Why unrestricted discipleship resources are the future of the global church

Part of the process of preparing for an upcoming conference on "open collaboration" in world missions contexts involved compiling a list of factors that help make open collaboration projects succeed. The first factor in the list (the rest of which will be posted here shortly) is open-licensed content. Here's why.

There are only two alternatives for managing the intellectual property of a collaborative project:

1. Either everyone consigns the copyright of the content they create in the project to the owners of the project (which is all but guaranteed to stifle the growth and effectiveness of the project), or
2. Everyone agrees to release what they create under an open license which allows the use and re-purposing of the content.

We have argued before that the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License is one of the best "open licenses" for discipleship resources, but in order to help understand why that is, consider the following context.

A group of believers in a village somewhere in Africa/Asia/wherever needs discipleship resources to help them grow in spiritual maturity. In the realm of copyrighted, "all rights reserved" discipleship resources, the process for them to obtain legal access to use a discipleship resource or for use as the basis to create a contextualized discipleship resource is complex and full of ways to fail. They need to ask themselves the following questions (at a minimum), and if an answer to any of the questions is a negative, they cannot legally use the resource:

1. Can I identify the copyright holder?
2. Do I know how to contact them?
3. Can I communicate in their language?
4. Am I able to contact the copyright holder?
5. Do I have the Intellectual Property knowledge to request permission?

6. Write the request

   ...extreme time lapse... (usually 6+ months if not much longer)

7. Do I get a response?
8. Did they understand my request?
9. Do I understand their contract?
10. Can I comply with the contract?
11. Can I afford the terms of the contract?
12. Can the resource be used without translation (which would require making a derivative work)?
13. Can the resource be used without adaptation (contextualization, also a derivative work)?
14. Can I provide an independent back-translation?
15. Can I track the translation with forms for every participant?
16. Can I comply with the publisher's work-for-hire agreement?
17. Do I know who owns the translation?
18. Can I provide the finished product to the author?

If all these answers are "yes", then the resource can be legally used. But there is one more catch: what if I need to use the resource in ways that excede the original permissions of the contract? The process begins again from "Do I have the Intellectual Property knowledge to request permission?"

This process can be visualized in the following flowchart *(click the image for a larger version):

Contrast this process with the one step involved in gaining legal access to a discipleship resource released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License:

1. Am I willing to give attribution for the resource and release what I create with it under the same license?

If yes, then the resource can be legally used. The simplicity of this process, contrasted with the previous, can be see in the following flowchart:

There is a tremendous need for a core of open-licensed discipleship resources (like those being created in the Door43 project) to be created and made available as the foundation upon which anyone can legally and easily create their own contextualized discipleship resources. With the technology available to us today, we have an unprecedented opportunity to help the global church by openly collaborating with them in the creation of unrestricted discipleship resources that can go farther, be used more effectively, by more people, in more languages and on more mobile devices than ever before in history.

Photo credit: mythic_moonlight, by-nc