Tomas Ashe was our very first graphic design intern, who came from the Cork Institute of Technology in Ireland. Tomas spent the summer working on updating our presentations and presentation style; a fresh new board report; some exciting concepts for creativecommons.org; and some great new info flyers.

Lee-Sean Huang was the International Outreach intern, who spent the summer asking questions and designing solutions for our efforts to support this community, with particular attention to OpenEd. Open education is a global phenomenon, and is supported by a global community. His work on translation, compelling images, and other key messaging issues is helping to globalize our work and bring greater coherence to the many OER projects around the world. We will be publishing a report on Lee-Sean’s work and recommendations soon.

Michelle Hugard was a Legal intern, who will be beginning her third year at UC Davis School of Law this fall. Michelle was busy with building and populating the UCOP database, as well as analyzing university copyright ownership policies and drafting a report about them. Please watch for the publishing of this report, but feel free to contribute to the UCOP database now!

Joe Merante was our other Legal intern, who is also starting his third year at New York Law School this fall. Joe’s primary focus over the summer was researching accessibility policies of institutions publishing content believed to be in the public domain. His research and recommendations will inform Creative Common’s future work on the upcoming Public Domain Assertion tool. That tool will allow organizations and individuals to mark and tag works believed to be in the public domain with facts supporting that conclusion.

Parker Phinney was the Technology intern who came to us after his first year at Dartmouth College. Parker spent the summer giving much needed attention to the code and interface for search.creativecommons.org. Thanks to his work this summer we’ve cleaned up the interface, added support for Google Image search and identified and prototyped several opportunities for further improvements.

Aurelia Schultz was our first Google Policy Fellow, who completed her final year at Vanderbilt University Law School. Aurelia focused on two interrelated projects this summer. First, she analyzed the WIPO development agenda to determine possible strategic areas of overlap and coordination on understanding, marking and tagging the public domain. Aurelia has created a draft strategic plan for CC’s engagement with WIPO and its members at both a policy and project level. Read her recent blog post for most information about her work in this area. She also spent time developing a strategic plan for CC’s outreach in Africa. The plan includes recommendations on expanding our license porting projects as well as through participation by CC in local activities focused on education and the public domain. Aurelia is going to continue researching these policies for us this fall, thanks to Vanderbilt’s public interest initiative funding.

It was a pleasure having these fine students here at the Creative Commons office. On behalf of the CC staff, we thank you for your beautiful presentations, innovative thinking, and enthusiastic work ethic.

The 1st Wiki-Conference New York will be held over the weekend of July 25-26 2009 at New York University, and hosted by Free Culture @ NYU and Wikimedia New York City.

The location for the conference is Vanderbilt Hall, part of NYU law school, in the Village. This hall is opposite the southwest corner of Washington Square Park.

Plans are still gestating, and more schedule details should appear soon; participants are encouraged to give your own ideas for topic sessions. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will be giving a keynote, and we will also have a second keynote speaker TBA.

You can register for the Wiki-Conference here.

We wanted to give big thanks to Ben, Dean, Elizabeth, Adi, and all the volunteers to helped make the fantastic Open Video Conference happen. Myself, Jane and Alex K were all in attendance on behalf of CC and we figured we’d post a wrap up about our experience at the conference.

At the CC Salon NYC / OVC Pre-party, I was able to record my conversation with Brett Gaylor, the director and creator of RiP! A Remix Manifesto which also screened at OVC. You can download our interview in ogg here, or mp3 here, available under a our Attribution license. Fans of Adam McHeffey will be happy to watch a YouTube video of his performance here. And last but not least, thanks to Erik Möller from the Wikimedia Foundation for guiding us through Wikipedia’s switch to CC-BY-SA.

And of course, we couldn’t forget about Blip.tv for supplying the beer at the salon, For Your Imagination Studios for the space, and Parker and Wesley for helping out with setup and breakdown. We couldn’t have done it without you guys!

