pdf-to-markdown/examples/Made-with-cc.md

ii Made With Creative Commons

Made With Creative Commons iii

MADE

WITH

CRE ATI V E

COMMONS

PAUL STACEY AND SARAH HINCHLIFF PEARSON

iv Made With Creative Commons

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-

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 Denmark http://www.cadb.dk hey@cadb.dk

Printer: Drukarnia POZKAL Spółka z o.o. Spółka komandytowa 88-100 Inowrocław, ul. Cegielna 10/12, Poland

This 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 the same 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 and backers of our crowdfunding-campaign on the Kickstarter.com platform.

Made With Creative Commons v

“I don’t know a whole lot about non-

fiction journalism... The way that I

think about these things, and in terms

of what I can do is... essays like this are

occasions to watch somebody reason-

ably 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

vi Made With Creative Commons

Made With Creative Commons vii

CONTENTS

Foreword xi Introduction xv

• 1 The New World of Digital Commons by Paul Stacey PART 1: THE BIG PICTURE
  • The Commons, the Market, and the State
  • The Four Aspects of a Resource
  • A Short History of the Commons
  • The Digital Revolution.
  • The Birth of Creative Commons
  • The Changing Market
  • Benefits of the Digital Commons
  • Our Case Studies.
• 2 How to Be Made with Creative Commons by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson
  • Problem Zero: Getting Discovered.
  • Making Money
  • Making Human Connections
• 3 The Creative Commons Licenses
  • Arduino PART 2: THE CASE STUDIES
  • Ártica
  • Blender Institute.
    • Cards Against Humanity
    • The Conversation
    • Cory Doctorow.
    • Figshare.
    • Figure.nz
    • Knowledge Unlatched.
    • Lumen Learning
    • Jonathan Mann.
• Noun Project viii Made With Creative Commons
• Open Data Institute
• Opendesk.
• OpenStax
• Amanda Palmer
• PLOS (Public Library of Science)
• Rijksmuseum.
• Shareable.
• Siyavula
• SparkFun
• TeachAIDS.
• Tribe of Noise.
• Wikimedia Foundation
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments.

Made With Creative Commons ix

x Made With Creative Commons

Made With Creative Commons xi

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 as a writer who shares his work using CC—I told him I thought CC had a role in defining and ad- vancing open business models. He kindly dis- agreed, and called the pursuit of viable busi- ness models through CC “a red herring.” He was, in a way, completely correct—those who make things with Creative Commons have ulterior motives, as Paul Stacey explains in this book: “Regardless of legal status, they all have a social mission. Their primary reason for be- ing is to make the world a better place, not to profit. Money is a means to a social end, not the end itself.” In the case study about Cory Doctorow, Sar- ah Hinchliff Pearson cites Cory’s words from his book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: “Entering the arts because you want to get rich is like buying lottery tickets because you want to get rich. It might work, but it almost certain- ly 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 signif- icant and long-lasting. This book is filled with stories of those who take much greater risks than the two dollars we pay for a lottery ticket, and instead reap the rewards that come from pursuing their passions and living their values. So it’s not about the money. Also: it is. Find- ing the means to continue to create and share often requires some amount of income. Max Temkin of Cards Against Humanity says it best

in their case study: “We don’t make jokes and
games to make money—we make money so
we can make more jokes and games.”
Creative Commons’ focus is on building a
vibrant, usable commons, powered by collab-
oration 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, the
project 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 mod-
els of creativity and innovation overpower the
inequality and scarcity that today define the
worst parts of capitalism. He is driven by the
power of human connections between com-
munities of creators. He takes a longer view
than most, and it’s made him a better educa-
tor, an insightful researcher, and also a skilled
gardener. He has a calm, cool voice that con-
veys a passion that inspires his colleagues and
community.
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 from
investing so much into a political campaign
that didn’t end as she’d hoped. Today, she’s
more determined than ever to live with her
values right out on her sleeve. I can always
count on Sarah to push Creative Commons to
focus 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.

xii Made With Creative Commons

As coauthors, Paul and Sarah complement each other perfectly. They researched, ana- lyzed, argued, and worked as a team, some- times together and sometimes independently. They dove into the research and writing with passion and curiosity, and a deep respect for what goes into building the commons and sharing 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 coura- geous, and it has made for a better book that is insightful, honest, and useful. From the beginning, CC wanted to develop this project with the principles and values of open collaboration. The book was funded, de- veloped, researched, and written in the open. It is being shared openly under a CC BY-SA li- cense for anyone to use, remix, or adapt with attribution. It is, in itself, an example of an open 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 book projects on Kickstarter, smashing through two stretch goals and engaging over 1,600 do- nors—the majority of them new supporters of Creative Commons. Paul and Sarah worked openly throughout the project, publishing the plans, drafts, case studies, and analysis, early and often, and they engaged communities all over the world to help write this book. As their opinions di- verged and their interests came into focus, they divided their voices and decided to keep them separate in the final product. Working in this way requires both humility and self-confi- dence, and without question it has made Made with Creative Commons a better project. Those who work and share in the com- mons are not typical creators. They are part of something greater than themselves, and what they offer us all is a profound gift. What they receive in return is gratitude and a community.

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 to
offer himself up as a Kickstarter benefit), he
agreed immediately. Why would he agree to
do that? Because the commons has collabora-
tion at its core, and community as a key value,
and because the CC licenses have helped so
many to share in the ways that they choose
with a global audience.
Sarah writes, “Endeavors that are Made
with Creative Commons thrive when com-
munity 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 in-
terests or beliefs. To a certain extent, simply
being Made with Creative Commons auto-
matically brings with it some element of com-
munity, by helping connect you to like-minded
others who recognize and are drawn to the val-
ues 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 some-
one tell you that what you do is genuinely of
value to them.”

This is not a typical business book. For those
looking for a recipe or a roadmap, you might
be disappointed. But for those looking to pur-
sue a social end, to build something great
through collaboration, or to join a powerful
and growing global community, they’re sure
to be satisfied. Made with Creative Commons of-
fers 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 “ The
Zones of Cyberspace” , CC founder Lawrence Les-
sig 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 xiii

some, they experience more. They experience this not as isolated individuals, playing some high tech computer game; they experience it in groups, in communities, among strangers, among people they come to know, and some- times like.” I’m incredibly proud that Creative Com- mons is able to publish this book for the many communities that we have come to know and like. I’m grateful to Paul and Sarah for their cre- ativity and insights, and to the global commu- nities 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 Made with Creative Commons

Ryan Merkley CEO, Creative Commons

xiv Made With Creative Commons

Made With Creative Commons xv

INTRODUCTION

This book shows the world how sharing can be good 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 Com- mons licenses. Our goal was not to identify a formula for business models that use Creative Commons but instead gather fresh ideas and dynamic examples that spark new, innovative models and help others follow suit by build- ing on what already works. At the onset, we framed our investigation in familiar business terms. We created a blank “open business model canvas,” an interactive online tool that would help people design and analyze their business model. Through the generous funding of Kickstart- er backers, we set about this project first by identifying 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 Com- mons We interviewed them and wrote up their stories. We analyzed what we heard and dug deep into the literature. But as we did our research, something in- teresting happened. Our initial way of framing the work did not match the stories we were hearing. Those we interviewed were not typical busi- nesses selling to consumers and seeking to maximize 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 generat- ing revenue not for unlimited growth but to sustain the operation.

They often didn’t like hearing what they do
described as an open business model. Their
endeavor was something more than that.
Something different. Something that gener-
ates not just economic value but social and
cultural value. Something that involves human
connection. Being Made with Creative Com-
mons is not “business as usual.”
We had to rethink the way we conceived of
this project. And it didn’t happen overnight.
From the fall of 2015 through 2016, we docu-
mented our thoughts in blog posts on Medium
and with regular updates to our Kickstarter
backers. We shared drafts of case studies and
analysis with our Kickstarter cocreators, who
provided invaluable edits, feedback, and ad-
vice. Our thinking changed dramatically over
the course of a year and a half.
Throughout the process, the two of us have
often had very different ways of understand-
ing and describing what we were learning.
Learning from each other has been one of the
great joys of this work, and, we hope, some-
thing that has made the final product much
richer than it ever could have been if either of
us undertook this project alone. We have pre-
served our voices throughout, and you’ll be
able to sense our different but complementa-
ry approaches as you read through our differ-
ent sections.
While we recommend that you read the
book from start to finish, each section reads
more or less independently. The book is struc-
tured into two main parts.

Part one, the overview, begins with a
big-picture framework written by Paul. He pro-
vides some historical context for the digital
commons, describing the three ways society

xvi Made With Creative Commons

has managed resources and shared wealth— the commons, the market, and the state. He advocates for thinking beyond business and market terms and eloquently makes the case for sharing and enlarging the digital commons. The overview continues with Sarah’s chap- ter, as she considers what it means to be suc- cessfully Made with Creative Commons. While making money is one piece of the pie, there is also a set of public-minded values and the kind of human connections that make sharing truly meaningful. This section outlines the ways the creators, organizations, and busi- nesses 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 sec- tion that explains the different Creative Com- mons licenses. We talk about the misconcep- tion that the more restrictive licenses—the ones 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 twen- ty-four stories of the creators, businesses, and organizations 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 book available using a Creative Commons Attribu- tion-ShareAlike license. Please copy, distribute, translate, localize, and build upon this work. Writing this book has transformed and in- spired 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 con- tribute to the transformation of our economy and world for the better.

Paul and Sarah

Part 1

THE BIG PICTURE

1

THE NEW

WORLD OF

DIGITA L

COMMONS

PAUL STACEY

Jonathan Rowe eloquently describes the com- mons as “the air and oceans, the web of spe- cies, wilderness and flowing water—all are parts of the commons. So are language and knowledge, 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 human endeavor. 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 com- mons of human-produced works. This com- mons cuts across a broad range of areas in- cluding cultural heritage, education, research, technology, art, design, literature, entertain- ment, business, and data. Human-produced works in all these areas are increasingly dig- ital. The Internet is a kind of global, digital commons. The individuals, organizations, and businesses we profile in our case studies use

Creative Commons to share their resources
online over the Internet.
The commons is not just about shared re-
sources, however. It’s also about the social
practices and values that manage them. A re-
source is a noun, but to common —to put the
resource into the commons—is a verb.^2 The
creators, organizations, and businesses we
profile are all engaged with commoning. Their
use of Creative Commons involves them in the
social practice of commoning, managing re-
sources in a collective manner with a commu-
nity of users.^3 Commoning is guided by a set of
values and norms that balance the costs and
benefits of the enterprise with those of the
community. Special regard is given to equita-
ble access, use, and sustainability.

The Commons, the Market, and the State

Historically, there have been three ways to
manage resources and share wealth: the com-
mons (managed collectively), the state (i.e., the
government), and the market—with the last
two being the dominant forms today.^4
The organizations and businesses in our
case studies are unique in the way they par-
ticipate in the commons while still engaging
with the market and/or state. The extent of
engagement 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 sustainabili-
ty. All operate as hybrids, blending the norms
of the commons with those of the market or
state.
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 com-
mons and market enterprises with little or no
engagement with the state. A depiction of those
case studies would show the state sphere as

tiny or even absent. Other case studies are pri-
marily market-based with only a small engage-
ment with the commons. A depiction of those
case studies would show the market sphere as
large and the commons sphere as small. The
extent to which an enterprise sees itself as be-
ing primarily of one type or another affects the
balance of norms by which they operate.
All our case studies generate money as a
means of livelihood and sustainability. Money
is primarily of the market. Finding ways to gen-
erate revenue while holding true to the core
values of the commons (usually expressed in
mission statements) is challenging. To man-
age interaction and engagement between
the commons and the market requires a deft
touch, a strong sense of values, and the ability
to blend the best of both.
The state has an important role to play in
fostering the use and adoption of the com-
mons. State programs and funding can delib-
erately contribute to and build the commons.
Beyond money, laws and regulations regard-
ing property, copyright, business, and finance
can all be designed to foster the commons.

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

It’s helpful to understand how the commons, market, and state manage resources different- ly, and not just for those who consider them- selves primarily as a commons. For businesses or governmental organizations who want to engage in and use the commons, knowing how the commons operates will help them under- stand how best to do so. Participating in and using the commons the same way you do the market or state is not a strategy for success.

The Four Aspects of a Resource

As part of her Nobel Prize–winning work, Eli- nor Ostrom developed a framework for ana- lyzing how natural resources are managed in a commons.^6 Her framework considered things like the biophysical characteristics of common resources, the community’s actors and the interactions that take place between them, rules-in-use, and outcomes. That framework has been simplified and generalized to apply to the commons, the market, and the state for this chapter. To compare and contrast the ways in which the commons, market, and state work, let’s consider four aspects of resource manage-

ment: resource characteristics, the people in-
volved and the process they use, the norms
and rules they develop to govern use, and fi-
nally actual resource use along with outcomes
of 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 com-
mons—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 de-
pleted. Scarcity can result in competing rivalry
for the resource. Made with Creative Com-
mons enterprises are usually digitally based
but some of our case studies also produce
resources in physical form. The costs of pro-
ducing and distributing a physical good usually
require them to engage with the market.
Physical resources are depletable, exclu-
sive, and rivalrous. Digital resources, on the
other hand, are nondepletable, nonexclusive,
and nonrivalrous. If I share a digital resource
with you, we both have the resource. Giving it
to you does not mean I no longer have it. Dig-
ital 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 of
digital resources.
The nondepletable, nonexclusive, and non-
rivalrous nature of digital resources means
the rules and norms for managing them can
(and ought to) be different from how physi-
cal resources are managed. However, this is
not always the case. Digital resources are fre-
quently 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 the
possibility of being made into a physical re-
source. The digital file of a book can be print-

PE
OP
L
E
DIRECT &
OR

(^) IN DI RE CT WHO HAS (^) A UT HO RI TY WHO (^) C AN AC CE SS (^) O R US E PR OC E S S E S N O R M S & RU LES GO A L S C H A R A C T ER IS TICS PH YS IC AL O R^ D IGITAL^ SC AR CE O R^ ABU NDANT NA TU RA L^ OR PR ODUC ED IN FO RM AL (^) ( NOR MS) FO RM AL (^) ( LA WS) (^) USE^ O UT CO ME ADDITIV E^ O R^ EX TR AC TI VE USE^ O UTC OM E^ ME AS UR ES Fig. 2. Four aspects of resource management.

ed on paper and made into a physical book.
A computer-rendered design for furniture can
be physically manufactured in wood. This con-
version 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—commod-
ities for sale—from which value is extracted.
The state sees resources as public goods that
provide value to state citizens. The commons
sees resources as common goods, providing
a common wealth extending beyond state
boundaries, to be passed on in undiminished
or enhanced form to future generations.

People and processes
In the commons, the market, and the state, dif-
ferent people and processes are used to man-
age resources. The processes used define both
who has a say and how a resource is managed.
In the state, a government of elected offi-
cials is responsible for managing resources
on behalf of the public. The citizens who pro-
duce and use those resources are not directly
involved; instead, that responsibility is given
over to the government. State ministries and
departments staffed with public servants set
budgets, implement programs, and manage

resources based on government priorities and
procedures.
In the market, the people involved are pro-
ducers, buyers, sellers, and consumers. Busi-
nesses act as intermediaries between those
who produce resources and those who con-
sume or use them. Market processes seek
to extract as much monetary value from re-
sources as possible. In the market, resourc-
es are managed as commodities, frequently
mass-produced, and sold to consumers on the
basis of a cash transaction.
In contrast to the state and market, resourc-
es in a commons are managed more directly
by the people involved.^7 Creators of human
produced resources can put them in the com-
mons by personal choice. No permission from
state or market is required. Anyone can par-
ticipate in the commons and determine for
themselves the extent to which they want to
be involved—as a contributor, user, or manag-
er. The people involved include not only those
who create and use resources but those af-
fected by outcome of use. Who you are affects
your say, actions you can take, and extent of
decision making. In the commons, the com-
munity as a whole manages the resources. Re-
sources put into the commons using Creative
Commons require users to give the original
creator credit. Knowing the person behind
a resource makes the commons less anony-
mous and more personal.

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

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Norms and rules The social interactions between people, and the processes used by the state, market, and commons, evolve social norms and rules. These norms and rules define permissions, al- locate entitlements, and resolve disputes. State authority is governed by national con- stitutions. Norms related to priorities and de- cision making are defined by elected officials and parliamentary procedures. State rules are expressed through policies, regulations, and laws. The state influences the norms and rules of 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 influ- enced by state policies, regulations, and laws. But the norms and rules of a commons are largely defined by the community. They weigh individual costs and benefits against the costs and benefits to the whole community. Consid- eration is given not just to economic efficiency but also to equity and sustainability.^9

Goals The combination of the aspects we’ve dis- cussed so far—the resource’s inherent char- acteristics, 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 mea- sure of the utility they provide. The goal then becomes maximizing total monetary value in the economy.^10 Units consumed translates to sales, revenue, profit, and growth, and these are all ways to measure goals of the market. The state aims to use and manage resourc- es in a way that balances the economy with the 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

applies its resources toward these aims. State
goals are reflected in quality of life measures.
In the commons, the goal is maximizing ac-
cess, equity, distribution, participation, inno-
vation, and sustainability. You can measure
success by looking at how many people access
and use a resource; how users are distributed
across gender, income, and location; if a com-
munity to extend and enhance the resources
is being formed; and if the resources are being
used in innovative ways for personal and so-
cial good.
As hybrid combinations of the commons
with the market or state, the success and sus-
tainability of all our case study enterprises
depends on their ability to strategically utilize
and balance these different aspects of manag-
ing resources.

A Short History of the Commons

Using the commons to manage resources is
part of a long historical continuum. However,
in contemporary society, the market and the
state dominate the discourse on how resourc-
es 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 li-
censed with Creative Commons around the
world are indications of a grassroots move
toward the commons. The commons is mak-
ing a resurgence. To understand the resilience
of the commons and its current renewal, it’s
helpful to know something of its history.
For centuries, indigenous people and pre-
industrialized societies managed resources,
including water, food, firewood, irrigation, fish,
wild game, and many other things collective-
ly as a commons.^11 There was no market, no
global economy. The state in the form of rul-
ers influenced the commons but by no means
controlled it. Direct social participation in a
commons was the primary way in which re-
sources were managed and needs met. (Fig. 4
illustrates the commons in relation to the state
and the market.)

This is followed by a long history of the state (a monarchy or ruler) taking over the commons for their own purposes. This is called enclosure of the commons.^12 In olden days, “commoners” were evicted from the land, fences and hedg- es erected, laws passed, and security set up to forbid access.^13 Gradually, resources became the property of the state and the state be- came the primary means by which resources were managed. (See Fig. 5). Holdings of land, water, and game were distributed to ruling family and political ap- pointees. Commoners displaced from the land

migrated to cities. With the emergence of the in-
dustrial 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 in-
dustry. Financial, business, and property laws
were revised by governments to support mar-
kets, growth, and productivity. Over time ready
access to market produced goods resulted in a
rising standard of living, improved health, and
education. Fig. 6 shows how today the market

Fig. 4. In preindustrialized society.

LONG AGO:

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

STATE TAKEOVER OF THE COMMONS:

is the primary means by which resources are managed. However, the world today is going through turbulent times. The benefits of the market have been offset by unequal distribution and overexploitation. Overexploitation was the topic of Garrett Hardin’s influential essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” published in Science in 1968. Har- din argues that everyone in a commons seeks to maximize personal gain and will continue to do so even when the limits of the commons are reached. The commons is then tragically depleted to the point where it can no longer support anyone. Hardin’s essay became widely accepted as an economic truism and a justifi- cation for private property and free markets. However, there is one serious flaw with Har- din’s “The Tragedy of the Commons”—it’s fic- tion. Hardin did not actually study how real com- mons work. Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics for her work studying differ- ent commons all around the world. Ostrom’s work shows that natural resource commons can be successfully managed by local com- munities without any regulation by central au- thorities or without privatization. Government and privatization are not the only two choices. There is a third way: management by the peo- ple, 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 man-
age it. Ostrom’s approach to the governance of
natural resources broke with convention; she
recognized 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 autonomous-
ly, out of pure self-interest, without interac-
tion or consideration of others. But as Ostrom
found, in reality, managing common resources
together forms a community and encourages
discourse. This naturally generates norms and
rules that help people work collectively and
ensure a sustainable commons. Paradoxically,
while Hardin’s essay is called The Tragedy of
the Commons it might more accurately be ti-
tled The Tragedy of the Market.
Hardin’s story is based on the premise of de-
pletable resources. Economists have focused
almost exclusively on scarcity-based markets.
Very little is known about how abundance
works.^15 The emergence of information tech-
nology and the Internet has led to an explosion
in digital resources and new means of sharing

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

TODAY:

and distribution. Digital resources can never be depleted. An absence of a theory or mod- el for how abundance works, however, has led the market to make digital resources artificially scarce and makes it possible for the usual mar- ket norms and rules to be applied. When it comes to use of state funds to cre- ate digital goods, however, there is really no justification for artificial scarcity. The norm for state funded digital works should be that they are freely and openly available to the public that paid for them.

The Digital Revolution.

In the early days of computing, programmers and developers learned from each other by sharing software. In the 1980s, the free-soft- ware movement codified this practice of shar- ing 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 pro- gram works (because access to the source code 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 your modified versions to others.^16

These principles and freedoms constitute a set of norms and rules that typify a digital com- mons. In the late 1990s, to make the sharing of source code and collaboration more appeal- ing to companies, the open-source-software initiative converted these principles into li- censes and standards for managing access to and distribution of software. The benefits of open source—such as reliability, scalabil- ity, and quality verified by independent peer review—became widely recognized and ac- cepted. Customers liked the way open source gave them control without being locked into a closed, proprietary technology. Free and

open-source software also generated a net-
work effect where the value of a product or
service increases with the number of people
using 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 a
commons, many businesses and markets did
build up around it. Business models based
on the licenses and standards of open-source
software evolved alongside organizations that
managed software code on principles of abun-
dance rather than scarcity. Eric Raymond’s es-
say “The Magic Cauldron” does a great job of
analyzing the economics and business models
associated with open-source software.^18 These
models can provide examples of sustainable
approaches for those Made with Creative
Commons.
It isn’t just about an abundant availability
of digital assets but also about abundance of
participation. The growth of personal comput-
ing, information technology, and the Internet
made it possible for mass participation in pro-
ducing creative works and distributing them.
Photos, books, music, and many other forms
of digital content could now be readily creat-
ed 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 property
of the creator, and by law others are excluded
from accessing and using it without the cre-
ator’s permission.
But people like to share. One of the ways we
define ourselves is by sharing valuable and en-
tertaining content. Doing so grows and nour-
ishes 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 a
nonprofit to support all those who wanted to
share digital content. A suite of Creative Com-
mons licenses was modeled on those of open-
source software but for use with digital con-

tent rather than software code. The licenses give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, stan- dardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. Creative Commons licenses have a three-lay- er 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 commons deed , expressing the permissions in plain lan- guage, which regular people can read and quickly understand. It acts as a user-friend- ly 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 technolo- gy can understand.^20 Taken together, these three 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 Cre- ative 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, in thirty-four languages. These resources include photos, artwork, research articles in journals, educational resources, music and other audio tracks, and videos. Individual artists, photographers, musi- cians, and filmmakers use Creative Commons, but so do museums, governments, creative industries, manufacturers, and publishers. Millions of websites use CC licenses, includ- ing major platforms like Wikipedia and Flickr and smaller ones like blogs.^21 Users of Creative Commons are diverse and cut across many dif- ferent 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. Oth- ers are simply committed to the norms asso- ciated with a commons. And for some, partic-

ipation has been spurred by the free-culture
movement, a social movement that promotes
the freedom to distribute and modify cre-
ative works. The free-culture movement sees
a commons as providing significant benefits
compared to restrictive copyright laws. This
ethos of free exchange in a commons aligns
the free-culture movement with the free and
open-source software movement.
Over time, Creative Commons has spawned
a range of open movements, including open
educational resources, open access, open sci-
ence, and open data. The goal in every case
has been to democratize participation and
share digital resources at no cost, with legal
permissions for anyone to freely access, use,
and modify.
The state is increasingly involved in support-
ing open movements. The Open Government
Partnership was launched in 2011 to provide
an international platform for governments to
become more open, accountable, and respon-
sive to citizens. Since then, it has grown from
eight participating countries to seventy.^22 In all
these countries, government and civil society
are working together to develop and imple-
ment ambitious open-government reforms.
Governments are increasingly adopting Cre-
ative Commons to ensure works funded with
taxpayer dollars are open and free to the pub-
lic that paid for them.

The Changing Market

Today’s market is largely driven by global cap-
italism. Law and financial systems are struc-
tured to support extraction, privatization, and
corporate growth. A perception that the mar-
ket is more efficient than the state has led to
continual privatization of many public natural
resources, utilities, services, and infrastruc-
tures.^23 While this system has been highly ef-
ficient at generating consumerism and the
growth of gross domestic product, the impact
on human well-being has been mixed. Offset-
ting rising living standards and improvements
to health and education are ever-increasing
wealth inequality, social inequality, poverty,

deterioration of our natural environment, and breakdowns of democracy.^24 In light of these challenges there is a grow- ing recognition that GDP growth should not be an end in itself, that development needs to be socially and economically inclusive, that envi- ronmental 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 resurgence of interest in the commons as a means of en- abling that balance. City governments like Bologna, Italy, are collaborating with their cit- izens to put in place regulations for the care and regeneration of urban commons.^26 Seoul and Amsterdam call themselves “sharing cit- ies,” 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 a platform for ride sharing. However, Airbnb and Uber are still largely operating under the usual norms and rules of the market, making them less like a commons and more like a tradition- al business seeking financial gain. Much of the sharing economy is not about the commons or building an alternative to a corporate-driv- en market economy; it’s about extending the deregulated free market into new areas of our lives.^28 While none of the people we inter- viewed 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 broad- ens and diversifies the number of people who can use and derive value from an asset. One way Made with Creative Commons case studies differ from those of the shar- ing economy is their focus on digital resourc- es. Digital resources function under different

economic rules than physical ones. In a world
where prices always seem to go up, informa-
tion technology is an anomaly. Computer-pro-
cessing power, storage, and bandwidth are all
rapidly increasing, but rather than costs going
up, costs are coming down. Digital technolo-
gies 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 Com-
mons are looking to leverage the unique
inherent characteristics of digital resourc-
es, including lowering costs. The use of dig-
ital-rights-management technologies in the
form of locks, passwords, and controls to
prevent digital goods from being accessed,
changed, replicated, and distributed is minimal
or nonexistent. Instead, Creative Commons li-
censes are used to put digital content out in
the commons, taking advantage of the unique
economics associated with being digital. The
aim is to see digital resources used as widely
and by as many people as possible. Maximiz-
ing 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 a
market based on abundance rather than scar-
city is so alien to the way we conceive of eco-
nomic theory and practice that we struggle to
do so.^30 Those that are Made with Creative
Commons are each pioneering in this new
landscape, devising their own economic mod-
els and practice.
Some are looking to minimize their inter-
actions with the market and operate as au-
tonomously as possible. Others are operating
largely as a business within the existing rules
and norms of the market. And still others are
looking to change the norms and rules by
which 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 fi-
nancially benefit stockholders. But new forms
of business are emerging. There are benefit
corporations and social enterprises, which

broaden their business goals from making a profit to making a positive impact on society, workers, the community, and the environ- ment.^31 Community-owned businesses, work- er-owned businesses, cooperatives, guilds, and other organizational forms offer alterna- tives to the traditional corporation. Collective- ly, these alternative market entities are chang- ing the rules and norms of the market.^32 “A book on open business models” is how we described it in this book’s Kickstarter cam- paign. We used a handbook called Business Model Generation as our reference for defining just what a business model is. Developed over nine years using an “open process” involving 470 coauthors from forty-five countries, it is useful as a framework for talking about busi- ness models.^33 It contains a “business model canvas,” which conceives of a business model as having nine building blocks.^34 This blank canvas can serve as a tool for anyone to design their own busi- ness model. We remixed this business model canvas into an open business model canvas, adding three more building blocks relevant to hybrid market, commons enterprises: so - cial good , Creative Commons license , and “type of open environment that the business fits in.”^35 This enhanced canvas proved useful when we analyzed businesses and helped start-ups plan their economic model. In our case study interviews, many ex- pressed discomfort over describing them- selves as an open business model—the term business model suggested primarily being situated in the market. Where you sit on the commons-to-market spectrum affects the ex- tent to which you see yourself as a business in the market. The more central to the mission shared resources and commons values are, the less comfort there is in describing your- self, or depicting what you do, as a business. Not all who have endeavors Made with Cre- ative Commons use business speak; for some the process has been experimental, emergent, and organic rather than carefully planned us- ing a predefined model.

The creators, businesses, and organizations
we profile all engage with the market to gen-
erate 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, matchmak-
ing, value-add services, patrons . . . the list goes
on and on. (Initial description of how to earn
revenue available through reference note. For
latest thinking see How to Bring In Money in
the next section.)^36 There is no single magic
bullet, and each endeavor has devised ways
that work for them. Most make use of more
than one way. Diversifying revenue streams
lowers risk and provides multiple paths to sus-
tainability.

Benefits of the Digital Commons

While it may be clear why commons-based or-
ganizations want to interact and engage with
the market (they need money to survive), it
may be less obvious why the market would en-
gage with the commons. The digital commons
offers many benefits.
The commons speeds dissemination. The free
flow of resources in the commons offers tre-
mendous economies of scale. Distribution is
decentralized, with all those in the commons
empowered to share the resources they have
access to. Those that are Made with Creative
Commons have a reduced need for sales or
marketing. Decentralized distribution ampli-
fies supply and know-how.
The commons ensures access to all. The mar-
ket has traditionally operated by putting re-
sources behind a paywall requiring payment
first before access. The commons puts re-
sources in the open, providing access up front
without payment. Those that are Made with
Creative Commons make little or no use of
digital rights management (DRM) to manage
resources. Not using DRM frees them of the
costs of acquiring DRM technology and staff
resources to engage in the punitive practices
associated with restricting access. The way the
commons provides access to everyone levels
the playing field and promotes inclusiveness,
equity, and fairness.

