Two fantastic Creative Commons and related events happening in Turin, Italy late this month, with registration deadlines fast approaching.

June 26 is a one day CC Technology Summit. This is the place to be for learning how CC and others are using the Semantic Web to support open and interoperable rights information, decentralized copyright registries, machine-readable citation, and more. Unintentionally it is also a showcase of the global nature of CC technology innovation, with 13 presenters from 8 countries. The registration price is €75 or €50 for COMMUNIA attendees (see below) and CC Network members and the deadline is June 15. See video and slides from last year’s CC tech summits at Google in Mountain View, California and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Second COMMUNIA International Conference 2009 is scheduled for Sunday 28, Monday 29 & Tuesday 30 June 2009 in Torino, under the title Global Science and the Economics of Knowledge-Sharing Institutions. Among the exciting keynote addresses is John Wilbanks of Science Commons. Registration is €168 and closes June 12. See one of our past posts on COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network for the Digital Public Domain.

Both events promise compelling, cutting-edge talks, and are also a fantastic opportunity to meet many of the leads of CC jurisdiction projects in Europe. A special mention and thanks must be given to Juan Carlos De Martin, project lead of CC Italy, organizer of COMMUNIA, and Co-director, NEXA Center for Internet & Society, Politecnico of Torino, speaker and host at both events!

I hope to see you in Torino.

Once again we’re offering a special deal for CC Network members (25€ off the regular price). The Technology Summit is being organized in collaboration with NEXA Center for Internet & Society and the timing makes it possible to attend two great Commons events in the same place — the 2009 COMMUNIA Conference is taking place two days after the Technology Summit. If you’re already attending COMMUNIA there’s a special registration deal for you, too.

If you have any questions, just email techsummit@creativecommons.org.

We’re currently looking for presentations around copyright registries, ccREL and provenance in semantic web applications for the day’s program. If you’re interested, see the full details and CFP in the wiki. Hope to see many of you there!

In December we held our second CC Technology Summit at MIT in Cambridge, MA. I think the day provided a great perspective on what we’re doing at CC and how others are building a real community around it. If you weren’t able to attend, we now have audio and video available. And if you missed the first one, the video for that is available as well.

We’re currently thinking about plans for the next event; if you have feedback or suggestions, email them to techsummit@creativecommons.org.

We’re thrilled to announce the third and final matching challenge of the 2008 annual campaign! This round’s matcher is FairShare, a new service from Attributor. FairShare is putting up $3000 in order to match every single donation (up to $3000) between now and the end of the campaign.

FairShare was previewed at CC’s 2nd Technology Summit on Friday. FairShare is a free service that lets you assign a CC license to your work and receive information on how and where it is shared with others. Results come back as an RSS feed and include information about the percentage of your work re-used, whether a link back exists and if ads are present. Support for Share-Alike and No Derivatives licenses are expected soon. FairShare is currently in beta, and they are looking for help testing http://www.fairshare.cc.

This is a great opportunity to double the value of your contribution to CC. The end of the campaign is quickly approaching and we need your help — donate today!

If you can’t make the event, fear not; Frank will be pseudo-live-blogging the event over on the CC Labs blog and we’ll have video available afterwards.

Registration is available online and we’ve added student rates at about half the normal rate: $40 or $25 for students who are also CC Network members (plus the option to buy both at the same time). Hope to see you there!

For those of you interested in the tech side of Creative Commons, MIT’s CSAIL is hosting CC’s second Tech Summit from 9-4:30. The first Tech Summit, held at Google this past summer, was a complete success; those archived presentations are here.

And for those of you interested in CC generally, CC and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society have joined forces to bring you the panel discussion: “The Commons: Celebrating accomplishments, discerning futures.” Panelists include James Boyle, The Public Domain; Lawrence Lessig, Remix; Joi Ito, Free Souls; and Molly S. Van Houweling, Creative Commons’ first Executive Director. Jonathan Zittrain, of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, will moderate. A reception will follow at 7:30 pm. Details are here.

We hope you will join us in celebrating Creative Commons’ sixth successful year and the culmination of our 2008 Annual Fundraising Campaign, “Build the Commons.” This event is open to the public, but because we’re closing in on the end of our campaign, we encourage you to bring your check books (or cash rather) and help sustain CC by donating at the door!

Space is limited. Please RSVP by December 1st to Melissa Reeder, Development Manager, at melissa@creativecommons.org.

Registration is also now open for the event. While the first Technology Summit was free thanks to Google’s generous support, we do have costs associated with the December Technology Summit. To offset those costs, there is a registration fee: $50 for CC Network members or $75 for non-members. If you’d like to sign up for CC Network membership at the same time as you register, we’ve enabled that as well (no discount, though; $100 total).

It’s been a busy year at CC and I’m looking forward to the Technology Summit as an opportunity to review what we’ve done and look ahead to 2009.