Mike Linksvayer / Joi / CC BY

Many of you know Mike Linksvayer, the first CTO and then Vice President of Creative Commons. Mike started at Creative Commons back in 2003 (almost a decade ago!), and since then has shepherded CC through a period of great expansion, providing leadership and support for efforts across various initiatives and around the world. He has also been a great help to all of us this past year, during the transition from part-time to full-time CEO. We can not begin to name everything that Mike has done, not only for Creative Commons, but for free and open culture generally, so we’ll just name a few, with the caveat that, if ever there was a jack of all trades, he is Mike Linksvayer.

Since 2003, Mike has helped to:

• forward RDFa to a W3C Recommendation,
• migrate Wikipedia to BY-SA,
• build scalable tools and processes to support translation and localization,
• deploy constituent management tools to support fundraising and development,
• provide a great place for technical interns to come and develop their skills,
• improve scalability and responsiveness of the CC website,
• build visionary legal tools that enhance access to and grow our valuable public domain
• test, test and re-test new ideas and experimental projects,
• support the continued development and well-being of staff,
• develop our global network, providing guidance, support and encouragement for our affiliates worldwide,
• bridge communities including F/LOSS and Wikimedia, and
• implement compliant, employee-friendly operations and procedures to scale with staff size and program complexity, and
• bring exaggerated skepticism, rigorous logic and thorough analysis to all of CC’s program activities.

Finally, the board and staff would like to acknowledge that Mike has served as the primary voice of reason and forward thinking that has kept Creative Commons on a track that balances idealism with resource realism. We are grateful for Mike Linksvayer’s exceptional role in building the Creative Commons organization.

His contributions to CC make it all the more difficult to announce Mike’s transition from Vice President to Senior Fellow at Creative Commons. In his new role, he will continue to advise on CC-related research and tech projects, in addition to overarching strategy. We fully expect Mike will continue to bring passion and opinion and reason to all of our work in his new role.

Please join us in thanking Mike for all of his hard work! Mike, we wish you the very best in your future endeavors.

This is an important question not only for entrepreneurs and communities, but for the commons generally — the success of which depends significantly on the vibrancy of sites where the commons is built. So I’m happy to participate on this panel with representatives of two such sites — Jack Herrick of wikiHow and Emily Richards of ArtisTech Media (which has run ccMixter since last year). The panel will be moderated by Josh Crandall of Netpop Research, which conducted a study on noncommercial use with Creative Commons last year.

Previewing the panel, the Web 2.0 Expo blog has published an excellent interview with Jack Herrick, worth reading in its entirety. Excerpt:

Kaitlin: So, out with it – how do you create a “Culture of Sharing”? Or at least, what would your 1 minute elevator pitch be?

Jack: We like to call wikiHow “built to share“. And we do it three ways:

1. Build trust with your community. At wikiHow we do this via open content licensing and building and distributing our open source software.
2. Build software which enables sharing and collaboration. A common example of this is to have tools to allow others to easily republish content on other sites.
3. Walk the walk. Be accessible to your community and practice the behavior of sharing, openness that you want your community to adopt.

The initial collaborators each had considerable experience with free software or free culture collaborations — Michael Mandiberg, Marta Peirano, Alan Toner, Mushon Zer-Aviv, me, and FLOSS Manuals’ honcho Adam Hyde and programmer Aleksandar Erkalovic.

Initially we thought we’d write much about licenses and other topics much debated by those in the free software and free culture community. After a day of intense discussion of book content and structure, those debates were left in the background as we tackled explaining what kinds of collaboration we intended to write about and speculating about what the future of collaboration holds. As appropriate, we did use licenses — the book is released under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license and incorporates a fair amount of previously existing material under the same or compatible licenses (surprisingly enough, none from Wikipedia).

A one minute video was made for the book’s New York launch, available at the Internet Archive and Vimeo.

There’s also a licensing (and collaboration?) story behind the video. Producer Bennett Williamson wanted to use “Rolands Vegners” by Ergo Phizmiz & Margita Zalite as the soundtrack. Bennett writes on his Free Music Archive blog:

This was a problem, because Collaborative Futures (and all its related materials) already had a different type of CC license than Ergo’s track; Attribution-ShareAlike and Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike respectively.

I really liked the song and wanted to keep it in the video, so I contacted Ergo and asked him if he’d be willing to change the license type of his track… and he agreed! Score one for copyright alternatives!

So remember kids, when syncing up these jams to your sweet vids, make sure that your derivitive has a license that jives with that of the original work. And sometimes all you have to do is ask.

With that, here’s ten more instrumentals from the Archives ready for you to slap into your timeline. Thanks to those of you who made suggestions of tracks to include; please keep them coming!

All well worth keeping in mind for future collaborations. Check out the book, and more importantly, FLOSS Manuals and the Free Music Archive, excellent free culture projects covering a broad range of tastes.

Free Culture, Free Software, and Free Content will again join forces under the banner of “Free Society” at FSCONS 2009 in Gothenburg, Sweden, 13-15th November.  The organizers, Creative Commons Sweden, Free Software Foundation Europe, and Wikimedia Sverige, have just announced the conference’s Call for Participation.

