that proves the successof 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 (CCBY) licensed, and each textbook is available asa PDF, an e-book, or web pages. Those whowant a physical copy can buy one for an affordable price. Given the cost of education andstudent 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, andcustomize 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 atextbook, 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 useof 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 haveadopted their textbooks.2

106

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 ofpartners.

Up-front funding of a professionally produced
all-color turnkey textbook is expensive. For
this part of their model, OpenStax relies onphilanthropy. They have initially been fundedby the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,
the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Billand Melinda Gates Foundation, the 20 Million
Minds Foundation, the Maxfield Foundation,
the Calvin K. Kazanjian Foundation, and Rice
University. To develop additional titles andsupporting technology is probably still goingto 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 thatit can create revenue from. For example, WebAssign, an online homework and assessment
tool, takes the physics book and adds algorithmically generated physics problems, withproblem-specific feedback, detailed solutions,and tutorial support. WebAssign resources areavailable to students for a fee.
Another example is Odigia, who has turned
OpenStax books into interactive learning experiences and created additional tools tomeasure and promote student engagement.
Odigia licenses its learning platform to institutions. Partners like Odigia and WebAssign givea 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 thesefunds.
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 thoseMade With Creative Commonsdevelopment costs and letting them focus onwhat they do best. With OpenStax textbooks
available at no cost, they can provide theirservices 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 areout there showcasing their materials.
OpenStax’s cost of sales to acquire a single
student is very, very low and is a fraction ofwhat 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 withthe community.

MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR EVERYSTUDENT WHO WANTS ACCESS TOEDUCATION TO GET IT.
While OpenStax books are available online
for free, many students still want a print copy.
Through a partnership with a print and couriercompany, OpenStax offers a complete solutionthat scales. OpenStax sells tens of thousandsof print books. The price of an OpenStax sociology textbook is about twenty-eight dollars,a fraction of what sociology textbooks usuallycost. 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 ofCollege Stores Corporation) to provide printversions 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 inthe bookstore. And OpenStax is trying to break

Made With Creative Commonsthe 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 locallyfunded 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 thestart. 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 iswhat David calls the acquisition model, where
OpenStax purchases the rights from a publisher or author for an already published bookand 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, agood 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 itthrough. OpenStax selects a team of authors
who come together to develop a template fora 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 alongwith the text. The book is then copyedited to107ensure grammatical correctness and a singular voice. Finally, it goes into production andthrough a final proofread. The whole process
is very time-consuming.
All the people involved in this process arepaid. 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 5percent 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 themand 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 ofcustomization 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 theirbooks aren’t shared. By using CC BY, OpenStax
avoids having to deal with digital rights management and its costs. OpenStax books canbe 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• 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, and344 colleges and universities outside theU.S.)
While OpenStax has to date been focusedon 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 ishigh enrollment, but they are starting to think
about verticals—a broad offering for a specificgroup or need. David thinks it would be terrific if OpenStax could provide access to freetextbooks through the entire curriculum of anursing degree, for example.
Finally, for OpenStax success is not justabout the adoption of their textbooks and student savings. There is a human aspect to thework 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• Students who have used OpenStax: 1.6
million108

Made With Creative Commons

AMANDAPALMER
Amanda Palmer is a musician, artist, and writer. Based in the U.S.
amandapalmer.net

Revenue model: crowdfunding (subscriptionbased), pay-what-you-want, charging forphysical copies (book and album sales), charging for in-person version (performances),
selling merchandiseInterview 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 “journeywith 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 anddirectly feel the reverberations of their artistic
gifts to the community, and make a living doing that.”
While she seems to have successfully foundthat sweet spot for herself, Amanda is the firstto acknowledge there is no silver bullet. She
thinks the digital age is both an exciting andfrustrating time for creators. “On the one hand,
we have this beautiful shareability,” Amanda
said. “On the other, you’ve got a bunch of con-Made With Creative Commonsfused 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 antiquewedding gown, paint her face white, stand ona 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 anessential few stopped to watch and drop somemoney 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.