The commons maximizes participation. Re- sources in the commons can be used and con- tributed to by everyone. Using the resources of others, contributing your own, and mixing yours with others to create new works are all dynamic forms of participation made possible by the commons. Being Made with Creative Commons means you’re engaging as many us- ers with your resources as possible. Users are also authoring, editing, remixing, curating, lo- calizing, translating, and distributing. The com- mons makes it possible for people to directly participate in culture, knowledge building, and even democracy, and many other socially ben- eficial practices. The commons spurs innovation. Resources in the hands of more people who can use them leads to new ideas. The way commons resourc- es 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 the community.^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 of others, and steward the resources and the re- lationship with the community. The commons boosts reach and impact. The digital commons is global. Resources may be created for a local or regional need, but they go far and wide generating a global impact. In the digital 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 lo- cally. Digital books or music being globally dis- tributed but readings and concerts performed locally. The digital commons magnifies impact by connecting creators to those who use and build on their work both locally and globally. The commons is generative. Instead of ex- tracting value, the commons adds value. Dig-

itized resources persist without becoming
depleted, and through use are improved, per-
sonalized, and localized. Each use adds value.
The market focuses on generating value for
the business and the customer. The commons
generates value for a broader range of bene-
ficiaries including the business, the custom-
er, the creator, the public, and the commons
itself. The generative nature of the commons
means that it is more cost-effective and pro-
duces a greater return on investment. Value is
not just measured in financial terms. Each new
resource added to the commons provides val-
ue to the public and contributes to the overall
value of the commons.
The commons brings people together for a
common cause. The commons vests people
directly with the responsibility to manage the
resources for the common good. The costs
and benefits for the individual are balanced
with the costs and benefits for the communi-
ty and for future generations. Resources are
not anonymous or mass produced. Their prov-
enance is known and acknowledged through
attribution and other means. Those that are
Made with Creative Commons generate
awareness and reputation based on their con-
tributions 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 im-
prove them. By functioning on the basis of so-
cial engagement, not monetary exchange, the
commons unifies people.
The benefits of the commons are many.
When these benefits align with the goals of
individuals, communities, businesses in the
market, or state enterprises, choosing to man-
age resources as a commons ought to be the
option of choice.

Our Case Studies.

The creators, organizations, and business-
es in our case studies operate as nonprofits,
for-profits, and social enterprises. Regardless
of legal status, they all have a 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, not the end itself. They factor public interest into decisions, behavior, and practices. Transparency and trust are re- ally important. Impact and success are mea- sured against social aims expressed in mission statements, and are not just about the finan- cial bottom line. The case studies are based on the narra- tives told to us by founders and key staff. In- stead of solely using financials as the measure of success and sustainability, they emphasized their mission, practices, and means by which they measure success. Metrics of success are a blend of how social goals are being met and how sustainable the enterprise is. Our case studies are diverse, ranging from publishing to education and manufacturing. All of the organizations, businesses, and creators in the case studies produce digital resources. Those resources exist in many forms including books, designs, songs, research, data, cultur- al works, education materials, graphic icons, and video. Some are digital representations of physical 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, par- ticipatory role in managing those resources, including their preservation, curation, distri- bution, and enhancement. Access and partic- ipation is open to all regardless of monetary means. And as users of Creative Commons licenses, they are automatically part of a global commu- nity. The new digital commons is global. Those we profiled come from nearly every continent in the world. To build and interact within this global community is conducive to success. Creative Commons licenses may express le- gal rules around the use of resources in a com- mons, but success in the commons requires more than following the letter of the law and acquiring financial means. Over and over we heard in our interviews how success and sus- tainability are tied to a set of beliefs, values, and principles that underlie their actions:

Give more than you take. Be open and inclu-
sive. Add value. Make visible what you are us-
ing from the commons, what you are adding,
and what you are monetizing. Maximize abun-
dance. Give attribution. Express gratitude. De-
velop trust; don’t exploit. Build relationship
and community. Be transparent. Defend the
commons.
The new digital commons is here to stay.
Made With Creative Commons case studies
show how it’s possible to be part of this com-
mons while still functioning within market and
state systems. The commons generates ben-
efits neither the market nor state can achieve
on their own. Rather than the market or state
dominating as primary means of resource
management, a more balanced alternative is
possible.
Enterprise use of Creative Commons has
only just begun. The case studies in this book
are merely starting points. Each is changing
and evolving over time. Many more are join-
ing and inventing new models. This overview
aims to provide a framework and language
for thinking and talking about the new digital
commons. The remaining sections go deeper
providing further guidance and insights on
how it works.

Notes 1 Jonathan Rowe, Our Common Wealth (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2013), 14.

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

3 Ibid., 15.

4 Ibid., 145.

5 Ibid., 175.

6 Daniel H. Cole, “Learning from Lin: Les- sons 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, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (New York: Zed Books, 2014), 93.

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

9 Bollier, Think Like a Commoner , 175.

10 Joshua Farley and Ida Kubiszewski, “The Economics of Information in a Post-Car- bon Economy,” in Free Knowledge: Con- fronting the Commodification of Human Discovery , eds. Patricia W. Elliott and Daryl H. Hepting (Regina, SK: University of Regi- na Press, 2015), 201–4.

11 Rowe, Our Common Wealth , 19; and Heather Menzies, Reclaiming the Com- mons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2014), 42–43.

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

13 Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei, The Ecolo -
gy 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.

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 of
Information,” 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, http://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: Musings
on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental
Revolutionary , rev. ed. (Sebastopol, CA:
O’Reilly Media, 2001), http://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), http://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/.

22 Wikipedia, s.v. “Open Government Part- nership,” 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 State- ment” accessed February 15, 2017, sida. se/globalassets/sida/eng/press /stockholm-statement.pdf

26 City of Bologna, Regulation on Collabora - tion between Citizens and the City for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons , trans. LabGov (LABoratory for the GOVer- nance of Commons) (Bologna, Italy: City of Bologna, 2014), http://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 http://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 Smart - est Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing , Reprint with new preface. (New York: Hyperion, 2010), 78.

30 Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Soci - ety: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 273.

31 Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do?

Straight Talk about the Next American Rev-
olution: Democratizing Wealth and Building
a Community-Sustaining Economy from
the 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, Busi -
ness Model Generation (Hoboken, NJ: John
Wiley and Sons, 2010). A preview of the
book is available at strategyzer.com
/books/business-model-generation.

34 This business model canvas is available to
download 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
/1QOIDa2qak7wZSSOa4Wv6qVMO77Iwk-
KHN7CYyq0wHivs/edit. You can also find
the accompanying Open Business Model
Canvas Questions at docs.google.com
/drawings/d/1kACK7TkoJgsM18HUWC-
bX9xuQ0Byna4plSVZXZGTtays/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 at
medium.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 Profiting
from Technology (Boston: Harvard Busi-
ness Review Press, 2006), 31–44.

2

HOW

TO BE

MADE WITH

CRE ATI V E

COMMONS

SARAH HINCHLIFF PEARSON

When we began this project in August 2015, we set out to write a book about business mod- els that involve Creative Commons licenses in some significant way—what we call being Made with Creative Commons. With the help of our Kickstarter backers, we chose twen- ty-four endeavors from all around the world that are Made with Creative Commons. The mix is diverse, from an individual musician to a university-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

use the licenses, these endeavors share their
work—whether it’s open data or furniture de-
signs—in a way that enables the public not
only to access it but also to make use of it.
We analyzed the revenue models, custom-
er segments, and value propositions of each
endeavor. We searched for ways that putting
their content under Creative Commons licens-
es helped boost sales or increase reach. Using
traditional measures of economic success, we
tried to map these business models in a way
that meaningfully incorporated the impact of
Creative Commons. In our interviews, we dug
into the motivations, the role of CC licenses,
modes of revenue generation, definitions of
success.

In fairly short order, we realized the book we set out to write was quite different from the one that was revealing itself in our inter- views and research. It isn’t that we were wrong to think you can make money while using Creative Com- mons 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 part of their livelihood or business could replicate. What we didn’t realize was just how misguided it would be to write a book about being Made with Creative Commons using only a busi- ness 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 about sharing in terms of creating and capturing value always felt inappropriately transaction- al 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 Cre- ative Commons is more than a business mod- el. While we will talk about specific revenue models as one piece of our analysis (and in more detail in the case studies), we scrapped that as our guiding rubric for the book. Admittedly, it took me a long time to get there. When Paul and I divided up our writing after finishing the research, my charge was to distill everything we learned from the case studies and write up the practical lessons and takeaways. I spent months trying to jam what we learned into the business-model box, con- vinced there must be some formula for the way things interacted. But there is no formu- la. 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 among

the creators, organizations, and businesses we
profiled, there was one constant. Being Made
with Creative Commons may be good for
business, but that is not why they do it. Shar-
ing work with Creative Commons is, at its core,
a moral decision. The commercial and other
self-interested benefits are secondary. Most
decided to use CC licenses first and found a
revenue model later. This was our first hint
that writing a book solely about the impact of
sharing on business might be a little off track.
But we also started to realize something
about what it means to be Made with Cre-
ative Commons. When people talked to us
about how and why they used CC, it was clear
that it meant something more than using a
copyright license. It also represented a set of
values. 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 value
of Creative Commons. While there are many
different flavors of CC licenses and nearly in-
finite ways to be Made with Creative Com-
mons , the basic value system is rooted in a
fundamental belief that knowledge and cre-
ativity are building blocks of our culture rather
than just commodities from which to extract
market value. These values reflect a belief that
the common good should always be part of
the equation when we determine how to reg-
ulate 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 oppor-
tunity to copy and adapt your work, sharing
with a Creative Commons license is a symbol
of how you want to interact with the people
who consume your work. Whenever you cre-
ate something, “all rights reserved” under
copyright is automatic, so the copyright sym-
bol (©) on the work does not necessarily come
across as a marker of distrust or excessive
protectionism. But using a CC license can be a
symbol of the opposite—of wanting a real hu-
man relationship, rather than an impersonal

market transaction. It leaves open the possi- bility of connection. Being Made with Creative Commons not only demonstrates values connected to CC and sharing. It also demonstrates that some- thing other than profit drives what you do. In our interviews, we always asked what success looked like for them. It was stunning how rare- ly 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 your creative work under a CC license, that dynamic is even more pronounced. Similarly, for tech- nological innovators, it is often less about cre- ating a specific new thing that will make you rich and more about solving a specific problem you have. The creators of Arduino told us that the key question when creating something is “Do you as the creator want to use it? It has to have personal use and meaning.” Many that are Made with Creative Com- mons have an express social mission that underpins everything they do. In many cas- es, sharing with Creative Commons expressly advances that social mission, and using the licenses can be the difference between legiti- macy and hypocrisy. Noun Project co-founder Edward Boatman told us they could not have stated their social mission of sharing with a straight face if they weren’t willing to show the world that it was OK to share their content us- ing 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 drive social 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, and producing social good and human connection are integral to success.

Even if profit isn’t the end goal, you have to
bring in money to be successfully Made with
Creative Commons. At a bare minimum, you
have to make enough money to keep the lights
on.
The costs of doing business vary widely for
those made with CC, but there is generally a
much lower threshold for sustainability than
there used to be for any creative endeavor.
Digital technology has made it easier than ever
to 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-support-
ed media have it), there is the fact that it’s
possible to run a business that gets the same
amount of advertising as its forebears at a
fraction of the price.”
Some creation costs are the same as they
always were. It takes the same amount of time
and money to write a peer-reviewed journal
article or paint a painting. Technology can’t
change that. But other costs are dramati-
cally reduced by technology, particularly in
production-heavy domains like filmmaking.^3
CC-licensed content and content in the public
domain, as well as the work of volunteer col-
laborators, can also dramatically reduce costs
if they’re being used as resources to create
something new. And, of course, there is the
reality that some content would be created
whether or not the creator is paid because it is
a labor of love.
Distributing content is almost universally
cheaper than ever. Once content is created,
the costs to distribute copies digitally are es-
sentially zero.^4 The costs to distribute physi-
cal copies are still significant, but lower than
they have been historically. And it is now much
easier to print and distribute physical copies
on-demand, which also reduces costs. De-
pending on the endeavor, there can be a whole
host of other possible expenses like marketing
and promotion, and even expenses associated
with the various ways money is being made,
like touring or custom training.

It’s important to recognize that the biggest impact of technology on creative endeavors is that creators can now foot the costs of cre- ation and distribution themselves. People now often have a direct route to their potential pub- lic without necessarily needing intermediaries like record labels and book publishers. Doc- torow 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 the assistance of the industry-dominating mega- companies, now you have hundreds of ways to do it without them.”^5 Previously, distribution of creative work involved the costs associated with sustaining a monolithic entity, now cre- ators can do the work themselves. That means the financial needs of creative endeavors can be a lot more modest. Whether for an individual creator or a larg- er endeavor, it usually isn’t enough to break even 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, in nearly all cases for those Made with Creative Commons , the definition of “enough money” looks a lot different than it does in the world of 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 gran- diose 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 li- censes and CC-licensed content, but we are still very much at an experimental stage. The creators, organizations, and businesses we profile in this book are blazing the trail and adapting 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

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

Problem Zero: Getting Discovered.

Once you create or collect your content, the
next 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 some-
thing, for anything to work at all.”^6 There isn’t
any magic to finding your people, and there is
certainly no formula. Your work has to connect
with people and offer them some artistic and/
or utilitarian value. In some ways, this is easier
than ever. Online we are not limited by shelf
space, so there is room for every obscure in-
terest, 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 for
every particular niche. As Anderson wrote,
“We are all different, with different wants and
needs, and the Internet now has a place for all
of them in the way that physical markets did
not.”^7 We are no longer limited to what appeals
to the masses.
While finding “your people” online is theo-
retically easier than in the analog world, as a
practical matter it can still be difficult to ac-
tually get noticed. The Internet is a firehose
of content, one that only grows larger by the
minute. As a content creator, not only are you
competing for attention against more content
creators than ever before, you are competing
against creativity generated outside the mar-
ket as well.^8 Anderson wrote, “The greatest
change of the past decade has been the shift
in time people spend consuming amateur con-
tent instead of professional content.”^9 To top
it all off, you have to compete against the rest
of their lives, too—“friends, family, music play-
lists, 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 the
start, you are often restricting access to your
work before there is even any demand for it. In

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 avail- able at the price of one cent versus the price of zero.^11 That doesn’t mean it is wrong to charge money for your content. It simply means you need to recognize the effect that doing so will have on demand. The same principle applies to restricting access to copy the work. If your problem is how to get discovered and find “your people,” prohibiting people from copy- ing your work and sharing it with others is counterproductive. Of course, it’s not that being discovered by people who like your work will make you rich— far from it. But as Cory Doctorow says, “Recog- nition is one of many necessary preconditions for artistic success.”^12 Choosing not to spend time and energy re- stricting access to your work and policing in- fringement also builds goodwill. Lumen Learn- ing, a for-profit company that publishes online educational materials, made an early decision not to prevent students from accessing their content, even in the form of a tiny paywall, be- cause it would negatively impact student suc- cess in a way that would undermine the social mission behind what they do. They believe this decision has generated an immense amount of goodwill within the community. It is not just that restricting access to your work 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 with others. But as David Bollier wrote, “Our natu- ral 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 other- wise, copying a copyrighted work just doesn’t feel like stealing a loaf of bread. And, of course, that’s because it isn’t. Sharing a creative work

has no impact on anyone else’s ability to make
use of it.
If you take some amount of copying and
sharing your work as a given, you can invest
your time and resources elsewhere, rather
than wasting them on playing a cat and mouse
game with people who want to copy and share
your work. Lizzy Jongma from the Rijksmu-
seum said, “We could spend a lot of money
trying to protect works, but people are going
to do it anyway. And they will use bad-quali-
ty versions.” Instead, they started releasing
high-resolution digital copies of their collec-
tion into the public domain and making them
available for free on their website. For them,
sharing was a form of quality control over the
copies that were inevitably being shared on-
line. 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 Commons
means you stop thinking about ways to arti-
ficially make your content scarce, and instead
leverage it as the potentially abundant re-
source it is.^14 When you see information abun-
dance as a feature, not a bug, you start think-
ing about the ways to use the idling capacity of
your content to your advantage. As my friend
and 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 to
stop people from copying their hardware, so
they decided not to even try and instead look
for the benefits of being open. For them, the
result is one of the most ubiquitous pieces of
hardware in the world, with a thriving online
community of tinkerers and innovators that
have done things with their work they never
could have done otherwise.
There are all kinds of way to leverage the
power of sharing and remix to your benefit.
Here are a few.

Use CC to grow a larger audience Putting a Creative Commons license on your content won’t make it automatically go viral, but eliminating legal barriers to copying the work certainly can’t hurt the chances that your work 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 the work—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 with in-depth articles written by academics who are experts on particular topics. All of the articles are CC-licensed, and they are copied and re- shared on other sites by design. This proliferat- ing effect, which they track, is a central part of the value to their academic authors who want to reach as many readers as possible. The idea that more eyeballs equates with more success is a form of the max strategy , adopted by Google and other technology com- panies. According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, the idea is simple: “Take whatever it is you are do- ing and do it at the max in terms of distribu- tion. The other way of saying this is that since marginal cost of distribution is free, you might as well put things everywhere.”^16 This strate- gy is what often motivates companies to make their 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 and likely to spread. If you are successful in reaching more users, readers, listeners, or other consumers of your work, you can start to benefit from the bandwagon effect. The simple fact that there are other people consuming or following your work spurs others to want to do the same.^17 This is, in part, because we simply have a ten- dency to engage in herd behavior, but it is also because a large following is at least a partial indicator of quality or usefulness.^18

Use CC to get attribution and name
recognition
Every Creative Commons license requires that
credit be given to the author, and that reus-
ers supply a link back to the original source
of the material. CC0, not a license but a tool
used to put work in the public domain, does
not make attribution a legal requirement, but
many communities still give credit as a matter
of best practices and social norms. In fact, it
is social norms, rather than the threat of legal
enforcement, that most often motivate peo-
ple to provide attribution and otherwise com-
ply with the CC license terms anyway. This is
the mark of any well-functioning community,
within both the marketplace and the society at
large.^19 CC licenses reflect a set of wishes on
the part of creators, and in the vast majority
of circumstances, people are naturally inclined
to follow those wishes. This is particularly the
case for something as straightforward and
consistent with basic notions of fairness as
providing credit.
The fact that the name of the creator fol-
lows a CC-licensed work makes the licenses an
important means to develop a reputation or, in
corporate speak, a brand. The drive to associ-
ate your name with your work is not just based
on commercial motivations, it is fundamental
to authorship. Knowledge Unlatched is a non-
profit that helps to subsidize the print produc-
tion of CC-licensed academic texts by pooling
contributions from libraries around the United
States. The CEO, Frances Pinter, says that the
Creative 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 most
people see and cite your work.
Attribution can be about more than just
receiving credit. It can also be about estab-
lishing provenance. People naturally want to
know where content came from—the source
of a work is sometimes just as interesting as
the work itself. Opendesk is a platform for fur-
niture designers to share their designs. Con-
sumers who like those designs can then get
matched with local makers who turn the de-

signs into real-life furniture. The fact that I, sit- ting in the middle of the United States, can pick out a design created by a designer in Tokyo and then use a maker within my own commu- nity to transform the design into something tangible is part of the power of their platform. The provenance of the design is a special part of the product. Knowing the source of a work is also critical to ensuring its credibility. Just as a trademark is designed to give consumers a way to identify the source and quality of a particular good and service, knowing the author of a work gives the public a way to assess its credibility. In a time when online discourse is plagued with misin- formation, being a trusted information source is more valuable than ever.

Use CC-licensed content as a marketing tool As we will cover in more detail later, many en- deavors that are Made with Creative Com- mons make money by providing a product or service other than the CC-licensed work. Sometimes that other product or service is completely unrelated to the CC content. Other times it’s a physical copy or live performance of the CC content. In all cases, the CC content can attract people to your other product or service. Knowledge Unlatched’s Pinter told us she has seen time and again how offering CC-li- censed content—that is, digitally for free—ac- tually increases sales of the printed goods be- cause it functions as a marketing tool. We see this phenomenon regularly with famous art- work. The Mona Lisa is likely the most recog- nizable painting on the planet. Its ubiquity has the effect of catalyzing interest in seeing the painting in person, and in owning physical goods with the image. Abundant copies of the content often entice more demand, not blunt it. Another example came with the advent of the radio. Although the music industry did not see it coming (and fought it!), free music on the radio functioned as advertising for the paid version people bought in music stores.^20 Free can be a form of promotion.

In some cases, endeavors that are Made
with Creative Commons do not even need
dedicated marketing teams or marketing bud-
gets. 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 the
best-marketed games in the world, and they
have never spent a dime on marketing. The
textbook publisher OpenStax has also avoid-
ed hiring a marketing team. Their products are
free, or cheaper to buy in the case of physical
copies, which makes them much more attrac-
tive to students who then demand them from
their universities. They also partner with ser-
vice providers who build atop the CC-licensed
content and, in turn, spend money and re-
sources marketing those services (and by ex-
tension, the OpenStax textbooks).

Use CC to enable hands-on engagement
with your work
The great promise of Creative Commons li-
censing is that it signifies an embrace of remix
culture. Indeed, this is the great promise of
digital technology. The Internet opened up a
whole new world of possibilities for public par-
ticipation in creative work.
Four of the six CC licenses enable reusers to
take apart, build upon, or otherwise adapt the
work. Depending on the context, adaptation
can mean wildly different things—translating,
updating, localizing, improving, transforming.
It enables a work to be customized for partic-
ular needs, uses, people, and communities,
which is another distinct value to offer the
public.^21 Adaptation is more game changing in
some contexts than others. With educational
materials, the ability to customize and update
the content is critically important for its use-
fulness. For photography, the ability to adapt a
photo 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 consume

them.”^22 If even the tiny act of volition of pay- ing one penny for something changes our perception of that thing, then surely the act of remixing it enhances our perception expo- nentially.^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 con- suming something created by someone else.^25 Actively engaging with the content helps us avoid the type of aimless consumption that anyone who has absentmindedly scrolled through their social-media feeds for an hour knows all too well. In his book, Cognitive Sur- plus , 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 to your 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. Business strategies that are embedded in the tradition- al 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 from OpenStax said they specifically pursue strate- gies they know that traditional publishers can- not. “Don’t go into a market and play by the in- cumbent rules,” David said. “Change the rules of engagement.”

Making Money

Like any moneymaking endeavor, those that are Made with Creative Commons have to generate some type of value for their audi- ence or customers. Sometimes that value is subsidized by funders who are not actually beneficiaries of that value. Funders, whether

philanthropic institutions, governments, or
concerned individuals, provide money to the
organization 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 Made
with Creative Commons are directly tied to
the value they generate, where the recipient
is paying for the value they receive like any
standard market transaction. In still other
cases, rather than the quid pro quo exchange
of money for value that typically drives market
transactions, the recipient gives money out of
a sense of reciprocity.
Most who are Made with Creative Com-
mons use a variety of methods to bring in rev-
enue, some market-based and some not. One
common strategy is using grant funding for
content creation when research-and-develop-
ment costs are particularly high, and then find-
ing 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 the
various revenue-generating mechanisms used
by 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 much
about what we learned. Nonetheless, zooming
out and viewing things from a higher level of
abstraction can be instructive.

Market-based revenue streams
In the market, the central question when de-
termining how to bring in revenue is what val-
ue people are willing to pay for.^30 By definition,
if you are Made with Creative Commons , the
content you provide is available for free and
not a market commodity. Like the ubiquitous
freemium business model, any possible mar-
ket transaction with a consumer of your con-
tent 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,

value lives in things that are scarce. Because the Internet makes a universe of content avail- able to all of us for free, it is difficult to get peo- ple 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 inevita- ble. That means you may end up competing with free versions of your own content, wheth- er you condone it or not.^32 If people can easi- ly find your content for free, getting people to buy it will be difficult, particularly in a context where access to content is more important than owning it. In Free , Anderson wrote, “Copy- right protection schemes, whether coded into either law or software, are simply holding up a price against the force of gravity.” Of course, this doesn’t mean that con- tent-driven endeavors have no future in the traditional marketplace. In Free, Anderson ex- plains how when one product or service be- comes 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 find some way other than the content to provide value to your audience or customers. As An- derson says, “It’s easy to compete with Free: simply offer something better or at least dif- ferent from the free version.”^33 In light of this reality, in some ways endeav- ors 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.

For content creators and distributors, there are nearly infinite ways to provide value to the consumers of your work, above and beyond the value that lives within your free digital con- tent. Often, the CC-licensed content functions

as a marketing tool for the paid product or
service.
Here are the most common high-level
categories.

Providing a custom service to con-
sumers of your work
In this age of information abundance, we
don’t lack for content. The trick is find-
ing content that matches our needs and
wants, so customized services are par-
ticularly valuable. As Anderson wrote,
“Commodity information (everybody
gets the same version) wants to be free.
Customized information (you get some-
thing unique and meaningful to you)
wants to be expensive.”^34 This can be
anything 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, An-
derson characterizes this model as giv-
ing away the bits and selling the atoms
(where bits refers to digital content and
atoms refer to a physical object).^35 This is
particularly successful in domains where
the digital version of the content isn’t as
valuable as the analog version, like book
publishing where a significant subset of
people still prefer reading something
they can hold in their hands. Or in do-
mains 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 con-
venience of having someone else put the
physical version together for them. Some
endeavors squeeze even more out of this
revenue stream by using a Creative Com-
mons license that only allows noncom-
mercial uses, which means no one else
can sell physical copies of their work in
competition with them. This strategy of
reserving commercial rights can be par-
ticularly important for items like books,

MARKET-BASED

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, the
provider of the physical goods can com-
pete with other providers of the same
works based on quality, service, or other
traditional business principles.

Charging for the in-person version
As anyone who has ever gone to a con-
cert will tell you, experiencing creativity
in person is a completely different expe-
rience from consuming a digital copy on
your own. Far from acting as a substitute
for face-to-face interaction, CC-licensed
content can actually create demand for
the in-person version of experience. You
can see this effect when people go view
original art in person or pay to attend a
talk or training course.

Selling merchandise
In many cases, people who like your work
will pay for products demonstrating a
connection to your work. As a child of
the 1980s, I can personally attest to the
power of a good concert T-shirt. This can
also be an important revenue stream for
museums and galleries.

Sometimes the way to find a market-based revenue stream is by providing value to peo- ple other than those who consume your CC-li- censed content. In these revenue streams, the free content is being subsidized by an entirely different category of people or businesses. Of- ten, those people or businesses are paying to access your main audience. The fact that the content is free increases the size of the audi- ence, which in turn makes the offer more valu- able to the paying customers. This is a varia- tion of a traditional business model built on free called multi-sided platforms.^36 Access to your audience isn’t the only thing people are

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

Charging advertisers or sponsors
The traditional model of subsidizing free
content is advertising. In this version of
multi-sided platforms, advertisers pay
for the opportunity to reach the set of
eyeballs the content creators provide in
the form of their audience.^37 The Internet
has made this model more difficult be-
cause the number of potential channels
available to reach those eyeballs has be-
come essentially infinite.^38 Nonetheless,
it remains a viable revenue stream for
many content creators, including those
who are Made with Creative Commons.
Often, instead of paying to display adver-
tising, the advertiser pays to be an official
sponsor of particular content or projects,
or of the overall endeavor.

Charging your content creators
Another type of multisided platform is
where the content creators themselves
pay to be featured on the platform. Ob-
viously, this revenue stream is only avail-
able to those who rely on work created,
at least in part, by others. The most well-
known version of this model is the “au-
thor-processing charge” of open-access
journals like those published by the Pub-
lic Library of Science, but there are other
variations. The Conversation is primar-
ily funded by a university-membership
model, where universities pay to have
their faculties participate as writers of
the content on the Conversation website.

Charging a transaction fee
This is a version of a traditional business
model based on brokering transactions
between parties.^39 Curation is an import-
ant element of this model. Platforms like
the Noun Project add value by wading
through CC-licensed content to curate
a high-quality set and then derive reve-
nue when creators of that content make

MARKET-BASED

MARKET-BASED

MARKET-BASED

MARKET-BASED

MARKET-BASED

transactions with customers. Other plat-
forms make money when service pro-
viders transact with their customers; for
example, Opendesk makes money every
time someone on their site pays a mak-
er to make furniture based on one of the
designs on the platform.

Providing a service to your creators
As mentioned above, endeavors can
make money by providing customized
services to their users. Platforms can un-
dertake a variation of this service model
directed at the creators that provide the
content they feature. The data platforms
Figure.NZ and Figshare both capitalize
on this model by providing paid tools to
help their users make the data they con-
tribute to the platform more discover-
able and reusable.

Licensing a trademark
Finally, some that are Made with Cre-
ative Commons make money by sell-
ing use of their trademarks. Well known
brands that consumers associate with
quality, credibility, or even an ethos can
license that trademark to companies that
want to take advantage of that goodwill.
By definition, trademarks are scarce be-
cause they represent a particular source
of a good or service. Charging for the
ability to use that trademark is a way of
deriving revenue from something scarce
while taking advantage of the abundance
of CC content.

