Without the state

Public housing needs radical reform: here's how - republished from 'The Conversation'

Public housing needs radical reform: here's how

Ben Allan/Unsplash, FAL

Matthew Thompson, University of Liverpool

Britain’s housing system is well and truly broken. House-builders sit on land already granted planning permission and drip-feed the market to keep supply low and prices high. Despite the coronavirus crisis, house prices continue to soar, excluding most from ever reaching onto the property ladder.

Tax subsidies help speculative landlords exploit “generation rent”, who face a future far less secure or prosperous than that of their parents – or even their grandparents. As the welfare state is hollowed out, property assets replace retirement benefits, deepening deprivation and inflating property bubbles.

Widening inequalities collide with privatisation of public housing to exacerbate the homelessness crisis – despite thousands of homes lying empty across the country.

The UK’s housing problems are also grossly unevenly distributed. In economically depressed regions such as Liverpool, where I’m based, the state has been demolishing “obsolete” houses owing to “housing market failure”.

Yet only a few hundred miles away lies the epicentre of the property boom, London, where demand and financial speculation are so intense that local authorities engage in the creative destruction of ex-council estates. Thousands of tenants are displaced, often out of London, to clear sites for lucrative redevelopment as private flats with minimal affordable housing.

In both London and Liverpool – two extremes of Britain’s polarised housing market – activists have been busy re-imagining the future of public housing. One way this is being explored is through the use of community land trusts (CLTs), a form of collective ownership of land for affordable housing and other community uses, innovated in the 1960s American civil rights movement. I’ve been studying them over the past decade and recently published a book on the topic.

In London, led by East London CLT in Tower Hamlets, the CLT model has been used to contest the adverse effects – gentrification and displacement – of housing markets becoming “too hot”.

In Liverpool, a city where housing markets are “too cold”, having lost close to half its population in the second half of the 20th century, communities facing forced eviction and the state-funded demolition of their neighbourhoods have come together to campaign for CLT alternatives. Granby Four Streets and Homebaked are the country’s very first to pioneer the model for inner-city regeneration in contexts of urban decline.

Community alternatives

Granby Four Streets won the Turner Prize in 2015 – the first architectural project ever to do so. The award recognised the creative work of architects Assemble in bringing residents together in a democratic do-it-yourself rehabilitation process – what they call “community homesteading”.

This built on years of residents’ hard graft – and creative craft – to resist the bulldozers since the 1990s and transform their neglected neighbourhood into a horticultural wonderland, with street planters, vegetable plots, climbing flowers, garden benches and artistic murals; hosting a popular street market once a month.

Such guerrilla gardening was inspiration for a vision to establish a CLT in 2011 to restore derelict properties as decent affordable homes. Some were too dilapidated to save, transformed instead into a beautiful Winter Garden with subtropical plants, an artist studio and community meeting house.

A view of the winter garden. © Matthew Thompson, Author provided

This is about more than just bricks and mortar. The CLT is revitalising Granby’s struggling local economy through providing a permanent home for the street market, creating space for new businesses and community enterprise, providing new jobs as well as public space and community facilities for residents to engage in festivities and the collective management of their neighbourhood.

On the other side of the city, right opposite Liverpool Football Club, is Homebaked. This started life as a public arts project funded by the 2010 Liverpool Biennial called “2up2down”, which invited residents to re-imagine the terraced house.

 

Having successfully campaigned to save the local bakery and its terraced row from demolition, 2up2down evolved into Homebaked CLT to take on the ownership of the buildings and bring the bakery back into use. Plans are now afoot to renovate the terrace into cooperative housing and, on the ground floor, provide space for community enterprise, including their sister organisations Homebaked bakery co-op and Homegrown, a food growing and beer brewing collective. All of this is part of a long-term vision to democratically transform the neighbourhood.

Stronger foundations

CLTs such as Granby and Homebaked provide an inspiring blueprint for reconstructing public housing on stronger social and economic foundations.