109

Enough to make it worth coming back the nextday, enough people to help me make rent andput food on the table. Enough so I could keep
making art.”
Amanda has come a long way from herstreet-performing days, but her career remains dominated by that same sentiment—
finding ways to reach “her crowd” and feelinggratitude when she does. With her band theDresden 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 neverwhat Amanda and the Dresden Dolls set out
to do.
After leaving the record label in 2008, shebegan experimenting with different ways tomake a living. She released music directly tothe public without involving a middle man, releasing digital files on a “pay what you want”
basis and selling CDs and vinyl. She also mademoney from live performances and merchandise sales. Eventually, in 2012 she decided totry her hand at the sort of crowdfunding weknow 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 awayfrom crowdfunding for specific projects to instead getting consistent financial support fromher fan base on Patreon, a crowdfunding sitethat 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 before110

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 theband 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 andbuild upon her music. In The Art of Asking, shewrote that some of her fans’ unofficial videos
using her music surpass the official videos
in number of views on YouTube. Rather thanseeing 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, theline between fans and friends was completely blurred. “Not only did most our early fansknow 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 andglobal, 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 forbackers. She spends hours in the signing line
after shows. It helps that Amanda has the kindof dynamic, engaging personality that instantly draws people to her, but a big component ofMade With Creative Commons

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 feelwith 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 kindof trust in her fans—the trust it takes to betruly honest—begets trust from her fans in return. When she meets fans for the first time after a show, they can legitimately feel like theyknow her.
“With social media, we’re so concerned withthe picture looking palatable and consumablethat we forget that being human and showing the flaws and exposing the vulnerability
actually create a deeper connection than justlooking 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 detailsof 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 yourfriends—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 tolend a hand at a concert. As Amanda explainsit, crowdfunding (which is really what all ofthese different things are) is about asking for
support from people who know and trust you.

Made With Creative Commons

IT SOUNDS SO CORNY, 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 TELLYOU THAT WHAT YOU DO IS
GENUINELY OF VALUE TO THEM.
People who feel personally invested in yoursuccess.
“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 fanbase. From the beginning, Amanda and herband encouraged people to dress up for theirshows. 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’ttake for granted that I happen to be the typeof 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 havedone won’t work for others if it isn’t joyful tothem. It’s about finding a way to channel energy in a way that is joyful to you.”111

Yet while Amanda joyfully interacts with herfans and involves them in her work as much as
possible, she does keep one job primarily toherself—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 arewhat initially draw people to Amanda Palmer.
It is only once she has connected to people
through her music that she can then begin tobuild 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 withthe art and then the bond strengthens withhuman 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 withhuman 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 aten-dollar bill, usually what they are saying isthat 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 notthat different from what she did as a young
street performer. She shares her music andother 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

112

Made With Creative Commons

PLOS(PUBLIC LIBRARY
OF SCIENCE)
PLOS (Public Library of Science) is a nonprofit
that publishes a library of academic journals
and other scientific literature. Founded in2000 in the U.S.

plos.org
Revenue model: charging content creators
an author processing charge to be featured in
the journalInterview date: March 7, 2016
Interviewee: Louise Page, publisher
Profile written by Paul Stacey

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) began in2000 when three leading scientists—Harold E.
Varmus, Patrick O. Brown, and Michael Eisen—
started an online petition. They were callingfor scientists to stop submitting papers tojournals that didn’t make the full text of theirpapers 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

Made With Creative Commonspromised. With start-up grant support fromthe Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation,
PLOS was launched to provide new open-access journals for biomedicine, with research
articles being released under Attribution (CCBY) 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,

113

the publisher takes the article through theprocess 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 toread 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 researchwould be required to pay again to access theresults. 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 thisresearch and advancement of the field. It wastime for a new model.

That new model became known as open access. That is, free and open availability on theInternet. 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 thearticles, 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 accessthe 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,114

and support for discovery. Fees are per article
and are billed upon acceptance for publishing. There are no additional charges based onword length, figures, or other elements.
Calculating the article-processing charge
involves taking all the costs associated withpublishing 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 haveto invest heavily in staff, buildings, and infrastructure to market their journal and convince
customers to subscribe. Restricting accessto 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 noneed 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 researchcommunity 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 itvery clear what rights are associated with thecontent and provides a safe way for researchers to make their work available while ensuring

Made With Creative Commons

they get recognition (appropriate attribution).
For PLOS, all of this aligns with how they thinkresearch 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 withthe open-access model still largely follow theexisting publishing model. PLOS journals areonline 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 otherpremier 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, eventhough 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 thework of others in their field, they go to an online aggregator or search engine, and not typically to a particular journal. The CC BY licensingof PLOS research articles ensures easy accessfor readers and generates more discovery andcitations for authors.
Louise believes that open access has beena huge success, progressing from a movement
led by a small cadre of researchers to something that is now widespread and used in someform by every journal publisher. PLOS has had
a big impact. In 2012 to 2014, they publishedmore 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-accessMade With Creative Commons

peer-reviewed academic journal that is muchlarger than a traditional journal, publishing
thousands of articles per year and benefiting from economies of scale. PLOS ONE has abroad scope, covering science and medicine aswell as social sciences and the humanities. The
review and editorial process is less subjective.
Articles are accepted for publication basedon 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 canthen be published as well, which are generally rejected by traditional journals. PLOS ONE,
like all the PLOS journals, is online only withno print version. PLOS passes on the financial
savings accrued through economies of scale
to researchers and the public by lowering thearticle-processing charges, which are belowthat of other journals. PLOS ONE is the biggest
journal in the world and has really set the bar
for publishing academic journal articles on alarge scale. Other publishers see the value ofthe PLOS ONE model and are now offering theirown multidisciplinary forums for publishing allsound science.