Last year’s conference featured a host of workshops and speakers, including CC’s Mike Linksvayer on “How far is free culture behind free software?” and Victor Stone on ccMixter‘s solution to online attribution via Sample Pool API.

We’re looking forward to what this year’s FSCONS has in store. Submissions close on June 21, so send in your proposal soon!

The FSF Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented annually to a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society by applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life.

Since its launch in 2001, Creative Commons has worked to foster a growing body of creative, educational and scientific works that can be shared and built upon by others. Creative Commons has also worked to raise awareness of the harm inflicted by increasingly restrictive copyright regimes.

Creative Commons vice president Mike Linksvayer accepted the award saying, “It’s an incredible honor. Creative Commons should be giving an award to the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman, because what Creative Commons is doing would not be possible without them.”

Congratulations also to Wietse Venema, honored with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his “significant and wide-ranging technical contributions to network security, and his creation of the Postfix email server.”

FSF president Stallman presented a plaque by artist Lincoln Read commemorating the award to Creative Commons.

It is worth noting that the FSF Social Benefit Award’s 2005 and 2007 winners are Wikipedia and Groklaw both because it is tremendous to be in their company and as the former is in the process of migrating to a CC BY-SA license (thanks in large part to the FSF) and the latter publishes under a CC BY-NC-ND license.

Only last December CC was honored to receive an award from another of computing’s most significant pioneers, Doug Engelbart.

Thanks again to the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman. Please join us in continuing to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his founding of the free software movement. As Stallman would say, “Happy Hacking!”

Melissa Reeder will speak on a panel titled Sharing, Selling and Defending Photos Online at the conference, February 10 in San Jose, California.

Conference attendees intrigued by what Melissa has to say can make the trip up to San Francisco the next evening (February 11) for our CC Salon SF!

Addendum: Those in San Jose looking for even more CC info, and soon, you’re in luck. Thursday evening (February 5) Mike is presenting Open Licensing 101: How to Get the Most Out of Your Copyrights in the Information Age, hosted by California Lawyers for the Arts.

We’re delighted to announce that the next CC Salon SF (Wednesday, February 11, from 7-9pm) will be held at PariSoMa, located at 1436 Howard Street, San Francisco (map and directions). We extend our sincerest thanks to the generous folks at PariSoMa for offering up their lovely space! We hope you’ll join us in making our first evening in these new surroundings a warm and lively one. Light refreshments will be served.

We’ll have the entire CC staff under one roof, and the evening’s program includes brief presentations from:

Mike Linksvayer, Vice President
Eric Steuer, Creative Director
Catharina Maracke, Director, Creative Commons International
John Wilbanks, Vice President, Science Commons
Ahrash Bissell, Executive Director, ccLearn
Joi Ito, CEO

Following the presentations, we’ll open the floor to questions and discussion. Whether you’ve been a fan of CC from the start or you’re new to the world of free culture, this salon is not to be missed!

You can also check it out on Upcoming!

We rely on the generosity of our community to keep us afloat, so we’ll be accepting donations for CC at the door. If you didn’t get a chance to support us during our fundraising campaign, now is your chance.

CC Salons are global events, and anyone can start one, no matter where you live. We encourage you to check out our resources for starting your own salon in your area.

The salon will be held on Wednesday, February 11, from 7-9pm. Location TBD. For location info, please check back at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/San_Francisco_Salon

From 7-8:15pm, we’ll have brief presentations from:
Mike Linksvayer, Vice President
Eric Steuer, Creative Director
Catharina Maracke, Director, Creative Commons International
John Wilbanks, Vice President, Science Commons
Ahrash Bissell, Executive Director, ccLearn
Joi Ito, CEO

At 8:15pm, we will open the floor for questions and discussion.

Come meet the members of CC’s fabulous staff for a fun-filled evening of presentations, conversations, and mingling. We hope to see you there!

Check it out on Upcoming!

CC Salons are global events, and anyone can start one, no matter where you live. We encourage you to check out our resources for starting your own salon in your area.

In the wave of free culture gatherings this October, don’t miss out on the Nordic Cultural Commons Conference 2008, in Stockholm on October 22-23, organized by the Creative Commons Nordic network.

How is business created around open licensing? What benefits does the Creative Commons model provide for public broadcasting and archiving? How open licensing changes the production of cultural works? How does the common Nordic legal environment affect re-use of cultural works?

Nordic Cultural Commons Conference provides insight into these questions. Bringing together all Nordic Creative Commons scholars and practitioners, it is also a great opportunity to meet and discuss the latest open content practices and ideas.

Speakers include Mike Linksvayer (Creative Commons), John Buckman (Magnatune), Nicklas Lundblad (Google) and Paul Gerhardt (BBC Creative Archive), as well as Creative Commons Project Leads Henrik Moltke (CC Denmark), Prodromos Tsiavos (CC England & Wales), and Herkko Hietanen (CC Finland).

For more information, please visit the conference web site: http://www.hiit.fi/nccc/.