Tag: Creative Commons

  • A Creative Commons Primer for Journalists

    Creative Commons, in partnership with Open Newswire, recently released this “practical primer on Creative Commons for journalism, and how to make the most of CC licenses.”

    According to the Open Newswire website:

    “Open Newswire is a consolidated feed of freely-republishable news articles written by professional journalists from around the world! Articles are written in over 90 languages and are available to be used under Creative Commons licenses or similar guidelines.”

    This guide is a useful tool because, as the Creative Commons post says, “some journalists may not be aware of the potential and ease of these tools.” Furthermore, the guide itself is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. 

    The complete “A Journalist’s Guide to Creative Commons” can be downloaded or read for free here.

  • Civil Society Urges EU to Invest in Non-commercial Digital Commons and Infrastructure

    More than forty civil society groups recently released this statement as a response to the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade, which was signed in December 2022. 

    The signatories of the statement “welcome the attention to sustainability and the need to avoid environmental harm” in the EU declaration and highlight “the growing recognition that there is a need for alternatives to the dominant commercial platforms and the extractive practices that dominate the online environment today.” 

    The central argument of the statement is this:

    “To create more socially-oriented and climate-friendly digital spaces and ensure the sovereignty of communities and our societies as a whole, Europe needs to invest in digital commons and public digital infrastructures.”

    “As a concrete first step” towards that end, the statement proposes that “the EU and its Member States should set up a European Public Digital Infrastructure fund” which “should be tasked with supporting the development and maintenance of digital public infrastructure that delivers public value by providing citizens and institutions with alternatives to commercial digital infrastructures.” 

    Read the full statement here.

  • The Long Road to Peace in Colombia

    This piece in The New Humanitarian, “the trusted news source on humanitarian crises,” by Bogotá-based journalist Joshua Collins is a useful resource in understanding the durability and effectiveness of long-term peace efforts. The writer reports on the aftermath of the 2016 peace deal in Colombia: 

    “Despite a historic peace deal between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) ending more than a half-century of civil war in 2016, conflict has been surging since in many rural areas of the country. 

    New armed groups have moved into the vacuum left behind when FARC fighters laid down their weapons and are now vying for territorial control with other older criminal organisations, with the lucrative production and smuggling of cocaine continuing to drive the violence.” 

    Even though the government of Gustavo Petro, famously the first leftist President of Colombia, “announced ceasefires with four of the five largest armed groups in Colombia,” the problem is that “none of the groups signed official written agreements.”

    Civil society organisations were reportedly “cautiously supportive of the ceasefire strategy.” While the government had claimed that the ceasefires “will allow for much-needed assistance to reach civilians in conflict zones,” humanitarian organisations raised questions about “whether they will actually improve conditions on the ground for civilians.” What makes matters worse is that many of the affected regions “are also effectively stateless as they’ve been neglected for decades – across administrations – by the national government in Bogotá.” 

    The scale of the problem is sobering: 

    “The UN estimates that 7.7 million Colombians are in need of some type of immediate humanitarian assistance, including hundreds of thousands of people who have suffered due to rising levels of conflict in recent years, in particular displacement and confinement.”

     The issues raised in the article take on more significance in light of recent reports that “[t]he administration of Colombian President Gustavo Petro has announced it is suspending a ceasefire agreement with a rebel group accused of killing four Indigenous people in a recent attack.” 

    Read the full article in The New Humanitarian here.

  • A Resource for Social Theory from a Global Perspective

    globalsocialtheory.org is “an open, collaborative resource for all those interested in global social theory” (as described in their Twitter bio). 

    Their website describes them as: 

    “This site is intended as a free resource for students, teachers, academics, and others interested in social theory and wishing to understand it in global perspective. It emerges from a long-standing concern with the parochiality of standard perspectives on social theory and seeks to provide an introduction to a variety of theorists and theories from around the world.” 

    Furthermore: “All entries published by Global Social Theory are covered by a Creative Commons licence, allowing share alike for non-commercial purposes, with attribution to author and link to the Global Social Theory web-page for the entry.” 

    Visit their website here. Read a sample entry on Critical Race Theory here.

  • Reporting Accurately on New Research

    The Journalist’s Resource, a project of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, put out this tip sheet on how news outlets can report on new research studies more accurately. It warns that sometimes press releases “mistakenly state researchers have proven something they haven’t.” The author, Denise-Marie Ordway, lays out four pointers to using the correct language to convey the strength of the evidence that the new research has put forward instead of claiming it has “proven” something, a rarity outside of mathematics. 

    Read the full article here.