Louise outlined some other aspects of theresearch-journal business model PLOS is experimenting with, describing each as a kind ofslider that could be adjusted to change current
practice.
One slider is time to publication. Time topublication 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 moretime the approval process inevitably takes.
Peer review is another part of the processthat 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 toshift to an open-review process, placing theemphasis on transparency rather than dou-115

ble-blind reviews. Louise thinks we’re moving
into a direction where it’s actually beneficial foran author to know who is reviewing their paperand for the reviewer to know their review will
be public. An open-review process can also ensure everyone gets credit; right now, credit islimited to the publisher and author.
Louise says research with negative outcomes is almost as important as positive results. If journals published more researchwith negative outcomes, we’d learn from what
didn’t work. It could also reduce how much theresearch wheel gets reinvented around theworld.
Another adjustable practice is the sharing ofarticles at early preprint stages. Publication ofresearch in a peer-reviewed journal can take along 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 theirdiscoveries 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 alsochange. 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. Eventhe size of what gets published could change.
With these changes the current form factor forwhat constitutes a research article would undergo transformation.
As journals scale up, and new journals are
introduced, more and more information is be-

116

ing 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 networkof blogs.1 It also offers something called Article-Level Metrics, which helps users assess research most relevant to the field itself, basedon indicators like usage, citations, social bookmarking and dissemination activity, media andblog coverage, discussions, and ratings.2 Louise
believes that the journal model could evolve toprovide a more friendly and interactive user
experience, including a way for readers to communicate with authors.
The big picture for PLOS going forward is tocombine 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 ofchange 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 andsociety. 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 theadvancement of science.
Web links
1 collections.plos.org
2 plos.org/article-level-metrics

Made With Creative CommonsRIJKSMUSEUM
The Rijksmuseum is a Dutch national museum dedicated to art and history. Founded in
1800 in the Netherlands

Revenue model: grants and government
funding, charging for in-person version(museum admission), selling merchandisewww.rijksmuseum.nl

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, hasbeen housed in its current building since 1885.
The monumental building enjoyed more than
125 years of intensive use before needing athorough overhaul. In 2003, the museum wasclosed for renovations. Asbestos was foundin the roof, and although the museum wasscheduled to be closed for only three to four
years, renovations ended up taking ten years.
During this time, the collection was moved toa different part of Amsterdam, which createda physical distance with the curators. Out ofnecessity, 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, themuseum became largely forgotten by the public. Out of these circumstances emerged a newand more open model for the museum.

Made With Creative Commons

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 verymuch of the whole collection—eight thousandof over one million works representing just 1
percent. Staff began exploring ways to express
themselves, to have something to show for allof 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 theentire collection online.
It was effective but a bit boring. It was justdata. 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.

117

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 thefirst major adopter, using CC0 to release metadata about their collection and the public domain mark for millions of digital works in theircollection. Lizzy says the Rijksmuseum initially found this change in business practice a bitscary, but at the same time it stimulated evenmore discussion on whether the Rijksmuseum
should follow suit.
They realized that they don’t “own” the collection and couldn’t realistically monitor andenforce 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 alreadyonline, 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 wasteof 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 theirdigital photos of works known to be free of
copyright available online, using Creative
Commons CC0 to place works in the publicdomain. 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 a118

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 ofa work in the public domain from a collection
owned by the Dutch government (i.e., paid forby 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 willingto 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 theentire collection online.
Releasing these high-quality images for free
reduced the number of poor-quality images
that were proliferating. The high-quality imageof 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 sofamous that people want to see it in real life byvisiting 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 thegovernment. But like many museums, it must
generate the rest of the funding through othermeans. The admission fee has long been a way