As for the OVC itself, we were blown away with the focus and intensity in every panel and session. I repeatedly heard from attendees how nice it was to have 100% of a conference focused on an issue that typically receives only 10% of the attention. One of my favorite presentations was by Chris Blizzard from Mozilla showing of Firefox’s 3.5 Ogg Theora capabilities. Here’s a quick screen cast some of the capabilities Chris showed off at the conference:

On Saturday afternoon I gave a well packed luncheon presentation on Open Video, Metadata, and Creative Commons. You can download the slides from my presentation here.

Here’s a brief summary from Jane and Alex who attended on behalf of ccLearn:

OVC by Alex Kozak / ccLearn

ccLearn also attended the first ever Open Video Conference and had a blast. We think much of the OVC’s success is due to the fact that so much of it was relevant to openness in general that education naturally fit the bill. “Open Video in Education” especially blew us away by the diversity of forward thinking present in the room by both open education advocates and those with little to no experience with open educational resources (OER). Most everyone in the room, including the audience, were in agreement that open video and open technologies are essential to the future of education. The expressed concerns were more about how to convince the higher-ups at their institutions to see the light.

To reiterate, the session was not lacking in representation. Someone remarked how the variety of perspectives yielded a kind of “transformer panel.” From Bjoern Hassler (Cambridge University’s Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies) who set the tone in the beginning by assuming that it is (or should be) apparent to everyone that CC BY is the best license for OER, Tiffiny Cheng (Participatory Culture Foundation) who highlighted Miro, the open source free high definition video player, to UC Berkeley’s webcast.berkeley, the panel was diverse but consistent in their view that open video for education is essential, that CC licenses for that video is a given, and that—to quote an audience member’s words—”You have to do more than just tape lectures.”

Finally, you can also watch most of the main hall sessions on the Livestream feed page for the OVC, though Flash is required. We’re assured these will be available in Theora in short order.

Great job OVC, we’re looking forward to the next one!

I’ll be there representing CC (so ask me for some schwag if you see me) but many other important organizations will be in attendance as well, so it will be a great opportunity to put many names to faces.

Registration is now open, so go and sign up now!

Please let me introduce:

• Lee-Sean Huang will be the International Outreach intern for ccLearn. He is a first-year masters student at the Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP) at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
• Joe Merante will work under our General Counsel as a Legal intern. He is a second year law student at New York Law School.
• Michelle Hugard will work with the ccLearn counsel as another Legal intern. She is a second year law student from UC Davis School of Law.
• Parker Phinney will be the Technology intern. He is a first year student of computer science at Dartmouth College.
• Tomas Ashe will be the very fist Graphic Design & Media Development intern. He will be completing his final year at the Cork Institute of Technology in Ireland.
• Aurelia Schultz, our first Google Policy Fellow, will also be joining us this summer.

Also see our goodbye post featuring last year’s interns. If you’re interested an internship next year (2010), keep in mind that we’ll post a call for applications around February. Get your resumes into shape starting now! The strongest applicants have played leadership roles in Students for Free Culture chapters or been active contributors to other free culture and free and open source software projects — regarding the latter, we even have a few of our own to get involved with.

The Open Video Conference taking place on June 19th and 20th in NYC has published its call for proposals:

The conference is a co-production of the Yale Law School Information Society Project, the Participatory Culture Foundation, Kaltura, and iCommons. The conference will feature talks from internet luminaries, panels and discussions, screenings of video art, and demonstrations of the newest internet video technology. We expect more than 400 participants. Here are some goals for the gathering:

1. Bring together stakeholders in the online video space (video makers, coders, lawyers, academics, entrepreneurs, etc.) for cross-pollination and development of the Open Video movement.
2. Raise public interest and awareness around the Principles for an Open Video Ecosystem, a community effort to define best practices in online video.
3. Raise the public profile of video creators and artists working in the online space.

Check out the proposal form and make sure you get yours in by March 19th!