Reciprocity-based revenue streams Even if we set aside grant funding, we found that the traditional economic framework of understanding the market failed to fully cap- ture the ways the endeavors we analyzed were making money. It was not simply about mone- tizing scarcity. Rather than devising a scheme to get peo- ple to pay money in exchange for some direct value provided to them, many of the revenue streams were more about providing value,

building a relationship, and then eventually
finding some money that flows back out of a
sense of reciprocity. While some look like tra-
ditional nonprofit funding models, they aren’t
charity. The endeavor exchange value with
people, just not necessarily synchronous-
ly or in a way that requires that those values
be equal. As David Bollier wrote in Think Like
a Commoner , “There is no self-serving calcula-
tion of whether the value given and received is
strictly equal.”
This should be a familiar dynamic—it is the
way 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 func-
tion that helps the human species survive and
evolve.”
What is rare is to incorporate this sort of rela-
tionship into an endeavor that also engages with
the market.^40 We almost can’t help but think of
relationships in the market as being centered on
an even-steven exchange of value.^41

Memberships and individual
donations
While memberships and donations are
traditional nonprofit funding models, in
the Made with Creative Commons con-
text, they are directly tied to the recipro-
cal relationship that is cultivated with the
beneficiaries of their work. The bigger
the pool of those receiving value from
the content, the more likely this strategy
will work, given that only a small percent-
age of people are likely to contribute.
Since using CC licenses can grease the
wheels for content to reach more people,
this strategy can be more effective for
endeavors that are Made with Creative
Commons. The greater the argument
that the content is a public good or that
the entire endeavor is furthering a social
mission, the more likely this strategy is to
succeed.

MARKET-BASED

MARKET-BASED

RECIPROCITY

-BASED

The pay-what-you-want model
In the pay-what-you-want model, the
beneficiary of Creative Commons con-
tent is invited to give—at any amount
they can and feel is appropriate, based
on 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 simi-
lar to a tip jar. People make financial con-
tributions as an act of gratitude. These
models capitalize on the fact that we
are naturally inclined to give money for
things we value in the marketplace, even
in situations where we could find a way
to get it for free.

Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding models are based on re-
couping the costs of creating and dis-
tributing content before the content is
created. 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 than
just receiving the work. They have to
want you to succeed. Amanda Palmer
credits the success of her crowdfunding
on Kickstarter and Patreon to the years
she spent building her community and
creating a connection with her fans. She
wrote in The Art of Asking , “Good art is
made, good art is shared, help is offered,
ears are bent, emotions are exchanged,
the compost of real, deep connection is
sprayed all over the fields. Then one day,
the artist steps up and asks for some-
thing. And if the ground has been fertil-
ized enough, the audience says, without
hesitation: of course.”
Other types of crowdfunding rely on
a sense of responsibility that a partic-
ular community may feel. Knowledge
Unlatched pools funds from major U.S.
libraries to subsidize CC-licensed aca-
demic work that will be, by definition,

available to everyone for free. Libraries
with bigger budgets tend to give more
out of a sense of commitment to the li-
brary community and to the idea of open
access generally.

Making Human Connections

Regardless of how they made money, in our
interviews, we repeatedly heard language like
“persuading people to buy” and “inviting peo-
ple to pay.” We heard it even in connection
with revenue streams that sit squarely within
the market. Cory Doctorow told us, “I have to
convince my readers that the right thing to do
is to pay me.” The founders of the for-profit
company Lumen Learning showed us the let-
ter they send to those who opt not to pay for
the services they provide in connection with
their CC-licensed educational content. It isn’t
a cease-and-desist letter; it’s an invitation to
pay because it’s the right thing to do. This sort
of behavior toward what could be considered
nonpaying customers is largely unheard of in
the traditional marketplace. But it seems to be
part of the fabric of being Made with Creative
Commons.
Nearly every endeavor we profiled relied, at
least in part, on people being invested in what
they do. The closer the Creative Commons
content 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 this
avoidance of thinking about what they do in
pure market terms was deeply tied to being
Made with Creative Commons.
I came to the research with preconceived
notions about what Creative Commons is and
what it means to be Made with Creative Com-
mons. It turned out I was wrong on so many
counts.
Obviously, being Made with Creative Com-
mons means using Creative Commons licens-
es. That much I knew. But in our interviews,
people spoke of so much more than copyright

RECIPROCITY

-BASED

RECIPROCITY

-BASED

permissions when they explained how sharing fit into what they do. I was thinking about shar- ing too narrowly, and as a result, I was missing vast swaths of the meaning packed within Cre- ative Commons. Rather than parsing the spe- cific and narrow role of the copyright license in the equation, it is important not to disaggre- gate 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 shar- ing 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 imper- sonal market exchange, but on connections with the people with whom you share—con- nections with you, with your work, with your values, with each other. The rest of this section will explore some of the common strategies that creators, compa- nies, and organizations use to remind us that there are humans behind every creative en- deavor. To remind us we have obligations to each other. To remind us what sharing really looks like.

Be human Humans are social animals, which means we are naturally inclined to treat each other well.^42 But the further removed we are from the per- son with whom we are interacting, the less car- ing our behavior will be. While the Internet has democratized cultural production, increased access to knowledge, and connected us in ex- traordinary ways, it can also make it easy for- get we are dealing with another human. To counteract the anonymous and imper- sonal tendencies of how we operate online, individual creators and corporations who use Creative Commons licenses work to demon- strate their humanity. For some, this means

pouring their lives out on the page. For oth-
ers, 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.”^43
A critical component to doing this effec-
tively 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 with
them. You’re too preoccupied with the task of
impressing them.” Not everyone is suited to
live 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 tempta-
tion 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 import-
ant for businesses and organizations because
we instinctively conceive of them as nonhu-
man (though in the United States, corporations
are people!). When corporations and organiza-
tions make the people behind them more ap-
parent, it reminds people that they are dealing
with something other than an anonymous cor-
porate entity. In business-speak, this is about
“humanizing your interactions” with the pub-
lic.^44 But it can’t be a gimmick. You can’t fake
being 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 surpris-
ing things you can do in capitalism is just be
honest with people.” That means sharing the
good and the bad. As Amanda Palmer wrote,
“You can fix almost anything by authentically
communicating.”^45 It isn’t about trying to satis-

fy 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.^46
Being accountable does not mean operating
on consensus. According to James Surowiec-
ki, consensus-driven groups tend to resort to
lowest-common-denominator solutions and
avoid the sort of candid exchange of ideas that
cultivates healthy collaboration.^47 Instead, it
can be as simple as asking for input and then
giving context and explanation about deci-
sions you make, even if soliciting feedback and
inviting discourse is time-consuming. If you
don’t go through the effort to actually respond
to 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 di-
versity 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 make decisions based solely on their own econom- ic self-interest.^49 Any relatively introspective human knows this is a fiction—we are much more complicated beings with a whole range of needs, emotions, and motivations. In fact, we are hardwired to work together and ensure fairness.^50 Being Made with Creative Com- mons requires an assumption that people will largely act on those social motivations, motiva- tions that would be considered “irrational” in an economic sense. As Knowledge Unlatched’s Pinter told us, “It is best to ignore people who try to scare you about free riding. That fear is based on a very shallow view of what mo- tivates human behavior.” There will always be people who will act in purely selfish ways, but endeavors that are Made with Creative Com- mons design for the good actors. The assumption that people will largely do the right thing can be a self-fulfilling prophe- cy. 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.”^51 When we acknowledge that
people are often motivated by something oth-
er than financial self-interest, we design our
endeavors in ways that encourage and accen-
tuate our social instincts.
Rather than trying to exert control over
people’s behavior, this mode of operating re-
quires a certain level of trust. We might not
realize 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 or-
ganization to rely on contracts alone to make
sure that its managers and workers live up to
their obligation.” Instead, we largely trust that
people—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 bet-
ter off remembering that the people who fol-
low 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 commu-
nicate with her public, making a point to listen
just as much as she talks.^54
The same idea goes for businesses and or-
ganizations. Rather than automating its cus-
tomer service, the music platform Tribe of
Noise makes a point to ensure its employees
have personal, one-on-one interaction with
users.
When we treat people like humans, they typ-
ically 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 mistake
of treating people as anonymous customers
or free labor.^55 Platforms that rely on content
from contributors are especially at risk of cre-
ating an exploitative dynamic. It is important
to find ways to acknowledge and pay back the

value that contributors generate. That does not mean you can solve this problem by simply pay- ing contributors for their time or contributions. As soon as we introduce money into a relation- ship—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 them Being 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 to your work. Sometimes people will be drawn to endeavors that are Made with Creative Com- mons 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 connected with an endeavor’s separate social mission. Often both. The expression of your values doesn’t have to be implicit. In fact, many of the people we interviewed talked about how important it is to state your guiding principles up front. Lu- men Learning attributes a lot of their success to having been outspoken about the funda- mental 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 cred- ibility 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 no- tice when you have a sense of purpose that transcends your own self-interest.^57 It attracts committed employees, motivates contribu- tors, and builds trust.

Build a community Endeavors that are Made with Creative Com- mons thrive when community is built around what they do. This may mean a community col- laborating together to create something new,

or it may simply be a collection of like-minded
people who get to know each other and ral-
ly around common interests or beliefs.^58 To a
certain extent, simply being Made with Cre-
ative Commons automatically brings with it
some element of community, by helping con-
nect 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. One critical piece to
this 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 cre-
ating an accepting and inclusive environment
where people felt a part of their “weird little
family.”^59 For organizations like Red Hat, that
means 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 kinds
of participative communities that drive open
organizations.”^60
Communities that collaborate together
take deliberate planning. Surowiecki wrote, “It
takes 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 the
members of the group (which isn’t surprising
given that they don’t really know each other),
considerable energy is wasted trying to deter-
mine each other’s bona fides.”^61 Building true
community requires giving people within the
community the power to create or influence
the rules that govern the community.^62 If the
rules are created and imposed in a top-down
manner, people feel like they don’t have a
voice, which in turn leads to disengagement.
Community takes work, but working togeth-
er, or even simply being connected around
common interests or values, is in many ways
what sharing is about.

Give more to the commons than you take Conventional wisdom in the marketplace dic- tates that people should try to extract as much money as possible from resources. This is es- sentially what defines so much of the so-called sharing 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 trans- actions in most sharing-economy businesses are purely about monetizing access.^63 As Lisa Gansky put it in her book The Mesh , the prima- ry strategy of the sharing economy is to sell the same product multiple times, by selling access rather than ownership.^64 That is not sharing. 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 oth- er ways. The social blogging platform Medium provides value to its community by incentiv- izing good behavior, and the result is an on- line space with remarkably high-quality user- generated content and limited trolling.^65 Opendesk contributes to its community by committing to help its designers make money, in part by actively curating and displaying their work on its platform effectively. In all cases, it is important to openly ac- knowledge the amount of value you add ver- sus 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. When your endeavor is making money, that also means apportion- ing financial compensation in a way that re- flects the value contributed by others, provid- ing 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 the talents and expertise of people around the

globe. Chris Anderson calls it the Long Tail
of talent.^66 But to make collaboration work,
the group has to be effective at what it is do-
ing, and the people within the group have to
find satisfaction from being involved.^67 This
is easier to facilitate for some types of cre-
ative 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 im-
provements without a particularly heavy time
commitment.^68
As the success of Wikipedia demonstrates,
editing an online encyclopedia is exactly the
sort of activity that is perfect for massive co-
creation because small, incremental edits
made by a diverse range of people acting
on their own are immensely valuable in the
aggregate. Those same sorts of small contri-
butions would be less useful for many other
types of creative work, and people are in-
herently less motivated to contribute when
it doesn’t appear that their efforts will make
much of a difference.^69
It is easy to romanticize the opportunities
for global cocreation made possible by the In-
ternet, and, indeed, the successful examples
of it are truly incredible and inspiring. But in a
wide range of circumstances—perhaps more
often than not—community cocreation is not
part of the equation, even within endeavors
built on CC content. Shirky wrote, “Some-
times the value of professional work trumps
the value of amateur sharing or a feeling of
belonging.^70 The textbook publisher Open-
Stax, which distributes all of its material for
free under CC licensing, is an example of this
dynamic. Rather than tapping the communi-
ty to help cocreate their college textbooks,
they invest a significant amount of time and
money to develop professional content. For
individual creators, where the creative work is
the basis for what they do, community cocre-
ation is only rarely a part of the picture. Even
musician Amanda Palmer, who is famous for
her openness and involvement with her fans,
said, “The only department where I wasn’t

open to input was the writing, the music it- self.”^71 While we tend to immediately think of co- creation and remixing when we hear the word collaboration , you can also involve others in your 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 in public” opens the door to letting people feel more invested in your creative work.^72 And it shows a nonterritorial approach to ideas and information. Stephen Covey (of The 7 Hab- its of Highly Effective People fame) calls this the abundance mentality —treating ideas like something plentiful—and it can create an en- vironment where collaboration flourishes.^73 There is no one way to involve people in what you do. They key is finding a way for peo- ple to contribute on their terms, compelled by their own motivations.^74 What that looks like varies wildly depending on the project. Not every endeavor that is Made with Creative Commons can be Wikipedia , but every en- deavor can find ways to invite the public into what they do. The goal for any form of collab- oration is to move away from thinking of con- sumers as passive recipients of your content and transition them into active participants.^75

Notes 1 Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Busi- ness Model Generation (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2010), 14. A preview of the book is available at strategyzer.com /books/business-model-generation.

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

3 Ibid., 55.

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

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

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

7 Chris Anderson, Makers: The New Indus- trial Revolution (New York: Signal, 2012), 64.

8 David Bollier, Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Com- mons (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2014), 70.

9 Anderson, Makers , 66.

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

11 Anderson, Free , 62.

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

13 Bollier, Think Like a Commoner , 68.

14 Anderson, Free , 86.

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

16 Anderson, Free , 123.

17 Ibid., 132.

18 Ibid., 70.

19 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds
(New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 124.
Surowiecki says, “The measure of suc-
cess of laws and contracts is how rarely
they are invoked.”

20 Anderson, Free , 44.

21 Osterwalder and Pigneur, Business Model
Generation , 23.

22 Anderson, Free , 67.

23 Ibid., 58.

24 Anderson, Makers , 71.

25 Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: How Tech-
nology Makes Consumers into Collabora-
tors (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 78.

26 Ibid., 21.

27 Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be
Free , 43.

28 William Landes Foster, Peter Kim, and
Barbara Christiansen, “Ten Nonprofit
Funding Models,” Stanford Social Innova-
tion Review , Spring 2009, ssir.org/articles
/entry/ten_nonprofit_funding_models.

29 Shirky, Cognitive Surplus , 111.

30 Osterwalder and Pigneur, Business Model
Generation , 30.

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.

40 Bollier, Think Like a Commoner , 150.

41 Ibid., 134.

42 Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hid- den Forces That Shape Our Decisions , rev. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 109.

43 Austin Kleon, Show Your Work: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (New York: Workman, 2014), 93.

44 Kramer, Shareology , 76.

45 Palmer, Art of Asking , 252.

46 Whitehurst, Open Organization , 145.

47 Surowiecki, Wisdom of Crowds , 203.

48 Whitehurst, Open Organization , 80.

49 Bollier, Think Like a Commoner , 25.

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

59 Palmer, 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 Future
of 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, http://www.bbc.com
/news/technology-35709680.

66 Anderson, Makers , 148.

67 Shirky, Cognitive Surplus , 164.

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.

74 Whitehurst, foreword to Open Organization.

75 Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (New York: Harper Busi- ness, 2010), 188.

3 The Creative Commons Licenses

All of the Creative Commons licenses grant a basic set of permissions. At a minimum, a CC- licensed work can be copied and shared in its original form for noncommercial purposes so long as attribution is given to the creator. There are six licenses in the CC license suite that build on that basic set of permissions, ranging from the most restrictive (allowing only those basic permissions to share unmodified cop- ies for noncommercial purposes) to the most permissive (reusers can do anything they want with the work, even for commercial purposes, as long as they give the creator credit). The li- censes are built on copyright and do not cover other types of rights that creators might have in their works, like patents or trademarks. Here are the six licenses:

The Attribution license (CC BY) lets others dis- tribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercial- ly, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of

licenses offered. Recommended for maximum
dissemination and use of licensed materials.

The Attribution-Share-
Alike license (CC BY-
SA) lets others remix,
tweak, and build upon your work, even for
commercial purposes, as long as they cred-
it you and license their new creations under
identical terms. This license is often compared
to “copyleft” free and open source software li-
censes. All new works based on yours will car-
ry the same license, so any derivatives will also
allow commercial use.

The Attribution-NoDerivs
license (CC BY-ND) al-
lows for redistribution,
commercial and noncommercial, as long as it
is passed along unchanged with credit to you.

The Attribution-Non- Commercial license (CC BY-NC) lets others re- mix, tweak, and build upon your work noncom- mercially. Although their new works must also acknowledge you, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

The Attribution-Non- Commercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA) lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work noncommercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the same terms.

The Attribution-Non- Commercial-NoDerivs license (CC BY-NC-ND) is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them or use them commercially.

In addition to these six licenses, Creative Com- mons has two public-domain tools—one for creators and the other for those who manage collections of existing works by authors whose terms of copyright have expired:

CC0 enables authors and copyright owners to dedicate their works to the worldwide public domain (“no rights re- served”).

The Creative Commons Public Domain Mark fa- cilitates the labeling and discovery of works that are already free of known copyright restrictions.

In our case studies, some use just one Cre- ative Commons license, others use several. At- tribution (found in thirteen case studies) and Attribution-ShareAlike (found in eight stud- ies) were the most common, with the other

licenses coming up in four or so case studies,
including the public-domain tool CC0. Some of
the organizations we profiled offer both digital
content and software: by using open-source-
software licenses for the software code and
Creative Commons licenses for digital content,
they amplify their involvement with and com-
mitment to sharing.
There is a popular misconception that the
three NonCommercial licenses offered by CC
are the only options for those who want to
make money off their work. As we hope this
book makes clear, there are many ways to
make 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 make
commercial use of your work (CC BY, CC BY-SA,
and CC BY-ND) forecloses some traditional rev-
enue streams. If you apply an Attribution (CC
BY) license to your book, you can’t force a film
company to pay you royalties if they turn your
book into a feature-length film, or prevent an-
other company from selling physical copies of
your work.
The decision to choose a NonCommercial
and/or NoDerivs license comes down to how
much you need to retain control over the cre-
ative work. The NonCommercial and NoDerivs
licenses are ways of reserving some significant
portion of the exclusive bundle of rights that
copyright 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 the
creative jackpot. The music platform Tribe of
Noise told us the NonCommercial licenses
were popular among their users because peo-
ple still held out the dream of having a major
record label discover their work.
Other times the decision to use a more re-
strictive license is due to a concern about the
integrity of the work. For example, the non-
profit TeachAIDS uses a NoDerivs license for
its educational materials because the medical
subject matter is particularly important to get
right.

There is no one right way. The NonCom- mercial and NoDerivs restrictions reflect the values and preferences of creators about how their creative work should be reused, just as the ShareAlike license reflects a different set of values, one that is less about controlling ac- cess to their own work and more about ensur- ing that whatever gets created with their work is available to all on the same terms. Since the beginning of the commons, people have been setting up structures that helped regulate the way 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 ex- amples and tips on sharing your work in the digital commons, start with the Creative Commons page called “Share Your Work” at creativecommons.org/share-your-work/.

Part 2

THE

CASE STUDIES

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 Com- mons community. We selected eighty poten- tial candidates that represented a mix of in- dustries, content types, revenue streams, and parts of the world. Twelve of the case studies were selected from that group based on votes cast by Kickstarter backers, and the other twelve were selected by us.

We did background research and conduct- ed interviews for each case study, based on the same set of basic questions about the endeavor. The idea for each case study is to tell 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.

In 2005, at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in northern Italy, teachers and students needed an easy way to use electronics and pro- gramming to quickly prototype design ideas. As musicians, artists, and designers, they needed a platform that didn’t require engineering ex- pertise. A group of teachers and students, in- cluding Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino, and David Mellis, built a platform that combined different open tech- nologies. They called it Arduino. The platform integrated software, hardware, microcontrol- lers, and electronics. All aspects of the platform were openly licensed: hardware designs and documentation with the Attribution-Share- Alike 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-

ing something online. You send a set of instruc-
tions to the microcontroller on the board by
using the Arduino programming language and
Arduino software (based on a piece of open-
source software called Processing, a program-
ming tool used to make visual art).
“The reasons for making Arduino open
source are complicated,” Tom says. Partly it
was about supporting flexibility. The open-
source nature of Arduino empowers users
to modify it and create a lot of different vari-
ations, adding on top of what the founders
build. David says this “ended up strengthen-
ing the platform far beyond what we had even
thought of building.”
For Tom another factor was the impend-
ing closure of the Ivrea design school. He’d
seen 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

ARDUINO

Arduino is a for-profit open-source electronics platform and computer hardware and soft- ware 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

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

With the school closing, David and some of the other Arduino founders started a consulting firm and multidisciplinary design studio they called Tinker, in London. Tinker designed prod- ucts and services that bridged the digital and the physical, and they taught people how to use new technologies in creative ways. Rev- enue from Tinker was invested in sustaining and enhancing Arduino. For Tom, part of Arduino’s success is be- cause the founders made themselves the first customer of their product. They made products they themselves personally want- ed. 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 over time—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 used that to make another thousand, which gener- ated enough revenue to make five thousand. In the early days, they simply tried to generate enough funding to keep the venture going day to day. When they hit the ten thousand mark, they started to think about Arduino as a com- pany. By then it was clear you can open-source the design but still manufacture the physical product. As long as it’s a quality product and sold at a reasonable price, people will buy it. Arduino now has a worldwide community of makers—students, hobbyists, artists, pro- grammers, and professionals. Arduino pro-

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 multi-
language discussion forum where users can
get help using Arduino, discuss topics like ro-
botics, 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 of
makers has contributed an incredible amount
of accessible knowledge helpful to novices and
experts alike.
Transitioning Arduino from a project to a
company was a big step. Other businesses
who made boards were charging a lot of mon-
ey for them. Arduino wanted to make theirs
available at a low price to people across a wide
range of industries. As with any business, pric-
ing was key. They wanted prices that would get
lots of customers but were also high enough
to 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 to
successfully run one still apply. David says, “If
you do those other things well, sharing things
in an open-source way can only help you.”
While openly licensing the designs, docu-
mentation, and software ensures longevity,
it does have risks. There’s a possibility that
others will create knockoffs, clones, and cop-
ies. The CC BY-SA license means anyone can
produce copies of their boards, redesign them,
and even sell boards that copy the design.
They don’t have to pay a license fee to Ardu-
ino or even ask permission. However, if they
republish the design of the board, they have
to give attribution to Arduino. If they change
the design, they must release the new design
using the same Creative Commons license to
ensure that the new version is equally free and
open.
Tom and David say that a lot of people have
built companies off of Arduino, with dozens of

Arduino derivatives out there. But in contrast to closed business models that can wring mon- ey out of the system over many years because there is no competition, Arduino founders saw competition as keeping them honest, and aimed for an environment of collaboration. A benefit of open over closed is the many new ideas and designs others have contributed back to the Arduino ecosystem, ideas and de- signs that Arduino and the Arduino communi- ty use and incorporate into new products. Over time, the range of Arduino products has diversified, changing and adapting to new needs and challenges. In addition to simple entry level boards, new products have been added ranging from enhanced boards that provide advanced functionality and faster per- formance, to boards for creating Internet of Things applications, wearables, and 3-D print- ing. The full range of official Arduino products includes boards, modules (a smaller form-fac- tor of classic boards), shields (elements that can be plugged onto a board to give it extra features), and kits.^1

Arduino’s focus is on high-quality boards, well-designed support materials, and the

building of community; this focus is one of the
keys to their success. And being open lets you
build a real community. David says Arduino’s
community is a big strength and something
that really does matter—in his words, “It’s
good business.” When they started, the Ardu-
ino team had almost entirely no idea how to
build a community. They started by conduct-
ing numerous workshops, working directly
with people using the platform to make sure
the hardware and software worked the way it
was meant to work and solved people’s prob-
lems. The community grew organically from
there.

A key decision for Arduino was trademark-
ing the name. The founders needed a way to
guarantee to people that they were buying a
quality product from a company committed to
open-source values and knowledge sharing.
Trademarking the Arduino name and logo ex-
presses that guarantee and helps customers
easily identify their products, and the prod-
ucts sanctioned by them. If others want to sell
boards using the Arduino name and logo, they
have to pay a small fee to Arduino. This allows
Arduino to scale up manufacturing and dis-
tribution while at the same time ensuring the
Arduino 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. Trademark-
ing their brand provided the founders with a
way to protect Arduino, build it out further,
and fund software and tutorial development.
The trademark-licensing fee for the brand be-
came 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, think-
ing people would be mad if they policed their
brand. There was some early backlash with

THE OPEN-SOURCE NATURE OF

ARDUINO EMPOWERS USERS

TO MODIFY IT AND CREATE A

LOT OF DIFFERENT VARIATIONS,

STRENGTHENING THE

PLATFORM FAR BEYOND WHAT

THE FOUNDERS THOUGHT OF

BUILDING

a project called Freeduino, but overall, trade- marking and branding has been a critical tool for Arduino. David encourages people and business- es 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, where nothing is shared. Tom suggests a business formalize 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, does a great job of explaining the full complexities of how trademarking their brand has played out, distinguishing between official boards and those that are clones, derivatives, compat- ibles, and counterfeits.^2 For David, an exciting aspect of Arduino is the way lots of people can use it to adapt

technology in many different ways. Technolo-
gy 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. Ar-
duino’s goal is “making things that help other
people make things.”
Arduino has been hugely successful in mak-
ing 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 the
world get over the idea that technology has to
be protected. Tom says, “Technology is a liter-
acy everyone should learn.”
Ultimately, for Arduino, going open has
been good business—good for product devel-
opment, good for distribution, good for pric-
ing, and good for manufacturing.

Web links
1 http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Products
2 blog.arduino.cc/2013/07/10/send-in-the
-clones/

The story of Mariana Fossatti and Jorge Ge- metto’s business, Ártica, is the ultimate ex- ample 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 creat- ed them. In 2011, Mariana was a sociologist working for an international organization to develop research and online education about rural-de- velopment issues. Jorge was a psychologist, also working in online education. Both were bloggers and heavy users of social media, and both had a passion for arts and culture. They decided to take their skills in digital technol- ogy and online learning and apply them to a topic area they loved. They launched Ártica, an online business that provides education and consulting for people and institutions creating artistic and cultural projects on the Internet.

Ártica feels like a uniquely twenty-first cen-
tury business. The small company has a global
online presence with no physical offices. Jorge
and Mariana live in Uruguay, and the other
two full-time employees, who Jorge and Mar-
iana have never actually met in person, live in
Spain. They started by creating a MOOC (mas-
sive open online course) about remix culture
and collaboration in the arts, which gave them
a direct way to reach an international audience,
attracting students from across Latin America
and Spain. In other words, it is the classic Inter-
net story of being able to directly tap into an
audience without relying upon gatekeepers or
intermediaries.
Ártica offers personalized education and
consulting services, and helps clients imple-
ment projects. All of these services are cus-
tomized. They call it an “artisan” process be-
cause of the time and effort it takes to adapt
their work for the particular needs of students

Ártica

Ártica provides online courses and consulting services focused on how to use digital tech- nology to share knowledge and enable collab- oration 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

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 free and 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 that online communities are more specific than we thought,” Mariana said. Ártica now provides more options for classes and has lower enroll- ment in each course. This means they can pro- vide more attention to individual students and offer 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 from digitization to event planning to marketing campaigns. Some are significant in scope, par- ticularly when they work with cultural institu- tions, and some are smaller projects commis- sioned by individual artists. Ártica also seeks out public and private funding for specific projects. Sometimes, even if they are unsuccessful in subsidizing a proj- ect like a new course or e-book, they will go ahead because they believe in it. They take the stance that every new project leads them to something new, every new resource they cre- ate opens new doors.

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

students and clients. Everything they create—
online education, blog posts, videos—is pub-
lished under an Attribution-ShareAlike license
(CC BY-SA). “We use a ShareAlike license be-
cause we want to give the greatest freedom to
our students and readers, and we also want
that freedom to be viral,” Jorge said. For them,
giving others the right to reuse and remix their
content is a fundamental value. “How can you
offer an online educational service without giv-
ing permission to download, make and keep
copies, or print the educational resources?”
Jorge said. “If we want to do the best for our
students—those who trust in us to the point
that they are willing to pay online without face-
to-face contact—we have to offer them a fair
and ethical agreement.”
They also believe sharing their ideas and ex-
pertise openly helps them build their reputa-
tion and visibility. People often share and cite
their work. A few years ago, a publisher even
picked up one of their e-books and distribut-
ed printed copies. Ártica views reuse of their
work as a way to open up new opportunities
for their business.
This belief that openness creates new op-
portunities reflects another belief—in ser-
endipity. When describing their process for
creating content, they spoke of all of the spon-
taneous and organic ways they find inspira-
tion. “Sometimes, the collaborative process
starts with a conversation between us, or
with friends from other projects,” Jorge said.
“That can be the first step for a new blog post
or another simple piece of content, which can
evolve to a more complex product in the fu-
ture, 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 ad-
just based on what they learn, always explor-
ing and testing new ideas and ways of operat-
ing. In many ways, for them, the process is just
as important as the final product.

IN THE EDUCATIONAL AND

CULTURAL BUSINESS, IT IS MORE

IMPORTANT TO PAY ATTENTION

TO PEOPLE AND PROCESS, RATHER

THAN CONTENT OR SPECIFIC

FORMATS OR MATERIALS

People and relationships are also just as im- portant, sometimes more. “In the educational and 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 can learn from them and share their knowledge.

At the core of everything Ártica does is a set of values. “Good content is not enough,” Jorge said. “We also think that it is very important to 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 creative work) and work to demonstrate the intersec- tion between free culture and other social-jus- tice movements. Their efforts to involve people in their work and enable artists and cultural in- stitutions to better use technology are all tied closely to their belief system. Ultimately, what drives their work is a mission to democratize art and culture.