Made With Creative Commons

to generate revenue generation, including for
the Rijksmuseum.
As museums create a digital presence forthemselves and put up digital representationsof their collection online, there’s frequently aworry that it will lead to a drop in actual physical visits. For the Rijksmuseum, this has notturned out to be the case. Lizzy told us the Rijksmuseum used to get about one million visitors a year before closing and now gets morethan two million a year. Making the collection
available online has generated publicity andacts as a form of marketing. The Creative Commons mark encourages reuse as well. Whenthe image is found on protest leaflets, milk
cartons, and children’s toys, people also see
what museum the image comes from and thisincreases 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 theirmain 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 andeven 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, andusers 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 virtualexhibitions on a wide variety of topics ranging from tapestries to ugly babies and birds.
Sets of images have also been created for ed-

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RIJKSMUSEUM IMAGES ARENOW USED IN THOUSANDS OF
WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES, RECEIVINGTEN TO ELEVEN MILLION VIEWSPER MONTH EXTENDING REACH
FAR BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THEIROWN WEBSITE.
ucational purposes including use for school
exams.
Some contemporary artists who have works
in the Rijksmuseum collection contacted themto 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 tosell 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 theirfirst 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 to119make new creative designs. A jury of renowned
designers and curators selects ten finalists
and three winners. The final award comes witha prize of €10,000. The second edition in 2015
attracted a staggering 892 top-class entries.
Some award winners end up with their worksold 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 theinspirational. The third international edition of
the Rijksstudio Award started in September
2016.
For the next iteration of the Rijksstudio, theRijksmuseum is considering an upload tool, forpeople to upload their own works of art, andenhanced 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, alongwith 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 asuccessful 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 thatwhile museum curators know a lot about theworks 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.

120

For the Rijksmuseum, adopting an open business model was scary. They came up withmany worst-case scenarios, imagining all kindsof awful things people might do with the museum’s works. But Lizzy says those fears did
not come true because “ninety-nine percent ofpeople have respect for great art.” Many museums think they can make a lot of money by
selling things related to their collection. But inLizzy’s experience, museums are usually bad at
selling things, and sometimes efforts to generate a small amount of money block somethingmuch 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 tonever 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 theirexperience: “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

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SHAREABLE
Shareable is an online magazine aboutsharing. Founded in 2009 in the U.S.

Revenue model: grant funding, crowdfunding(project-based), donations, sponsorships

www.shareable.net

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 overtime, they watched one part of the movement
stray from its ideals. As giants like Uber andAirbnb gained ground, attention began to center on the “sharing economy” we know now—
profit-driven, transactional, and loaded withventure-capital money. Leaders of corporate
start-ups in this domain invited Shareable
to advocate for them. The magazine faced achoice: ride the wave or stand on principle.
As an organization, Shareable decided to
draw a line in the sand. In 2013, the cofounderand 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, partici-

Made With Creative Commonspatory budgeting (where citizens decide how
a public budget is spent), cooperatives, andmore. 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 ofus,” he said. “We are a small, mission-driven
organization. We would never have been able
to weather the criticism that Airbnb and Uberare getting now.”
Interestingly, impassioned supporters are
only a small sliver of Shareable’s total audience. Most are casual readers who comeacross a Shareable story because it happens
to align with a project or interest they have.

121But choosing principles over the possibilityof riding the coattails of the major corporate
players in the sharing space saved Shareable’s
credibility. Although they became detachedfrom the corporate sharing economy, the online magazine became the voice of the “realsharing economy” and continued to grow theiraudience.

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 wasconnecting 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 tosolving some of the major problems humanbeings face—resource inequality, social isolation, and global warming.
They have worked hard to find ways to tellstories 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 makechanges 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 areasthat 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 byguest 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 sharingof content and audiences among a large andgrowing group of mostly nonprofits. Each or-122

ganization gets a chance to present stories to
the group, and the organizations can use andpromote 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 longas 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 fortheir 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 andinformal 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 wedo.”
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 Generationin an Age of Crisis. The CC-licensed book wasavailable in print form for purchase or online
for free. To this day, the book—along with theirCC-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 inrecent years. Currently, Shareable is primarily
funded by grants from foundations, but they
are actively moving toward a more diversified
model. They have organizational sponsors andare working to expand their base of individual
donors. Ideally, they will eventually be a hundred percent funded by their audience. Neal

Made With Creative Commons

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 successis having fun and taking care of yourself while
you do something you love. “A central part ofhuman 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 andimagine and create new worlds, but we alsoseek the comfort of hearth and home.”

and reach far more people. Shareable has catalyzed three hundred different events reaching over twenty thousand people since implementing this strategy three years ago. Goingforward, Shareable is focusing the networkon creating and distributing content meant tospur local action. For instance, Shareable will
publish a new CC-licensed book in 2017 filledwith ideas for their network to implement.
Neal says Shareable stumbled upon thisstrategy, but it seems to perfectly encapsulate just how the commons is supposed towork. 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.

