Commons News
The Complete Guide to Google Wave is BY-SA
Gina Trapani and Adam Pash are editors at Lifehacker, but over the last couple of months they’ve been penning (wiki-ying?) a guide to Google Wave. Their hard work has paid off as a preview edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave is now available for purchase as a DRM-free PDF. The first edition of the book will be debuting in January as both a PDF and a softcover print book with new editions to follow throughout 2010.
What’s particularly salient to those in the CC-community is that Trapani and Pash have authored and collaborated on the book using MediaWiki and are releasing its content under our Attribution-ShareAlike license. This means the book is not only compatible with Wikipedia (allowing it to be imported to and exported from the encyclopedia), but also free to share, sell, and reproduce online – a decision that is already bearing fruit in the form of a full Japanese translation.
You can learn more about the project at their website, where the guide will continue to be freely available.
1 Comment »December CC Music Happenings
Three stories from the Creative Commons music world came across our radar recently, each showcasing a different facet of how our licenses are used to expose artists, encourage collaboration, and promote commercial avenues for freely-licensed works.
First comes news today that The Everybody, a new project from Joey Santiago and David Lovering (guitarist and drummer of the Pixies, respectively), have released their latest album Avatar with a CC-licensed twist. Available in both MP3 and lossless formats, a deluxe version of the album can be purchased ($40) that includes CC BY BY-SA licensed stems for each track. Beyond the legal freedoms this choice allows, The Everybody are asking for submissions of re-worked tacks to include in a forthcoming release which will be submitted the band through CC-friendly music community Soundcloud:
Once David and Joey have had a chance to check out all of the tracks they’re going to choose the best of the best of these new creations and turn them into an album called The Everybody Else and release it as a limited-edition gatefold vinyl alongside the originals in Spring 2010.
Phlow Magazine is currently running a month-long feature called The Best Creative Commons Music Moments in 2009. Every day until Christmas, a new post goes live from one of “the worlds most active Creative Commons music freaks,” featuring their favorite songs, netlabels, and albums from the open music universe. The series gives a great overview of how diverse and expansive CC-licensed music has become, unearthing a bevy of musical gems in the process.
The Monome Community Remix Project is a collaborative project in which contributors create samples, upload them to a community pool, and make remixes from the community collection. In keeping with its namesake, all remixes must utilize the monome, an open-source hardware controller, as a compositional tool. The first round of the project is now complete, with a CC BY-NC-SA licensed compilation of the final remixes available for download and stream at the MCRP website. The second iteration is currently underway, although the initial deadline for contributions has passed. Thankfully, a third round is planned for January.
2 Comments »Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, supports CC with a $10,000 gift!
We are delighted to announce the generous support of Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and CEO/CTO of SpaceX, who has given $10,000 to this year’s annual fundraising campaign. We are honored to receive this gift, which will have a great impact in helping us reach our $500,000 goal this year. We rely very much on the generosity of innovators and leaders who recognize the importance of participatory culture and CC’s work promoting openness and collaboration, and we’re thrilled to have Elon’s support this year.
His gift, and the gifts of so many others who have given whatever they can in support of Creative Commons during this campaign, will go far in sustaining CC as an organization, keeping our tools free for everyone to use, and allowing us to continue our work facilitating a global participatory culture.
Many thanks again to Elon for his generosity. If you see the value and importance in CC’s work, I hope you will consider joining Elon by giving back to CC in whatever capacity you are able and donate today!
No Comments »Thank you to Tucows for their continued support!
Tucows, the Toronto-based internet services company, has decided to generously continue their support of Creative Commons this year. Tucows has been a strong advocate and a good friend of CC for several years, and first contributed to CC’s annual campaign in 2006.
Tucows seeks to provide simple, useful services that help people unlock the power of the Internet. Their mission is to provide a web address and email address for every person and business. To that end, the company provides domain names, email and other services through their extensive reseller network and directly to consumers and small businesses through their retail and content groups.
Tucows understands the importance of developing powerful and effective digital tools to better link individuals, communities, and businesses worldwide, and CC is honored to have them supporting our work. We rely heavily on the expertise and financial support of forward-thinking companies to enable us to carry out our mission of facilitating participatory culture, and we deeply appreciate Tucows’ ongoing support, especially during strained economic times.
Thank you to Tucows and to all of the other individuals and companies who have supported our campaign thus far. I encourage you to join them in investing in the future of creativity and knowledge and donate today.
No Comments »Java software engineer wanted for Nutch-based search development and support
If you are a software developer who has excellent knowledge of Linux and open source development tools with experience in web services, software design, engineering techniques, we would love to hear from you! We have a contract position open for someone who is familiar with Java, Apache Nutch, and Lucene.
