The past 24 hours have been rather active as we close in on the end of the campaign. We’ve now received $27,240 in support for the CCi Affiliate scholarships! We’re so close and with your support we can meet this goal. Over the past 10 days we’ve traversed the globe and have heard incredible news about what is going on in the “commons” movement. Today’s story comes from Carolina Botero from CC Colombia. I will let her tell you what they’ve been up to because it’s rather impressive.

Spreading the idea of free culture has become the main focus of the CC Colombia team. After the launch of the ported licences in August 2006 the community and the interest in using CC licenses has experienced significant growth.

Musicians are committing themselves to this alternative way of spreading culture as exemplified by groups like Colombita or Calambuco. It’s not just the commitment of bands to use CC licenses but also the way Silvia O is using CCMixter or the way video artists like Videopopuli that are helping to educate people on the importance of CC licensing. Interesting examples of a Colombian netlabel using CC licences is Seriesmedia and of netradio is La Capsula.

The free software movement has been very supportive of our cause; and has assisted us by brokering opportunities to present talks about Creative Commons and free culture where ever the opportunity presents itself like during the last Latin American Installation Festival. People from the free software movement are also using the licences in their projects. For instance Essentia Libre journal, the first Colombian magazine about Open Technologies, Open Contents and Education, is published under Creative Commons BY-SA. According to it’s ideology Essentia Libre’s design is done using only Open Source applications like Scribus, Inkscape, Gimp and GhostScript because they want to really be consistent with the copyleft element on the Creative Commons license. Accordingly the magazine’s code is released facilitating others the complete recreation of the content.

The case of el Sistema de Información sobre Biodiversidad de Colombia (SIB), a public database of Colombian biodiversity information, is a perfect example of a public project that found a solution in Creative Commons.

In the educational sector, the Colombia Aprende website of the Ministry of Education is an important forum. This website explains and clarifies the possibilities of this new approach to teachers and researchers. The support of other leaders in the CC community has also been of special impact to the educational sector. For example, the presentation of Ariel Vercelli during the Learning Objects event in December 2006.

Special projects deserve special mention, the book “Palabras desde el silencio”, a compilation of stories from young deaf people is a beautiful example of the way communities start to find special use for Creative Commons, showing a path where licences have become an important tool to share.

In the field of journalism we should mention that El Tiempo, the most important Colombian journal, uses CC licences for their citizen journalism section, allowing bloggers to choose the way their content will be used in the web.

Participating in a broader research to find out the ways music circulates in developing countries also has been a great opportunity to place Creative Commons in our cultural environment and will certainly support future efforts.

Help send the people that are responsible for these innovative projects to the conference that is at the forefront of this movement. These discussions/debates need to happen and deserve to be as globally holistic as possible. Support this campaign today.