In 2013, Shareable ran its first crowdfunding
campaign to launch their Sharing Cities Network. Neal said at first they were on pace tofail spectacularly. They called in their advisers
in a panic and asked for help. The advice theyreceived was simple—“Sit your ass in a chairand 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 majorityof backers were people in their existing base.
For Neal, this symbolized how so much of
success comes down to relationships. Overtime, 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 travelto the event,” Neal said. Enabling others to create their own events around the globe allowed
them to scale up their work more effectively

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123

124

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SIYAVULA
Siyavula is a for-profit educational-technology
company that creates textbooks and integrated learning experiences. Founded in 2012 inSouth 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 shouldhave access to high-quality educational resources, as this forms the basis for long-term
growth and development. Siyavula has beena 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 beenaround the block a few times. Siyavula has significantly shifted directions and strategies tosurvive 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 HighSchool Science Texts project. Most students inSouth Africa high schools didn’t have access tohigh-quality, comprehensive science and mathMade With Creative Commons

textbooks, so Mark and his colleagues set out
to write them and make them freely available.
As physicists, Mark and his colleagues wereadvocates of open-source software. To makethe books open and free, they adopted theFree 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 offive 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 thisaccomplishment.

125But the development of new textbooks
froze at this stage. Mark shifted his focus torural schools, which didn’t have textbooks atall, 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 waslicensed 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 andwriters. Although sharing is fundamental toteaching, there can be a few challenges when
you create educational resources collectively.
One concern is legal. It is standard practice ineducation to copy diagrams and snippets oftext, but of course this doesn’t always comply with copyright law. Another concern istransparency. Sharing what you’ve authoredmeans everyone can see it and opens you up
to criticism. To alleviate these concerns, Markadopted a team-based approach to authoringand insisted the curricula be based entirely on
resources with Creative Commons licenses,
thereby ensuring they were safe to share andfree from legal repercussions.
Not only did Mark want the resources to beshareable, he wanted all teachers to be able to126

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 thattransition in 2009–10, Mark inherited Siyavula
as an independent entity and took ownershipover 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 inSouth Africa would give their brand huge exposure and could drive vast amounts of traffic
to their website. In addition to print books, Si-

USING SIYAVULA BOOKSGENERATED HUGE SAVINGS FOR
THE GOVERNMENT.
Made With Creative Commons

yavula 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, aone-line answer is given at the end of the book
but nothing on the process for arriving at thatsolution. 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 wereset very low, making it accessible even to thosewith 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’sIntelligent Practice service inadvertently became low-income learners.
Siyavula’s site did see a dramatic increasein traffic. They got five hundred thousand
visitors per month to their math site and thesame number to their science site. Two-fifthsof the traffic was reading on a “feature phone”(a nonsmartphone with no apps). People on
basic phones were reading math and scienceon a two-inch screen at all hours of the day.
To Mark, it was quite amazing and spoke to aneed they were servicing.
At first, the Intelligent Practice services
could only be paid using a credit card. This
proved problematic, especially for those in theMade With Creative Commons

low-income demographic, as credit cards were
not prevalent. Mark says Siyavula got a harshbusiness-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 paidcustomer.
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 andcharging for it. Mark contrasts this with traditional publishers who charge over and overagain for the same content without adding
value.

Version two of Siyavula’s business model wasa big, ambitious idea—scale up. They also decided to sell the Intelligent Practice service toschools 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 areover two hundred students, and big schools
have a price cap. A 40 percent discount is offered to schools where both the science andmath departments subscribe.
Teachers get a dashboard that allows themto monitor the progress of an entire class orview an individual learner’s results. They can
see the questions that learners are working
on, identify areas of difficulty, and be morestrategic in their teaching. Students also havetheir own personalized dashboard, where theycan view the sections they’ve practiced, howmany points they’ve earned, and how theirperformance is improving.

127

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 eachyear, and new books created for grades 4 to 6
and later grades 7 to 9.
In partnership with, and sponsored by, theSasol 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 withteacher’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 andredistribute the books.
Although the South African government
paid to print and distribute hard copies of thebooks to schoolkids, Siyavula itself received
no funding from the government. Siyavula
initially tried to convince the government toprovide 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 Practicefor free to every child in the country. But aftera lengthy negotiation, the government said no.