Please send cover letters and resumes to:
Jennifer Yip
Operations Director
jennifer [at] creativecommons.org
fax: 415.278.9419
We will be evaluating applications on a rolling basis until the position is filled.
No Comments »Microsoft Continues to Support CC!
Since 2005 Microsoft has been an ongoing supporter of CC — including putting our campaign over the top last year — and we’re very happy to announce that they are helping to jumpstart our 2009 campaign with a donation of $25,000.
According to Tom Rubin, Microsoft’s Chief Counsel for Intellectual Property Strategy, “Creative Commons is an exciting and vital part of the ecosystem of creativity. Microsoft is very pleased to continue to support its efforts.”
The support of Microsoft and other computing industry heavyweights is a key indicator that CC is seen as important infrastructure for the future of the network, for business as well as for the arts, education and science. If you too believe CC is an essential component to participatory culture, please join Microsoft in donating to CC.
Thank you to Microsoft and everyone else who has invested in the future of creativity and knowledge by supporting CC!
2 Comments »The Future of Peer 2 Peer University
The pilot phase of P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University) ended in October, after having run for six weeks with seven courses and approximately 90 participants. Last month, the pilot phase volunteers, including the course organizers, met in person for the first time at the first ever P2PU Workshop in Berlin. The goal of the workshop was to integrate pilot phase experiences into a working plan for the future of P2PU. Judging from the outcomes, the workshop achieved its goal. Check out CC Learn’s video download of the workshop at Blip.tv, Vimeo, or YouTube. (It’s CC BY, so feel free to share and remix!)
Background
“The mission of P2PU is to leverage the power of the Internet and social software to enable communities of people to support learning for each other. P2PU combines open educational resources, structured courses, and recognition of knowledge/learning in order to offer high-quality low-cost education opportunities. It is run and governed by volunteers.”
Why is CC Learn interested in P2PU?
“P2PU is the social wrapper around open educational resources.”
The open education movement started by focusing on the legal and technical aspects of educational resources, and how they could be opened up for use by anyone, anywhere. Creative Commons licenses provide the legal, technical, and social infrastructure for OER, enabling the easy use and reuse of OER while improving discoverability and adaptability around the world. This movement towards opening education has resulted in an abundant and still growing commons of open educational resources (OER).
However, P2PU recognizes that content isn’t enough. Accessing OER does not automatically result in learning. There are reasons why traditional education institutions exist, one of these being the social interaction between peers that enables, facilitates, and motivates learning. But what about those that want to learn outside of brick and ivy walls? P2PU is an initiative outside of the traditional institution that aims to provide the social learning structures, the “social wrapper”, around existing open educational resources.
Because P2PU is a true OER project, testing the bounds of what can work when you empower a community of volunteers and peers to learn for free from each other, CC Learn is interested in where it’s going.
Where is P2PU going?
In the short term, P2PU is aiming to double its courses for its second pilot, which launches towards the end of January next year. P2PU has also established a strong community of core volunteers in tech, outreach, sustainability, research, and course organizing. These volunteers run P2PU, and they are all very busy getting P2PU ready for its next phase which will feature, among other things:
- a new website and social platform
- an orientation process for new course organizers
- a CC BY-SA licensing policy (and a compendium on how to choose a license for your open education project)
- a set of core values that the community subscribes to
P2PU is also preparing a research workshop on alternative accreditations in early 2010, and building relationships with other organizations (such as CC Learn) to explore avenues in research, assessment, and sustainability.
What is the role of P2PU in education?
Good question, and good answers—here. Like the education landscape, P2PU is still evolving. For more reflections on the workshop, check out the video, Nadeem Shabir’s post on Talis Education, and my post on OnOpen.net.
3 Comments »We Met Greenplum’s Matching Challenge!
Thank you to all who gave a donation to CC over the past week! All gifts were generously doubled by Greenplum, who matched $5000 of donations to our fundraising campaign. We’re extremely grateful to Greenplum for their ongoing support of Creative Commons and their dedicated work building digital tools for the 21st century.
We rely on the generosity of our corporate and individual supporters to enable us to carry out our mission of facilitating participatory culture, and we hope you will join all those who have already supported CC by donating to our annual campaign!
No Comments »Commoner Letter #5: Indaba Music’s Daniel Zaccagnino and Matthew Siegel
Indaba Music, an international community of musicians, music professionals, and fans exploring the creative possibilities of making music with people in different places, has been up to some pretty impressive stuff since being founded just a few years ago. We’re honored to have Daniel Zaccagnino and Matthew Siegel, the company’s co-Founders, write the fifth letter in the Commoner Letter series of this year’s fundraising campaign. We hope you will be inspired by their story of remix, collaboration, and creation in the online music world and will join them in supporting Creative Commons today.