Of course, Ártica also has to make enough
money to cover its expenses. Human resourc-
es are, by far, their biggest expense. They tap
a network of collaborators on a case-by-case
basis and hire contractors for specific projects.
Whenever possible, they draw from artistic
and cultural resources in the commons, and
they rely on free software. Their operation is
small, efficient, and sustainable, and because
of that, it is a success.
“There are lots of people offering online
courses,” Jorge said. “But it is easy to differen-
tiate us. We have an approach that is very spe-
cific and personal.” Ártica’s model is rooted in
the personal at every level. For Mariana and
Jorge, 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 of
success 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.”

For Ton Roosendaal, the creator of Blender software and its related entities, sharing is practical. Making their 3-D content creation software available under a free software li- cense has been integral to its development and popularity. Using that software to make movies that were licensed with Creative Com- mons pushed that development even further. Sharing enables people to participate and to interact 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 pro- duces a host of openly licensed outputs, not just the final film itself but all of the source ma- terial as well. The creative process also enhanc- es the development of the Blender software

because the technical team responds directly
to the needs of the film production team, cre-
ating tools and features that make their lives
easier. And, of course, each project involves a
long, rewarding process for the creative and
technical community working together.
Rather than just talking about the theoret-
ical benefits of sharing and free culture, Ton
is very much about doing and making free cul-
ture. Blender’s production coordinator Fran-
cesco Siddi told us, “Ton believes if you don’t
make content using your tools, then you’re not
doing anything.”

Blender Institute.

The Blender Institute is an animation studio that creates 3-D films using Blender software. Founded in 2006 in the Netherlands.

www blender org

Revenue model: crowdfunding (subscrip-
tion-based), charging for physical copies,
selling merchandise

Interview date: March 8, 2016
Interviewee: Francesco Siddi, production coordinator

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

Blender’s history begins in the late 1990s, when Ton created the Blender software. Orig- inally, the software was an in-house resource for his animation studio based in the Nether- lands. Investors became interested in the soft- ware, so he began marketing the software to the public, offering a free version in addition to a paid version. Sales were disappointing, and his investors gave up on the endeavor in the early 2000s. He made a deal with investors—if he could raise enough money, he could then make 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 for anyone to use. Simply applying the General Public License to the software, however, was not enough to create a thriving community around it. Francesco told us, “Software of this complexity 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 de- velopers so that the project could live.” Like any successful free and open-source software project, Blender developed quickly because the community could make fixes and improvements. “Software should be free and open to hack,” Francesco said. “Otherwise, ev- eryone is doing the same thing in the dark for ten years.” Ton set up the Blender Foundation to oversee and steward the software develop- ment 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 a call online for all interested and skilled artists. Francesco said the idea was to get the best artists available, put them in a building togeth- er with the best developers, and have them work together. They would not only produce high-quality openly licensed content, they would improve the Blender software in the process.

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 suc-
ceeded, people were astounded. “The idea
that making money was possible by producing
CC-licensed material was mind-blowing to peo-
ple,” he said. “They were like, ‘I have to see it to
believe it.’”
The first film, which was released in 2006,
was an experiment. It was so successful that
Ton 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 pro-
cess has become more complex, combining
technical experts and artists who focus on sto-
rytelling. Francesco says the process is almost
on an industrial scale because of the number
of moving parts. This requires a lot of special-
ized assistance, but the Blender Institute has
no problem finding the talent it needs to help
on projects. “Blender hardly does any recruit-
ing for film projects because the talent emerg-
es naturally,” Francesco said. “So many people
want to work with us, and we can’t always hire
them because of budget constraints.”

Blender has had a lot of success raising mon-
ey from its community over the years. In many
ways, the pitch has gotten easier to make. Not
only is crowdfunding simply more familiar to
the public, but people know and trust Blender
to deliver, and Ton has developed a reputation
as an effective community leader and vision-
ary for their work. “There is a whole commu-
nity who sees and understands the benefit of
these projects,” Francesco said.
While these benefits of each open-movie
project make a compelling pitch for crowd-

funding campaigns, Francesco told us the Blender Institute has found some limitations in the 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. That is a problem.” To make their work more sustainable, they needed a way to receive ongoing support rath- er than on a project-by-project basis. Their solution is Blender Cloud, a subscription-style crowdfunding model akin to the online crowd- funding platform, Patreon. For about ten euros each month, subscribers get access to down- load everything the Blender Institute produc- es—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 sub- scribers to follow Blender’s movie projects as they develop, sharing detailed information and content 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 art- ists, 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 develop- ment and maintenance. The revenue streams of the Institute and Foundation are deliberate- ly kept separate. Blender also has other reve-

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

Ton has worked on projects relating to his
Blender software for nearly twenty years.
Throughout most of that time, he has been
committed to making the software and the
content produced with the software free and
open. Selling a license has never been part of
the business model.
Since 2006, he has been making films avail-
able along with all of their source material. He
says he has hardly ever seen people stepping
into Blender’s shoes and trying to make mon-
ey off of their content. Ton believes this is be-
cause the true value of what they do is in the
creative and production process. “Even when
you share everything, all your original sources,
it still takes a lot of talent, skills, time, and bud-
get to reproduce what you did,” Ton said.
For Ton and Blender, it all comes back to
doing.

TON BELIEVES IF YOU DON’T

MAKE CONTENT USING YOUR

TOOLS, THEN YOU’RE NOT DOING

ANYTHING

If you ask cofounder Max Temkin, there is noth- ing particularly interesting about the Cards Against Humanity business model. “We make a 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 game Apples to Apples. To play, one player asks a question or fill-in-the-blank statement from a black card, and the other players submit their funniest white card in response. The catch is that all of the cards are filled with crude, grue- some, and otherwise awful things. For the right kind of people (“horrible people,” accord- ing to Cards Against Humanity advertising), this makes for a hilarious and fun game. The revenue model is simple. Physical cop- ies of the game are sold for a profit. And it works. At the time of this writing, Cards Against

Humanity is the number-one best-selling item
out of all toys and games on Amazon. There
are official expansion packs available, and sev-
eral official themed packs and international
editions as well.
But Cards Against Humanity is also avail-
able for free. Anyone can download a digital
version of the game on the Cards Against Hu-
manity website. More than one million people
have downloaded the game since the compa-
ny began tracking the numbers.
The game is available under an Attribu-
tion-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 un-
der the same noncommercial terms. The abili-
ty to adapt the game is like an entire new game
unto itself.

Cards Against Humanity

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

All together, these factors—the crass tone of the game and company, the free download, the openness 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 last in a long line of games and comedy projects that Max Temkin and his friends put togeth- er for their own amusement. As Max tells the story, they made the game so they could play it 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 ask- ing 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 only grown more popular over time. Max says the eight 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 and memorable. It is hard to forget a company that calls the FAQ on their website “Your dumb questions.” Like most quality satire, however, there is more to the joke than vulgarity and shock val- ue. The company’s marketing efforts around Black Friday illustrate this particularly well. For those outside the United States, Black Friday is the term for the day after the Thanksgiving hol- iday, 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” the day has become, particularly since it follows a day that is about being grateful for what you

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 to
hate us for it,” he said. “But it made us laugh
so we went with it. People totally caught the
joke.”
This sort of bold transparency delights the
media, but more importantly, it engages their
fans. “One of the most surprising things you
can do in capitalism is just be honest with peo-
ple,” Max said. “It shocks people that there is
transparency about what you are doing.”
Max also likened it to a grand improv scene.
“If we do something a little subversive and un-
expected, the public wants to be a part of the
joke.” One year they did a Give Cards Against
Humanity $5 event, where people literally paid
them five dollars for no reason. Their fans
wanted to make the joke funnier by making it
successful. They made $70,000 in a single day.
This remarkable trust they have in their
customers is what inspired their decision
to apply a Creative Commons license to the
game. Trusting your customers to reuse and
remix your work requires a leap of faith. Cards
Against Humanity obviously isn’t afraid of do-
ing the unexpected, but there are lines even
they do not want to cross. Before applying the
license, Max said they worried that some fans
would 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 cost
of using CC, I’d pay that a hundred times over
because 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 ra-
dar. The Creative Commons license gives fans
of Cards Against Humanity the freedom to run
with the game and copy, adapt, and promote
their creations openly. Today there are thou-
sands of fan expansions of the game.

Max said, “CC was a no-brainer for us because it gets the most people involved. Making the 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.” Of course, there are limits to what the company allows its customers to do with the game. They chose the Attribution-NonCom- mercial-ShareAlike license because it restricts people from using the game to make money. It also requires that adaptations of the game be 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 brand and our game and make money off of it,” Max said. About 99.9 percent of the time, they just send an email to those making commercial use of 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 be playable, every white card has to work syntac- tically with enough black cards. The eight cre- ators invest an incredible amount of work into creating new cards for the game. “We have daylong arguments about commas,” Max said. “The slacker tone of the cards gives people the impression that it is easy to write them, but it is actually a lot of work and quibbling.” That means cocreation with their fans real- ly doesn’t work. The company has a submis- sion mechanism on their website, and they get thousands of suggestions, but it is very rare that a submitted card is adopted. Instead, the eight initial creators remain the primary au- thors of expansion decks and other new prod- ucts released by the company. Interestingly, the creativity of their customer base is really only an asset to the company once their orig- inal work is created and published when peo- ple make their own adaptations of the game.

For all of their success, the creators of Cards
Against Humanity are only partially motivated
by money. Max says they have always been
interested in the Walt Disney philosophy of
financial success. “We don’t make jokes and
games 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 have
other interests and hobbies. We are passion-
ate 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 and
channeling some of the excitement from the
game into it.”
Seeing money as fuel rather than the ulti-
mate goal is what has enabled them to em-
brace Creative Commons licensing without
reservation. CC licensing ended up being a
savvy marketing move for the company, but
nonetheless, giving up exclusive control of
your work necessarily means giving up some
opportunities to extract more money from
customers.

CC WAS A NO-BRAINER FOR

US BECAUSE IT GETS THE MOST

PEOPLE INVOLVED MAKING

THE 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

“It’s not right for everyone to release every- thing under CC licensing,” Max said. “If your only 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.”

The Conversation

The Conversation is an independent source of news, sourced from the academic and re- search community and delivered direct to the public over the Internet. Founded in 2011 in Australia.

theconversation com

Revenue model: charging content creators
(universities pay membership fees to have
their faculties serve as writers), grant funding

Andrew Jaspan spent years as an editor of ma- jor newspapers including the Observer in Lon- don, the Sunday Herald in Glasgow, and the Age in Melbourne, Australia. He experienced first- hand the decline of newspapers, including the collapse of revenues, layoffs, and the constant pressure to reduce costs. After he left the Age in 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 citi- zens would get news grounded in fact and ev- idence rather than opinion or ideology. He be- lieved there was still an appetite for journalism

with depth and substance but was concerned
about the increasing focus on the sensational
and sexy.
While at the Age , he’d become friends with
a 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 were
more involved in informing the world about
what is going on and correcting the errors that
appear in media. However, they were reluctant
to engage with mass media. Often, journalists
didn’t understand what they said, or unilater-
ally chose what aspect of a story to tell, putting
out a version that these people felt was wrong
or mischaracterized. Newspapers want to at-
tract a mass audience. Scholars want to com-

Interview date: February 4, 2016
Interviewee: Andrew Jaspan, founder

Profile written by Paul Stacey

municate serious news, findings, and insights. It’s not a perfect match. Universities are massive repositories of knowledge, research, wisdom, and expertise. But a lot of that stays behind a wall of their own making—there are the walled garden and ivory tower metaphors, and in more literal terms, the paywall. Broadly speaking, universi- ties are part of society but disconnected from it. 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, and maybe help society find solutions to big prob- lems. He thought about pairing professional editors with university and research experts, working one-on-one to refine everything from story structure to headline, captions, and quotes. The editors could help turn something that is academic into something understand- able and readable. And this would be a key dif- ference from traditional journalism—the sub- ject matter expert would get a chance to check the article and give final approval before it is published. Compare this with reporters just picking and choosing the quotes and writing whatever they want. The people he spoke to liked this idea, and Andrew embarked on raising money and sup- port with the help of the Commonwealth Sci- entific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the University of Melbourne, Monash University, the University of Technology Syd- ney, 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 the university and research sector. With their help, in 2011, the Conversation, was launched as an independent news site in Australia. Every- thing published in the Conversation is openly licensed with Creative Commons.

The Conversation is founded on the belief that underpinning a functioning democracy is

access to independent, high-quality, informa-
tive journalism. The Conversation’s aim is for
people to have a better understanding of cur-
rent affairs and complex issues—and hope-
fully a better quality of public discourse. The
Conversation sees itself as a source of trust-
ed information dedicated to the public good.
Their core mission is simple: to provide read-
ers with a reliable source of evidence-based
information.
Andrew worked hard to reinvent a meth-
odology for creating reliable, credible content.
He introduced strict new working practices, a
charter, and codes of conduct.^1 These include
fully disclosing who every author is (with their
relevant expertise); who is funding their re-
search; and if there are any potential or real
conflicts of interest. Also important is where

the content originates, and even though it
comes from the university and research com-
munity, it still needs to be fully disclosed.
The Conversation does not sit behind a pay-
wall. Andrew believes access to information is
an issue of equality—everyone should have
access, like access to clean water. The Conver-
sation is committed to an open and free Inter-
net. Everyone should have free access to their
content, and be able to share it or republish it.
Creative Commons help with these goals;
articles are published with the Attribution-
NoDerivs license (CC BY-ND). They’re freely
available for others to republish elsewhere
as long as attribution is given and the con-
tent is not edited. Over five years, more than
twenty-two thousand sites have republished
their content. The Conversation website gets
about 2.9 million unique views per month,

ACCESS TO INFORMATION IS AN

ISSUE OF EQUALITY—EVERYONE

SHOULD HAVE ACCESS, LIKE

ACCESS TO CLEAN WATER

but through republication they have thirty-five million 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 Conver- sation, they seem to like what they find and recommend it to their friends, peers, and networks. Readership has grown primarily through word of mouth. While they don’t have sales and marketing, they do promote their work through social media (including Twitter and 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 should be. It quickly became clear to the founders of the Conversation that they wanted to create a public good rather than make money off of information. Most media companies are work- ing 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 the Conversation for Africa, the United King- dom, France, and the United States, in addi- tion to the one for Australia. All five editions have their own editorial mastheads, advisory boards, and content. The Conversation’s glob- al virtual newsroom has roughly ninety staff working with thirty-five thousand academics from over sixteen hundred universities around the world. The Conversation would like to be working with university scholars from even more parts of the world. Additionally, each edition has its own set of founding partners, strategic partners, and funders. They’ve received funding from foun- dations, corporates, institutions, and individu- al donations, but the Conversation is shifting toward paid memberships by universities and research institutions to sustain operations. This would safeguard the current service and help improve coverage and features.

When professors from member universities
write an article, there is some branding of the
university associated with the article. On the
Conversation website, paying university mem-
bers are listed as “members and funders.” Early
participants may be designated as “founding
members,” with seats on the editorial advisory
board.
Academics are not paid for their contribu-
tions, but they get free editing from a profes-
sional (four to five hours per piece, on average).
They also get access to a large audience. Ev-
ery author and member university has access
to a special analytics dashboard where they
can check the reach of an article. The metrics
include what people are tweeting, the com-
ments, countries the readership represents,
where the article is being republished, and the
number of readers per article.
The Conversation plans to expand the dash-
board 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 a
show to discuss their piece, give a talk at a con-
ference, collaborate, submit a journal paper,
and consult a company on a topic.
These reach and impact metrics show the
benefits of membership. With the Conversa-
tion, universities can engage with the public
and show why they’re of value.
With its tagline, “Academic Rigor, Journalis-
tic Flair,” the Conversation represents a new
form of journalism that contributes to a more
informed citizenry and improved democracy
around the world. Its open business model
and use of Creative Commons show how it’s
possible to generate both a public good and
operational revenue at the same time.

Web link
1 theconversation.com/us/charter

Cory Doctorow hates the term “business mod- el,” and he is adamant that he is not a brand. “To me, branding is the idea that you can take a thing that has certain qualities, remove the qualities, and go on selling it,” he said. “I’m not out there trying to figure out how to be a brand. I’m doing this thing that animates me to work crazy insane hours because it’s the most important 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 out of the way of them sharing it. He is a science fiction writer, activist, blog- ger, and journalist. Beginning with his first nov- el, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom , in 2003, his work has been published under a Creative Commons license. Cory is coeditor of the pop- ular CC-licensed site Boing Boing , where he

writes about technology, politics, and intel-
lectual property. He has also written several
nonfiction books, including the most recent
Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free , about the
ways in which creators can make a living in the
Internet age.
Cory primarily makes money by selling phys-
ical books, but he also takes on paid speaking
gigs and is experimenting with pay-what-you-
want 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 opponent
of restrictive copyright and digital-rights-man-
agement (DRM) technology used to lock up
content because he thinks both undermine
creators and the public interest. He is current-
ly a special adviser at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, where he is involved in a lawsuit

Cory Doctorow.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, activ- ist, 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 trans-
lation rights to books

Interview date: January 12, 2016

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

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 important- ly, lose the drive that propels him to create. “My political work is a different expression of the same artistic-political urge,” he said. “I have this suspicion that if I gave up the things that didn’t make me money, the genuineness would leach out of what I do, and the quality that causes people to like what I do would be gone.”

Cory has been financially successful, but mon- ey is not his primary motivation. At the start of 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 the arts 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 certain- ly 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 am compelled 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 Cre- ative 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 and censorship 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 Com- mons. While he acknowledges he hasn’t been able 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 he would have without it. Cory says his goal is to

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 nov-
el came out, he says the science fiction genre
was overrun with people scanning and down-
loading books without permission. When he
and his publisher took a closer look at who was
doing that sort of thing online, they realized it
looked a lot like book promotion. “I knew there
was a relationship between having enthusias-
tic readers and having a successful career as
a 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 Commons
licenses. He only had to sell two thousand cop-
ies of his book to break even. People often said
he was only able to use CC licenses success-
fully at that time because he was just starting
out. Now they say he can only do it because he
is an established author.
The bottom line, Cory says, is that no one
has found a way to prevent people from copy-
ing the stuff they like. Rather than fighting the
tide, Cory makes his work intrinsically share-
able. “Getting the hell out of the way for peo-
ple who want to share their love of you with
other people sounds obvious, but it’s remark-
able how many people don’t do it,” he said.

Making his work available under Creative Com-
mons 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 web-
site routinely highlights cool things his audi-
ence has done with his work. Unlike corpora-
tions like Disney that tend to have a hands-off
relationship with their fan activity, he has a
symbiotic relationship with his audience. “En-

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 most restrictive Creative Commons license, Attribu- tion-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND). It allows only verbatim copying for noncom- mercial purposes. His later work is published under the Attribution-NonCommercial-Share- Alike license (CC BY-NC-SA), which gives people the right to adapt his work for noncommercial purposes but only if they share it back un- der the same license terms. Before releasing his work under a CC license that allows adap- tations, he always sells the right to translate the book to other languages to a commercial publisher first. He wants to reach new poten- tial buyers in other parts of the world, and he thinks it is more difficult to get people to pay for translations if there are fan translations al- ready available for free. In his book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free , Cory likens his philosophy to thinking like a dandelion. Dandelions produce thousands of seeds each spring, and they are blown into the air going in every direction. The strategy is to maximize the number of blind chances the dandelion has for continuing its genetic line. Similarly, he says there are lots of people out there who may want to buy creative work or compensate authors for it in some other way.

“The more places your work can find itself,
the greater the likelihood that it will find one
of those would-be customers in some unsus-
pected crack in the metaphorical pavement,”
he wrote. “The copies that others make of my
work cost me nothing, and present the possi-
bility that I’ll get something.”
Applying a CC license to his work increas-
es the chances it will be shared more widely
around the Web. He avoids DRM—and open-
ly opposes the practice—for similar reasons.
DRM has the effect of tying a work to a partic-
ular platform. This digital lock, in turn, strips
the authors of control over their own work
and 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 art-
ists benefit when there are more, rather than
fewer, places where people can access their
work. The Internet has opened up those ave-
nues, but DRM is designed to limit them. “On
the one hand, we can credibly make our work
available to a widely dispersed audience,” he
said. “On the other hand, the intermediaries
we historically sold to are making it harder to
go around them.” Cory continually looks for
ways to reach his audience without relying
upon major platforms that will try to take con-
trol over his work.

Cory says his e-book sales have been lower
than those of his competitors, and he attri-
butes 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 is
easy to do. He was extremely successful using
Humble Bundle, a platform that allows people
to pay what they want for DRM-free versions
of a bundle of a particular creator’s work. He
is planning to try his own pay-what-you-want
experiment soon.

GETTING THE HELL OUT OF THE

WAY FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO

SHARE THEIR LOVE OF YOU WITH

OTHER PEOPLE SOUNDS OBVIOUS,

BUT IT’S REMARKABLE HOW

MANY PEOPLE DON’T DO IT

Fans are particularly willing to pay when they feel personally connected to the artist. Cory works hard to create that personal con- nection. One way he does this is by personally answering every single email he gets. “If you look at the history of artists, most die in pen- ury,” he said. “That reality means that for art- ists, we have to find ways to support ourselves when public tastes shift, when copyright stops producing. Future-proofing your artistic ca- reer in many ways means figuring out how to stay connected to those people who have been touched by your work.”

Cory’s realism about the difficulty of mak-
ing a living in the arts does not reflect pessi-
mism 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 peo-
ple’s hands and minds.”
It has never been easier to think like a dan-
delion.

Interview date: January 28, 2016
Interviewee: Mark Hahnel, founder

Profile written by Paul Stacey

Figshare’s mission is to change the face of ac- ademic publishing through improved dissemi- nation, discoverability, and reusability of schol- arly research. Figshare is a repository where users can make all the output of their research available—from posters and presentations to data 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 disseminat- ed in a way that the current scholarly-publish- ing model does not allow. Figshare founder Mark Hahnel often gets asked: How do you make money? How do we know you’ll be here in five years? Can you, as a for-profit venture, be trusted? Answers have evolved over time.

Mark traces the origins of Figshare back to when 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-

search, there was no way for him to also pub-
lish the videos, figures, graphs, and data sets.
This was frustrating. Mark believed publishing
his complete research would lead to more cita-
tions and be better for his career.
Mark does not consider himself an ad-
vanced 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 make
the data citable, and persistent identifiers—
URL links that always point back to the original
object ensuring the research is citable for the
long 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. Refer-
ring to an object by its DOI is more stable than
referring to it by its URL, because the location
of an object (the web page or URL) can often

Figshare.

Figshare is a for-profit company offering an online repository where researchers can pre- serve and share the output of their research, including figures, data sets, images, and vid- eos. Founded in 2011 in the UK.

figshare.com

Revenue model: platform providing paid
services to creators

change. Mark partnered with DataCite for the provision of DOIs for research data. As for licenses, Mark chose Creative Com- mons. The open-access and open-science communities were already using and recom- mending Creative Commons. Based on what was happening in those communities and Mark’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 had a science blog where he wrote about it and made all his data open. People started com- menting on his blog that they wanted to do the same. So he opened it up for them to use, too. People liked the interface and simple up- load process. People started asking if they could also share theses, grant proposals, and code. Inclusion of code raised new licensing issues, as Creative Commons licenses are not used for software. To allow the sharing of soft- ware 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 ex- pressed interest but insisted on a more viable business model. They made an initial invest- ment, and together they came up with a free- mium-like business model.

Under the freemium model, academics
upload their research to Figshare for storage
and sharing for free. Each research object is
licensed with Creative Commons and receives
a DOI link. The premium option charges re-
searchers 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 geograph-
ically dispersed research groups. Figshare
sums 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. (The
fig in Figshare stands for figures .) Using invest-
ment funds, Mark made significant improve-
ments to Figshare. For example, researchers
could quickly preview their research files with-
in a browser without having to download them
first or require third-party software. Journals
who were still largely publishing articles as
static noninteractive PDFs became interested
in having Figshare provide that functionality
for them.
Figshare diversified its business model to
include services for journals. Figshare began
hosting large amounts of data for the jour-
nals’ online articles. This additional data im-
proved the quality of the articles. Outsourcing
this service to Figshare freed publishers from
having to develop this functionality as part
of their own infrastructure. Figshare-hosted
data also provides a link back to the article,
generating additional click-through and read-
ership—a benefit to both journal publish-
ers and researchers. Figshare now provides
research-data infrastructure for a wide variety
of publishers including Wiley, Springer Nature,
PLOS, and Taylor and Francis, to name a few,
and has convinced them to use Creative Com-
mons licenses for the data.

Governments allocate significant public funds
to research. In parallel with the launch of
Figshare, governments around the world be-
gan requesting the research they fund be open

CHANGE THE FACE OF ACADE-

MIC PUBLISHING THROUGH

IMPROVED DISSEMINATION,

DISCOVERABILITY, AND RE-

USABILITY OF SCHOLARLY

RESEARCH

and accessible. They mandated that research- ers and academic institutions better manage and disseminate their research outputs_._ Insti- tutions looking to comply with this new man- date became interested in Figshare. Figshare once again diversified its business model, add- ing services for institutions. Figshare now offers a range of fee-based services to institutions, including their own minibranded Figshare space (called Figshare for Institutions) that securely hosts research data of institutions in the cloud. Services in- clude not just hosting but data metrics, data dissemination, and user-group administration. Figshare’s workflow, and the services they of- fer for institutions, take into account the needs of librarians and administrators, as well as of the researchers. As with researchers and publishers, Fig- share encouraged institutions to share their research with CC BY (Attribution) and their data with CC0 (into the public domain). Funders who require researchers and insti- tutions to use open licensing believe in the social responsibilities and benefits of making research accessible to all. Publishing research in this open way has come to be called open access. But not all funders specify CC BY; some institutions want to offer their researchers a choice, 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 sci- ence are at the heart of Figshare, and Mark believes CC BY is the best license for this. On the other hand, institutions were saying they wouldn’t use Figshare unless it offered a choice in licenses. He initially refused to offer anything beyond CC0 and CC BY, but after see- ing an open-source CERN project offer all Cre- ative 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.

You could see which license generates the big-
gest impact. If the data showed that CC BY is
more impactful, Mark believes more and more
researchers and institutions will make it their
license of choice.

Figshare has an Application Programming In-
terface (API) that makes it possible for data
to be pulled from Figshare and used in other
applications. As an example, Mark shared a
Figshare data set showing the journal subscrip-
tions 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 differ-
ent researcher that converts the data into a vi-
sually interesting graph, which any viewer can
alter by changing any of the variables.^2
The free version of Figshare has built a com-
munity of academics, who through word of
mouth and presentations have promoted and
spread awareness of Figshare. To amplify and
reward the community, Figshare established
an Advisor program, providing those who pro-
moted Figshare with hoodies and T-shirts, ear-
ly access to new features, and travel expenses
when they gave presentations outside of their
area. 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 be-
lieves that the diversification of Figshare’s mod-
el over time has been key to success. Figshare
now offers a comprehensive set of services to
researchers, publishers, and institutions.^3 If he
had relied solely on revenue from premium
subscriptions, he believes Figshare would have
struggled. In Figshare’s early days, their pri-
mary 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.

Today Figshare has 26 million–plus page views, 7.5 million–plus downloads, 800,000–plus user uploads, 2 million–plus articles, 500,000- plus collections, and 5,000–plus projects. Sixty percent of their traffic comes from Google. A sister company called Altmetric tracks the use of Figshare by others, including Wikipedia and news sources. Figshare uses the revenue it generates from the 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 the free 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 was only in it for the money, they wouldn’t care about offering a free version. Figshare’s princi- ples and advocacy for openness are a key dif- ferentiator. Going forward, Mark sees Figshare not only as supporting open access to research but also enabling people to collaborate and make 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

In the paper Harnessing the Economic and So- cial Power of Data presented at the New Zea- land Data Futures Forum in 2014,^1 Figure.NZ founder Lillian Grace said there are thousands of valuable and relevant data sets freely avail- able to us right now, but most people don’t use them. She used to think this meant peo- ple didn’t care about being informed, but she’s come to see that she was wrong. Almost ev- eryone wants to be informed about issues that matter—not only to them, but also to their families, their communities, their businesses, and their country. But there’s a big difference between availability and accessibility of infor- mation. Data is spread across thousands of sites and is held within databases and spread- sheets that require both time and skill to en- gage with. To use data when making a deci- sion, you have to know what specific question to ask, identify a source that has collected the data, and manipulate complex tools to extract and visualize the information within the data set. Lillian established Figure.NZ to make data

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 In-
stitute, a think tank concerned with improv-
ing economic prosperity, social well-being,
environmental quality, and environmental
productivity for New Zealand and New Zea-
landers. While giving talks to community and
business groups, Lillian realized “every single
issue we addressed would have been easier to
deal with if more people understood the ba-
sic facts.” But understanding the basic facts
sometimes requires data and research that
you often have to pay for.
Lillian began to imagine a website that lift-
ed data up to a visual form that could be eas-
ily understood and freely accessed. Initially
launched as Wiki New Zealand, the original
idea was that people could contribute their

Figure.nz

Figure.NZ is a nonprofit charity that makes an online data platform designed to make data reusable and easy to understand. Founded in 2012 in New Zealand.

figure.nz

Revenue model: platform providing paid ser-
vices to creators, donations, sponsorships

Interview date: May 3, 2016
Interviewee: Lillian Grace, founder

Profile written by Paul Stacey

data and visuals via a wiki. However, few peo- ple had graphs that could be used and shared, and there were no standards or consistency around the data and the visuals. Realizing the wiki model wasn’t working, Lillian brought the process of data aggregation, curation, and vi- sual presentation in-house, and invested in the technology to help automate some of it. Wiki New Zealand became Figure.NZ, and ef- forts were reoriented toward providing ser- vices to those wanting to open their data and present it visually. Here’s how it works. Figure.NZ sources data from other organizations, including corpo- rations, public repositories, government de- partments, and academics. Figure.NZ imports and extracts that data, and then validates and standardizes 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, with rich metadata about the sources, the licenses, and data types. Figure.NZ has a chart-design- ing tool that makes simple bar, line, and area graphs from any data source. The graphs are posted to the Figure.NZ website, and they can also be exported in a variety of formats for print or online use. Figure.NZ makes its data and graphs available using the Attribution (CC BY) license. This allows others to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute Figure.NZ data and graphs as long as they give attribution to the original 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 Com- mons offered and thought it looked good, was clear, and made common sense. It was easy to use and easy for others to understand. Over time, she’s come to realize just how fortunate and important that decision turned out to be. New Zealand’s government has an open-ac- cess and licensing framework called NZGOAL, which provides guidance for agencies when they release copyrighted and noncopyrighted work and material.^2 It aims to standardize the licensing of works with government copyright

and how they can be reused, and it does this
with 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 business
is are relatively new, only a hundred years old
or so. She’s convinced that twenty years from
now, we will see new and different models for
business. 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 purpose
of Figure.NZ. She believes Wikipedia would
not work if it were for profit, and similarly, Fig-
ure.NZ’s nonprofit status assures people who
have data and people who want to use it that
they can rely on Figure.NZ’s motives. People
see them as a trusted wrangler and source.
Although Figure.NZ is a social enterprise
that openly licenses their data and graphs for
everyone to use for free, they have taken care
not to be perceived as a free service all around
the table. Lillian believes hundreds of millions
of dollars are spent by the government and or-
ganizations 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 of
the data for policy, but Lillian believes that it is
underutilized and the potential value is much
larger. Figure.NZ is focused on solving that
problem. They believe a portion of money allo-
cated to collecting data should go into making
sure that data is useful and generates value. If
the government wants citizens to understand
why certain decisions are being made and to
be more aware about what the government is
doing, why not transform the data it collects
into easily understood visuals? It could even
become a way for a government or any orga-
nization to differentiate, market, and brand
itself.