128

Using Siyavula books generated huge savings for the government. Providing students
with a traditionally published grade 12 scienceor math textbook costs around 250 rand perbook (about US$18). Providing the Siyavula
version cost around 36 rand (about $2.60), a
savings of over 200 rand per book. But noneof 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 thatprovides the revenue-generating service andgenerating 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 arereally 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 tobe 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

Made With Creative Commons

makes Intelligent Practice free to all kids byselling the nonpersonal data Intelligent Practice collects.
Siyavula is a for-profit business but one witha 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 thatpeople volunteered to do for them. They believe each individual should have access to theresources 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 havebeen around the block a few times, but bothhe 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

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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 cloneof a SparkFun product in an electronics market
in China, with a huge grin on his face. He wastraveling in China when he came across their
LilyPad wearable technology being made bysomeone else. His reaction was glee.
“Being copied is the greatest earmark offlattery 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 theworld.”
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 canMade With Creative Commons

make their products on their own. Being copied is part of the design.
Nathan believes open licensing is good forthe world. “It touches on our natural humaninstinct to share,” he said. But he also strongly
believes it makes SparkFun better at what theydo. They encourage copying, and their products are copied at a very fast rate, often within
ten to twelve weeks of release. This forces thecompany 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 andrest 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 thanthey were five years ago,” Nathan said. “We

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used to just sell products. Now it’s a productplus 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 betterfor the customers.”
SparkFun parts are available on eBay forlower prices. But people come directly to
SparkFun because SparkFun makes their lives
easier. The example code works; there is aservice 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’scollege dorm room. He spent a lot of time experimenting with and building electronics, andhe realized there was a void in the market. “Ifyou 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 hegraduated, 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 prod-

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BEING COPIED IS THE GREATEST
EARMARK OF FLATTERY AND
SUCCESS.
ucts, but they also partner with Arduino (alsoprofiled 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 highschool students by 2020.”
The Creative Commons license underlying
all of SparkFun’s products is central to thismission. The license not only signals a willingness to share, but it also expresses a desire forothers to get in and tinker with their products,
both to learn and to make their products better. SparkFun uses the Attribution-ShareAlikelicense (CC BY-SA), which is a “copyleft” licensethat allows people to do anything with the content as long as they provide credit and makeany adaptations available under the same licensing terms.

From the beginning, Nathan has tried to createa 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 theMade With Creative Commons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, Nathansays it’s a terrible idea. But they don’t hold theevent 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. “Thisevent 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-executedplan,” 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 totheir site don’t find only unchanging content.

SparkFun’s customer base is largely made up ofindustrious electronics enthusiasts. They havecustomers who are regularly involved in thecompany’s customer support, independently
responding to questions in forums and product-comment sections. Customers also bringproduct ideas to the company. SparkFun regularly sifts through suggestions from custom-

Made With Creative Commonsers 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 codefor each of its devices online. On a particularly active project, there will only be about twodozen 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 sothey can fix and improve things independently.
“What gives me joy is when people take opensource layouts and then build their own circuitboards from our designs,” Nathan said.
Obviously, opening up the design of theirproducts is a necessary step if their goal is toempower 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 asmuch 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 ashort-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.

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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 theirlogos appear on the educational materials
TeachAIDS distributes.
But unlike most media companies, TeachAIDS is a nonprofit organization with a purelysocial 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 morethan 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 andMade With Creative Commons

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 whilepursuing her doctorate at Stanford University.
She was reading reports about India, noting
it would be the next hot zone of people livingwith HIV. Despite international and national entities pouring in hundreds of millions ofdollars 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

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the previous research. They found that the primary cause of the limited understanding wasthat HIV, and issues relating to it, were often
considered too taboo to discuss comprehensively. The other major problem was that mostof the education on this topic was being taught
through television advertising, billboards, andother 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 inIndia to help distribute them. As soon as theanimated 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 byidentifying 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 alsoneeded 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 andchair Shuman Ghosemajumder said. “It wasalmost a no-brainer to go with a CC license
because it was a plug-and-play solution to thisexact problem. It has allowed us to scale ourmaterials safely and quickly worldwide while
preserving our content and protecting us at
the same time.”