Subscribe to receive future Commoner Letters by email.
Dear Creative Commoner,
It has been an incredible year for Indaba Music – with much owed to Creative Commons and the incredible tools and culture it has fostered.
Indaba Music is a community of over 350,000 musicians from 185 countries who create music together in online recording sessions. As you might surmise from this concept, Indaba Music leverages Creative Commons licensing in a number of ways, each meaningful to our business and to the community we have cultivated. The following are just a few examples of how Creative Commons has enabled us to create some of the most interesting musical opportunities in the world:
Indaba Music Sessions are online projects in which musicians come together to combine tracks recorded in different places into single pieces of music. Every file that is uploaded to a session can be explicitly licensed under Creative Commons so musicians have control over how their music is used by those with whom they collaborate.
The Lawrence Lessig vs. Stephen Colbert Remix Challenge is an incredible example of an Indaba Music Session that leveraged Creative Commons licensing to create something extraordinary. In January of 2009 Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig was a guest on the Colbert Report. He discussed his just-released book “Remix.” As Larry and Stephen debated the merits of remixing, Stephen interrupted and issued a tongue-in-cheek challenge to his audience: “I will be very angry and possibly litigious if anyone out there takes this interview right here and remixes it with some great dance beat and it starts showing up in clubs across America.”
Of course, the Indaba Music community took the challenge seriously and began to remix the interview. Days later, hundreds of remixes emerged and Stephen caught wind of the Indaba Music Session. Again he issued a remix challenged to the Colbert Nation and, again, the Indaba Music community responded in force. Ultimately, we were invited to come on the show as the guest and, on February 4, 2009, had the opportunity to sit down with Stephen and defend our community and all Creative Commoners! It was great fun and a wonderful example of how everyone can benefit from being open with their content – from Colbert generating an incredible viral marketing campaign, to Indaba getting exposure, to a few select musicians who had their music played on national TV.
Indaba Music Contests are another great example of how Creative Commons has continuously broken down barriers in music. We have run several collaborative contests in which our entire community was able to remix and re-imagine such artists as The Roots, Rivers Cuomo, John Legend, and The Crystal Method with all remixes licensed under Creative Commons.
In particular, two contests have pushed the barriers of music creation and distribution. We just concluded a contest in which Indaba Music members competed to remix the entire Marcy Playground album Leaving Wonderland… In a Fit of Rage. All of the remixes are CC licensed and winners will actually get royalties on the sale of a remix CD that will hit airwaves early next year. Taking CC utilization a step further, Canadian pop-duo Carmen & Camille were the first to run a contest on Indaba Music in which submissions were licensed under CC Attribution 3.0 and remixers were allowed to sell their remixes for profit with no payments back to Carmen & Camille. Carmine & Camille wanted to create an incentive to generate the very best content that would expose their song in a new light – if one of those remixes should become a hit single it would be great for Carmen & Camille and they were happy for the remixer to benefit financially.
Our Creative Commons Clips Library is the newest CC addition to Indaba Music. Anyone can search thousands of CC licensed audio clips generated by professional musicians for Indaba Music. Moreover, the CC Mixter audio library is syndicated within our system, making all of the wonderful CC Mixter content available to over 350,000 musicians around the world.
As you can probably tell by now, we are big Creative Commons fans and CC has become an integral part of our site, our business, and our ability to continue to push musical barriers. CC licensing has opened up possibilities that never before existed, and has created an environment full of openness, collaboration, and sharing…all things that those of us in the business of music can learn from!
Support Creative Commons and help spread the word. This shouldn’t be an innovative way of doing things – it should be the standard.
Sincerely,
Dan Zaccagnino Matthew Siegel
Co-CEO, Co-Founder Co-CEO, Co-Founder
ccNewsletter #15: September-December 2009
Creative Commons will soon be turning 7 (Help us celebrate!), and we’re in the midst of our 5th annual fundraising campaign, our yearly effort to raise public awareness and support of our mission to promote free and legal sharing of creative works. This newsletter, from September-December 2009, is a testament to how important our work is, and includes all of the highlights from the past couple months, including stories of new jurisdiction launches, a Nobel Prize for work concerning “the Commons,” CC-licensed feature-length films, and much more. This quarterly version of the newsletter is in beautifully-designed PDF format (download), designed for your reading pleasure by the CC Philippines team!
Subscribe to receive our monthly e-news updates and quarterly PDF newsletters by email, and stay on top of the inspiring stories coming out of the Commons.
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