Figure.NZ spends a lot of time seeking to understand the motivations of data collectors and to identify the channels where it can pro- vide 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 organi- zations that want their data publicly available and want to use Figure.NZ as their publishing platform. 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 us- ers find, use, and make things from the data they make available on Figure.NZ’s website. Customers control what is released and the license terms (although Figure.NZ encourages Creative Commons licensing). Figure.NZ also serves customers who want a specific collec- tion of charts created—for example, for their website or annual report. Charging the organi- zations that want to make their data available enables Figure.NZ to provide their site free to all users, to truly democratize data. Lillian notes that the current state of most data is terrible and often not well understood by the people who have it. This sometimes makes it difficult for customers and Figure.NZ to figure out what it would cost to import, stan- dardize, 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 cus- tomer can determine the value for money. This strategy has helped build trust and transpar- ency about the level of effort associated with doing 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 sup- port Figure.NZ has been able to create Busi- ness Figures, a special way for businesses to find useful data without having to know what questions to ask.^3

Figure.NZ also has patrons.^4 Patrons donate
to topic areas they care about, directly en-
abling 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 dona-
tions, which are used to provide more content,
extend technology, and improve services, or
are targeted to fund a specific effort or pro-
vide in-kind support. As a charity, donations
are tax deductible.

Figure.NZ has morphed and grown over time.
With data aggregation, curation, and visualiz-
ing services all in-house, Figure.NZ has devel-
oped a deep expertise in taking random styles
of data, standardizing it, and making it useful.
Lillian realized that Figure.NZ could easily be-
come a warehouse of seventy people doing
data. But for Lillian, growth isn’t always good.
In her view, bigger often means less effective.
Lillian set artificial constraints on growth, forc-
ing the organization to think differently and be
more efficient. Rather than in-house growth,
they are growing and building external rela-
tionships.

Figure.NZ’s website displays visuals and
data associated with a wide range of cate-
gories including crime, economy, education,
employment, energy, environment, health,
information and communications technology,
industry, tourism, and many others. A search
function helps users find tables and graphs.
Figure.NZ does not provide analysis or inter-
pretation of the data or visuals. Their goal is to

IN THE WORLD WE LIVE IN NOW,

THE BEST FUTURE IS THE ONE

WHERE EVERYONE CAN MAKE

WELL-INFORMED DECISIONS

teach people how to think, not think for them. Figure.NZ wants to create intuitive experienc- es, not user manuals. Figure.NZ believes data and visuals should be useful. They provide their customers with a data collection template and teach them why it’s important and how to use it. They’ve begun putting more emphasis on tracking what users of their website want. They also get requests from social media and through email for them to 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 relation- ship so they can be included on Figure.NZ’s site. Overall, Figure.NZ is seeking to provide a place for people to be curious about, access, and interpret data on topics they are interest- ed in.

Lillian has a deep and profound vision for Fig- ure.NZ that goes well beyond simply providing open-data services. She says things are differ- ent 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 created by having a few great leaders who essentially had access to the information and made de- cisions on behalf of others, whether it was on behalf of a country or companies. “But now we live in a world where it’s real- ly easy to share information widely and also to communicate widely. In the world we live in now, the best future is the one where every- one can make well-informed decisions. “The use of numbers and data as a way of making well-informed decisions is one of the areas 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 the most part, deep thinking based on data is constrained to experts because most people don’t have data literacy. There once was a time

when many citizens in society couldn’t read or
write. However, as a society, we’ve now come
to believe that reading and writing skills should
be something all citizens have. We haven’t yet
adopted a similar belief around numbers and
data literacy. We largely still believe that only
a few specially trained people can analyze and
think with numbers.
“Figure.NZ may be the first organization to
assert that everyone can use numbers in their
thinking, and it’s built a technological platform
along with trust and a network of relation-
ships 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 alpha-
bet that can help people analyze what they
see around them. A way to be thoughtful and
informed about society. A means of engaging
in conversation and shaping decision mak-
ing that transcends personal experience. The
long-term value and impact is almost impos-
sible to measure, but the goal is to help citi-
zens gain understanding and work together in
more informed ways to shape the future.”
Lillian sees Figure.NZ’s model as having
global potential. But for now, their focus is
completely on making Figure.NZ work in New
Zealand and to get the “network effect”—
users dramatically increasing value for them-
selves and for others through use of their ser-
vice. Creative Commons is core to making the
network effect possible.

Web links
1 http://www.nzdatafutures.org.nz/sites/default
/files/NZDFF_harness-the-power.pdf
2 http://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/

The serial entrepreneur Dr.  Frances Pinter has been at the forefront of innovation in the publishing industry for nearly forty years. She founded the UK-based Knowledge Unlatched with a mission to enable open access to schol- arly books. For Frances, the current scholarly- book-publishing system is not working for any- one, and especially not for monographs in the humanities and social sciences. Knowledge Un- latched is committed to changing this and has been working with libraries to create a sustain- able 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

Commercial Innovation Award for Innovation
in Education in 2015.

Dr.  Pinter has been in academic publishing
most of her career. About ten years ago, she
became acquainted with the Creative Com-
mons founder Lawrence Lessig and got inter-
ested in Creative Commons as a tool for both
protecting 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 for
free using a Creative Commons license and to
see what happened to print sales. Sales went
up, not down.

Knowledge Unlatched.

Knowledge Unlatched is a not-for-profit com- munity interest company that brings libraries together to pool funds to publish open-access books. 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

In 2008, Bloomsbury Academic, a new im- print of Bloomsbury Publishing in the United Kingdom, appointed her its founding publish- er in London. As part of the launch, Frances convinced Bloomsbury to differentiate them- selves by putting out monographs for free on- line 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-book sales at all, and the costs associated with get- ting the book to print would be lost. Surpris- ingly, Bloomsbury found that sales of the print versions of these books were 10 to 20 percent higher than normal. Frances found it intrigu- ing that the Creative Commons–licensed free online book acts as a marketing vehicle for the print format. Frances began to look at customer interest in 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 ver- sion 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 cream cone, 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 un- derwrite 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 digi- tal copy? Then you could either bring down the cost of the printed book, or do a whole bunch of interesting things with the printed book and e-book—the ice cream cone or sundae part of the model. This idea is similar to the article-processing charge some open-access journals charge re- searchers to cover publishing costs. Frances began to imagine a coalition of libraries pay- ing for the prepress costs—a “book-processing charge”—and providing everyone in the world

with an open-access version of the books re-
leased 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 the
idea. Her husband came up with Knowledge
Unlatched, and after two years of generating
interest, she decided to move forward and
launch a community interest company (a UK
term for not-for-profit social enterprises) in
2012.

She describes the business model in a paper
called Knowledge Unlatched: Toward an Open
and Networked Future for Academic Publishing :

1 Publishers offer titles for sale reflecting
origination costs only via Knowledge Un-
latched.

2 Individual libraries select titles either as in-
dividual titles or as collections (as they do
from library suppliers now).

3 Their selections are sent to Knowledge
Unlatched specifying the titles to be pur-
chased at the stated price(s).

4 The price, called a Title Fee (set by publish-
ers and negotiated by Knowledge Un-
latched), is paid to publishers to cover the
fixed costs of publishing each of the titles
that were selected by a minimum number
of libraries to cover the Title Fee.

5 Publishers make the selected titles avail-
able Open Access (on a Creative Commons
or similar open license) and are then paid
the Title Fee which is the total collected
from the libraries.

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

The first round of this model resulted in a collection of twenty-eight current titles from thirteen recognized scholarly publishers being unlatched. The target was to have two hun- dred libraries participate. The cost of the pack- age 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 per book came in at just under forty-three dollars. The open-access, Creative Commons ver- sions of these twenty-eight books are still available online.^4 Most books have been li- censed with CC BY-NC or CC BY-NC-ND. Au- thors are the copyright holder, not the publish- er, and negotiate choice of license as part of the publishing agreement. Frances has found that most authors want to retain control over the commercial and remix use of their work. Publishers list the book in their catalogs, and the noncommercial restriction in the Creative Commons license ensures authors continue to get 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 to acquire all the books, and the individual price per book. The fee publishers charge for each title is a fixed charge, and Knowledge Un- latched 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 maxi- mum based on a minimum number of libraries participating. If the number of participating li- braries exceeds the minimum, then the cost of the order and the price per book go down for each library. The second round, recently completed, un- latched seventy-eight books from twenty-six publishers. For this round, Frances was ex- perimenting with the size and shape of the of-

ferings. Books were being bundled into eight
small packages separated by subject (including
Anthropology, History, Literature, Media and
Communications, and Politics), of around ten
books per package. Three hundred libraries
around the world have to commit to at least
six 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 publish-
ers for titles, followed by having a library task
force select the titles, getting authors’ permis-
sions, getting the libraries to pledge, billing the
libraries, and finally, unlatching.

The longest part of the whole process is get-
ting 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 three
hundred libraries that participated in the first
round, 80 percent are also participating in the
second round, and there are an additional
eighty new libraries taking part. Knowledge
Unlatched is also working not just with individ-
ual 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 chose
monographs as the initial type of book to un-
latch. Monographs are foundational and im-
portant, but also problematic to keep going in
the standard closed publishing model.
The cost for the publisher to get to a first dig-
ital 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 of

copies. A publisher who in the past sold three thousand copies now typically sells only three hundred. 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 roy- alties from monographs. Royalties range from zero 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 in- creases their reputation. Open access through unlatching generates many more downloads and therefore awareness. (On the Knowledge Unlatched website, you can find interviews with the twenty-eight round-one authors de- scribing their experience and the benefits of taking part.)^5 Library budgets are constantly being squeezed, partly due to the inflation of journal subscriptions. But even without budget con- straints, academic libraries are moving away from buying physical copies. An academic li- brary catalog entry is typically a URL to wher- ever the book is hosted. Or if they have enough electronic 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 separately from the digital version. Knowledge Unlatched offers libraries a compelling economic argument. Many of the participating 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 not just the participating libraries, but to the world. Not only do the economics make sense, but there is very strong alignment with library mandates. The participating libraries pay less than they would have in the closed model, and the open-access book is available to all librar- ies. While this means nonparticipating librar- ies could be seen as free riders, in the library world, wealthy libraries are used to paying more than poor libraries and accept that part

of their money should be spent to support
open access. “Free ride” is more like commu-
nity 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, the
Knowledge Unlatched model for monographs
is a win-win-win.

In the first round, Knowledge Unlatched’s over-
heads were covered by grants. In the second
round, they aim to demonstrate the model is
sustainable. Libraries and publishers will each
pay a 7.5 percent service charge that will go
toward Knowledge Unlatched’s running costs.
With plans to scale up in future rounds, Fran-
ces figures they can fully recover costs when
they are unlatching two hundred books at a
time. Moving forward, Knowledge Unlatched
is making investments in technology and pro-
cesses. Future plans include unlatching jour-
nals and older books.
Frances believes that Knowledge Unlatched
is tapping into new ways of valuing academ-
ic content. It’s about considering how many
people can find, access, and use your content
without pay barriers. Knowledge Unlatched
taps into the new possibilities and behaviors of
the digital world. In the Knowledge Unlatched
model, the content-creation process is exactly
the same as it always has been, but the eco-
nomics are different. For Frances, Knowledge
Unlatched is connected to the past but moving
into the future, an evolution rather than a rev-
olution.

Web links
1 http://www.pinter.org.uk/pdfs/Toward_an
_Open.pdf
2 http://www.oapen.org
3 http://www.hathitrust.org
4 collections.knowledgeunlatched.org
/collection-availability-1/
5 http://www.knowledgeunlatched.org
/featured-authors-section/

Cofounded by open education visionary Dr.  David Wiley and education-technology strat- egist Kim Thanos, Lumen Learning is dedi- cated to improving student success, bringing new ideas to pedagogy, and making educa- tion more affordable by facilitating adoption of open educational resources. In 2012, David and Kim partnered on a grant-funded project called the Kaleidoscope Open Course Initia- tive.^1 It involved a set of fully open general-ed- ucation courses across eight colleges predom- inantly serving at-risk students, with goals to dramatically reduce textbook costs and collab- orate to improve the courses to help students succeed. David and Kim exceeded those goals: the cost of the required textbooks, replaced with OER, decreased to zero dollars, and aver- age student-success rates improved by 5 to 10 percent when compared with previous years.

After a second round of funding, a total of
more than twenty-five institutions participat-
ed in and benefited from this project. It was
career changing for David and Kim to see the
impact this initiative had on low-income stu-
dents. David and Kim sought further funding
from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
who asked them to define a plan to scale their
work in a financially sustainable way. That is
when they decided to create Lumen Learning.
David and Kim went back and forth on
whether it should be a nonprofit or for-
profit. A nonprofit would make it a more com-
fortable fit with the education sector but meant
they’d be constantly fund-raising and seeking
grants from philanthropies. Also, grants usual-
ly require money to be used in certain ways for
specific deliverables. If you learn things along
the way that change how you think the grant

Lumen Learning

Lumen Learning is a for-profit company help- ing educational institutions use open educa- tional resources (OER). Founded in 2013 in the U.S.

lumenlearning com

Revenue model: charging for custom ser-
vices, grant funding

Interview date: December 21, 2015
Interviewees: David Wiley and Kim Thanos, cofounders

Profile written by Paul Stacey

money should be used, there often isn’t a lot of 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 have more control over what to do with the revenue and investment money; they could make deci- sions to invest the funds or use them different- ly based on the situation and shifting oppor- tunities. In the end, they chose the for-profit status, with its different model for and ap- proach to sustainability. Right from the start, David and Kim posi- tioned Lumen Learning as a way to help insti- tutions engage in open educational resourc- es, or OER. OER are teaching, learning, and research materials, in all different media, that reside in the public domain or are released un- der an open license that permits free use and repurposing by others.

Originally, Lumen did custom contracts for each institution. This was complicated and challenging to manage. However, through that process patterns emerged which al- lowed 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 their off-the-shelf options. Lumen finds that insti- tutions and faculty are generally very good at seeing the value Lumen brings and are willing to pay for it. Serving disadvantaged learner populations has led Lumen to be very prag- matic; they describe what they offer in quan- titative terms—with facts and figures—and in a way that is very student-focused. Lumen Learning helps colleges and universities—

• replace expensive textbooks in high-enroll- ment courses with OER;
• provide enrolled students day one access to Lumen’s fully customizable OER course materials through the institution’s learn- ing-management system; - measure improvements in student success with 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, Cre-
ative Commons–licensed courseware in more
than sixty-five subjects. All courses are freely
and publicly available right off their website.
They can be copied and used by others as long
as they provide attribution to Lumen Learning
following the terms of the Creative Commons
license.
Then there are three types of bundled
services that cost money. One option, which
Lumen calls Candela courseware, offers inte-
gration with the institution’s learning-manage-
ment system, technical and pedagogical sup-
port, and tracking of effectiveness. Candela
courseware costs institutions ten dollars per
enrolled 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, and
helps instructors find and support the stu-
dents 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 pursu-
ing the development of complete OER degrees.
Often called Z-Degrees, these programs elimi-
nate textbook costs for students in all courses
that make up the degree (both required and
elective) by replacing commercial textbooks
and other expensive resources with OER.
Lumen generates revenue by charging for
their value-added tools and services on top of
their free courses, just as solar-power compa-
nies provide the tools and services that help
people use a free resource—sunlight. And Lu-
men’s business model focuses on getting the
institutions to pay, not the students. With proj-
ects they did prior to Lumen, David and Kim

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. Right from the start, their stance was that they would not put their content behind a paywall. Lumen invests zero dollars in technologies and pro- cesses for restricting access—no digital rights management, no time bombs. While this has been a challenge from a business-model per- spective, from an open-access perspective, it has generated immense goodwill in the com- munity.

In most cases, development of their courses is funded by the institution Lumen has a con- tract with. When creating new courses, Lu- men typically works with the faculty who are teaching the new course. They’re often part of the institution paying Lumen, but sometimes Lumen has to expand the team and contract faculty from other institutions. First, the fac- ulty identifies all of the course’s learning out- comes. Lumen then searches for, aggregates, and curates the best OER they can find that addresses those learning needs, which the fac- ulty reviews. Sometimes faculty like the existing OER but not the way it is presented. The open licens- ing of existing OER allows Lumen to pick and choose from images, videos, and other media to adapt and customize the course. Lumen creates new content as they discover gaps in existing 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 plat- form with all the attributions and links to the original sources intact, and any of Lumen’s new content is given an Attribution (CC BY) license. Using only OER made them experience first- hand how complex it could be to mix different- ly licensed work together. A common strategy with OER is to place the Creative Commons license and attribution information in the

website’s footer, which stays the same for all
pages. This doesn’t quite work, however, when
mixing different OER together.
Remixing OER often results in multiple at-
tributions on every page of every course—text
from one place, images from another, and
videos from yet another. Some are licensed
as Attribution (CC BY), others as Attribution-
ShareAlike (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 informa-
tion as metadata, and getting it to show up at
the end of each page.

Lumen’s commitment to open licensing and
helping low-income students has led to strong
relationships with institutions, open-educa-
tion enthusiasts, and grant funders. People
in their network generously increase the vis-
ibility of Lumen through presentations, word
of mouth, and referrals. Sometimes the num-
ber of general inquiries exceed Lumen’s sales
capacity.
To manage demand and ensure the success
of projects, their strategy is to be proactive
and focus on what’s going on in higher educa-
tion in different regions of the United States,
watching out for things happening at the sys-
tem level in a way that fits with what Lumen
offers. A great example is the Virginia com-
munity college system, which is building out
Z-Degrees. David and Kim say there are nine
other U.S. states with similar system-level ac-
tivity 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 the
largest number of students.

As a business, Lumen is committed to open-
ness. There are two core nonnegotiables: Lu-
men’s use of CC BY, the most permissive of the

Creative Commons licenses, for all the materi- als it creates; and day-one access for students. Having clear nonnegotiables allows them to then engage with the education community to solve for other challenges and work with insti- tutions 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 nonri- valrous. This represents several big challenges for the business model: Why should you invest in creating something that people will be re- luctant to pay for? How do you ensure that the investment the diverse education community makes in OER is not exploited? Lumen thinks we all need to be clear about how we are benefiting from and contributing to the open community. In the OER sector, there are examples of corporations, and even institutions, acting as free riders. Some simply take and use open resources without paying anything or contrib- uting anything back. Others give back the min- imum amount so they can save face. Sustain- ability will require those using open resources to give back an amount that seems fair or even give 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 en- couraging them to switch to a paid model. Lu- men explains the advantages of the paid mod- el: a more interactive relationship with Lumen; integration with the institution’s learning-man- agement system; a guarantee of support for faculty and students; and future sustainability with funding supporting the evolution and im- provement of the OER they are using. Lumen works hard to be a good corporate citizen in the OER community. For David and Kim, a good corporate citizen gives more than they take, adds unique value, and is very trans- parent about what they are taking from com- munity, what they are giving back, and what they are monetizing. Lumen believes these are the building blocks of a sustainable model

and strives for a correct balance of all these
factors.
Licensing all the content they produce with
CC BY is a key part of giving more value than
they 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 than
seventy-five thousand student enrollments.
Lumen received early start-up funding from
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the
Hewlett Foundation, and the Shuttleworth
Foundation. Since then, Lumen has also at-
tracted investment funding. Over the last
three years, Lumen has been roughly 60 per-
cent grant funded, 20 percent revenue earned,
and 20 percent funded with angel capital. Go-
ing forward, their strategy is to replace grant
funding with revenue.
In creating Lumen Learning, David and Kim
say they’ve landed on solutions they never
imagined, and there is still a lot of learning
taking place. For them, open business models
are an emerging field where we are all learn-
ing through sharing. Their biggest recommen-
dations for others wanting to pursue the open
model 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/

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 gets advertising revenue from YouTube and Band- camp, 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 a willingness to take action quickly. A perfect il- lustration of his ability to act fast happened in

2010, when he read that Apple was having a
conference the following day to address a sna-
fu related to the iPhone 4. He decided to write
and 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 and
promote his video at the Apple conference.
The song then went viral, and the experience
landed him in Time magazine.
Jonathan’s successful “hustling” is also
about old-fashioned persistence. He is cur-
rently in his eighth straight year of writing one
song each day. He holds the Guinness World
Record for consecutive daily songwriting, and
he is widely known as the “song-a-day guy.”

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 and jonathanmann bandcamp com

Revenue model: charging for custom ser-
vices, pay-what-you-want, crowdfunding
(subscription-based), charging for in-person
version (speaking engagements and musical
performances)

Interview date: February 22, 2016

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

He fell into this role by, naturally, seizing a random opportunity a friend alerted him to seven years ago—an event called Fun-A-Day, where people are supposed to create a piece of 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 the songs because he knew people were more likely to watch video online than simply listen- ing to audio files. He had a really good time doing the thirty- one-day challenge, so he decided to see if he could continue it for one year. He never stopped. He has written and posted a new song 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 by clients, he writes songs about whatever is on his mind that day. His songs are catchy and mostly lighthearted, but they often contain at least an undercurrent of a deeper theme or meaning. Occasionally, they are extreme- ly personal, like the song he cowrote with his exgirlfriend announcing their breakup. Rain or shine, in sickness or health, Jonathan posts and writes a song every day. If he is on a flight or otherwise incapable of getting Internet ac- cess in time to meet the deadline, he will pre- pare ahead and have someone else post the song for him. Over time, the song-a-day gig became the basis of his livelihood. In the beginning, he made money one of two ways. The first was by entering a wide variety of contests and win- ning a handful. The second was by having the occasional song and video go some varying degree of viral, which would bring more eye- balls and mean that there were more people wanting him to write songs for them. Today he earns most of his money this way. His website explains his gig as “taking any message, from the super simple to the total- ly complicated, and conveying that message through a heartfelt, fun and quirky song.” He charges $500 to create a produced song and $300 for an acoustic song. He has been hired for product launches, weddings, conferences,

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

Jonathan can’t recall when exactly he first
learned about Creative Commons, but he be-
gan applying CC licenses to his songs and vid-
eos as soon as he discovered the option. “CC
seems 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 be
able 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 to
work,” Jonathan said. “That is how music has
worked since the beginning of time. Our me-
me, 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 more
he 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 cultivates
on Bandcamp, but it isn’t his major focus. “I do
have a core audience that has stuck around for
a really long time, some even longer than I’ve
been doing song-a-day,” he said. “There is also
a transitional aspect that drop in and get what
they need and then move on.” Focusing less on
community building than other artists makes
sense given Jonathan’s primary income source
of writing custom songs for clients.
Jonathan recognizes what comes naturally
to him and leverages those skills. Through the
practice 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,”

Jonathan explained the process of creating a secure 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 to include in the song. He puts all of that into a text file and starts moving things around, cut- ting and pasting until the message starts to come together. The first thing he tries to do is grok the core message and develop the cho- rus. 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 information that doesn’t seem like it should be sung about or doesn’t seem like it lends itself to a song,” he said. “I find that creative challenge really satisfying. I enjoy getting lost in that process.” Jonathan admits that in an ideal world, he would exclusively write the music he wanted to write, rather than what clients hire him to write. But his business model is about capi- talizing on his strengths as a songwriter, and he 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 have lines he won’t cross. He won’t write songs about things he fundamentally does not be- lieve in, and there are times he has turned down jobs on principle. He also won’t stray

too much from his natural style. “My style is
silly, so I can’t really accommodate people who
want 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 com-
mercials for the same reasons; he is best at us-
ing his own unique style rather than mimicking
others.

Jonathan’s song-a-day commitment exempli-
fies 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 the
importance of ritual and action. No amount of
planning can replace the value of simple prac-
tice and just doing. Jonathan Mann’s work is a
living embodiment of these principles.
When he speaks about his work, he talks
about how much the song-a-day process has
changed him. Rather than seeing any given
piece of work as precious and getting stuck
on trying to make it perfect, he has become
comfortable with just doing. If today’s song is a
bust, tomorrow’s song might be better.
Jonathan seems to have this mentality about
his career more generally. He is constantly ex-
perimenting with ways to make a living while
sharing his work as widely as possible, seeing
what sticks. While he has major accomplish-
ments he is proud of, like being in the Guinness
World Records or having his song used by Steve
Jobs, he says he never truly feels successful.
“Success feels like it’s over,” he said. “To a
certain extent, a creative person is not ever
going to feel completely satisfied because then
so much of what drives you would be gone.”

IT SEEMS LIKE SUCH AN OBVIOUS

THING THAT YOU WOULD WANT

YOUR WORK TO BE ABLE TO BE

SHARED

The Noun Project creates and shares visual language. 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 was a student in architecture design school. He’d always 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 sim- ple image or small icon of every single object or concept on the planet. When Edward went on to work at an archi- tecture firm, he had to make a lot of presenta- tion boards for clients. But finding high-quality sources for symbols and icons was difficult. He

couldn’t find any website that could provide
them. Perhaps his idea for creating a library
of icons could actually help people in similar
situations.
With his partner, Sofya Polyakov, he began
collecting symbols for a website and writing a
business plan. Inspiration came from the book
Professor and the Madman , which chronicles
the use of crowdsourcing to create the Ox-
ford 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 reces-
sion, 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 Proj-
ect with a Kickstarter campaign, back when

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

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 to raise $1,500, but in twenty days they got over $14,000. They realized their idea had the po- tential to be something much bigger. They created a platform where symbols and icons could be uploaded, and Edward be- gan recruiting talented designers to contrib- ute their designs, a process he describes as a relatively easy sell. Lots of designers have old drawings just gathering “digital dust” on their hard drives. It’s easy to convince them to final- ly share them with the world. The Noun Project currently has about seven thousand designers from around the world. But not all submissions are accepted. The Noun Project’s quality-review process means that only the best works become part of its collection. They make sure to provide encour- aging, constructive feedback whenever they reject a piece of work, which maintains and builds the relationship they have with their global community of designers.

Creative Commons is an integral part of the Noun 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 busi- ness model around free content. Edward knew he wanted to offer a free visual language while still providing some protection and reward for its contributors. There is a ten- sion 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, which means people can download the icons for free and modify them and even use them commer- cially. The requirement to give attribution to the original creator ensures that the creator can build a reputation and get global recogni- tion for their work. And if they simply want to offer an icon that people can use without hav-

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

Noun Project’s business model and means of
generating revenue have evolved significantly
over time. Their initial plan was to sell T-shirts
with 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 of
giving attribution. Ad agencies (among others)
wanted to keep marketing and presentation
materials clean and free of attribution state-
ments. For Edward, “That’s when our lightbulb
went off.”
They asked their global network of design-
ers whether they’d be open to receiving mod-
est remuneration instead of attribution. De-
signers 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 some
money was pretty exciting for most designers.
The Noun Project first adopted a model
whereby using an icon without giving attribu-
tion would cost $1.99 per icon. The model’s
second iteration added a subscription com-
ponent, where there would be a monthly fee
to access a certain number of icons—ten, fif-
ty, a hundred, or five hundred. However, us-
ers didn’t like these hard-count options. They
preferred to try out many similar icons to see
which worked best before eventually choos-
ing the one they wanted to use. So the Noun
Project moved to an unlimited model, where-
by users have unlimited access to the whole
library for a flat monthly fee. This service is
called NounPro and costs $9.99 per month.
Edward says this model is working well—good
for customers, good for creators, and good for
the platform.
Customers then began asking for an ap-
plication-programming interface (API), which
would allow Noun Project icons and symbols
to be directly accessed from within other ap-
plications. Edward knew that the icons and
symbols would be valuable in a lot of different

contexts and that they couldn’t possibly know all of them in advance, so they built an API with a lot of flexibility. Knowing that most API appli- cations would want to use the icons without giving attribution, the API was built with the aim 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 im- plementation will require you to purchase the API Pro version.

The Noun Project shares revenue with its in- ternational designers. For one-off purchases, the revenue is split 70 percent to the designer and 30 percent to Noun Project.

