@mlinksva just put out a great slide show, albeit the over-use of bullet points ;), that is an overview of CC as well as a general look at the historical trajectories of Free Software and how Free Culture Movement is approximately 10 years behind. This is a great beginning at the more intimate look at where WE are heading collectively, because of course, Free Software and Free Culture’s paths are intermingled. It would be quite interesting actually to write a book about these paths with major highlights and where WE are heading.

Yes, I know there are many books analyzing Free Software and then some coming out like David Bollier’s Viral Spiral that looks at Commons production overall including rise of Creative Commons, but actually one looking at the larger scope of Free Culture would be quite interesting.

Check out the slides and throw em up if you have any comments:

Free Software/Free Culture Collaboration

view presentation (tags: wiki opencontent opensource freesoftware)

BTW, I wonder if we should collectively be working on a more finite conference about the Free Culture Movement for next year. This would be one targeted towards production of content, assessing failed projects, live events, and no eunuchs to assist in cultural production. The idea is that this conference would directly fit into the trajectory of Free Software. This conference would be in the optimal location globally for most people to attend for the least amount of expenditure, such as Amsterdam, Vancouver, Singapore, or a better optimized location. I think we can learn from Wikimania in Cairo and conferences in Sapporo as absurd for more the usual suspects on the conference circuit (of which I am a part).

Free Culture Conference (”Get your FreeCon”) would be a meeting of specific projects to hash out interrelationships and collective trajectories for the coming year. We have had great success with the Libre Graphics Meeting which is not about people hand waving and armchair philosophizing about every single person’s movement, but specific projects coming together to their roadmap, challenges for interoperability, and real hacking on projects more than just declarations.

What would it take to put on a proper Free Culture Conference and who would need to be present. I would say:

Free Software Foundation
Creative Commons
Wikimedia Properties
Gnome Foundation
Open Courseware Consortium
Internet Archive

And the list keeps going on…please add to, as this is just off the head…the number of companies that would be interested in this intermixing would be quite high IMO. I’m particularly interested in this being a place for companies interested in Open Hardware and Specifications to intermingle (aka, Openmoko, VIA, Intel)

The idea is that this is a place where project roadmaps are compared, integrations resolved (like Wikipedia BY-SA compatibility), and real hacking would take place. Also, this conference would be 2-3 days max and marked with conversions of projects to more liberalized licensing as affirmations each day to pump up participants [0]. The goal of the event would be to produce actual statements showing resolutions with implementation to back them up, and to announce the next 5-10 free culture priorities for the year.

Is anyone interested in this?

[0] I’ve called this Freedom Day before, but it needs a better name without the negative associations with Freedom in many asian countries - aka, freedom means free as in destroy the government, which this is NOT. Rather, the idea of Freedom Day would be for projects to announce using free licenses and/or moving from more restrictive licenses to more free licenses. What would a better name for this annual day be? What about SHARING DAY, or Global Day of Sharing

I just announced over on the CC site my job change. I will still be on the books with Creative Commons, but will not be a full time staff member any longer. While I have been a human interface for Creative Commons to people, businesses and organizations, particularly in the technology space, my role will change to be Business Development and Community Liaison.

I have been working for Creative Commons for the past 3 years. In that time, I’ve fully devoted myself because I wanted to “scratch an itch,” as its called in open source development circles. Over the last few months I have felt that I sufficiently scratched the itch. Through my contributions to Inkscape and Open Clip Art Library I met the best boss and coolest person in the world, Mike Linksvayer. I wanted to make CC easier for the free and open source world by creating a library to make CC licensing easy: Now we have liblicense and LicenseChooser.js. I wanted to see the expansion of an international public domain dedication that worked globally, as Open Clip Art Library wanted: Now we have CC Zero Waiver and soon a Universal Public Domain dedication.

Of course, along the way, there have been other projects which I’m massively happy I contributed to, such as brewing the ingredients for CC Salons, working on media sharing web engine ccHost, and then efforts to provide simple solutions to help people, businesses and organizations to use CC licensing: Case Studies, http://creativecommons.org/projects/metrics”>Metrics and Documentation project.

After August 2nd, the world will continue to be in great hands with new and ongoing staff members that are supporting the efforts of Creative Commons around the clock. The international community of CC Jurisdiction Projects has an amazing line-up of individuals globally that are handling relationships amazingly. And, I’m still on the books to keep facilitating when possible.