They are legally incorporated with an “asset lock” which protects the land from being sold off and ensures that all surpluses from renting buildings get reinvested for community benefit. They are governed democratically through a trust structure with board members elected by the wider CLT membership, open to all local residents.

This also enables a public-common partnership approach with local authorities. In return for public land transfer and development expertise, CLTs make their permanently affordable homes available to local people in need.

But Granby and Homebaked remain artistic exemplars – too few and far between to make a huge difference to widespread housing problems. These extraordinary practices need to be replicated across Liverpool, London and beyond through radical new initiatives, so they become more ordinary features of public housing.

Learning from Liverpool

Public housing in the UK is witnessing a revival. Tight borrowing constraints imposed on councils have been loosened to enable the construction of new council housing for the first time in decades.

Yet it is vital that local authorities don’t repeat past mistakes. Bureaucratic and paternalistic management of council estates and the undemocratic commissioning of alienating designs, unresponsive to residents’ needs, inspired a backlash from tenants and gave hostile politicians the ammunition they needed to systematically privatise public housing.

By outsourcing public services to unaccountable firms seeking higher profit margins at all costs, privatisation paved the way for the Grenfell Tower tragedy, when 72 people lost their lives. Learning from more imaginative and democratic alternatives to this broken system is urgently needed.

Matthew Thompson, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place, University of Liverpool

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why lockdowns don't necessarily infringe on freedom

Annelien de Dijn, Utrecht University

Europe is dealing with its “second wave” of COVID-19. And governments seem powerless to stem the tide. Dutch political leaders find it difficult to convince their citizens to wear face masks. A large majority of French voters think that Emmanuel Macron’s government has handled the pandemic badly. And Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, is facing anger from all sides about the circumstances that led to a new English lockdown.

According to these leaders, the arrival of a second wave has nothing to do with their own policy failures, or poor communication. No, the numbers are rising because Europeans are freedom-loving people and it’s hard to make them follow rules. “It is very difficult to ask the British population, uniformly, to obey guidelines in the way that is necessary,” said Johnson for example, in response to criticism of his government’s testing policy. Similarly, in the Netherlands some were quick to attribute soaring infection rates to the fact that the Dutch are famously averse to being “patronised”.

The same explanation is often invoked to account for why Europe is doing significantly worse than countries in East Asia, where the disease seems more under control. According to some commentators, the authoritarian, top-down political culture of countries like China and Singapore makes it far easier to implement strict measures than in liberal Europe.

Singapore’s “effective crisis management”, for instance, was supposedly made possible by the fact that its government “has always wielded absolute control over the state, with an iron fist and a whip in it.” Conversely, many believe that a devotion to “individual liberty” doomed the west to its ongoing crisis.

A coronavirus screening centre in Singapore. EPA-EFE

Is this true? Is a poorly functioning government indeed the price that must be paid for freedom? If that is the case, then perhaps we had better give up on liberty. After all, anyone who is dead or seriously ill does not benefit much from being free.

Collective freedom

Fortunately, that’s a conclusion we needn’t draw. As history shows, freedom is quite compatible with effective government. Western political thinkers ranging from Herodotus to Algernon Sidney did not think that a free society is a society without rules, but that those rules should be decided collectively. In their view, freedom was a public good rather than a purely individual condition. A free people, Sidney wrote for instance, was a people living “under laws of their own making”.

Even philosophers such as John Locke, it is worth noting, agreed with this view. Locke is often portrayed as a thinker who believed that freedom coincided with individual rights, rights that should be protected at all costs against state interference. But Locke explicitly denied that freedom was harmed by government regulation – as long as those rules were made “with the consent of society”.

“Freedom then is not … a liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any law,” he wrote in his famous Second Treatise. “But freedom of men under government, is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it.”

It was only in the early 19th century that some began to reject this collective ideal in favour of a more individualistic conception of liberty.