The revenue from premium purchases (the subscription and API options) is split a little dif- ferently. 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 of per download.) Noun Project’s share is higher

this time as it’s providing more service to the
user.
The Noun Project tries to be completely
transparent about their royalty structure.^2
They tend to over communicate with cre-
ators about it because building trust is the top
priority.
For most creators, contributing to the
Noun Project is not a full-time job but some-
thing they do on the side. Edward categoriz-
es monthly earnings for creators into three
broad categories: enough money to buy beer;
enough to pay the bills; and most successful of
all, enough to pay the rent.

Recently the Noun Project launched a new
app called Lingo. Designers can use Lingo to
organize not just their Noun Project icons and
symbols 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 visuals
with each other and search across their com-
bined 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 month
allows up to twenty-five team members to col-
laborate, 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 rough-
ly one million members have a free account,
but there are still lots of paid accounts coming
from digital designers, advertising and design
agencies, educators, and others who need to
communicate ideas visually.

For Edward, “creating, sharing, and celebrating
the world’s visual language” is the most im-
portant aspect of what they do; it’s their stat-
ed mission. It differentiates them from others
who offer graphics, icons, or clip art.

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

Noun Project creators agree. When sur- veyed on why they participate in the Noun Project, this is how designers rank their rea- sons: 1) to support the Noun Project mission, 2) to promote their own personal brand, and 3) to generate money. It’s striking to see that money comes third, and mission, first. If you want to engage a global network of contribu- tors, it’s important to have a mission beyond making money. In Edward’s view, Creative Commons is cen- tral 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 and fans. Edward told us, “Don’t underestimate the power of a passionate community around your product or your business. They are go- ing to go to bat for you when you’re getting ripped in the media. If you go down the road of 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 need to continue to foster that community through other initiatives and continue to nurture it.” The Noun Project nurtures their creators’ second motivation—promoting a personal brand—by connecting every icon and symbol to the creator’s name and profile page; each profile features their full collection. Users can also 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 gar- dening, human rights) and a list of icons that are needed, which designers are invited to create at the event. The results are vectorized, and added to the Noun Project using CC0 so they can be used by anyone for free. Providing a free version of their product that satisfies a lot of their customers’ needs has actually enabled the Noun Project to build the paid version, using a service-oriented

model. The Noun Project’s success lies in cre-
ating 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 Cre-
ative Commons into their model has been key
to that goal.

Web links
1 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tnp
/building-a-free-collection-of-our-worlds-
visual-sy/description
2 thenounproject.com/handbook
/royalties/#getting_paid
3 thenounproject.com/iconathon/

Cofounded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt in 2012, the London-based Open Data Institute (ODI) offers data-relat- ed training, events, consulting services, and research. For ODI, Creative Commons licens- es are central to making their own business model and their customers’ open. CC BY (At- tribution), CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike), and CC0 (placed in the public domain) all play a 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 their crops, flight time data from airplane compa- nies helps us plan our travel, data on local housing informs city planning. When this data

is not only accurate and timely, but open and
accessible, it opens up new possibilities. Open
data can be a resource businesses use to build
new products and services. It can help govern-
ments measure progress, improve efficiency,
and target investments. It can help citizens im-
prove their lives by better understanding what
is happening around them.
The Open Data Institute’s 2012–17 business
plan starts out by describing its vision to es-
tablish itself as a world-leading center and to
research and be innovative with the opportu-
nities created by the UK government’s open
data policy. (The government was an early pio-
neer in open policy and open-data initiatives.)
It goes on to say that the ODI wants to—

Open Data Institute

The Open Data Institute is an independent nonprofit that connects, equips, and inspires people around the world to innovate with data. Founded in 2012 in the UK.

theodi org

Revenue model: grant and government fund-
ing, charging for custom services, donations

Interview date: November 11, 2015
Interviewee: Jeni Tennison, technical director

Profile written by Paul Stacey

• demonstrate the commercial value of open government data and how open-data poli- cies affect this;
• develop the economic benefits case and business 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 to make open business models, and defining what this means. Jeni Tennison, ODI’s techni- cal director, puts it this way: “There is a whole ecosystem 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 particu- lar focus is to show open data’s potential for revenue. As an independent nonprofit, ODI secured £10 million over five years from the UK gov- ernment via Innovate UK, an agency that pro- motes innovation in science and technology. For this funding, ODI has to secure matching funds from other sources, some of which were met through a $4.75-million investment from the Omidyar Network.

Jeni started out as a developer and technical architect for data.gov.uk, the UK government’s pioneering open-data initiative. She helped make data sets from government depart- ments available as open data. She joined ODI in 2012 when it was just starting up, as one of six people. It now has a staff of about sixty. ODI strives to have half its annual bud- get come from the core UK government and Omidyar grants, and the other half from proj- ect-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

these matching funds in response to market
needs.

On the commercial side, ODI generates fund-
ing through memberships, training, and advi-
sory services.
You can join the ODI as an individual or com-
mercial member. Individual membership is
pay-what-you-can, with options ranging from
£1 to £100. Members receive a newsletter and
related 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 is
divided into two tiers: small to medium size
enterprises and nonprofits at £720 a year, and
corporations and government organizations
at £2,200 a year. Commercial members have
greater opportunities to connect and collab-
orate, explore the benefits of open data, and
unlock new business opportunities. (All mem-
bers are listed on their website.)^2
ODI provides standardized open data train-
ing courses in which anyone can enroll. The
initial idea was to offer an intensive and aca-
demically oriented diploma in open data, but
it quickly became clear there was no market
for that. Instead, they offered a five-day-long
public training course, which has subsequent-
ly been reduced to three days; now the most
popular course is one day long. The fee, in ad-
dition to the time commitment, can be a bar-
rier for participation. Jeni says, “Most of the
people who would be able to pay don’t know
they need it. Most who know they need it can’t
pay.” 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 train-
ing usually emerges through an established
relationship with an organization. The training
program is based on a definition of open-data
knowledge as applicable to the organization
and on the skills needed by their high-level
executives, management, and technical staff.

The training tends to generate high interest and commitment. Education about open data is also a part of ODI’s annual summit event, where curat- ed presentations and speakers showcase the work of ODI and its members across the entire ecosystem. Tickets to the summit are available to the public, and hundreds of people and or- ganizations 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 with technical-data support, technology develop- ment, change management, policies, and oth- er areas. ODI has advised large commercial organizations, small businesses, and interna- tional 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 data from outside their business to get more insight. Businesses can generate value and more effectively pursue their own goals if they open up their own data too. Big data is a hot topic.
• Open innovation. Many large-scale enter- prises are aware they don’t innovate very well. One way they can innovate is to open up their data. ODI encourages them to do so even if it exposes problems and chal- lenges. The key is to invite other people to help while still maintaining organizational autonomy.
• Corporate social responsibility. While this resonates with businesses, ODI cautions against having it be the sole reason for making data open. If a business is just thinking about open data as a way to be transparent and accountable, they can miss out on efficiencies and opportunities.

During their early years, ODI wanted to focus
solely on the United Kingdom. But in their first
year, large delegations of government visitors
from over fifty countries wanted to learn more
about the UK government’s open-data practic-
es and how ODI saw that translating into eco-
nomic 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 region-
al or city level. Hosted by existing (for-profit or
not-for-profit) organizations, they operate lo-
cally but are part of the global network. Each
ODI node adopts the charter, a set of guiding
principles and rules under which ODI oper-
ates. They develop and deliver training, con-
nect people and businesses through member-
ship and events, and communicate open-data
stories from their part of the world. There are
twenty-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 sustain-
able business around open data, offering men-
toring, 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. (In
fact, ODI even operates something called an
Open Data Leaders Network.) For ODI, com-
munity is key to success. They devote signifi-
cant time and effort to build it, not just online
but through face-to-face events.

IT IS PERFECTLY POSSIBLE

TO GENERATE SUSTAINABLE

REVENUE STREAMS THAT DO NOT

RELY ON RESTRICTIVE LICENSING

OF CONTENT, DATA, OR CODE

ODI has created an online tool that organi- zations 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 recog- nized mark that signals that their open data is useful, reliable, accessible, discoverable, and supported.^4 Separate from commercial activities, the ODI 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 database rights and ODI recommends CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC0 for data releases. ODI encourages publishers of data to use Creative Commons licenses rather than creating new “open licens- es” of their own. For ODI, open is at the heart of what they do. They also release any software code they pro- duce 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 li- cense 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 they use. Producing open content, data, and source code helps establish credibility and creates leads for the paid services that they offer. Ac- cording to Jeni, “The biggest lesson we have learned is that it is completely possible to be open, 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-

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 partner- ships, and income that ODI nodes and ODI start-ups have generated since joining the ODI program: £44.5 million
• Total number of active members and nodes across the globe: 1,350
• Total sales since ODI began: £7.44 million
• Total number of unique people reached since 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-464b4b70b-
4554c1a79566214d402739e.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

Opendesk is an online platform that connects furniture designers around the world not just with customers but also with local reg- istered makers who bring the designs to life. Opendesk and the designer receive a portion of every sale that is made by a maker. Cofounders Nick Ierodiaconou and Joni Steiner studied and worked as architects to- gether. 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 licens- ing got them to thinking how the open-source world may interact and apply to physical goods. They sought to design something for their client that was also reproducible. As they put it, they decided to “ship the recipe, but not the goods.” They created the design using soft- ware, put it under an open license, and had it manufactured locally near the client. This was

the start of the idea for Opendesk. The idea
for Wikihouse—another open project dedicat-
ed to accessible housing for all—started as dis-
cussions around the same table. The two proj-
ects ultimately went on separate paths, with
Wikihouse 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 viabil-
ity of distributed manufacturing. No one was
doing it in a way that was even close to realistic
or competitive. The design community had the
intent, but fulfilling this vision was still a long
way away.
And now this sector is emerging, and Nick
and Joni are highly interested in the commer-
cialization aspects of it. As part of coming up

Opendesk.

Opendesk is a for-profit company offering an online platform that connects furniture de- signers around the world with customers and local 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

with a business model, they began investigat- ing 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 own- ership? In the end, they decided there was no need to reinvent the wheel and settled on us- ing Creative Commons. When designing the Opendesk system, they had two goals. They wanted anyone, any- where in the world, to be able to download de- signs so that they could be made locally, and they wanted a viable model that benefited designers when their designs were sold. Com- ing up with a business model was going to be complex. They gave a lot of thought to three an- gles—the potential for social sharing, allowing designers to choose their license, and the im- pact these choices would have on the business model. In support of social sharing, Opendesk ac- tively 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 proprietary or choose from the full suite of Creative Com- mons licenses, deciding for themselves how open or closed they want to be. For the most part, designers love the idea of 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 profiling the designers.^1 While designers are largely OK with person- al sharing, there is a concern that someone will take the design and manufacture the furniture in bulk, with the designer not getting any ben- efits. So most Opendesk designers choose the Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BY- NC). Anyone can download a design and make it themselves, provided it’s for noncommer- cial use — and there have been many, many downloads. Or users can buy the product

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 accord-
ing to the specifications in the design file.
Makers benefit from being part of
Opendesk’s network. Making furniture for
local customers is paid work, and Opendesk
generates business for them. Joni said, “Find-
ing 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 for-
ward.” Opendesk now has relationships with
hundreds of makers in countries all around
the 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 di-
rectly from a registered maker, they pay:

• the manufacturing cost as set by the maker (this covers material and labour costs for the product to be manufactured and any extra assembly costs charged by the mak- er)

• a design fee for the designer (a design fee that is paid to the designer every time their design is used)

• a percentage fee to the Opendesk platform (this supports the infrastructure and ongo- ing development of the platform that helps us build out our marketplace)

• a percentage fee to the channel through which the sale is made (at the moment this is Opendesk, but in the future we aim to open this up to third-party sellers who can sell 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 in some cases may be paid to a third-party delivery partner)

• charges for any additional services the cus- tomer 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 and maker 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 break- down of fees including the manufacturing cost, design fee, Opendesk platform fee and channel fees. If a customer opts to buy by get- ting in touch directly with a registered local maker using a downloaded Opendesk file, the maker is responsible for ensuring the design fee, Opendesk platform fee and channel fees are included in any quote at the time of sale. Percentage fees are always based on the un- derlying manufacturing cost and are typically apportioned as follows:

• manufacturing cost: fabrication, finishing and any other costs as set by the maker (excluding any services like delivery or on- site assembly)
• design fee: 8 percent of the manufacturing cost - platform fee: 12 percent of the manufac- turing cost - channel fee: 18 percent of the manufactur- ing cost - sales tax: as applicable (depends on prod- uct and location)

Opendesk shares revenue with their com-
munity of designers. According to Nick and Joni,
a typical designer fee is around 2.5 percent, so
Opendesk’s 8 percent is more generous, and
providing a higher value to the designer.
The Opendesk website features stories of
designers and makers. Denis Fuzii published
the design for the Valovi Chair from his studio
in São Paulo. His designs have been down-
loaded over five thousand times in ninety-five
countries. I.J. CNC Services is Ian Jinks, a pro-
fessional 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 nar-
row niche—primarily office furniture of a cer-
tain simple aesthetic, which uses only one
type of material and one manufacturing tech-
nique. This allows them to be more strategic
and more disruptive in the market, by getting
things to market quickly with competitive pric-
es. It also reflects their vision of creating repro-
ducible and functional pieces.
On their website, Opendesk describes what
they do as “open making”: “Designers get a
global distribution channel. Makers get prof-
itable jobs and new customers. You get de-
signer products without the designer price
tag, a more social, eco-friendly alternative to
mass-production and an affordable way to
buy custom-made products.”

Nick and Joni say that customers like the fact that the furniture has a known prove- nance. People really like that their furniture was designed by a certain international de- signer 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 usual mass-produced items from a store.

Nick and Joni are taking a community-based approach to define and evolve Opendesk and the “open making” business model. They’re engaging thought leaders and practitioners to define this new movement. They have a separate Open Making site, which includes a manifesto, a field guide, and an invitation to get involved in the Open Making community.^4 People can submit ideas and discuss the prin- ciples and business practices they’d like to see used. Nick and Joni talked a lot with us about in- tellectual property (IP) and commercializa- tion. Many of their designers fear the idea that someone could take one of their design files and make and sell infinite number of pieces of furniture with it. As a consequence, most Opendesk designers choose the Attribu- tion-NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC).

Opendesk established a set of principles for
what their community considers commercial
and noncommercial use. Their website states:

It is unambiguously commercial use when any-
one:

• charges a fee or makes a profit when mak- ing an Opendesk
• sells (or bases a commercial service on) an Opendesk

It follows from this that noncommercial use is
when you make an Opendesk yourself, with
no intention to gain commercial advantage or
monetary compensation. For example, these
qualify as noncommercial:

• you are an individual with your own CNC machine, or access to a shared CNC ma- chine, 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 purposes or 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 have
found that people tend to comply with the
wishes 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 stakehold-
ers—designers, channels, manufacturers, and
customers. For them, the value Opendesk gen-
erates hangs off “open,” not IP.

YOU GET DESIGNER PRODUCTS

WITHOUT THE DESIGNER PRICE

TAG, A MORE SOCIAL, ECO-

FRIENDLY ALTERNATIVE TO

MASSPRODUCTION, AND AN

AFFORDABLE WAY TO BUY

CUSTOM-MADE PRODUCTS

The mission of Opendesk is about relocaliz- ing manufacturing, which changes the way we think about how goods are made. Commercial- ization 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 on honesty, transparency, and inclusivity. As Nick and Joni describe it, they put ideas out there that get traction and then have faith in people.

Web links 1 http://www.opendesk.cc/designers 2 http://www.opendesk.cc/open-making/makers/ 3 http://www.opendesk.cc/open-making/join 4 openmaking.is

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 Engi- neering 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 share and freely adapt educational materials such as courses, books, and reports. Today, Con- nexions (now called OpenStax CNX) is one of the world’s best libraries of customizable ed- ucational materials, all licensed with Creative Commons and available to anyone, anywhere, anytime—for free. In 2008, while in a senior leadership role at WebAssign and looking at ways to reduce the risk that came with relying on publishers, David Harris began investigating open edu- cational resources (OER) and discovered Con-

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 came
on 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 understand-
ing of the best practices of publishing along
with where publishers have inefficiencies. In
David’s view, peer review and high standards
for quality are critically important if you want
to scale easily. Books have to have logical scope
and sequence, they have to exist as a whole
and not in pieces, and they have to be easy to
find. The working hypothesis for the launch
of OpenStax was to professionally produce a
turnkey textbook by investing effort up front,
with the expectation that this would lead to

OpenStax

OpenStax is a nonprofit that provides free, openly licensed textbooks for high-enroll- ment introductory college courses and Ad- vanced Placement courses. Founded in 2012 in the U.S.

www openstaxcollege org

Revenue model: grant funding, charging for
custom services, charging for physical copies
(textbook sales)

Interview date: December 16, 2015
Interviewee: David Harris, editor-in-chief

Profile written by Paul Stacey

rapid growth through easy downstream adop- tions by faculty and students. In 2012, OpenStax College launched as a nonprofit with the aim of producing high-qual- ity, peer-reviewed full-color textbooks that would be available for free for the twenty-five most heavily attended college courses in the nation. Today they are fast approaching that number. There is data that proves the success of their original hypothesis on how many stu- dents 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 (CC BY) licensed, and each textbook is available as a PDF, an e-book, or web pages. Those who want a physical copy can buy one for an af- fordable price. Given the cost of education and student debt in North America, free or very low-cost textbooks are very appealing. Open- Stax encourages students to talk to their pro- fessor and librarians about these textbooks and to advocate for their use.

Teachers are invited to try out a single chap- ter 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 unlimit- ed access. And with the CC BY license, teachers are free to delete chapters, make changes, and customize 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 a textbook, OpenStax also provides slide pre- sentations, test banks, answer keys, and so on. Institutions can stand out by offering stu- dents a lower-cost education through the use of OpenStax textbooks; there’s even a text- book-savings calculator they can use to see how much students would save. OpenStax keeps a running list of institutions that have adopted their textbooks.^2

Unlike traditional publishers’ monolithic ap-
proach of controlling intellectual property, dis-
tribution, and so many other aspects, Open-
Stax has adopted a model that embraces open
licensing and relies on an extensive network of
partners.

Up-front funding of a professionally produced
all-color turnkey textbook is expensive. For
this part of their model, OpenStax relies on
philanthropy. They have initially been funded
by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,
the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation, the 20 Million
Minds Foundation, the Maxfield Foundation,
the Calvin K. Kazanjian Foundation, and Rice
University. To develop additional titles and
supporting technology is probably still going
to 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 con-
tent from OpenStax and adds features that
it can create revenue from. For example, We-
bAssign, an online homework and assessment
tool, takes the physics book and adds algo-
rithmically generated physics problems, with
problem-specific feedback, detailed solutions,
and tutorial support. WebAssign resources are
available to students for a fee.
Another example is Odigia, who has turned
OpenStax books into interactive learning ex-
periences and created additional tools to
measure and promote student engagement.
Odigia licenses its learning platform to institu-
tions. Partners like Odigia and WebAssign give
a 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 these
funds.
In David’s view, this approach lets the mar-
ket operate at peak efficiency. OpenStax’s
partners don’t have to worry about developing
textbook content, freeing them up from those

development costs and letting them focus on what they do best. With OpenStax textbooks available at no cost, they can provide their services at a lower cost—not free, but still sav- ing students money. OpenStax benefits not only by receiving mission-support fees but through free publicity and marketing. Open- Stax doesn’t have a sales force; partners are out there showcasing their materials. OpenStax’s cost of sales to acquire a single student is very, very low and is a fraction of what traditional players in the market face. This year, Tyton Partners is actually evaluating the costs of sales for an OER effort like Open- Stax in comparison with incumbents. David looks forward to sharing these findings with the community.

While OpenStax books are available online for free, many students still want a print copy. Through a partnership with a print and courier company, OpenStax offers a complete solution that scales. OpenStax sells tens of thousands of print books. The price of an OpenStax so- ciology textbook is about twenty-eight dollars, a fraction of what sociology textbooks usually cost. 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 of College Stores Corporation) to provide print versions of their textbooks in the stores. While the overall cost of the textbook is significant- ly less than a traditional textbook, bookstores can still make a profit on sales. Sometimes stu- dents take the savings they have from the low- er-priced book and use it to buy other things in the bookstore. And OpenStax is trying to break

the 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 locally
funded by institutions or government min-
istries. In David’s view, this results in content
that has high local value but is infrequently ad-
opted 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 the
start. 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 is
what David calls the acquisition model, where
OpenStax purchases the rights from a pub-
lisher or author for an already published book
and 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, a
good example being their biology book.
The process is similar for both models. First
they look at the scope and sequence of exist-
ing textbooks. They ask questions like what
does the customer need? Where are students
having challenges? Then they identify poten-
tial authors and put them through a rigorous
evaluation—only one in ten authors make it
through. OpenStax selects a team of authors
who come together to develop a template for
a chapter and collectively write the first draft
(or revise it, in the acquisitions model). (Open-
Stax 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 chap-
ter. A second draft is generated, with artists
producing illustrations and visuals to go along
with the text. The book is then copyedited to

MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR EVERY

STUDENT WHO WANTS ACCESS TO

EDUCATION TO GET IT

ensure grammatical correctness and a singu- lar voice. Finally, it goes into production and through a final proofread. The whole process is very time-consuming. All the people involved in this process are paid. 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 tradition- al publishing model, but that is only maybe 5 percent of all authors. From David’s perspec- tive, 95 percent of all authors do better under the OER 2.0 model, as there is no risk to them and they earn all the money up front.

David thinks of the Attribution license (CC BY) as the “innovation license.” It’s core to the mis- sion of OpenStax, letting people use their text- books 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 of customization 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. Tra- ditional publishers rely on copyright to prevent others from making copies and heavily invest in digital rights management to ensure their books aren’t shared. By using CC BY, OpenStax avoids having to deal with digital rights man- agement and its costs. OpenStax books can be 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 re- cent press kit:

• Books published: 23
• Students who have used OpenStax: 1.6 million - 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, and 344 colleges and universities outside the U.S.)

While OpenStax has to date been focused
on the United States, there is overseas adop-
tion especially in the science, technology, en-
gineering, and math (STEM) fields. Large scale
adoption in the United States is seen as a nec-
essary precursor to international interest.
OpenStax has primarily focused on intro-
ductory-level college courses where there is
high enrollment, but they are starting to think
about verticals —a broad offering for a specific
group or need. David thinks it would be ter-
rific if OpenStax could provide access to free
textbooks through the entire curriculum of a
nursing degree, for example.
Finally, for OpenStax success is not just
about the adoption of their textbooks and stu-
dent savings. There is a human aspect to the
work that is hard to quantify but incredibly im-
portant. They get emails from students saying
how OpenStax saved them from making dif-
ficult choices like buying food or a textbook.
OpenStax would also like to assess the impact
their books have on learning efficiency, per-
sistence, and completion. By building an open
business model based on Creative Commons,
OpenStax is making it possible for every stu-
dent 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

Since the beginning of her career, Amanda Palmer has been on what she calls a “journey with 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 and directly feel the reverberations of their artistic gifts to the community, and make a living do- ing that.” While she seems to have successfully found that sweet spot for herself, Amanda is the first to acknowledge there is no silver bullet. She thinks the digital age is both an exciting and frustrating time for creators. “On the one hand, we have this beautiful shareability,” Amanda said. “On the other, you’ve got a bunch of con-

fused 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 antique
wedding gown, paint her face white, stand on
a stack of milk crates, and hand out flowers
to strangers as part of a silent dramatic per-
formance. She collected money in a hat. Most
people walked by her without stopping, but an
essential few stopped to watch and drop some
money into her hat to show their appreciation.
Rather than dwelling on the majority of peo-
ple who ignored her, she felt thankful for those
who stopped. “All I needed was . . . some peo -
ple,” she wrote in her book. “Enough people.

Amanda Palmer

Amanda Palmer is a musician, artist, and writ- er. Based in the U.S.

amandapalmer net

Revenue model: crowdfunding (subscription-
based), pay-what-you-want, charging for
physical copies (book and album sales), charg-
ing for in-person version (performances),
selling merchandise

Interview date: December 15, 2015

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

Enough to make it worth coming back the next day, enough people to help me make rent and put food on the table. Enough so I could keep making art.” Amanda has come a long way from her street-performing days, but her career re- mains dominated by that same sentiment— finding ways to reach “her crowd” and feeling gratitude when she does. With her band the Dresden 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 never what Amanda and the Dresden Dolls set out to do. After leaving the record label in 2008, she began experimenting with different ways to make a living. She released music directly to the public without involving a middle man, re- leasing digital files on a “pay what you want” basis and selling CDs and vinyl. She also made money from live performances and merchan- dise sales. Eventually, in 2012 she decided to try her hand at the sort of crowdfunding we know 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 suc- cessful Kickstarter projects of all time. Today, Amanda has switched gears away from crowdfunding for specific projects to in- stead getting consistent financial support from her fan base on Patreon, a crowdfunding site that allows artists to get recurring donations from fans. More than eight thousand people have signed up to support her so she can cre- ate 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-ShareA- like license (CC BY-NC-SA). Making her music and art available under Creative Commons licensing undoubtedly lim- its 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 before

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 the
band 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 and
build upon her music. In The Art of Asking , she
wrote that some of her fans’ unofficial videos
using her music surpass the official videos
in number of views on YouTube. Rather than
seeing this sort of thing as competition, Aman-
da 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 ca-
reer, she and the band would throw concerts
at house parties. As the gatherings grew, the
line between fans and friends was complete-
ly blurred. “Not only did most our early fans
know where I lived and where we practiced,
but most of them had also been in my kitch-
en,” Amanda wrote in The Art of Asking.
Even though her fan base is now huge and
global, she continues to seek this sort of hu-
man connection with her fans. She seeks out
face-to-face contact with her fans every chance
she can get. Her hugely successful Kickstart-
er featured fifty concerts at house parties for
backers. She spends hours in the signing line
after shows. It helps that Amanda has the kind
of dynamic, engaging personality that instant-
ly draws people to her, but a big component of

her ability to connect with people is her will- ingness to listen. “Listening fast and caring im- mediately is a skill unto itself,” Amanda wrote. Another part of the connection fans feel with Amanda is how much they know about her life. Rather than trying to craft a public per- sona 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 kind of trust in her fans—the trust it takes to be truly honest—begets trust from her fans in re- turn. When she meets fans for the first time af- ter a show, they can legitimately feel like they know her. “With social media, we’re so concerned with the picture looking palatable and consumable that we forget that being human and show- ing the flaws and exposing the vulnerability actually create a deeper connection than just looking fantastic,” Amanda said. “Everything in our culture is telling us otherwise. But my ex- perience has shown me that the risk of making yourself vulnerable is almost always worth it.” Not only does she disclose intimate details of her life to them, she sleeps on their couch- es, listens to their stories, cries with them. In short, she treats her fans like friends in nearly every possible way, even when they are com- plete strangers. This mentality—that fans are friends—is completely intertwined with Amanda’s success as an artist. It is also inter- twined with her use of Creative Commons li- censes. Because that is what you do with your friends—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 sup- port—through pay-what-you-want donations, Kickstarter, Patreon, or even asking them to lend a hand at a concert. As Amanda explains it, crowdfunding (which is really what all of these different things are) is about asking for support from people who know and trust you.

People who feel personally invested in your
success.
“When you openly, radically trust people,
they not only take care of you, they become
your allies, your family,” she wrote. There real-
ly is a feeling of solidarity within her core fan
base. From the beginning, Amanda and her
band encouraged people to dress up for their
shows. They consciously cultivated a feeling of
belonging to their “weird little family.”
This sort of intimacy with fans is not possi-
ble or even desirable for every creator. “I don’t
take for granted that I happen to be the type
of person who loves cavorting with strangers,”
Amanda said. “I recognize that it’s not neces-
sarily everyone’s idea of a good time. Every-
one does it differently. Replicating what I have
done won’t work for others if it isn’t joyful to
them. It’s about finding a way to channel ener-
gy in a way that is joyful to you.”

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 TELL

YOU THAT WHAT YOU DO IS

GENUINELY OF VALUE TO THEM

Yet while Amanda joyfully interacts with her fans and involves them in her work as much as possible, she does keep one job primarily to herself—writing the music. She loves the cre- ativity 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 are what initially draw people to Amanda Palmer. It is only once she has connected to people through her music that she can then begin to build ties with them on a more personal level, both in person and online. In her book, Aman- da describes it as casting a net. It starts with the art and then the bond strengthens with human connection. For Amanda, the entire point of being an art- ist is to establish and maintain this connection. “It sounds so corny,” she said, “but my experi- ence 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 capi- talist 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 a ten-dollar bill, usually what they are saying is that 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 not that different from what she did as a young street performer. She shares her music and other 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

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) began in 2000 when three leading scientists—Harold E. Varmus, Patrick O. Brown, and Michael Eisen— started an online petition. They were calling for scientists to stop submitting papers to journals that didn’t make the full text of their papers 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 pub- lishing operation to do just what the petition

promised. With start-up grant support from
the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation,
PLOS was launched to provide new open-ac-
cess journals for biomedicine, with research
articles being released under Attribution (CC
BY) licenses.
Traditionally, academic publishing begins
with an author submitting a manuscript to a
publisher. After in-house technical and ethi-
cal considerations, the article is then peer-re-
viewed to determine if the quality of the work
is acceptable for publishing. Once accepted,

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 in 2000 in the U.S.

plos org

Revenue model: charging content creators
an author processing charge to be featured in
the journal

Interview date: March 7, 2016
Interviewee: Louise Page, publisher

Profile written by Paul Stacey

the publisher takes the article through the process of copyediting, typesetting, and even- tual 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 to read 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-ap- pointed agencies, that is, with public funds. It’s unjust that the public who funded the research would be required to pay again to access the results. Not everyone can afford the ever-es- calating subscription fees publishers charge, especially when library budgets are being re- duced. Restricting access to the results of sci- entific research slows the dissemination of this research and advancement of the field. It was time for a new model.

