If you’re in Los Angeles, please consider stopping by the GOOD Space (6824 Melrose Ave., LA, CA 90038) this Wednesday, March 11, at 7pm for an event that GOOD is hosting in conjunction with Knight Pulse called GOOD Community Leaders.

Representatives from five social initiatives will offer short presentations about their work and talk about some of their ideas for expanding the reach of their respective projects. I’ll be talking about Creative Commons – specifically about the importance of effectively communicating CC’s work to the general public. Edgar Arceneaux (Watts House Project), Erik Knudson and Kelly Coyne (Urban Homestead), Alissa Walker (Design LA), and Sonja Rasula (Unique LA) will also be presenting.

Admission is free. Red Stripe is providing free beer, and the event is 21+. RSVP is required; more info is available on GOOD’s blog.

If you’re in Los Angeles over the next two weeks, GOOD is hosting a series called GOOD December from Friday, 12/5 through Friday 12/19 in their new space on Melrose Avenue. It’s open to the public from 11am-5pm every day and will offer salons, panel discussions, meals, and more. There will be occasional parties in the evening hours that require an RSVP; check out the GOOD December site for more details. There’s also a nice write-up about it at Flavorpill with some useful info.

Creative Commons is collaborating with GOOD on two of the ongoing pieces of the series. One is an installation of Into Infinity – the art and music project we’re producing with Dublab. The other is a set of podcast interviews about the culture of sharing that I conducted with Jimmy Wales, Chris Hughes, Chris Dibona, Caterina Fake, Curt Smith, Joi Ito and a variety of other luminaries who use sharing as a cornerstone to work they do across a variety of fields. Snippets of the interviews will be running throughout the series’ two weeks – grab a set of headphones and listen up!

One of my favorite elements of the magazine is its design, which is managed by creative director Casey Caplowe, who spoke recently at CC Salon LA about the advantages of using an open approach to creating and distributing content. The greatness of the magazine’s design is typified by a recurring feature called the GOOD Sheet, which presents large volumes of information in useful and beautiful graphical formats. The most recent GOOD Sheet is a collaboration with designer Atley Kasky called “The First 100 Days” and offers a sampling of decisions made by various US presidents in their first months in office.

"The First 100 Days" - (c) GOOD Worldwide, 2008, made available under a CC BY-NC-ND license. Click above for a not-tiny version of this cool chart.

Update (12/03/08): The GOOD Sheet came out of a relationship between GOOD and Starbucks, in which the latter agreed to distribute free weekly newsprint copies of the GOOD Sheet in its stores for eleven weeks. This means that for the eleven weeks prior to the US presidential election, Creative Commons-licensed media was being given away for free to hundreds of thousands of people in Starbucks stores. Pretty cool. This New York Times article describes the deal.