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!

Jose speaking about Knowledge Hub at the Open Ed conference in Dalian, China, Photo by Tom Caswell

I just arrived back home in Guangzhou, China from the OpenCourseWare Conference in Dalian, China last weekend and met many great people (but don’t have the tolerance to write out the contents of my thoughts ;), had many fruitful discussions, and rocked out a good slide deck for ccLearn (and you!). Check out my presentation (or any of my presentations and here), “OER XinXai (NOW!).

The most fruitful part of the conference for me was interacting with Philip Schmidt, Victor from Hewlett Foundation, Chunyan Wang from CC Mainland China, and Stewart Cheifet from Internet Archive. Also, hearing about sustain-o-bility in all its forms as a major consideration for projects, and mentions of CC+, made me quite happy. It also served as a nice place to test out my Mandarin skills for the good or worse of things. Hopefully at the next conference there will be more time for discussion during the conference days.

I jumped up on stage to give a final call for participation to the ccLearn and OER regional meeting at iSummit July 29 – August 1 in order to increase participation by principals in the region. Let’s hope it worked!

After this conference, I directly headed to Beijing where I worked with CC Mainland China team on accelerating business development and assessing great projects which would be great to integrate Creative Commons licensing. If you have an organization in China or any jurisdiction and want to help in this process, check out the page CC Web Integration.

The next stop for me is to head to celebrate Lu’s 27th birthday on May 4th, then onto Japan to meet up Joi, Catharina, Fumi and more (ken!). Then back to Guangzhou, Beijing, then back to Guangzhou, then back in San Francisco May 21 through at least end of July as homebase. Cheers!