From the editors:

[At the “Commons Crossroads” conference in Manila] it was proposed to have a bi-monthly electronic newsletter from which each of us can be informed of CC activities in one another’s jurisdiction. It is also hoped that the newsletter serves as a venue to share experience and to enable collaboration.

You can read more about the Commons Crossroads conference, the region’s Action Plan Statement, and more cool stories from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Australia, and China Mainland.

Although English isn’t the first language of many Asia-Pacific jurisdictions, the contributors took an extra effort to prepare the newsletter for a global audience. A huge thank you to the writers and to CC Philippines and CC Taiwan for editing this fantastic volume. For more international news, you can always check out our monthly newsletter and of course keep an eye out for the next Asia-Pacific issue.

Cover by Lairaja / Except when otherwise noted, this work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Philippines license.

The Fedora Project, best known for its community-centric and cutting-edge GNU/Linux distribution, but also committed to “leading the advancement of free, open software and content” (emphasis added, from the Fedora Project home page), has migrated all of its documentation and wiki content to CC BY-SA from the long-deprecated Open Publication License, via their contributor agreement. Among the reasons:

4. Other organizations that have content we can reuse in Fedora and contribute back to, such as Wikipedia and GNOME, have switched or are switching to the CC BY SA. Why does this matter? For one easy example, we can write a definitive history of Fedora, host it on Wikipedia as the upstream, then package it as part of the ‘about-fedora’ package.

5. If you’ve never looked at how much open content there is on e.g. flickr.com and Wikicommons, please look. For content authors, this is going from practically zero useful open media available to tens of millions of photographs, diagrams, and so forth that we can not only freely reuse, but we can contribute back to.

AntWeb, a project of the California Academy of Sciences that holds its own copyrights has changed its license from CC Attribution-NonCommercial to CC Attribution-ShareAlike, a change that has resulted in a major collaboration with Wikimedians and 30,000 ant images gracing Wikipedia articles. Waldir Pimenta guest-blogging with Brianna Laugher, writes:

I found the fantastic images from AntWeb, a project from The California Academy of Sciences, which aims to illustrate the enormous diversity of the ants of the world. I was especially happy to find that they were using a Creative Commons license — but soon after I was disappointed to find that the specific one they used (CC-BY-NC) was not appropriate for Wikipedia (or, more generally, free cultural works, and thus discouraged by Creative Commons itself).

So I sent them an email suggesting them to change the license. When they replied, I found out that they actuallly had been internally discussing license issues for quite a while. I kept in touch, and made sure to let them know the advantages of having their work showcased in such high-traffic websites as Wikipedia, Commons or WikiSpecies.

I like to think that my two cents helped in their decision, some time later, to not only change their license to CC-BY-SA, but also upload all their images to Commons themselves! This was part of their overall mission: “universal access to ant information”. Before, the AntWeb project focused only on digitization of content and development of the web portal; but now they also decided to “export” AntWeb content to improve access. Putting the images and associated metadata in Commons was an example their outreach initiatives.

Finally, Wikitravel, a very successful site that we’ve mentioned here many times (see founder Evan Prodromou’s letter in support of our 2007 fundraising campaign — which also works for 2009!) is building community consensus for upgrading from CC BY-SA 1.0 to CC BY-SA 3.0. Unfortunately 1.0 did not have an upgrade clause, a problem corrected in 2.0.

Many thanks to Canonical for their ongoing support of free culture and Creative Commons.

We still have a long way to go to reach our $500,000 goal for this year’s campaign, so please donate today and show your support for a culture of sharing!

Kickstarter is a funding platform for creators, and represents a refreshing way of thinking about supporting cultural production and creators. Most importantly, Kickstarter, like Creative Commons, offers a real mechanism for creators to connect with their supporters and share their work in a way that acknowledges the inevitabilities of digital media. Having launched and successfully funded my own project through Kickstarter, I know this platform works and I’m incredibly excited by its potential. But Kickstarter is also something that many of us in the free culture community have always dreamed of — a way to directly fund cultural production and its creators without resorting to leveraging scarcity and exclusivity.

