Sharing your work using CC can go beyond simply enabling copyright permissions. It can also mean acting in ways that help create the human connections that make sharing truly meaningful.

Photo by Stan Petersen, dedicated to the public domain using CC0.

Learning Outcomes

• Identify some of the shared values and practices of those who use CC

Big Question / Why It Matters

Why is simply attaching a CC license to a work not enough to ensure people engage with your work and with you? In today’s information ecosystem, any new piece of creative content is a drop in a seemingly infinite bucket. To truly make connections with the people who stumble upon your work, you often have to do more.

As we learned earlier, there is a set of core values associated with Creative Commons. Those values often translate into norms and behaviors designed to help make human connections.

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

Can you think of particular creators of CC-licensed content that made an impression on you? What made the difference?

As a creator yourself, what types of things could you do to help people feel more connected to your work and feel like they have a better understanding of who you are and what your values are?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Real sharing is not just about the act of licensing a copyrighted work under a set of standardized terms. It is also about community, social good, working together. These components of sharing require a conscious effort, above and beyond the act of applying a particular CC tool. They depend on making connections with the people with whom you share—connections with you, with your work, with your values, with each other.

Here are some of the key strategies that creators, companies, and organizations use to remind us there are humans behind every creative endeavor. What follows is an abridged version of many of the findings in the book, Made with Creative Commons.

Be human.

To counteract the anonymous and impersonal tendencies of how we operate online, individual creators and organizations who use Creative Commons licenses often work to demonstrate their humanity. For some, this means pouring their lives out on the page. For others, it means showing their creative process, giving a glimpse into how they do what they do. As writer Austin Kleon wrote, “Our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work affects how they value it.”

This is probably even more important for institutions, organizations, and businesses because we instinctively conceive of them as nonhuman. When organizations make the people behind them more apparent, it reminds people that they are dealing with something other than an anonymous corporate entity.

→ Creator highlight: Amanda Palmer

Be open and accountable.

Transparency helps people understand who you are and why you do what you do, but it also inspires trust. We tend to inherently understand this when it comes to governments and institutions (where transparency also serves important goals of ensuring equal access and a level playing field), but it really applies to everyone. Max Temkin of Cards Against Humanity (a CC-licensed card game) said, “One of the most surprising things you can do in capitalism is just be honest with people.” That means sharing the good and the bad. It isn’t about trying to satisfy everyone or trying to sugarcoat mistakes or bad news, but instead about explaining your rationale and then being prepared to defend it when people are critical.

→ Creator highlight: Cards Against Humanity

Design for the good actors.

Traditional economics assumes people make decisions based solely on their own economic self-interest. Any relatively introspective human knows this is a fiction — we are much more complicated beings with a whole range of needs, emotions, and motivations. There will always be people who will act based purely on economic self-interest and people who will violate the rules or laws, but endeavors that use Creative Commons tend to design for the good actors. The assumption that people will largely do the right thing can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Clay 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 work together better than neoclassical economics would predict.” When we acknowledge that people are often motivated by something other than pure financial self-interest, we design our endeavors in ways that encourage and accentuate our social instincts.

→ Creator highlight: Knowledge Unlatched

Treat humans like humans.

For creators, treating people as humans means not treating them as fans. 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. The same idea goes for business and organizations.

When we treat people like humans, they typically return the gift in kind. But social relationships are fragile. It is all too easy to destroy them if you treat people as anonymous customers or free labor. Platforms that rely on content from contributors are especially at risk of creating an exploitative dynamic. It is important to find ways to acknowledge and pay back the value that contributors generate.

→ Creator highlight: Tribe of Noise

State your principles and stick to them.

Using Creative Commons can make a statement about who you are and what you do. The symbolism can be powerful. Creative Commons licenses represent a fundamental belief in openness and sharing, which can generate goodwill and connect like-minded people to your work. Sometimes people will be drawn to endeavors that use Creative Commons as a way of demonstrating their own commitment to the principles and values of open, akin to a political statement. Other times people will identify and feel connected with an endeavor’s separate social mission. Often both.

The expression of your values doesn’t have to be implicit. Lumen Learning, a for-profit company helping institutions use OER, attributes a lot of their success to having been outspoken about the fundamental values that guide what they do. As a for-profit company, they think their expressed commitment to low-income students and open licensing has been critical to their credibility in the OER community in which they operate.

People notice when you have a sense of purpose that transcends your own self-interest. It attracts committed employees, motivates contributors, and builds trust.

→ Creator highlight: SparkFun

Build a community.

Endeavors that use Creative Commons thrive when community is built around what they do. This may mean a community collaborating together to create something new, or it may simply be a collection of like-minded people who get to know each other and rally around common interests or beliefs. To a certain extent, simply using Creative Commons licenses automatically brings with it some element of community, by helping connect you to like-minded others who recognize and are drawn to the values symbolized by using CC.

To be sustainable, though, you have to work to nurture community. People have to care about you and each other.

→ Creator highlight: Wikimedia Foundation

Give more to the commons than you take.

Conventional wisdom in the marketplace dictates that people should try to extract as much money as possible from resources. That is decidedly not what the commons is about. Sharing requires adding as much or more value to the ecosystem than you take. You can’t simply treat open content as a free pool of resources from which to extract value. Part of 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.

In all cases, it is important to openly acknowledge the amount of value you add versus that which you draw on that was created by others. Being transparent about this builds credibility and shows you are a contributing player in the commons.

→ Creator highlight: Lumen Learning

Involve people in what you do.

When we think about collaboration, we tend to immediately think of co-creation and remixing. But there is no one way to involve people in what you do. The key is finding a way for people to contribute on their terms, compelled by their own motivations. What that looks like varies wildly depending on the project. 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 particular heavy time commitment.

Not every endeavor that uses 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.

→ Creator highlight: Rijksmuseum

Final remarks

All of these norms are rooted in a fundamental belief that we have obligations to each other. At its core, this is really what sharing is about. It means putting something we have created out into to the world for others to use, enjoy, and repurpose. We do that not because it will benefit us, but because it will benefit others. We share because we believe in an interconnected world.