That new model became known as open ac- cess. That is, free and open availability on the Internet. Open-access research articles are not behind a paywall and do not require a log- in. A key benefit of open access is that it allows people to freely use, copy, and distribute the articles, as they are primarily published under an Attribution (CC BY) license (which only re- quires the user to provide appropriate attri- bution). And more importantly, policy makers, clinicians, entrepreneurs, educators, and stu- dents 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 access the 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 man- agement, journal production, online hosting,

and support for discovery. Fees are per article
and are billed upon acceptance for publish-
ing. There are no additional charges based on
word length, figures, or other elements.
Calculating the article-processing charge
involves taking all the costs associated with
publishing the journal and determining a cost
per article that collectively recovers costs. For
PLOS’s journals in biology, medicine, genetics,
computational biology, neglected tropical dis-
eases, and pathogens, the article-processing
charge ranges from $2,250 to $2,900. Arti-
cle-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 af-
ford the article-processing charges.

Louise identifies marketing as one area of
big difference between PLOS and traditional
journal publishers. Traditional journals have
to invest heavily in staff, buildings, and infra-
structure to market their journal and convince
customers to subscribe. Restricting access
to subscribers means that tools for manag-
ing 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 no
need for these massive expenses; the articles
are free, open, and accessible to all upon pub-
lication. 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 pro-
moting their research directly to the research
community 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 it
very clear what rights are associated with the
content and provides a safe way for research-
ers to make their work available while ensuring

they get recognition (appropriate attribution). For PLOS, all of this aligns with how they think research content should be published and dis- seminated. PLOS also has a broad open-data policy. To get their research paper published, PLOS au- thors must also make their data available in a public repository and provide a data-availabil- ity statement. Business-operation costs associated with the open-access model still largely follow the existing publishing model. PLOS journals are online only, but the editorial, peer-review, pro- duction, 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 other premier 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 as- sociated with it. PLOS journals rank high, even though they are relatively new. The promotion and tenure of researchers are partially based how many times other re- searchers cite their articles. Louise says when researchers want to discover and read the work of others in their field, they go to an on- line aggregator or search engine, and not typi- cally to a particular journal. The CC BY licensing of PLOS research articles ensures easy access for readers and generates more discovery and citations for authors. Louise believes that open access has been a huge success, progressing from a movement led by a small cadre of researchers to some- thing that is now widespread and used in some form by every journal publisher. PLOS has had a big impact. In 2012 to 2014, they published more open-access articles than BioMed Cen- tral, the original open-access publisher, or any- one else. PLOS further disrupted the traditional jour- nal-publishing model by pioneering the con- cept of a megajournal. The PLOS ONE mega- journal, launched in 2006, is an open-access

peer-reviewed academic journal that is much
larger than a traditional journal, publishing
thousands of articles per year and benefit-
ing from economies of scale. PLOS ONE has a
broad scope, covering science and medicine as
well as social sciences and the humanities. The
review and editorial process is less subjective.
Articles are accepted for publication based
on whether they are technically sound rath-
er than perceived importance or relevance.
This is very important in the current debate
about the integrity and reproducibility of re-
search because negative or null results can
then be published as well, which are general-
ly rejected by traditional journals. PLOS ONE ,
like all the PLOS journals, is online only with
no print version. PLOS passes on the financial
savings accrued through economies of scale
to researchers and the public by lowering the
article-processing charges, which are below
that of other journals. PLOS ONE is the biggest
journal in the world and has really set the bar
for publishing academic journal articles on a
large scale. Other publishers see the value of
the PLOS ONE model and are now offering their
own multidisciplinary forums for publishing all
sound science.

Louise outlined some other aspects of the
research-journal business model PLOS is ex-
perimenting with, describing each as a kind of
slider that could be adjusted to change current
practice.
One slider is time to publication. Time to
publication may shorten as journals get bet-
ter at providing quicker decisions to authors.
However, there is always a trade-off with scale,
as the bigger the volume of articles, the more
time the approval process inevitably takes.
Peer review is another part of the process
that could change. It’s possible to redefine
what peer review actually is, when to review,
and what constitutes the final article for pub-
lication. Louise talked about the potential to
shift to an open-review process, placing the
emphasis on transparency rather than dou-

ble-blind reviews. Louise thinks we’re moving into a direction where it’s actually beneficial for an author to know who is reviewing their paper and for the reviewer to know their review will be public. An open-review process can also en- sure everyone gets credit; right now, credit is limited to the publisher and author. Louise says research with negative out- comes is almost as important as positive re- sults. If journals published more research with negative outcomes, we’d learn from what didn’t work. It could also reduce how much the research wheel gets reinvented around the world. Another adjustable practice is the sharing of articles at early preprint stages. Publication of research in a peer-reviewed journal can take a long time because articles must undergo ex- tensive peer review. The need to quickly circu- late current results within a scientific communi- ty has led to a practice of distributing pre-print documents that have not yet undergone peer review. Preprints broaden the peer-review pro- cess, 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 au- thor concerns over ensuring their primacy of being first to come up with findings based on their research. Other researches may see find- ings the preprint author has not yet thought of. However, preprints help researchers get their discoveries 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 also change. The idea of a research article as print- ed, 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. Even the size of what gets published could change. With these changes the current form factor for what constitutes a research article would un- dergo transformation. As journals scale up, and new journals are introduced, more and more information is be-

ing pushed out to readers, making the experi-
ence feel like drinking from a fire hose. To help
mitigate this, PLOS aggregates and curates
content from PLOS journals and their network
of blogs.^1 It also offers something called Arti-
cle-Level Metrics, which helps users assess re-
search most relevant to the field itself, based
on indicators like usage, citations, social book-
marking and dissemination activity, media and
blog coverage, discussions, and ratings.^2 Louise
believes that the journal model could evolve to
provide a more friendly and interactive user
experience, including a way for readers to com-
municate with authors.
The big picture for PLOS going forward is to
combine and adjust these experimental prac-
tices in ways that continue to improve acces-
sibility and dissemination of research, while
ensuring its integrity and reliability. The ways
they interlink are complex. The process of
change and adjustment is not linear. PLOS sees
itself as a very flexible publisher interested in
exploring all the permutations research-pub-
lishing can take, with authors and readers who
are open to experimentation.

For PLOS, success is not about revenue. Suc-
cess is about proving that scientific research
can be communicated rapidly and economical-
ly at scale, for the benefit of researchers and
society. 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 dis-
coverable, available, and reproducible for the
advancement of science.

Web links
1 collections.plos.org
2 plos.org/article-level-metrics

The Rijksmuseum, a national museum in the Netherlands dedicated to art and history, has been housed in its current building since 1885. The monumental building enjoyed more than 125 years of intensive use before needing a thorough overhaul. In 2003, the museum was closed for renovations. Asbestos was found in the roof, and although the museum was scheduled to be closed for only three to four years, renovations ended up taking ten years. During this time, the collection was moved to a different part of Amsterdam, which created a physical distance with the curators. Out of necessity, they started digitally photographing the collection and creating metadata (informa- tion about each object to put into a database). With the renovations going on for so long, the museum became largely forgotten by the pub- lic. Out of these circumstances emerged a new and more open model for the museum.

By the time Lizzy Jongma joined the Rijksmu-
seum 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 larg-
er space, it still wouldn’t be able to show very
much of the whole collection—eight thousand
of over one million works representing just 1
percent. Staff began exploring ways to express
themselves, to have something to show for all
of the work they had been doing. The Rijksmu-
seum 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 the
entire collection online.
It was effective but a bit boring. It was just
data. 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.

Rijksmuseum.

The Rijksmuseum is a Dutch national muse- um dedicated to art and history. Founded in 1800 in the Netherlands

www rijksmuseum nl

Revenue model: grants and government
funding, charging for in-person version
(museum admission), selling merchandise

Interview date: December 11, 2015
Interviewee: Lizzy Jongma, the data manager of the collections information department

Profile written by Paul Stacey

What about giving online access to digital rep- resentations of the one hundred most import- ant pieces in the Rijksmuseum collection? That eventually led to why not put the whole collec- tion 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 the first major adopter, using CC0 to release meta- data about their collection and the public do- main mark for millions of digital works in their collection. Lizzy says the Rijksmuseum initial- ly found this change in business practice a bit scary, but at the same time it stimulated even more discussion on whether the Rijksmuseum should follow suit. They realized that they don’t “own” the col- lection and couldn’t realistically monitor and enforce compliance with the restrictive licens- ing terms they currently had in place. For ex- ample, many copies and versions of Vermeer’s Milkmaid (part of their collection) were already online, 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 waste of time to hunt down people who use the Ri- jksmuseum collection. And anyway, restricting access meant the people they were frustrating the most were schoolkids.

In 2011 the Rijksmuseum began making their digital photos of works known to be free of copyright available online, using Creative Commons CC0 to place works in the public domain. A medium-resolution image was of- fered for free, but a high-resolution version cost forty euros. People started paying, but Lizzy says getting the money was frequently a

nightmare, especially from overseas custom-
ers. The administrative costs often offset rev-
enue, and income above costs was relatively
low. In addition, having to pay for an image of
a work in the public domain from a collection
owned by the Dutch government (i.e., paid for
by the public) was contentious and frustrating
for some. Lizzy says they had lots of fierce de-
bates about what to do.
In 2013 the Rijksmuseum changed its busi-
ness model. They Creative Commons licensed
their highest-quality images and released
them online for free. Digitization still cost mon-
ey, however; they decided to define discrete
digitization projects and find sponsors willing
to 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 the
entire collection online.
Releasing these high-quality images for free
reduced the number of poor-quality images
that were proliferating. The high-quality image
of Vermeer’s Milkmaid , for example, is down-
loaded 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, re-
ceiving ten to eleven million views per month.
This extends Rijksmuseum’s reach far beyond
the scope of its website. Sharing these imag-
es online creates what Lizzy calls the “Mona
Lisa effect,” where a work of art becomes so
famous that people want to see it in real life by
visiting 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 the
government. But like many museums, it must
generate the rest of the funding through other
means. The admission fee has long been a way

to generate revenue generation, including for the Rijksmuseum. As museums create a digital presence for themselves and put up digital representations of their collection online, there’s frequently a worry that it will lead to a drop in actual phys- ical visits. For the Rijksmuseum, this has not turned out to be the case. Lizzy told us the Ri- jksmuseum used to get about one million vis- itors a year before closing and now gets more than two million a year. Making the collection available online has generated publicity and acts as a form of marketing. The Creative Com- mons mark encourages reuse as well. When the image is found on protest leaflets, milk cartons, and children’s toys, people also see what museum the image comes from and this increases 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 oth- er museum’s. In addition to redesigning their main website to be mobile friendly and re- sponsive to devices like the iPad, the Rijksmu- seum also created the Rijksstudio, where us- ers 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 col- lection. Users can zoom in to any work and even clip small parts of images they like. Ri- jksstudio is a bit like Pinterest. You can “like” works and compile your personal favorites, and you can share them with friends or down- load them free of charge. All the images in the Rijksstudio are copyright and royalty free, and users are encouraged to use them as they like, for private or even commercial purposes. Users have created over 276,000 Rijksstu- dios, generating their own themed virtual exhibitions on a wide variety of topics rang- ing from tapestries to ugly babies and birds. Sets of images have also been created for ed-

ucational purposes including use for school
exams.
Some contemporary artists who have works
in the Rijksmuseum collection contacted them
to ask why their works were not included in the
Rijksstudio. The answer was that contempo-
rary artists’ works are still bound by copyright.
The Rijksmuseum does encourage contempo-
rary artists to use a Creative Commons license
for their works, usually a CC BY-SA license
(Attribution-ShareAlike), or a CC BY-NC (Attri-
bution-NonCommercial) if they want to pre-
clude 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 stim-
ulates entrepreneurial activity. The line be-
tween creative and commercial can be blurry.
As Lizzy says, even Rembrandt was commer-
cial, making his livelihood from selling his
paintings. The Rijksmuseum encourages en-
trepreneurial commercial use of the images
in Rijksstudio. They’ve even partnered with
the DIY marketplace Etsy to inspire people to
sell their creations. One great example you
can find on Etsy is a kimono designed by An-
gie Johnson, who used an image of an elabo-
rate cabinet along with an oil painting by Jan
Asselijn called The Threatened Swan.^3
In 2013 the Rijksmuseum organized their
first 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 to

RIJKSMUSEUM IMAGES ARE

NOW USED IN THOUSANDS OF

WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES, RECEIVING

TEN TO ELEVEN MILLION VIEWS

PER MONTH EXTENDING REACH

FAR BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THEIR

OWN WEBSITE

make new creative designs. A jury of renowned designers and curators selects ten finalists and three winners. The final award comes with a prize of €10,000. The second edition in 2015 attracted a staggering 892 top-class entries. Some award winners end up with their work sold through the Rijksmuseum store, such as the 2014 entry featuring makeup based on a specific color scheme of a work of art.^5 The Ri- jksmuseum has been thrilled with the results. Entries range from the fun to the weird to the inspirational. The third international edition of the Rijksstudio Award started in September 2016. For the next iteration of the Rijksstudio, the Rijksmuseum is considering an upload tool, for people to upload their own works of art, and enhanced social elements so users can inter- act with each other more.

Going with a more open business model gen- erated 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, along with the many improvements to the Rijksmu- seum’s website, dramatically increased visits to their website from thirty-five thousand vis- its 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 inter- national day celebrating animals, they ran a successful 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 that while museum curators know a lot about the works 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 spe- cies of crane bird that was unknown to the sci- entific community at the time of the painting.

For the Rijksmuseum, adopting an open busi-
ness model was scary. They came up with
many worst-case scenarios, imagining all kinds
of awful things people might do with the mu-
seum’s works. But Lizzy says those fears did
not come true because “ninety-nine percent of
people have respect for great art.” Many mu-
seums think they can make a lot of money by
selling things related to their collection. But in
Lizzy’s experience, museums are usually bad at
selling things, and sometimes efforts to gener-
ate a small amount of money block something
much bigger—the real value that the collection
has. For Lizzy, clinging to small amounts of rev-
enue is being penny-wise but pound-foolish.
For the Rijksmuseum, a key lesson has been to
never 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 their
experience: “Give away; get something in re-
turn. Generosity makes people happy to join
you and help out.”

Web links
1 http://www.europeana.eu/portal/en
2 http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio
3 http://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/175696771
/fringe-kimono-silk-kimono-kimono-robe
4 http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio-award;
the 2014 award: http://www.rijksmuseum.nl
/en/rijksstudio-award-2014;
the 2015 award: http://www.rijksmuseum.nl
/en/rijksstudio-award-2015
5 http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/rijksstudio
/142328--nominees-rijksstudio-award
/creaties/ba595afe-452d-46bd-9c8c
-48dcbdd7f0a4

In 2013, Shareable faced an impasse. The non- profit online publication had helped start a sharing movement four years prior, but over time, they watched one part of the movement stray from its ideals. As giants like Uber and Airbnb gained ground, attention began to cen- ter on the “sharing economy” we know now— profit-driven, transactional, and loaded with venture-capital money. Leaders of corporate start-ups in this domain invited Shareable to advocate for them. The magazine faced a choice: ride the wave or stand on principle. As an organization, Shareable decided to draw a line in the sand. In 2013, the cofounder and 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-

patory budgeting (where citizens decide how
a public budget is spent), cooperatives, and
more. He wrote, “It’s not so much that collab-
orative consumption is dead, it’s more that it
risks dying as it gets absorbed by the ‘Borg.’”
Neal said their public critique of the corpo-
rate sharing economy defined what Shareable
was and is. He does not think the magazine
would still be around had they chosen differ-
ently. “We would have gotten another type of
audience, but it would have spelled the end of
us,” he said. “We are a small, mission-driven
organization. We would never have been able
to weather the criticism that Airbnb and Uber
are getting now.”
Interestingly, impassioned supporters are
only a small sliver of Shareable’s total au-
dience. Most are casual readers who come
across a Shareable story because it happens
to align with a project or interest they have.

Shareable.

Shareable is an online magazine about sharing. Founded in 2009 in the U.S.

www shareable net

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

Interview date: February 24, 2016
Interviewee: Neal Gorenflo, cofounder and executive editor

Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

But choosing principles over the possibility of riding the coattails of the major corporate players in the sharing space saved Shareable’s credibility. Although they became detached from the corporate sharing economy, the on- line magazine became the voice of the “real sharing economy” and continued to grow their audience.

Shareable is a magazine, but the content they publish is a means to furthering their role as a leader and catalyst of a movement. Share- able became a leader in the movement in 2009. “At that time, there was a sharing movement bubbling beneath the surface, but no one was connecting the dots,” Neal said. “We decided to step into that space and take on that role.” The small team behind the nonprofit publica- tion truly believed sharing could be central to solving some of the major problems human beings face—resource inequality, social isola- tion, and global warming. They have worked hard to find ways to tell stories that show different metrics for success. “We wanted to change the notion of what con- stitutes 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, cooper- ative way), as well as digital platforms that are run democratically. They particularly focus on how-to content that help their readers make changes 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 areas that 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 by guest writers, often for free, or written by oth- er publications from their network of content publishers. Shareable is a member of the Post Growth Alliance, which facilitates the sharing of content and audiences among a large and growing group of mostly nonprofits. Each or-

ganization gets a chance to present stories to
the group, and the organizations can use and
promote each other’s stories. Much of the con-
tent created by the network is licensed with
Creative Commons.
All of Shareable’s original content is pub-
lished under the Attribution license (CC BY),
meaning it can be used for any purpose as long
as credit is given to Shareable. Creative Com-
mons licensing is aligned with Shareable’s vi-
sion, mission, and identity. That alone explains
the organization’s embrace of the licenses for
their content, but Neal also believes CC licens-
ing helps them increase their reach. “By using
CC licensing,” he said, “we realized we could
reach far more people through a formal and
informal network of republishers or affiliates.
That has definitely been the case. It’s hard for
us to measure the reach of other media prop-
erties, but most of the outlets who republish
our work have much bigger audiences than we
do.”
In addition to their regular news and com-
mentary online, Shareable has also experi-
mented with book publishing. In 2012, they
worked with a traditional publisher to release
Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation
in an Age of Crisis. The CC-licensed book was
available in print form for purchase or online
for free. To this day, the book—along with their
CC-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 avail-
able 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-rais-
ing experiments Shareable has conducted in
recent years. Currently, Shareable is primarily
funded by grants from foundations, but they
are actively moving toward a more diversified
model. They have organizational sponsors and
are working to expand their base of individual
donors. Ideally, they will eventually be a hun-
dred percent funded by their audience. Neal

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 Share- able. “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 success is having fun and taking care of yourself while you do something you love. “A central part of human 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 and imagine and create new worlds, but we also seek the comfort of hearth and home.”

In 2013, Shareable ran its first crowdfunding campaign to launch their Sharing Cities Net- work. Neal said at first they were on pace to fail spectacularly. They called in their advisers in a panic and asked for help. The advice they received was simple—“Sit your ass in a chair and 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 majority of backers were people in their existing base. For Neal, this symbolized how so much of success comes down to relationships. Over time, 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 shar- ing community together. But over time they re- alized 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 travel to the event,” Neal said. Enabling others to cre- ate their own events around the globe allowed them to scale up their work more effectively

and reach far more people. Shareable has cat-
alyzed three hundred different events reach-
ing over twenty thousand people since imple-
menting this strategy three years ago. Going
forward, Shareable is focusing the network
on creating and distributing content meant to
spur local action. For instance, Shareable will
publish a new CC-licensed book in 2017 filled
with ideas for their network to implement.
Neal says Shareable stumbled upon this
strategy, but it seems to perfectly encapsu-
late just how the commons is supposed to
work. 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.

Openness is a key principle for Siyavula. They believe that every learner and teacher should have access to high-quality educational re- sources, as this forms the basis for long-term growth and development. Siyavula has been a pioneer in creating high-quality open text- books on mathematics and science subjects for grades 4 to 12 in South Africa. In terms of creating an open business mod- el that involves Creative Commons, Siyavu- la—and its founder, Mark Horner—have been around the block a few times. Siyavula has sig- nificantly shifted directions and strategies to survive and prosper. Mark says it’s been very organic. It all started in 2002, when Mark and sever- al other colleagues at the University of Cape Town in South Africa founded the Free High School Science Texts project. Most students in South Africa high schools didn’t have access to high-quality, comprehensive science and math

textbooks, so Mark and his colleagues set out
to write them and make them freely available.
As physicists, Mark and his colleagues were
advocates of open-source software. To make
the books open and free, they adopted the
Free Software Foundation’s GNU Free Docu-
mentation License.^1 They chose LaTeX, a type-
setting program used to publish scientific doc-
uments, to author the books. Over a period of
five years, the Free High School Science Texts
project produced math and physical-science
textbooks for grades 10 to 12.
In 2007, the Shuttleworth Foundation of-
fered funding support to make the textbooks
available for trial use at more schools. Surveys
before and after the textbooks were adopt-
ed showed there were no substantial criti-
cisms of the textbooks’ pedagogical content.
This pleased both the authors and Shuttle-
worth; Mark remains incredibly proud of this
accomplishment.

Siyavula

Siyavula is a for-profit educational-technology company that creates textbooks and integrat- ed learning experiences. Founded in 2012 in South 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

But the development of new textbooks froze at this stage. Mark shifted his focus to rural schools, which didn’t have textbooks at all, and looked into the printing and distribu- tion 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 princi- ples, strategies, and commitment to help the open-education movement grow.^2 Shuttle- worth also invited Mark to run a project writ- ing open content for all subjects for K–12 in En- glish. 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 was licensed with Creative Commons, significantly expanding the collection beyond the six origi- nal books. Mark wanted to build out the remaining curricula collaboratively through communities of practice—that is, with fellow educators and writers. Although sharing is fundamental to teaching, there can be a few challenges when you create educational resources collectively. One concern is legal. It is standard practice in education to copy diagrams and snippets of text, but of course this doesn’t always com- ply with copyright law. Another concern is transparency. Sharing what you’ve authored means everyone can see it and opens you up to criticism. To alleviate these concerns, Mark adopted a team-based approach to authoring and insisted the curricula be based entirely on resources with Creative Commons licenses, thereby ensuring they were safe to share and free from legal repercussions. Not only did Mark want the resources to be shareable, he wanted all teachers to be able to

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 au-
thored on a platform called Connexions.^3 Si-
yavula trained many teachers to use Connex-
ions, 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 founda-
tion into a fellowship model (for reasons com-
pletely unrelated to Siyavula). As part of that
transition in 2009–10, Mark inherited Siyavula
as an independent entity and took ownership
over it as a Shuttleworth fellow.
Mark and his team experimented with sev-
eral different strategies. They tried creating
an authoring and hosting platform called Full
Marks so that teachers could share assess-
ment 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 ap-
proached 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 Siyavu-
la 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 Si-
yavula. Printing Siyavula books for every kid in
South Africa would give their brand huge ex-
posure and could drive vast amounts of traffic
to their website. In addition to print books, Si-

USING SIYAVULA BOOKS

GENERATED HUGE SAVINGS FOR

THE GOVERNMENT

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 text- book is demonstrate solutions. Typically, a one-line answer is given at the end of the book but nothing on the process for arriving at that solution. Mark and his team developed prac- tice items and detailed solutions, giving learn- ers plenty of opportunity to test out what they’ve learned. Furthermore, an algorithm could adapt these practice items to the individ- ual needs of each learner. They called this ser- vice Intelligent Practice and embedded links to it in the open textbooks. The costs for using Intelligent Practice were set very low, making it accessible even to those with limited financial means. Siyavula was go- ing for large volumes and wide-scale use rath- er 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 unex- pected 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 distribut- ed, but with well-off schools mainly using a dif- ferent book, the primary market for Siyavula’s Intelligent Practice service inadvertently be- came low-income learners. Siyavula’s site did see a dramatic increase in traffic. They got five hundred thousand visitors per month to their math site and the same number to their science site. Two-fifths of the traffic was reading on a “feature phone” (a nonsmartphone with no apps). People on basic phones were reading math and science on a two-inch screen at all hours of the day. To Mark, it was quite amazing and spoke to a need they were servicing. At first, the Intelligent Practice services could only be paid using a credit card. This proved problematic, especially for those in the

low-income demographic, as credit cards were
not prevalent. Mark says Siyavula got a harsh
business-model lesson early on. As he de-
scribes 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 traf-
fic to your site, where you can offer a related
service and convert some people into a paid
customer.
For Mark a key decision for Siyavula’s busi-
ness 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 actu-
al content of the textbook isn’t unique at all, so
Siyavula sees no value in locking it down and
charging for it. Mark contrasts this with tra-
ditional publishers who charge over and over
again for the same content without adding
value.

Version two of Siyavula’s business model was
a big, ambitious idea—scale up. They also de-
cided to sell the Intelligent Practice service to
schools directly. Schools can subscribe on a
per-student, per-subject basis. A single sub-
scription gives a learner access to a single
subject, including practice content from every
grade available for that subject. Lower sub-
scription rates are provided when there are
over two hundred students, and big schools
have a price cap. A 40 percent discount is of-
fered to schools where both the science and
math departments subscribe.
Teachers get a dashboard that allows them
to monitor the progress of an entire class or
view an individual learner’s results. They can
see the questions that learners are working
on, identify areas of difficulty, and be more
strategic in their teaching. Students also have
their own personalized dashboard, where they
can view the sections they’ve practiced, how
many points they’ve earned, and how their
performance is improving.

Based on the success of this effort, Siyavula decided to substantially increase the produc- tion 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 each year, and new books created for grades 4 to 6 and later grades 7 to 9. In partnership with, and sponsored by, the Sasol Inzalo Foundation, Siyavula produced a series of natural sciences and technology workbooks for grades 4 to 6 called Thunder- bolt Kids that uses a fun comic-book style.^4 It’s a complete curriculum that also comes with teacher’s guides and other resources. Through this experience, Siyavula learned they could get sponsors to help fund open- ly 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-ben- efit aspect of textbooks unlocked via a Cre- ative Commons license. They also liked the ex- posure their brand got. For roughly $150,000, their logo would be visible on books distribut- ed to over one million students. The Siyavula books that are reviewed, ap- proved, and branded by the government are freely and openly available on Siyavula’s web- site under an Attribution-NoDerivs license (CC BY-ND) —NoDerivs means that these books cannot be modified. Non-government-brand- ed books are available under an Attribution license (CC BY), allowing others to modify and redistribute the books. Although the South African government paid to print and distribute hard copies of the books to schoolkids, Siyavula itself received no funding from the government. Siyavula initially tried to convince the government to provide them with five rand per book (about US35¢). With those funds, Mark says that Si- yavula could have run its entire operation, built a community-based model for producing more books, and provide Intelligent Practice for free to every child in the country. But after a lengthy negotiation, the government said no.

Using Siyavula books generated huge sav-
ings for the government. Providing students
with a traditionally published grade 12 science
or math textbook costs around 250 rand per
book (about US$18). Providing the Siyavula
version cost around 36 rand (about $2.60), a
savings of over 200 rand per book. But none
of 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 govern-
ment declared there would be only one autho-
rized textbook for each grade and each sub-
ject. There was no guarantee that Siyavula’s
would be chosen. This scared away potential
sponsors.

Rather than producing more textbooks, Si-
yavula focused on improving its Intelligent
Practice technology for its existing books.
Mark calls this version three of Siyavula’s busi-
ness model—focusing on the technology that
provides the revenue-generating service and
generating more users of this service. Version
three got a significant boost in 2014 with an in-
vestment by the Omidyar Network (the philan-
thropic 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 are
really nailing Intelligent Practice. Schools con-
tinue to use their open textbooks. The govern-
ment-announced policy that there would be
only one textbook per subject turned out to
be highly contentious and is in limbo.
Siyavula is exploring a range of enhance-
ments to their business model. These include
charging a small amount for assessment ser-
vices provided over the phone, diversifying
their market to all English-speaking countries
in Africa, and setting up a consortium that

makes Intelligent Practice free to all kids by selling the nonpersonal data Intelligent Prac- tice collects. Siyavula is a for-profit business but one with a social mission. Their shareholders’ agree- ment lists lots of requirements around open- ness for Siyavula, including stipulations that content always be put under an open license and that they can’t charge for something that people volunteered to do for them. They be- lieve each individual should have access to the resources and support they need to achieve the education they deserve. Having educa- tional resources openly licensed with Creative Commons means they can fulfill their social mission, on top of which they can build reve- nue-generating services to sustain the ongo- ing operation of Siyavula. In terms of open business models, Mark and Siyavula may have been around the block a few times, but both he and the company are stronger for it.