A new liberty

In the wake of the French Revolution, democracy slowly expanded across Europe. But this was not universally welcomed. The extension of the right to vote, many feared, would give political power to the poor and uneducated, who would no doubt use it to make dumb decisions or to redistribute wealth.

Storming of The Bastile, Jean-Pierre Houël, 1789. Wikimedia Commons

Hence, liberal elites embarked on a campaign against democracy – and they did so in the name of freedom. Democracy, liberal thinkers ranging from Benjamin Constant to Herbert Spencer argued, was not the mainstay of liberty but a potential threat to freedom properly understood – the private enjoyment of one’s life and goods.

Throughout the 19th century, this liberal, individualistic conception of freedom continued to be contested by radical democrats and socialists alike. Suffragettes such as Emmeline Pankhurst profoundly disagreed with Spencer’s view that the best way to protect liberty was to limit the sphere of government as much as possible. At the same time, socialist politicians such as Jean Jaurès claimed that they, and not the liberals, were the party of freedom, since socialism’s goal was “to organise the sovereignty of all in both the economic and political spheres”.

The ‘free’ West

Only after 1945 did the liberal concept of freedom prevail over the older, collective conception of freedom. In the context of cold war rivalry between the “free West” and the Soviet Union, distrust of state power grew - even democratic state power. In 1958, liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in a one-sided reading of the history of European political thought, stated that “Western” freedom was a purely “negative” concept. Every law, Berlin stated bluntly, had to be seen as an encroachment on freedom.

The cold war is of course since long over. Now that we are entering the third decade of the 21st century, we might want to dust off the older, collective concept of freedom. If the coronavirus crisis has made one thing clear, it is that collective threats such as a pandemic demand decisive, effective action from government.

This does not mean giving up our freedom in exchange for the protection of a nanny state. As Sidney and Locke remind us, as long as even the strictest lockdown can count on broad democratic support, and the rules remain subject to scrutiny by our representatives and the press, they do not infringe on our freedom.

Annelien de Dijn, Professor of History, Utrecht University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Copyright Nazis: Destroying “Intellectual Property” Rights in Order to Save Them

The International Intellectual Property Alliance, a powerful umbrella organization that includes the RIAA and MPAA, is arguing that open-source should be classified as a form of piracy!  It’s arguing that the U.S. Trade Representative put countries like Brazil, India and Indonesia on the “Special  301 watchlist” as international copyright scofflaws.  Their offense:  those countries’ governments have either officially adopted open-source software for use in government agencies and state enterprises, or have recommended the adoption of open-source software by such agencies and enterprises.

via c4ss.org

In Haiti, Control Becomes a Priority - by Darien Worden

I'm working on something about Haiti and the way in which the increasingly obvious failures in the relief effort seem to be down to a command and control system that treats Haitians as victims not people and on alternatives to that approach.

In the meantime read the article below from the Centre for a Stateless Society, reposted here under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license.

***

After years of being ruled by governments even more destructive than usual, Haiti was far less prepared for the recent earthquake than it could have been. Not inclined to let a serious crisis go to waste, the United States government and the business interests it works with will combine essential lifesaving work with efforts to gain control of Haiti’s future. The alternative to the deprivation of social control and the disasters it will cause is mutual aid.

A Guardian online article described frustration with the United States military control of relief efforts. US Military planes have been given landing priority while The Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières complained about their flights being redirected to the Dominican Republic. Certainly there is a scarcity in available runway space. However, aid organizations operate for the specific purpose of helping the less fortunate, while government operates primarily for the purpose of control. The character of relief efforts will be colored by this fact.

It goes without saying that Haitians deserve help. Unfortunately the ideas that people connect to “help” are often left unsaid. The thought process of authoritarianism requires the authoritarian to take control of the situation in order to improve it – and therefore improvement becomes conflated with getting the right people in charge. Rather than trying to work with people, authoritarians try to get people to work for them.

