Yesterday was another excruciatingly slow day for the campaign. We’ve now raised $6,818. At this rate over three days, we will fall short of our two week goal by a whopping $18,192, which will clearly not enable us to fund scholarships for all of our international volunteers who should be at the iSummit — to learn, share lessons, and plan for the next year of spreading the commons globally.

(Please help us get back on track!)

To give you an idea of the amazing work our volunteers are doing, we’re profiling a jurisdiction project each day of this campaign. Yesterday was CC Hungary. Today we have a very cool post and plea from CC Taiwan.

CC Taiwan: Help Others Go to the Summit!

Creative Commons Taiwan is one of CCi’s jurisdiction projects worldwide. This year CC Taiwan is fortunate to secure her own funding to support some of her members to the iCommons Summit. The works of CC Taiwan, like those of other jurisdiction projects, are carried out at non-profit organizations by volunteers. CC Taiwan understands how difficult it is to get funding to attend the Summit, therefore would like to ask for your help now to support other jurisdiction projects to participate in this year’s meeting.

Here is some background about CC Taiwan. CC Taiwan was officially launched in September 2004 when the Creative Commons Licenses had been ported to Taiwan. Since then we have been working hard with CC license users in Taiwan. “We do a lot of out-reach. We have been giving face-to-face seminars on CC licenses to school teachers, students, indie video producers, musicians, and government agencies,” said Wen-Yin Chou, the out-reach coordinator of CC Taiwan. CC Taiwan maintains a web site and publishes a monthly e-mail newsletter.

(CC Party at Taipei NGO House. Photo by Tyng-Ruey Chuang and released under CC BY-ND 2.5 Taiwan.)

A CC Party was organized in November 2005 to celebrate the anniversary of the launch of CC Taiwan; the press and the public were invited to the three-day extravaganza at the Taipei NGO House to learn about and share the experience of using the Creative Commons Licenses. In January 2007, CC Taiwan hosted the Open & Free: New Enterprise in the Information Age international workshop in Taipei.

(The logo of Creative Commons Taiwan.)

As a project, CC Taiwan has her own logo. The two Chinese characters at the left of the CC-in-a-circle mark mean Create and Use, which hopefully convey the share-and-remix spirit of Creative Commons. Representative CC-licensed publications from Taiwan can be found at CC Taiwan’s web site.

“People need tools in order to share their works. CC Licenses are a flexible set of legal tools allowing people to easily share, remix, and share again their works,” said Yi-Hsuan Lin, the legal lead of CC Taiwan. CC Taiwan recently works with the National Digital Archives Program (NDAP) of Taiwan to release more than three-million items in their Union Catalogs to the public under the Creative Commons licenses. (For samplers of the items in the Union Catalogs, look here and here.) The Union Catalogs has been being built on digitized cultural artifacts contributed by major collection holders including the National Palace Museum, National Taiwan University, and Academia Sinica. These content holders believe that, by releasing the Union Catalogs with their metadata under CC licenses, they can make this massive and diverse collection of cultural resources more accessible to people in Taiwan and worldwide.

“Creative Commons Taiwan is very glad to work with collection holders such as NDAP to help them license their collections to the public, so that they will have a greater impact,” said Tyng-Ruey Chuang, the public lead of CC Taiwan. There are success stories made possible by CCi’s jurisdiction projects worldwide in using CC licenses to free up cultural and social resources. “The last two iCommons Summits were just incredible,” said Tyng-Ruey, “we learned so much from one another. We are eager to meet other jurisdiction project teams again this year. Please help them get there!“

Also see CC Taiwan’s iSummit06 description and report to the iSummit (pdf).

Creative Commons Taiwan is hosted and supported by the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and has been funded in part by grants from the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office, the Ministry of Education, the Council for Cultural Affairs, and the National Science Council of Taiwan.