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Choosing a license that does not allow adaptation of the content was an outgrowth of thecareful 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 mostto 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 achievethis, TeachAIDS researches cultural icons thatwould 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 localizedversion 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 thecontent 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 substanceand 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 genderedversions 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 deeplycommitted to the cause, and the organization
has had better luck controlling the quality ofthe materials when they tap volunteers insteadof 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 basedon local customs and norms. Those three versions are then analyzed and combined into asingle master translation. TeachAIDS has ad-

Made With Creative Commonsditional teams of volunteers then translatethat version back into English to see how wellit 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 anddirectors to help keep the concepts entertaining and easy to understand. The inclusive, buthighly controlled, creative process is undertaken entirely by people who are specificallybrought on to help with a particular project,rather than ongoing staff. The final productthey 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 countthat never exceeded eight full-time employees. The organization is able to reduce costsby 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 wassimply 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

Made With Creative Commons

way to persuade them to use our highly effective model was to make it completely free.”
Like many content creators offering theirwork for free, they settled on advertising as afunding 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 thecontent remains branded as TeachAIDS.
TeachAIDS is careful not to seek funding tocover 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 wejust 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 eyeballswith their brand, but at a much lower cost thanother advertising channels. The audience for
TeachAIDS content also tends to skew young,which is often a desirable demographic forbrands. Unlike traditional advertising, the content is not time-sensitive, so an investment ina 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,” Shumansaid. Some companies have even built public-137

ity campaigns around the fact that they havesponsored 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 agame changer for TeachAIDS,” Piya said.

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TRIBEOF NOISE
Tribe of Noise is a for-profit online music platform serving the film, TV, video, gaming, andin-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 wasan entrepreneur running a business where hecoached other midsize entrepreneurs how tocreate an online business. He also coauthoreda number of workbooks for small- to mediumsize 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 opensource 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. Allthey could find was standard, cold stock-music. They thought of looking up websites where
you could license music directly from the mu-

Made With Creative Commons

sician 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 topursue this as an entrepreneurial opportunity.
Hessel says, “When lawyers are interested ina venture like this, you might have something
special.” So after some more research, in early 2008, Hessel and Sandra decided to build aplatform.

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Building a platform posed a real chicken-andegg problem. The platform had to build an online community of music-rights holders and, atthe same time, provide the community with information and ideas about how the new economy works. Community willingness to try newmusic business models requires a trust relationship.
In July 2008, Tribe of Noise opened its virtual
doors with a couple hundred musicians willingto use the CC BY-SA license (Attribution-ShareAlike) for a limited part of their repertoire. The
two entrepreneurs wanted to take the painaway for media makers who wanted to licensemusic 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 instore music playlists asking if they had enoughmusic licensed with Creative Commons thatthey could use. Stores need quality, good-listening music but not necessarily hits, a bit likea 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 thelicensing and helps collect the royalties. Copyright collecting societies in the European Union
usually hold monopolies in their respective national markets. In addition, they require theirmembers to transfer exclusive administrationrights 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 theirrepertoire. 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 ofcomposers 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

140

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, Tribeof Noise partnered with big organizations who
have lots of clients and can act as a kind of Tribeof Noise reseller. The largest telecom networkin the Netherlands, for example, sells Tribe’s Instore Music Service subscriptions to their business clients, which include fashion retailers andfitness centers. They have a similar deal with theleading trade association representing hotels
and restaurants in the country. Hessel hopes to“copy and paste” this service into other countries where collecting societies understandwhat 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 permonth per play-out. So if 42.5% is shared with
the Tribe musicians in this playlist and yourshare 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

Made With Creative Commonsmembers, most said they liked the exposureusing Creative Commons gets them and theway it lets them reach out to others to shareand remix. However, they had a bit of a mental struggle with Creative Commons licenses
being perpetual. A lot of musicians have themind-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 andcreated a second model and separate area ofthe 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 theywant. 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 themusician reuse their song for a better deal.
Tribe of Noise Pro is primarily geared toward
media makers who are looking for music. Ifthey buy a license from this catalog, they don’t
have to state the name of the creator; they justlicense the song for a specific amount. This is a
big plus for media makers. And musicians canpull 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’tthat many artists who upload only to Tribe of
Noise Pro, which has a smaller repertoire ofmusic than the community area.
Hessel sees the two as complementary.
Both are needed for the model to work. Witha whole generation of musicians interested in
the sharing economy, the community area ofTribe 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 getstheir own home page and free unlimited Web
space to upload as much of their own music

Made With Creative Commons

WITH A WHOLE GENERATIONOF MUSICIANS INTERESTED IN
THE SHARING ECONOMY, THE
COMMUNITY AREA OF TRIBE OF
NOISE IS WHERE THEY CAN BUILD
TRUST, CREATE EXPOSURE, AND
GENERATE MONEY.
as they like. Tribe of Noise is also a social network; fellow musicians and professionals canvote for, comment on, and like your music.
Community managers interact with and support members, and music supervisors pick andchoose from the uploaded songs for in-store
play or to promote them to media producers.
Members really like having people working forthe platform who truly engage with them.
Another way Tribe of Noise creates community and interest is with contests, which areorganized in partnership with Tribe of Noiseclients. 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 workwith clients: listening to them, understanding
what they want, and creating a song to meetthat need.
Tribe of Noise now has twenty-seven thousand members from 192 countries, and manyare exploring do-it-yourself models for generating revenue. Some came from music labelsand 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 athird 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 and141