Naomi Klein warns that the crisis will be exploited by capitalists who want to rebuild Haiti in ways that benefit them. In her “Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert” blog post, she links to a Heritage Foundation post called “Things to Remember While Helping Haiti”. Heritage includes the following position:

“While on the ground in Haiti, the U.S. military can also interrupt the nightly flights of cocaine to Haiti and the Dominican Republic from the Venezuelan coast and counter the ongoing efforts of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to destabilize the island of Hispaniola. This U.S. military presence, which should also include a large contingent of U.S. Coast Guard assets, can also prevent any large-scale movement by Haitians to take to the sea in dangerous and rickety watercraft to try to enter the U.S. illegally.”

Authoritarians like Heritage believe that helping people means forcing them to act in ways that benefit certain gangs.

Dominance by United States interests is being challenged by anarchist and anti-authoritarian medical and relief workers. Like Common Ground did for New Orleans, they intend to help Haitians without asking permission.

Mutual Aid Disaster Relief for Haiti, a partnership between the Common Ground Clinic and Herbs For Orphans, is heading to the disaster area to help those who need it most. More information, including donation options, can be found at the website http://herbs4orphans.org.

An inquisitive mind might ask what the difference is between what MADRH and the US government are doing. Are they not both seeking to influence post-disaster Haiti?

The difference is who is in charge – anarchists answer to the people instead of to political leaders.

Working on a consensual and inclusive basis, as anti-authoritarians do, assists people in building their lives. Working on the basis of command and control, as authoritarians do, primarily involves handing victims a future that has been decided for them. By helping people build grassroots mutual aid networks, anarchists protect them from further destruction that authority would cause through enforced dependence and deprivation.

Things that should be done, like keeping people from dying, should be done according to your values – especially when doing so offers people the best chance to have a healthy life of their own.

Mutual aid efforts that provide assistance based on consent are superior to authoritarian efforts to sustain that which is to be exploited. While authoritarians try to claim for their own what others have made, anarchists create grassroots networks of support and resistance.

***

Darian Worden is an individualist anarchist writer with experience in libertarian activism. His fiction includes Bring a Gun To School Day and the forthcoming Trade War. His essays and other works can be viewed at his personal website. He also hosts an internet radio show, Thinking Liberty, on PatriotRadio.com.

The politics of space

“We shape our buildings and afterwards they shape us”

Winston Churchill addressing the Commons in the chamber of the House of Lords on October 28, 1943.

I have always been interested in how we affect our physical surroundings – not just the appearance but the processes at work. Some of that explains I suppose my fascination with the work of Christopher Alexander.

The world in the 21^st century is overwhelmingly urban and it behoves us to make that world one in which our children and grandchildren will want to live. On 17^th October I went to a conference at the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. The topic was “The Politics of Place” – more particularly why even when there is agreement about the sorts of places we like to see, we are apparently still incapable of building them. Of course the answer to this one will depend on where you start. The ‘right libertarian’ will argue it is all because we have too much interference in private property rights by the planning system. Get rid of that and all will be well.

One of the speakers on the day, Benjamin Barber, had some interesting things to say on that theme, in the context of an analysis of the spatial implications of democracy – and vice versa. His analysis is much more than a nuanced version of the simplistic cause and effect link espoused by the likes of Alice Coleman and Oscar Newman. He sees public space as an indispensable requirement of democracy, going back to the agora of the Greeks. According to Barber, the corruption of public space can be linked to the deterioration of democratic process and to the growing restrictions we can see on free speech itself.

He identifies five forces/trends at work – suburbanisation, commercialisation, privatisation, bureaucratisation and simulation. Of course references to commercialisation and privatisation will give those who believe the answer always lies in private property rights apoplexy, but bear with me.

Barber’s arguments about suburbanisation are I think the weakest – at least in a UK context. The US suburb is more likely to be totally dominated by private car use, many will have no footway/sidewalk and very few will have any amenities. Any sense of neighbourhood in the historic sense is lost and since all journeys are by car, the chances of random encounters are much reduced. The idea that people fled the city at least in part because of its isolation is belied by the fact that in most of the suburban US, the same isolation now exists but without the city amenities.

