21.1 Educational development at otago polytechnic  (Page 11/13)

WikiEducators of the World Unite! :-) Randy

5. ken udas - december 2nd, 2007 at 10:51 am

Leigh, First, thank you for this very nice contribution! I am wondering if you could speak a bit to the nature of the decision and decision-making processes within Otago Polytechnic that led to adopting an open IP policy? We are currently poking around the edges here at Penn State and it would be great to get some insights from your experience. In addition, anybody else who has such experience (no matter what resulted), please feel free to contribute as well.

Cheers, Ken

6. wikirandy - december 2nd, 2007 at 1:57 pm

Hi Leigh, Adding to Ken’s comments, if in describing the “decision and decision-making processes within Otago…”, you could map it to an actual timeline, that would also be helpful. Might make a nice graphic! (However, the point is, that these things DO take time to evolve within institutions, and it would be useful to see the timeline.) - Randy

7. leigh blackall - december 2nd, 2007 at 11:08 pm

Hi Ken, Randy.

One key thing was that the old IP Policy here was long over due for a rewrite. We have an energetic CEO who had it pegged for a while now, and an upcoming audit that required it done.

The next thing was me addressing the leadership team and presenting an argument that said we needed an IP Policy that enabled us to sample copyleft content. My argument was that our copyright statement was too restrictive (all rights reserved) and that it effectively prevented us from being able to copy and reuse content from the likes of FlickCC, Wikipedia et al… We needed a Policy that would enable staff to sample media from these sources and then have the flexibility to mark their remixes with the license required by the copyleft material. I think I even put an estimate on the amount of money this might save the Poly. This raised interest and got me on the IP Policy team where I pushed for the adoption of CC BY.

In the IP Policy meetings it was evident that the main players in the rewrite saw the sense in CC BY and the benefits of enabling copy and reuse with attribution of Polytech materials. Thanks to their intuition for CC BY we were able to discuss more novel treatment of the Policy, rather than getting bogged down with should we/shouldn’t we kind of debates. It was a very encouraging team to work with. Interestingly, they had not heard of CreativeCommons before, but intuitively understood its benefits! Haven’t met too many bosses like that before!

They also saw that it helped to solve a number of concerns such as if a staff member was to pick up and leave a big hole in the content we rely on, the Polytech would be able to refill that hole because the material would have been CC BY, meaning the Poly could reuse it. In the past, this risk of a staff member leaving and taking their files with them was managed by a rather draconian statement along the lines of, “you work for the Poly, we own your IP..” - which needless to say was a big concern to staff. Using CC BY was a way to say to staff that they own their IP, but the Poly encourages the use of CC BY, and if restrictions are needed then come and talk about it.