If you are curious what I am immediately working on, then you kind readers of my blog might realize that I’ve been spending a lot of time on the upcoming art exhibition, Cantocore, an international contemporary art project between San Francisco and Guangzhou, China August 30 - September 6th near the Guangzhou Triennial. I am also planning a large art show in San Francisco for Overlap, which is Overlapping Networks of Experimental Media and Culture with Free Tools, Releases, News and Events” at the Gray Area Gallery starting Sept 13, 2008 through Sept 27, 2008. There is much work associated with the above projects which will require most of my time. This includes websites, projects for the shows, wrangling of participants, producing books, and more.

Cantocore ping pong space in Guangzhou

Beyond these immediate plans, I am of course entertaining various consulting projects, speaking engangements, writing for various magazines, trying to finish my book CVS (maybe should be renamed SVN ;), and then set-up my own solo art show somewhere in the next year before I turn 30 next May 28! If you would like to talk about these projects, are interested in working together with me on them, and/or hiring me for various gigs, contact me!

Cantocore Container

Lu and I will be primarily living in Guangzhou this August, then I will be in Beijing this fall. Of course, I’m traveling much around the globe. I’m particularly interested in working with more projects and companies in China and Asia.

Regardless, I’m more than ever committed to Creative Commons as an idea and set of practical tools. I am super committed as well to building up the projects I’ve been working on for some time with new vigor and knowledge gained from experience over the last few years in working with people, companies, and organizations.

Here is more as well from the post on the CC site:

Photo by-sa Freddy B. Used with permission from Photographer.

I’m in Sapporo for the CC Legal Day, Commons Research Mini-conference which the Metrics Project is but part, and to
further promote the CC Case Studies project. As Greg outlined so clearly last week and I presented at the launch of CC Singapore a few days ago,
this project is doing quite well with 112 submissions from around the world assisted by
a great system for supporting this community project, and even better brilliant people adding case studies daily!

Also, you kind readers might have noticed that we have launched and/or refreshed several projects over the last few weeks to prepare for a coming change. As of August, my role with Creative Commons will change from managing community and business development to being liaison in ongoing similar affairs. This also means that I will be spending most of my time on projects outside of Creative Commons — most still involve using Creative Commons licensing and technology.

I’m not leaving the culture of free and open, nor Creative Commons, both of which I have been involved with for some time. Rather, I will be, as of August 2nd, devoting most of my energy to projects I’ve been delaying or couldn’t do as effectively since I have been living and breathing Creative Commons. My job and peers at Creative Commons are amazing and working for CC, in my capacity at least which I can speak to, is a dream job. If anything, I will be pushing Creative Commons even more by action, projects, and facilitation in another capacity.

Thus, if you want to find out more about what I will be doing, you know where to find me. And, if I’ve been working with you, your business, your community, and/or organization, jon@creativecommons.org still works (and will so). I am continuing work on a couple of projects that have not launched in relationship to Open Library/PDWiki project. I also am on-demand still for speaking at events and conferences globally - particularly in Asia since I will be spending most time in China from August - December 2008. I’m still on the books and will facilitate any discussions to the appropriate people. I’m more excited that ever to keep growing the commons!

Help me spread the word. CC+ is NOT a license. It is a protocol. On the CC+ website, there is further clarification of this.

Ok, let me try that again:

CC+ is NOT a license.

Spread the news!

Here is a nice way to visualize what CC+ is built to enable.

+

CC+ is CC license + Another agreement.

It is NOT a new license, but a facilitation of morePermissions beyond ANY standard CC licenses.

If you want to adopt CC+, please (1) implement CC+ simple technology on your site, (2) add your project/company name, and (3) let us know!

The main idea behind it is to allow for commercial rights to be brokered for monetization of content. While the branding behind CC+ has worked brilliantly in spreading the term, a basic misunderstanding or word seriously skews the understanding of CC+.

If anyone is at CC Legal Day and Sapporo this week for various events, I’m microblogging at rejon on identi.ca (which then posts down to twitter via http://ping.fm). Also, using #cc on irc.freenode.net for any direct discussions.

Lets meet up and talk shop! All my social networks are on the sidebar of my site.

