Institute for Open Leadership

Description

"Creative Commons is developing an Institute for Open Leadership (IOL) to train new leaders in education, science, and public policy fields on the values and implementation of openness in licensing, policies, and practices. By training new leaders, connecting them to each other and helping them complete their first capstone open project in their institution, we will prepare them to guide emerging movements in open science, open education, open government, and open culture. These movements are using Creative Commons licenses to broaden public access to knowledge, data, culture, and research around the world, creating new opportunities for education, innovation, and creativity.

The first Institute for Open Leadership cohort will attend the institute during one of these two weeks (which week to be based on conference facility availability): 12-16 January or 19-23 January, 2015." (http://staging.openpolicynetwork.org/iol/)

Interview

Interview of Timothy Vollmer, conducted by Cat Johnson:

"* The first OPN project is the Institute for Open Leadership, created to “train new leaders in education, science, and public policy fields on the values and implementation of openness in licensing, policies, and practices.” Why is this initiative important and what will this training entail?

We need the next generation of leaders to help operationalize the vision of the Network. Policy changes require in-depth knowledge about how particular systems and processes within institutions work. And those persons working from within are best positioned to instigate change.

It’s one thing for me to offer advice to a university provost about how to adopt an open access policy on her campus. It’d be much better for a scholarly communications librarian within that university, who knows the needs of faculty, students, and staff, to work with these groups to educate and implement a policy. The training will depend on the interests of the accepted fellows.

The Network already has a wide range of experts in various fields, from Open Educational Resources to Open Access to public sector information. Depending on the focus areas of the fellows, we will bring together the related experts for a week-long, face-to-face summit. But we don’t want the experts lecturing the fellows. We’re thinking about operating the in-person institute as a sort of “flipped classroom” whereby accepted fellows complete a set of research and exercises in preparation of the summit. That way, we can have a more productive and interactive meeting between instructors and fellows when we come together in January.

This sort of setup also fits the best with the central purpose of the Institute itself: for each fellow to develop an idea for an open policy project that is relevant to their field of work, hone the project in collaboration with the other participants during the in-person meeting, and return to their institution to implement the policy after the summit.

* Who should apply for the inaugural IOL Fellowship program?

We are looking for a broad array of individuals who are interested, but not already experts in, open topics. We want persons who are willing to develop and work toward adopting an innovative open policy at their place of work or study. We foresee applicants coming from the government, university, GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) sector, publishing, and other areas. The application process is open until June 30th. We’re also looking for people to apply from outside of the United States." (http://www.shareable.net/blog/open-policy-network-to-give-governments-a-license-to-share)