BRYAN MATHERS: Hello, my name is Bryan Mathers, from Visual Thinkery. And here's a few thoughts on being open. Initially when I started to create stuff a few years ago-- so drawings, illustrations from people thinking-- I think my default mode was a copyright mode, to protect the thing that you've created if you feel happy with the thing that you've created. 

And therefore, being open is somehow counter-intuitive to that copyright mode, which almost wants to lock your creation away somehow. Because being open says, put it on a pedestal. Allow people to see. It allow people to interact with. Allow people to change it and build on top of it. 

And I wonder where that comes from, that sort of default being copyright. Maybe it's the school system that we've got that pits us against each other and has us in competition with each other, and a very definite idea of, well, that was my idea. Maybe that's just how kids are. I don't know. But somehow being open seemed counter-intuitive. 

And yet by getting stuff out there, obviously getting feedback, and improving your own work, but also being able to go wide with a creation-- and ultimately Creative Commons licenses provide a formalizing of the arrangement between me and the commons as a creator, in terms of the terms of the arrangement, saying that, hey, you can change this, hey, you can build on top of it, hey, you know, you can share it, but I do want you to change it. And I find that just a different way of looking at things that a person creates. 

But it doesn't work without a connected community. Because the role of a community in allowing a creation to go wide and having a need for those things at all, or an appreciation for the things that are being created, I think is fundamental, and also just a community that then respects the arrangement and respects the commons and knows how new things are added to the commons and knows how things are looked after in the commons. So essentially, if it wasn't for both a connected community, that open community, and Creative Commons licenses, my business wouldn't exist.