These characteristics do exist in UK suburbs, but not to the same extent and probably developed over a more limited time period. Places like Swindon, which grew rapidly on the back of appeal decisions that allowed massive housing without associated amenities are not typical of British suburban housing. In London for example most prewar suburbs were built around the railway and the tube system – Betjeman’s beloved Metroland. Even so there are still large areas of housing in the UK, often built by the public sector rather than the private, where the same lack of economic and cultural diversity prevails.

Barber also cites what he calls commercialisation. To an extent this seems to fall from the US system of zoning which very precisely delineates the nature of the uses allowed in a given area, but without attempting as the UK system does to allocate numbers or control growth levels. As a consequence, US cities and metropolitan areas a surrounded by vast tracts of housing zoned purely for a single house type on given plot sizes, usually much bigger than would prevail in the UK. The zoning system segregates uses much more comprehensively than the UK system does with the outcome a dispersal of uses across geographically large areas. Where people do come together it is largely in malls which are private and where the owners often seek to limit access by those commercially undesirable. Teenagers and the elderly have been excluded or moved on by mall owners since they simply don’t spend money and take up valuable space that could be given over to consumers.

Where cafes exist, they are in vast food courts, with false variety and set up for rapid turnover. Lingering over a cup of coffee while chatting up the local girls/boys is positively discouraged in such places. Commercialisation of the public space on this scale destroys the opportunity for public life. The paseo or promenade, the Sunday stroll, isn’t allowed to happen in a private mall since it serves no commercial purpose. Indeed many of the activities in Christopher Alexander’s ‘A Pattern Language‘ that he places at the centre of living in neighbourhoods, would be impossible or likely to be prohibited. In some malls even sitting is prohibited except in approved spaces.

This leads to Barber’s third trend, that of privatisation. The growth in gated communities in the US is spreading to the UK[i]. Where access is not directly closed, housing is often designed to exclude not include the casual visitor. Gated communities make real our secession from the public space that begins with the use of mobile phones/iPods/Blackberries. These tools, valuable in themselves, encourage us to treat public spaces as if they were private, impoverishing public life in the process. There is the story, probably apocryphal but describing an essential truth, of a group of teenagers chattering happily as they sit on a wall in the street. It is only when drawing closer that we can see they are all talking not to each other but on their mobiles. Commercialisation and privatisation also privatise us – we begin to see ourselves not as citizens, as inhabitants of a polis, but as consumers.

The process of bureaucratisation is I suppose self explanatory – professional judgment begins to cut into democratic life. Health and Safety concerns are for example entirely professionalised. As a consequence the citizen again becomes a consumer – this time of professional services - not someone exercising judgement on their own behalf and in their own right.

Finally Barber described a process he called simulation largely arising from frustrated attempts to counter the other trends, but leading for example in the urban environment to the faux variety seen at places like the Disney Corporation’s Celebration and in much new housing development, where perceived variety is no more than wallpaper.

According to Barber the outcome is that the idea of a democratic public realm vanishes; the very idea of being a citizen vanishes; replaced by consumers and consumerism. These forces may operate in the name of liberty but in the end are destroying it by destroying the important distinction between public and private liberty.

Commercialism, supported it must be said by tax breaks and concessions from government, may give us an almost unlimited choice of car for example but cannot give us the same choice - often any choice - of public transport. Our choices when we have them are often themselves destructive – ‘Sophie’s Choice’. We don’t have a chance to set agendas; they are handed down by the political or the corporate state. Nor do we have the chance to open up lateral communication. While talking to each other is after all the stuff of civic life, the limits placed on speech and communication by these trends make this increasingly difficult. The exercise of free speech and the opportunities for dissent are closed down. Free speech is only possible in public spaces and when space is privatised free speech is thereby diminished and damaged. In the US judges have already decided that the local neighbourhood mall is not a public space and allowed mall owners to prohibit distribution of literature, protest or other forms of behaviour they decide they do not want to allow. As Barber put it “there is no Speakers’ Corner in the Malls of America”.