I’m going to be doing very similar things at Kickstarter that I’ve been doing at CC: outreach, advocacy, some product, some community, some biz dev, and lots of pondering the future of culture and collaboration. But I’m also really looking forward to sharing a lot of the principles and relationships I developed at CC with my new colleagues, so if we’re currently working together on something, I’m sure we’ll still have plenty to talk about.

Working for Creative Commons has been fantastic, and I really couldn’t have imagined a better way or a better group of people to spend the last couple of years with, so it is not without some sadness that I’m leaving. So let’s stay in touch! Find me on twitter, check out my blog, or just drop me a line at fcb at fredbenenson.com.

See you on the ole tubes!

Fred

Levi van Veluw showcases miniature landscapes built on a human canvas in Landscapes (BY-NC-ND); Glenn Jones offers ideas for future t-shirts (BY-NC); L Filipe dos Santos highlights illustrations with See. Saw (BY-NC-ND); Si Sott offers a poster series in Silent Records (BY-NC-ND); and Iain Crawford shares his stunning still photography (BY-NC).

It is fantastic to see this kind of up-take with our licenses, and Behance is only one of the many content directories that use our tools to help increase sharing and reuse. For more info on Behance, be sure to read our intervew with founder/CEO Scott Belsky as well as explore the Behance Network itself.

Excerpt from See . Saw Series by L Filipe dos Santos | CC BY-NC-ND

Preparing Your Educational Resources for DiscoverEd is second in the CC Learn Step by Step Guides series, which is part of our larger Productions schema. It is a basic guide for those interested in preparing their resources for inclusion into search engines like DiscoverEd that utilize structured data. It is targeted at people or institutions interested in making their digitally published educational resources more discoverable. Though the document contains technical language and sample XHTML and RDFa, it’s really not all too complicated. Basically, you just need one of the right feeds to start, which you can then copy and paste the link of into ODEPO (the Open Database of Educational Projects and Organizations). ODEPO is hosted on OpenED, the community site for open education. It’s a wiki, so anyone can create an account and add their project or organization to the database.

But the guide explains all that, (as does the DiscoverEd FAQ) and the alternatives–which include contacting us directly. DiscoverEd already pulls from a number of institutions and repositories, and as it expands we hope to improve its search capabilities. Any feedback is welcome.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu project, was founded in 2004. The headquarters are in Europe, with over 200 employees working in 23 countries. Their mission is “to realize the potential of free software in the lives of individuals and organisations,” which they do by delivering the world’s best software platform and ensuring its availability to everyone.

From Jono Bacon, Canonical’s Ubuntu Community Manager: “Canonical are really happy to support the Creative Commons, an organization at the corner-stone of an ethos that we share in the Ubuntu world and that we are proud to support.” Likewise, we feel that Canonical’s mission could not be better aligned with our own, and as such we’re thrilled to partner with them on on this matching challenge.

Join Canonical in investing in the future of creativity and knowledge and give what you can today!

The Ministry’s Cultural Education program is the first of its kind in Poland to encourage grant recipients to freely and publicly share educational content. The program, with a budget of 11,5 million Polish zloty (about 4 million Euro), will fund educational projects that promote creativity and self-expression, as well as provide children and youth with extra-curricular artistic education.

KOED is coalition formed by one of CC Poland’s affiliate institutions, the Interdisciplinary Center for Modelling at University of Warsaw, and colleagues Wikimedia Polska Association, Foundation Modern Poland, and the Polish Librarians Association. We blogged about its inception in January 2009.

User Serratiago has used Blender to convert the original data from the Radiohead video into a set of coordinates that can be printed into a real-life 3D sculpture of Thom Yorke’s head. Since the original data is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, that means Serriago’s derivative is as well. What’s great about this story is that Serratiago didn’t need to ask Thom Yorke, Radiohead, or anyone for permission to make and distribute his work, as the Creative Commons license had already established it!

So if you own a 3D printer, you can download the data and get started. If you need a 3D printer, you should check out MakerBot, an open source project brought to you by the guys behind Thingiverse.

IH&RA members comprise around 300,000 hotels and 8 million restaurants, making this an incredible case study for how CC-licensed content can be monetized on a large scale. Artists that distribute their music through Jamendo PRO will receive half of the revenue generated from the licensing – these are the same artists who use Jamendo, the open music sharing site, to distribute CC-licensed recordings for free to the public under CC-licenses of their choosing.