Web links 1 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl 2 http://www.capetowndeclaration.org 3 cnx.org 4 http://www.siyavula.com/products -primary-school.html

SparkFun founder and former CEO Nathan Se- idle has a picture of himself holding up a clone of a SparkFun product in an electronics market in China, with a huge grin on his face. He was traveling in China when he came across their LilyPad wearable technology being made by someone else. His reaction was glee. “Being copied is the greatest earmark of flattery and success,” Nathan said. “I thought it was so cool that they were selling to a mar- ket we were never going to get access to oth- erwise. It was evidence of our impact on the world.” 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 Com- mons licenses to all of its schematics, images, tutorial content, and curricula, so anyone can

make their products on their own. Being cop-
ied is part of the design.
Nathan believes open licensing is good for
the world. “It touches on our natural human
instinct to share,” he said. But he also strongly
believes it makes SparkFun better at what they
do. They encourage copying, and their prod-
ucts are copied at a very fast rate, often within
ten to twelve weeks of release. This forces the
company to compete on something other than
product design, or what most commonly con-
sider their intellectual property.
“We compete on business principles,” Na-
than said. “Claiming your territory with intel-
lectual property allows you to get comfy and
rest on your laurels. It gives you a safety net.
We took away that safety net.”
The result is an intense company-wide fo-
cus on product development and improve-
ment. “Our products are so much better than
they were five years ago,” Nathan said. “We

SparkFun

SparkFun is an online electronics retailer spe- cializing 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

used to just sell products. Now it’s a product plus a video, a seventeen-page hookup guide, and example firmware on three different plat- forms 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 better for the customers.” SparkFun parts are available on eBay for lower prices. But people come directly to SparkFun because SparkFun makes their lives easier. The example code works; there is a service number to call; they ship replacement parts the day they get a service call. They in- vest heavily in service and support. “I don’t be- lieve 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’s college dorm room. He spent a lot of time ex- perimenting with and building electronics, and he realized there was a void in the market. “If you 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 some- one.” In 2003, during his third year of college, he registered sparkfun.com and started re- selling products out of his bedroom. After he graduated, he started making and selling his own products. Once he started designing his own prod- ucts, he began putting the software and sche- matics online to help with technical support. After doing some research on licensing op- tions, he chose Creative Commons licenses because he was drawn to the “human-read- able 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. Sell- ing components and widgets to hobbyists, pro- fessionals, and artists remains a major part of SparkFun’s business. They sell their own prod-

ucts, but they also partner with Arduino (also
profiled in this book) by manufacturing boards
for resale using Arduino’s brand.
SparkFun also has an educational depart-
ment dedicated to creating a hands-on curric-
ulum to teach students about electronics us-
ing 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 citi-
zens,” Nathan said. “Our goal is to affect the
lives of three hundred and fifty thousand high
school students by 2020.”
The Creative Commons license underlying
all of SparkFun’s products is central to this
mission. The license not only signals a willing-
ness to share, but it also expresses a desire for
others to get in and tinker with their products,
both to learn and to make their products bet-
ter. SparkFun uses the Attribution-ShareAlike
license (CC BY-SA), which is a “copyleft” license
that allows people to do anything with the con-
tent as long as they provide credit and make
any adaptations available under the same li-
censing terms.

From the beginning, Nathan has tried to create
a work environment at SparkFun that he him-
self 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 the

BEING COPIED IS THE GREATEST

EARMARK OF FLATTERY AND

SUCCESS

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 technolo- gy enthusiasts from around the area to race their own self-created bots against each oth- er, participate in training workshops, and so- cialize. From a business perspective, Nathan says it’s a terrible idea. But they don’t hold the event for business reasons. “The reason we do it is because I get to travel and have inter- actions with our customers all the time, but most of our employees don’t,” he said. “This event gives our employees the opportunity to get face-to-face contact with our customers.” The event infuses their work with a human el- ement, which makes it more meaningful. Nathan has worked hard to imbue a deep- er meaning into the work SparkFun does. The company is, of course, focused on being fiscal- ly responsible, but they are ultimately driven by something other than money. “Profit is not the goal; it is the outcome of a well-executed plan,” Nathan said. “We focus on having a big- ger impact on the world.” Nathan believes they get some of the brightest and most amazing employees because they aren’t singularly fo- cused on the bottom line. The company is committed to transparency and shares all of its financials with its employ- ees. They also generally strive to avoid being another soulless corporation. They actively try to reveal the humans behind the compa- ny, and they work to ensure people coming to their site don’t find only unchanging content.

SparkFun’s customer base is largely made up of industrious electronics enthusiasts. They have customers who are regularly involved in the company’s customer support, independently responding to questions in forums and prod- uct-comment sections. Customers also bring product ideas to the company. SparkFun reg- ularly sifts through suggestions from custom-

ers 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 de-
sign something to address it.”
However, this sort of customer engagement
does not always translate to people actively
contributing to SparkFun’s projects. The com-
pany has a public repository of software code
for each of its devices online. On a particular-
ly active project, there will only be about two
dozen people contributing significant improve-
ments. The vast majority of projects are rela-
tively untouched by the public. “There is a the-
ory 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 so
they can fix and improve things independently.
“What gives me joy is when people take open-
source layouts and then build their own circuit
boards from our designs,” Nathan said.
Obviously, opening up the design of their
products is a necessary step if their goal is to
empower the public. Nathan also firmly be-
lieves 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 as
much money as possible from it, they release
the keys necessary for others to build it them-
selves and then spend company time and re-
sources on innovation and service. From a
short-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.

TeachAIDS is an unconventional media com- pany with a conventional revenue model. Like most media companies, they are subsidized by advertising. Corporations pay to have their logos appear on the educational materials TeachAIDS distributes. But unlike most media companies, Teach- AIDS is a nonprofit organization with a purely social mission. TeachAIDS is dedicated to ed- ucating the global population about HIV and AIDS, particularly in parts of the world where education efforts have been historically unsuc- cessful. Their educational content is conveyed through interactive software, using methods based on the latest research about how peo- ple learn. TeachAIDS serves content in more than eighty countries around the world. In each instance, the content is translated to the local language and adjusted to conform to lo- cal norms and customs. All content is free and

made available under a Creative Commons li-
cense.

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 proj-
ect grew out of research she was doing while
pursuing her doctorate at Stanford University.
She was reading reports about India, noting
it would be the next hot zone of people living
with HIV. Despite international and nation-
al entities pouring in hundreds of millions of
dollars on HIV-prevention efforts, the reports
showed knowledge levels were still low. Peo-
ple were unaware of whether the virus could
be transmitted through coughing and sneez-
ing, for instance. Supported by an interdisci-
plinary team of experts at Stanford, Piya con-
ducted similar studies, which corroborated

TeachAIDS.

TeachAIDS is a nonprofit that creates edu- cational materials designed to teach people around the world about HIV and AIDS. Found- ed 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

the previous research. They found that the pri- mary cause of the limited understanding was that HIV, and issues relating to it, were often considered too taboo to discuss comprehen- sively. The other major problem was that most of the education on this topic was being taught through television advertising, billboards, and other mass-media campaigns, which meant people were only receiving bits and pieces of information. In late 2005, Piya and her team used re- search-based design to create new education- al materials and worked with local partners in India to help distribute them. As soon as the animated software was posted online, Piya’s team started receiving requests from indi- viduals and governments who were interest- ed in bringing this model to more countries. “We realized fairly quickly that educating large populations about a topic that was consid- ered taboo would be challenging. We began by identifying optimal local partners and worked toward creating an effective, culturally appro- priate education,” Piya said. Very shortly after the initial release, Piya’s team decided to spin the endeavor into an in- dependent nonprofit out of Stanford Univer- sity. They also decided to use Creative Com- mons licenses on the materials. Given their educational mission, TeachAIDS had an obvious interest in seeing the materi- als as widely shared as possible. But they also needed to preserve the integrity of the med- ical information in the content. They chose the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs li- cense (CC BY-NC-ND), which essentially gives the public the right to distribute only verba- tim copies of the content, and for noncom- mercial purposes. “We wanted attribution for TeachAIDS, and we couldn’t stand by deriva- tives without vetting them,” the cofounder and chair Shuman Ghosemajumder said. “It was almost a no-brainer to go with a CC license because it was a plug-and-play solution to this exact problem. It has allowed us to scale our materials safely and quickly worldwide while preserving our content and protecting us at the same time.”

Choosing a license that does not allow adap-
tation of the content was an outgrowth of the
careful precision with which TeachAIDS crafts
their content. The organization invests heavily
in research and testing to determine the best
method of conveying the information. “Creat-
ing high-quality content is what matters most
to us,” Piya said. “Research drives everything
we do.”
One important finding was that people ac-
cept the message best when it comes from fa-
miliar voices they trust and admire. To achieve
this, TeachAIDS researches cultural icons that
would best resonate with their target audienc-
es and recruits them to donate their likenesses
and voices for use in the animated software.
The celebrities involved vary for each localized
version of the materials.
Localization is probably the single-most im-
portant 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 the
content 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 lan-
guage, but there are also changes in substance
and 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 gendered
versions 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 deeply
committed to the cause, and the organization
has had better luck controlling the quality of
the materials when they tap volunteers instead
of using paid translators. For quality control,
TeachAIDS has three separate volunteer teams
translate the materials from English to the lo-
cal language and customize the content based
on local customs and norms. Those three ver-
sions are then analyzed and combined into a
single master translation. TeachAIDS has ad-

ditional teams of volunteers then translate that version back into English to see how well it lines up with the original materials. They re- peat 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 in- dividuals experienced in working in the NGO space. This diversity and breadth of knowl- edge help ensure their materials resonate with people from all walks of life. Additionally, TeachAIDS works closely with film writers and directors to help keep the concepts entertain- ing and easy to understand. The inclusive, but highly controlled, creative process is under- taken entirely by people who are specifically brought on to help with a particular project, rather than ongoing staff. The final product they create is designed to require zero train- ing for people to implement in practice. “In our research, we found we can’t depend on peo- ple 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 count that never exceeded eight full-time employ- ees. The organization is able to reduce costs by relying heavily on volunteers and in-kind donations. Nevertheless, the nonprofit need- ed a sustainable revenue model to subsidize content creation and physical distribution of the materials. Charging even a low price was simply 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

way to persuade them to use our highly effec-
tive model was to make it completely free.”
Like many content creators offering their
work for free, they settled on advertising as a
funding model. But they were extremely care-
ful not to let the advertising compromise their
credibility or undermine the heavy investment
they put into creating quality content. Spon-
sors 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 the
content remains branded as TeachAIDS.
TeachAIDS is careful not to seek funding to
cover the costs of a specific project. Instead,
sponsorships are structured as unrestricted
donations to the nonprofit. This gives the non-
profit more stability, but even more important-
ly, it enables them to subsidize projects being
localized for an area with no sponsors. “If we
just created versions based on where we could
get sponsorships, we would only have materi-
als for wealthier countries,” Shuman said.
As of 2016, TeachAIDS has dozens of spon-
sors. “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 val-
ue to sponsors. TeachAIDS sponsorships give
corporations the chance to reach new eyeballs
with their brand, but at a much lower cost than
other advertising channels. The audience for
TeachAIDS content also tends to skew young,
which is often a desirable demographic for
brands. Unlike traditional advertising, the con-
tent is not time-sensitive, so an investment in
a sponsorship can benefit a brand for many
years to come.
Importantly, the value to corporate spon-
sors goes beyond commercial considerations.
As a nonprofit with a clearly articulated so-
cial mission, corporate sponsorships are do-
nations to a cause. “This is something com-
panies can be proud of internally,” Shuman
said. Some companies have even built public-

ity campaigns around the fact that they have sponsored 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 safe- ly and quickly scale their materials worldwide. “The Creative Commons license has been a game changer for TeachAIDS,” Piya said.

In the early 2000s, Hessel van Oorschot was an entrepreneur running a business where he coached other midsize entrepreneurs how to create an online business. He also coauthored a number of workbooks for small- to medium- size enterprises to use to optimize their busi- ness for the Web. Through this early work, Hessel became familiar with the principles of open licensing, including the use of open- source software and Creative Commons. In 2005, Hessel and Sandra Brandenburg launched a niche video-production initia- tive. Almost immediately, they ran into issues around finding and licensing music tracks. All they could find was standard, cold stock-mu- sic. They thought of looking up websites where you could license music directly from the mu-

sician without going through record labels or
agents. But in 2005, the ability to directly li-
cense music from a rights holder was not read-
ily available.
They hired two lawyers to investigate fur-
ther, and while they uncovered five or six ex-
amples, Hessel found the business models
lacking. The lawyers expressed interest in
being their legal team should they decide to
pursue this as an entrepreneurial opportunity.
Hessel says, “When lawyers are interested in
a venture like this, you might have something
special.” So after some more research, in ear-
ly 2008, Hessel and Sandra decided to build a
platform.

Tribe of Noise.

Tribe of Noise is a for-profit online music plat- form serving the film, TV, video, gaming, and in-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

Building a platform posed a real chicken-and- egg problem. The platform had to build an on- line community of music-rights holders and, at the same time, provide the community with in- formation and ideas about how the new econ- omy works. Community willingness to try new music business models requires a trust rela- tionship. In July 2008, Tribe of Noise opened its virtual doors with a couple hundred musicians willing to use the CC BY-SA license (Attribution-Share- Alike) for a limited part of their repertoire. The two entrepreneurs wanted to take the pain away for media makers who wanted to license music and solve the problems the two had per- sonally experienced finding this music. As they were growing the community, Hessel got a phone call from a company that made in- store music playlists asking if they had enough music licensed with Creative Commons that they could use. Stores need quality, good-lis- tening music but not necessarily hits, a bit like a radio show without the DJ. This opened a new opportunity for Tribe of Noise. They start- ed their In-store Music Service, using music (li- censed with CC BY-SA) uploaded by the Tribe of Noise community of musicians.^1

In most countries, artists, authors, and musi- cians join a collecting society that manages the licensing and helps collect the royalties. Copy- right collecting societies in the European Union usually hold monopolies in their respective na- tional markets. In addition, they require their members to transfer exclusive administration rights to them of all of their works. This compli- cates the picture for Tribe of Noise, who wants to represent artists, or at least a portion of their repertoire. 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 of composers and musicians who’d be interested in trying out new models like the In-store Music Service? Collecting societies at first were hesi- tant and said no, but Tribe of Noise persisted

arguing that they primarily work with unknown
artists and provide them exposure in parts of
the world where they don’t get airtime normal-
ly 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, Tribe
of Noise partnered with big organizations who
have lots of clients and can act as a kind of Tribe
of Noise reseller. The largest telecom network
in the Netherlands, for example, sells Tribe’s In-
store Music Service subscriptions to their busi-
ness clients, which include fashion retailers and
fitness centers. They have a similar deal with the
leading trade association representing hotels
and restaurants in the country. Hessel hopes to
“copy and paste” this service into other coun-
tries where collecting societies understand
what you can do with Creative Commons. Out-
side 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 un-
common 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 be-
spoke 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 li-
cense fee agreed with this retailer is US$12 per
month per play-out. So if 42.5% is shared with
the Tribe musicians in this playlist and your
share 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

members, most said they liked the exposure using Creative Commons gets them and the way it lets them reach out to others to share and remix. However, they had a bit of a men- tal struggle with Creative Commons licenses being perpetual. A lot of musicians have the mind-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 and created a second model and separate area of the 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 al- lowing musicians to opt out whenever they want. When you opt out, Tribe of Noise agrees to take your music off the Tribe of Noise plat- form within one to two months. This lets the musician reuse their song for a better deal. Tribe of Noise Pro is primarily geared toward media makers who are looking for music. If they buy a license from this catalog, they don’t have to state the name of the creator; they just license the song for a specific amount. This is a big plus for media makers. And musicians can pull 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 com- munity area of Tribe of Noises. There aren’t that many artists who upload only to Tribe of Noise Pro, which has a smaller repertoire of music than the community area. Hessel sees the two as complementary. Both are needed for the model to work. With a whole generation of musicians interested in the sharing economy, the community area of Tribe of Noise is where they can build trust, create exposure, and generate money. And after that, musicians may become more inter- ested in exploring other models like Tribe of Noise Pro. Every musician who joins Tribe of Noise gets their own home page and free unlimited Web space to upload as much of their own music

as they like. Tribe of Noise is also a social net-
work; fellow musicians and professionals can
vote for, comment on, and like your music.
Community managers interact with and sup-
port members, and music supervisors pick and
choose from the uploaded songs for in-store
play or to promote them to media producers.
Members really like having people working for
the platform who truly engage with them.
Another way Tribe of Noise creates commu-
nity and interest is with contests, which are
organized in partnership with Tribe of Noise
clients. 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 work
with clients: listening to them, understanding
what they want, and creating a song to meet
that need.
Tribe of Noise now has twenty-seven thou-
sand members from 192 countries, and many
are exploring do-it-yourself models for gener-
ating revenue. Some came from music labels
and publishers, having gone through the tradi-
tional 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 a
third party or hand over some of the control.
Still a small but growing group of Tribe mem-
bers are pursuing a hybrid model by licens-
ing some of their songs under CC BY-SA and

WITH A WHOLE GENERATION

OF MUSICIANS INTERESTED IN

THE SHARING ECONOMY, THE

COMMUNITY AREA OF TRIBE OF

NOISE IS WHERE THEY CAN BUILD

TRUST, CREATE EXPOSURE, AND

GENERATE MONEY

opting in others with collecting societies like ASCAP or BMI. It’s not uncommon for performance-rights organizations, record labels, or music pub- lishers to sign contracts with musicians based on exclusivity. Such an arrangement prevents those musicians from uploading their music to Tribe of Noise. In the United States, you can have a collecting society handle only some of your tracks, whereas in many countries in Eu- rope, a collecting society prefers to represent your entire repertoire (although the European Commission is making some changes). Tribe of Noise deals with this issue all the time and gives you a warning whenever you upload a song. If collecting societies are willing to be open and flexible and do the most they can for their members, then they can consider orga- nizations like Tribe of Noise as a nice add-on, generating more exposure and revenue for the musicians they represent. So far, Tribe of Noise has been able to make all this work with- out litigation.

For Hessel the key to Tribe of Noise’s success is trust. The fact that Creative Commons licenses work the same way all over the world and have been translated into all languages really helps build that trust. Tribe of Noise believes in cre- ating a model where they work together with musicians. They can only do that if they have a live and kicking community, with people who think that the Tribe of Noise team has their best interests in mind. Creative Commons makes it possible to create a new business model for music, a model that’s based on trust.

Web links 1 http://www.instoremusicservice.com 2 http://www.tribeofnoise.com /info_instoremusic.php

Nearly every person with an online presence knows Wikipedia. In many ways, it is the preeminent open project: The online encyclopedia is created en- tirely 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 is released under a Creative Commons license that enables people to reuse and adapt it for any purpose. As of December 2016, there were more than forty-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-

dia domain name and hosts the site, along with
many other related sites like Wikidata and Wi-
kimedia Commons. The foundation employs
about two hundred and eighty people, who all
work to support the projects it hosts. But the
true heart of Wikipedia and its sister projects
is its community. The numbers of people in
the community are variable, but about seven-
ty-five thousand volunteers edit and improve
Wikipedia articles every month. Volunteers are
organized in a variety of ways across the globe,
including formal Wikimedia chapters (most-
ly national), groups focused on a particular
theme, 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-

Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit or- ganization that hosts Wikipedia and its sister projects. 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

pedia works in practice but not in theory.” While it undoubtedly has its challenges and flaws, Wikipedia and its sister projects are a striking testament to the power of human col- laboration. Because of its extraordinary breadth and scope, it does feel a bit like a unicorn. Indeed, there is nothing else like Wikipedia. Still, much of 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 many times. For our purposes, it is enough to know the experiment started in 2001 at a small scale, inspired by the crazy notion that perhaps a truly open, collaborative project could create something meaningful. At this point, Wikipe- dia is so ubiquitous and ingrained in our digital lives that the fact of its existence seems less remarkable. But outside of software, Wikipe- dia is perhaps the single most stunning exam- ple of successful community cocreation. Every day, seven thousand new articles are created on Wikipedia, and nearly fifteen thousand ed- its are made every hour. The nature of the content the community creates is ideal for asynchronous cocreation. “An encyclopedia is something where incre- mental community improvement really works,” Luis Villa, former Chief Officer of Community Engagement, told us. The rules and process- es that govern cocreation on Wikipedia and its sister projects are all community-driven and vary by language edition. There are entire books written on the intricacies of their sys- tems, but generally speaking, there are very few exceptions to the rule that anyone can edit any article, even without an account on their system. The extensive peer-review process in- cludes elaborate systems to resolve disputes, methods for managing particularly controver-

sial subject areas, talk pages explaining deci-
sions, and much, much more.
The Wikimedia Foundation’s decision to
leave governance of the projects to the com-
munity is very deliberate. “We look at the
things that the community can do well, and we
want to let them do those things,” Stephen told
us. Instead, the foundation focuses its time
and resources on what the community cannot
do as effectively, like the software engineering
that supports the technical infrastructure of
the sites. In 2015-16, about half of the foun-
dation’s budget went to direct support for the
Wikimedia sites.
Some of that is directed at servers and gen-
eral IT support, but the foundation also invests
a significant amount on architecture designed
to help the site function as effectively as pos-
sible. “There is a constantly evolving system
to keep the balance in place to avoid Wikipe-
dia 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 that
success 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. That
is partially our model working, and partially
just human nature.” Most of the time, people
want to do the right thing.
Wikipedia not only relies on good behav-
ior within its community and on its sites, but
also by everyone else once the content leaves
Wikipedia. All of the text of Wikipedia is avail-
able under an Attribution-ShareAlike license
(CC BY-SA), which means it can be used for any
purpose and modified so long as credit is giv-
en and anything new is shared back with the
public under the same license. In theory, that
means anyone can copy the content and start
a new Wikipedia. But as Stephen explained,
“Being open has only made Wikipedia bigger
and stronger. The desire to protect is not al-
ways what is best for everyone.”
Of course, the primary reason no one has
successfully co-opted Wikipedia is that copycat

efforts do not have the Wikipedia community to sustain what they do. Wikipedia is not sim- ply a source of up-to-the-minute content on every given topic—it is also a global patchwork of humans working together in a million differ- ent ways, in a million different capacities, for a million different reasons. While many have tried to guess what makes Wikipedia work as well it does, the fact is there is no single expla- nation. “In a movement as large as ours, there is an incredible diversity of motivations,” Ste- phen said. For example, there is one editor of the English Wikipedia edition who has correct- ed a single grammatical error in articles more than forty-eight thousand times.^1 Only a fraction of Wikipedia users are also editors. But editing is not the only way to con- tribute to Wikipedia. “Some donate text, some donate images, some donate financially,” Ste- phen told us. “They are all contributors.” But the vast majority of us who use Wiki- pedia are not contributors; we are passive readers. The Wikimedia Foundation survives primarily on individual donations, with about $15 as the average. Because Wikipedia is one of the ten most popular websites in terms of total page views, donations from a small por- tion of that audience can translate into a lot of money. In the 2015-16 fiscal year, they received more than $77 million from more than five mil- lion donors. The foundation has a fund-raising team that works year-round to raise money, but the bulk of their revenue comes in during the Decem- ber campaign in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They engage in extensive user testing and research to maximize the reach of 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 enough eyeballs, they are right.

The vision of the Wikimedia Foundation is a world in which every single human being can

freely share in the sum of all knowledge. They
work to realize this vision by empowering peo-
ple around the globe to create educational
content made freely available under an open
license or in the public domain. Stephen and
Luis said the mission, which is rooted in the
same philosophy behind Creative Commons,
drives everything the foundation does.
The philosophy behind the endeavor also
enables the foundation to be financially sus-
tainable. It instills trust in their readership,
which is critical for a revenue strategy that re-
lies on reader donations. It also instills trust in
their community.
Any given edit on Wikipedia could be moti-
vated by nearly an infinite number of reasons.
But the social mission of the project is what
binds the global community together. “Wikipe-
dia is an example of how a mission can moti-
vate an entire movement,” Stephen told us.
Of course, what results from that move-
ment is one of the Internet’s great public re-
sources. “The Internet has a lot of businesses
and stores, but it is missing the digital equiva-
lent 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/

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Acknowledgments.

We extend special thanks to Creative Com- mons CEO Ryan Merkley, the Creative Com- mons Board, and all of our Creative Commons colleagues for enthusiastically supporting our work. Special gratitude to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for the initial seed funding that 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 commons come alive. Thanks for the inspiration. We interviewed more than the twenty-four organizations profiled in this book. We extend special thanks to Gooru, OERu, Sage Bionet- works, and Medium for sharing their stories with us. While not featured as case studies in this 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 gener- ous support of 1,687 Kickstarter backers listed below. We especially acknowledge our many Kickstarter co-editors who read early drafts of our work and provided invaluable feedback. Heartfelt thanks to all of you.

Co-editor Kickstarter backers (alphabetically by first name): Abraham Taherivand, Alan Gra- ham, Alfredo Louro, Anatoly Volynets, Aurora Thornton, Austin Tolentino, Ben Sheridan, Ben- edikt Foit, Benjamin Costantini, Bernd Nurn- berger, 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, Clau- dia Cristiani, Cody Allard, Colleen Cressman, Craig Thomler, Creative Commons Uruguay, Curt McNamara, Dan Parson, Daniel Domin-

guez, Daniel Morado, Darius Irvin, Dave Taille-
fer, David Lewis, David Mikula, David Varnes,
David Wiley, Deborah Nas, Diderik van Wing-
erden, 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, Gatien
de Broucker, Gaurav Kapil, Gavin Romig-Koch,
George Baier IV, George De Bruin, Gianpaolo
Rando, Glenn Otis Brown, Govindarajan Uma-
kanthan, Graham Bird, Graham Freeman,
Hamish MacEwan, Harry Kaczka, Humble
Daisy, Ian Capstick, Iris Brest, James Cloos, Ja-
mie Stevens, Jamil Khatib, Jane Finette, Jason
Blasso, Jason E. Barkeloo, Jay M Williams, Jean-
Philippe Turcotte, Jeanette Frey, Jeff De Cagna,
Jérôme Mizeret, Jessica Dickinson Goodman,
Jessy Kate Schingler, Jim O’Flaherty, Jim Pel-
legrini, Jiří Marek, Jo Allum, Joachim von Goetz,
Johan Adda, John Benfield, John Bevan, Jonas
Öberg, Jonathan Lin, JP Rangaswami, Juan Car-
los Belair, Justin Christian, Justin Szlasa, Kate
Chapman, Kate Stewart, Kellie Higginbottom,
Kendra Byrne, Kevin Coates, Kristina Pop-
ova, 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 Co-
hen, Mark Mullen, Mary Ellen Davis, Mathias
Bavay, Matt Black, Matt Hall, Max van Balgooy,
Médéric Droz-dit-Busset, Melissa Aho, Men-
achem 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-

man, Nikki Thompson, Norrie Mailer, Omar Kaminski, OpenBuilds, Papp István Péter, Pat Sticks, Patricia Brennan, Paul and Iris Brest, Paul Elosegui, Penny Pearson, Peter Mengel- ers, Playground Inc., Pomax, Rafaela Kunz, Ra- jiv Jhangiani, Rayna Stamboliyska, Rob Berkley, Rob Bertholf, Robert Jones, Robert Thomp- son, 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, She- ona 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, Traci Long DeForge, Trevor Hogue, Tumuult, Vickie Goode, Vikas Shah, Virginia Kopelman, Wayne Mackintosh, William Peter Nash, Winie Evers, Wolfgang Renninger, Xavier Antoviaque, Yanc- ey 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 Fin- er, Adam Hansen, Adam Morris, Adam Procter, Adam Quirk, Adam Rory Porter, Adam Sim- mons, Adam Tinworth, Adam Zimmerman, Adrian Ho, Adrian Smith, Adriane Ruzak, Adria- no Loconte, Al Sweigart, Alain Imbaud, Alan Graham, Alan M. Ford, Alan Swithenbank, Alan Vonlanthen, Albert O’Connor, Alec Foster, Ale- jandro Suarez Cebrian, Aleks Degtyarev, Alex Blood, Alex C. Ion, Alex Ross Shaw, Alexander Bartl, Alexander Brown, Alexander Brunner, Alexander Eliesen, Alexander Hawson, Alexan- der Klar, Alexander Neumann, Alexander Plaum, Alexander Wendland, Alexandre Rafa- lovitch, Alexey Volkow, Alexi Wheeler, Alexis Sevault, Alfredo Louro, Ali Sternburg, Alicia Gibb & Lunchbox Electronics, Alison Link, Ali- son Pentecost, Alistair Boettiger, Alistair Walder, Alix Bernier, Allan Callaghan, Allen Rid- dell, Allison Breland Crotwell, Allison Jane Smith, Álvaro Justen, Amanda Palmer, Amanda Wetherhold, Amit Bagree, Amit Tikare, Amos Blanton, Amy Sept, Anatoly Volynets, Anders

Ericsson, Andi Popp, André Bose Do Amaral,
Andre Dickson, André Koot, André Ricardo, An-
dre van Rooyen, Andre Wallace, Andrea Bagna-
cani, Andrea Pepe, Andrea Pigato, Andreas
Jagelund, Andres Gomez Casanova, Andrew A.
Farke, Andrew Berhow, Andrew Hearse, An-
drew Matangi, Andrew R McHugh, Andrew
Tam, Andrew Turvey, Andrew Walsh, Andrew
Wilson, Andrey Novoseltsev, Andy McGhee,
Andy Reeve, Andy Woods, Angela Brett, Ange-
liki Kapoglou, Angus Keenan, Anne-Marie
Scott, Antero Garcia, Antoine Authier, Antoine
Michard, Anton Kurkin, Anton Porsche, Antònia
Folguera, António Ornelas, Antonis Triantafyl-
lakis, aois21 publishing, April Johnson, Aria F.
Chernik, Ariane Allan, Ariel Katz, Arithmomani-
ac, 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 Okpo-
kam, Barb Bartkowiak, Barbara Lindsey, Barry
Dayton, Bastian Hougaard, Ben Chad, Ben
Doherty, Ben Hansen, Ben Nuttall, Ben Rosen-
thal, Ben Sheridan, Benedikt Foit, Benita Tsao,
Benjamin Costantini, Benjamin Daemon, Ben-
jamin Keele, Benjamin Pflanz, Berglind Ósk
Bergsdóttir, Bernardo Miguel Antunes, Bernd
Nurnberger, Bernhard Seefeld, Beth Gis, Beth
Tillinghast, Bethanye Blount, Bill Bonwitt, Bill
Browne, Bill Keaggy, Bill Maiden, Bill Rafferty,
Bill Scanlon, Bill Shields, Bill Slankard, BJ Beck-
er, Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Bjørn Otto Walle-
vik, BK Bitner, Bo Ilsøe Hansen, Bo Sprotte Ko-
fod, 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, Bri-
an Walsh, Brooke Dukes, Brooke Schreier
Ganz, Bruce Lerner, Bruce Wilson, Bruno Bou-
tot, Bruno Girin, Bryan Mock, Bryant Durrell,
Bryce Barbato, Buzz Technology Limited,
Byung-Geun Jeon, C. Glen Williams, C. L. Couch,

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