This link between the growth in private spaces and the declining opportunities for dissent that creates is not often so explicitly stated. It seems obvious of course but so long as opponents of state power limit their opposition to a simplistic call for more private ownership – don’t reclaim the streets, sell them – it seems unlikely to be properly recognised. In any event even the public spaces are being closed down. State ‘ownership’ of the street is being used as a device to prevent and suppress public dissent – and not just about the war in Iraq. Under section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 it is an offence to organise or take part in a demonstration in a public place within the “designated area” (up to 1 km around Parliament) if authorisation has not been given by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. When so-called public ownership still leads to the suppression of dissent, it become that much more difficult to argue against the alternatives. Even so we must find ways to do so.

(As far as I can tell much of Barber’s argument was drawn from his new book ‘Consumed’.)

---

[i] It would appear that gated communities are not self-evidently attractive places to live. Existing research showed that motivations for living in a gated community are primarily driven by the need for security and a more generalised fear of crime. Importantly there was no apparent desire to come into contact with the ‘community’ within the gated or walled area. With regard to the specific impacts on crime only two studies could be identified. However, these indicate that sense of community is lower in gated ‘communities’ but perceived sense of safety is higher. While property crime went down violent crime was not affected. In some gated communities there was a greater fear of crime and outsiders more generally. – from Gated Communities: A Systematic Review of the Research Evidence

Liberty

Apropos the previous post:

In time, however, a democratic republic came to occupy a large portion of the earth's surface, and made itself felt as one of the most powerful members of the community of nations; and elective and responsible government became subject to the observations and criticisms which wait upon a great existing fact. It was now perceived that such phrases as "self-government," and "the power of the people over themselves," do not express the true state of the case. The "people" who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the "self-government" spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power. The limitation, therefore, of the power of government over individuals loses none of its importance when the holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, that is, to the strongest party therein. This view of things, recommending itself equally to the intelligence of thinkers and to the inclination of those important classes in European society to whose real or supposed interests democracy is adverse, has had no difficulty in establishing itself; and in political speculations "the tyranny of the majority" is now generally included among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard.

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

BBC, bfi, C4 and OU open archive to 'remixers'

BBC opens TV archive to remixers.

The BBC has released the first TV clips from its archive onto the internet for people to "rip, mix and share".

Almost 100 clips, from shows such as Walking With Beasts and Tomorrow's World, are for the UK public to use for free in their own creative works.

The BBC hopes to foster innovation by letting anyone re-use its material for personal and educational purposes under the Creative Archive Licence.

The Creative Archive Licence is modelled on Creative Commons with some amendments to suit the needs of the Creative Archive Group set out in the FAQ extract below:

The Creative Archive Licence is heavily inspired by the Creative
Commons Licences. However, public service organisations within the UK
have additional requirements that need to be reflected in the terms
under which they licence content. The two most obvious of these are the
UK-only requirement and the No Endorsement requirement. In addition,
the Creative Archive Licence seeks to protect the Licensor's moral
right of integrity, that is, the right not to have a work treated in a
derogatory or objectionable way.

 

BBC bfi C4 OU

Creative Commons

Creative Commons licensing is a wonderful idea, allowing an artist to set the terms on which their work can be used. The image below is one of mine from Flickr but based on another photograph, (licensed under these terms) so allowing me to create derivative works and in this case even to make commercial use.

Mysterious beauty, originally uploaded by ibanda.

Having access in this way is really stimulating, letting me work with a host of images I would never have taken myself and allowing me both to practice digiatal manipulation and in some cases to produce works that stand on their own.

This one for example is I think different enough from its source to have a standing of its own. I'm looking at how I might post some of my own images under a Creative Commons license. It seems reasonable that if I make use of these I should also offer some up.