Creative Commons Case Studies, Metrics Project, and CC Integration Tools at ISEA 2008 Singapore

view presentation (tags: freeculture opencontent singapore casestudies)

And, from Scribd:

Creative Commons Case Studies, Metrics Project, and CC Integration Tools at ISEA 2008 Singapore - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Creative Commons Case Studies, Metrics Project, and CC Integration Tools at ISEA 2008 Singapore

I’ve been here with my new media art homies of yester and today at ISEA 2008 in Singapore. I had the pleasure as well to speak at the CC Singapore launch yesterday and whipped up my feeder slide deck for this coming week’s conference in Sapporo on Commons Research, CC Metrics and CC Case Studies. It is going to be a lot of fun. I just have to remember to sleep a bunch today on my flights from Singapore to Sapporo, Japan.

I will then be heading to the BETA location in Guangzhou again for most of August. More news on that shortly and what I will be doing with most of my time.

Time to sort through my thoughts on this flight…the need for downtime will never come! Just get used to it Jon!

Loic Lemur came over to CC yesterday and we shot fun video about Seesmic adding CC licensing. Loic sat on Joi’s fixie from Mission Bicycle and I sat on my wife’s cruiser for this one:

The interface looks super-awesome. Great jobs guys and thanks for supporting the commons!

Loic and I at CC

From Joi’s site…I need to get one of those Yukata’s to wear around the house. I have some awesome shoes that Lu’s mom got me from Beijing (they look like stereotypical kung-fu shoe no joke):

News of Seesmic + CC startles me at 5AM

I’m stoked about the latest OpenMoko release and looking forward to getting my hands on the latest freerunner released last week. Over on the CC blog, Tim “thwang-roflcon” Hwang, blogged about the effects of releasing the OpenMoko case plans under CC BY-SA license. Enjoy!

Great news coming out recently that our good friends over at the awesome open source mobile phone project OpenMoko have been seeing rapid success with releasing their CAD design files for the FreeRunner phone under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license. Their open design approach has spurred adoption, becoming the basis for the Dash Express car navigation device, and a popular platform for other projects such as the Debian-based WEphone. It’s gaining a lot of traction, and it looks like we’ll be able to look forward to even more successes on the open design front in the near future. Might have to pick one up for myself…

This follows in the line of similar recent adoption successes seen by other businesses taking the strategy of making their CAD files open to the public like the award-winning OpenBook project that makes designs for their laptop available for anyone to use. We’re hoping that these examples set the stage for companies to take up the business opportunities available in CCing their product schematics.

Geez, how did I not blog this yet! We released the CC Metrics Project this week to open up the data so that anyone can help figure out how many CC licensed pieces of media are out in the world. CC has put a new number at 130 million, but I personally, as in a personal capacity, think this number is very very low! If Flickr has 70 Million CC licensed photos, then combine the rest of the cc licensed objects in the web, is the lower bound really only 130 million items?

Please help CC figure out a more accurate number please! There are tools, scrubbed apache logs, and more to help sort things out. If you don’t have time to help with this project, then please write a story about this project, shoot me an email for an interview, or help by blogging more about this project.

CC BizDev Intern Tim “thwang” Hwang, Mr FabBitches himself, aka Lucas Barton (The Power Glove, its so badddd), wrote on the CC blog about this:

Tim Hwang, Business Development Intern here. Along with Jon Phillips and many others, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes and excited to announce today that we’ve officially launched the Creative Commons Metrics Project!

Recently, there’s been a growing academic interest in understanding how CC adoption is changing the creative landscape worldwide. Metrics is a wiki-project designed to bring together existing efforts and encourage collaboration on this emerging field of research.

You can read more details about the project on our Press Releases page, and can visit the project directly to browse what we’ve gathered so far (and contribute!).

(image: Giorgos Cheliotis’ chart of global CC adoption and permissiveness — learn more about his amazing work at the Participatory Media Lab)

Here is the blog post draft I never released from the CC blog since I went on vacation to Yosemite with my parents on a fake vacation last 6 days:

We are on a roll with releases! Last week we successfully launched the Case Studies project which “explores and adds noteworthy global Creative Commons stories” (translation: an open wiki-based way for anyone to add and edit case studies about Creative Commons integration). This week, we are releasing the Metrics project.

Often, businesses, press, and people ask us CC folk, “How many CC licensed objects are there out there there?” Our response in the past varied in some accounts and then the solution struck us: release privacy scrubbed apache logs free of copyright, any tools we have used to scrape the web or find linkbacks from Google and Yahoo, and encourage people who are smarter than us (researchers and scholars around the world), to do research on this data to help everyone accurately understand how Creative Commons licensing is spreading globally.

Work on this project has been inspired by the great work by Giorgos Cheliotos and the Participatory Media Lab in Singapore.

A chart showing latest CC license usage we can stand by comfortably