An argument for extending the commons to Medium
The commons is a pretty abstract thing. Most people haven’t heard of it. Some have but think of it as just the Internet’s version of a “free stuff” box your neighbor fills with old tools and outdated tour books. But the vision I love, the one that people rally around, is somewhere between classic library archives made digital and tangible building blocks for new ideas.
Imagine photos, words, music, video — literally any idea you can publish in a collection, a commons, available for all to use. You can remix audio, find background images for your slides, and see yourself credited as your work is extended. This exists today spread across sites like Flickr, Wikimedia, The Internet Archive, The Free Music Archive, and in works published by thousands of creators around the world.
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization building tools and (most famously) licenses to support a rich commons built and maintained by the public. When you publish anything with a Creative Commons license you’re basically defining permissions; saying how you want to share your thing and on what terms.
Sharing is good. It’s how we build the commons.
Sharing is also good business. For the creator, sharing work can be a way to build audience, amplify a message, or seed an idea that needs growing. I’d argue that supporting Creative Commons licenses is good for services, too. Flickr’s long and deep support of Creative Commons has kept them at the front of photo sharing services, winning user loyalty through choice and traffic through supporting searches by license type. They’ve also remained integral in academic circles hosting public domain image collections for many universities and museums — an invaluable educational resource and a huge part of the larger commons.
I hope to see Medium embrace Creative Commons, too.
Medium is a unique offering, a perfect combination of ease and amplification. If it were to add machine-readable Creative Commons support Medium could quickly increase it’s versatility not only as a publishing tool, but as an endpoint for published writing. License-based search, automatic attribution, and open content features could all cement Medium as a central hub for healthy long-form writing and curation.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot as we’ve decided to move most CASH Music writing and content to Medium. We’ve long since decided that everything we create should use an open license. Open source for code, Creative Commons for writing. We can (and do) declare a CC BY license in the footer of everything we write. This serves one half of commons, but I can’t help but think about how powerful Medium could be if licenses and attribution happened at the code level as well.
Through my work at CASH and now also as a fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation I’ve given away just about all of my life’s most significant work. I realize I’m the weird one there, but I’m not advocating that everyone follow that path. The commons should be a tool for everyone, not just the most zealous participants. Which is exactly why Creative Commons support from popular services like Medium is so vital.
Medium is a private company. I’m not privy to their roadmap so this might well be a work in progress or it might be something they don’t care about at all. But consider this my way of saying that I love this thing Medium is building and I hope they choose to support a rich and open commons — for the sake of this platform as much as the commons itself.
This can be the future.
By Jesse von Doom, licensed under a Creative Commons BY license.