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 basedon exclusivity. Such an arrangement prevents
those musicians from uploading their music to
Tribe of Noise. In the United States, you canhave a collecting society handle only some ofyour tracks, whereas in many countries in Europe, a collecting society prefers to represent
your entire repertoire (although the European
Commission is making some changes). Tribeof Noise deals with this issue all the time andgives you a warning whenever you upload asong. If collecting societies are willing to beopen 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 forthe 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 istrust. The fact that Creative Commons licenses
work the same way all over the world and havebeen translated into all languages really helps
build that trust. Tribe of Noise believes in creating a model where they work together withmusicians. They can only do that if they have alive and kicking community, with people who
think that the Tribe of Noise team has their bestinterests in mind. Creative Commons makes it
possible to create a new business model formusic, a model that’s based on trust.
Web links
1 www.instoremusicservice.com
2 www.tribeofnoise.com/info_instoremusic.php

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WIKIMEDIAFOUNDATION
The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia and its sisterprojects. 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 isreleased under a Creative Commons licensethat enables people to reuse and adapt it forany purpose.
As of December 2016, there were more thanforty-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 Wikipe-

Made With Creative Commonsdia domain name and hosts the site, along withmany 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 thetrue heart of Wikipedia and its sister projects
is its community. The numbers of people inthe community are variable, but about seventy-five thousand volunteers edit and improve
Wikipedia articles every month. Volunteers areorganized in a variety of ways across the globe,
including formal Wikimedia chapters (mostly national), groups focused on a particulartheme, 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 Wiki-143

pedia works in practice but not in theory.”
While it undoubtedly has its challenges andflaws, Wikipedia and its sister projects are a
striking testament to the power of human collaboration.
Because of its extraordinary breadth andscope, it does feel a bit like a unicorn. Indeed,
there is nothing else like Wikipedia. Still, muchof 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 manytimes. For our purposes, it is enough to know
the experiment started in 2001 at a small scale,inspired by the crazy notion that perhaps atruly 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 lessremarkable. But outside of software, Wikipedia is perhaps the single most stunning example of successful community cocreation. Everyday, seven thousand new articles are createdon 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 andits 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 theirsystem. The extensive peer-review process includes elaborate systems to resolve disputes,
methods for managing particularly controver-144

sial subject areas, talk pages explaining decisions, and much, much more.
The Wikimedia Foundation’s decision toleave governance of the projects to the community is very deliberate. “We look at thethings that the community can do well, and wewant to let them do those things,” Stephen told
us. Instead, the foundation focuses its timeand resources on what the community cannot
do as effectively, like the software engineeringthat 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 thatsuccess 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. Thatis partially our model working, and partiallyjust 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, butalso 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, thatmeans anyone can copy the content and starta 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

Made With Creative Commons

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 patchworkof humans working together in a million different ways, in a million different capacities, fora 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 morethan 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, somedonate 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 oneof the ten most popular websites in terms of
total page views, donations from a small portion of that audience can translate into a lot ofmoney. 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 thatworks year-round to raise money, but the bulkof their revenue comes in during the December campaign in Australia, Canada, Ireland,
New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and theUnited States. They engage in extensive user
testing and research to maximize the reachof 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 enougheyeballs, they are right.

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 andLuis said the mission, which is rooted in thesame philosophy behind Creative Commons,drives everything the foundation does.
The philosophy behind the endeavor alsoenables 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 whatbinds 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/

The vision of the Wikimedia Foundation is aworld in which every single human being canMade With Creative Commons

145

146

Made With Creative Commons

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Made With Creative CommonsACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We extend special thanks to Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley, the Creative Commons Board, and all of our Creative Commonscolleagues for enthusiastically supporting ourwork. Special gratitude to the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation for the initial seed fundingthat 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 commonscome alive. Thanks for the inspiration.
We interviewed more than the twenty-fourorganizations 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 inthis 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 draftsof 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 Domin-

Made With Creative Commonsguez, 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, Gatiende 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, JeanPhilippe 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, JonasÖberg, 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 Hick-151

man, 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, TraciLong 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

152

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, BethTillinghast, 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 SchreierGanz, 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,

Made With Creative Commons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, ChadAnderson, 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, ChristianSchubert, Christian Sheehy, Christian Thibault,
Christian Villum, Christian Wachter, Christina
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