As noted elsewhere, myself (Jon Phillips) and Alex Roberts, CC’s brilliant graphic designer, attended the spectacular Libre Graphics Meeting 2007 (LGM2007) in Montreal last weekend, which I highly recommend for others to check out next year!

The highlight for me is always to see my friends and to make new acquaintances like Tina Piper from CC Canada. Also, Alex and I met up with Evan Prodromou, from Wikitravel.org amonst other projects, to talk shop about CC, the state of the web, and to sample Montreal’s famous dish, poutine.

I wanted to underline how key it is for all those in Open ____ (Open Content, Open Source, Open etc) get together at some point to see each other physically, as often its only virtually. Also, while LGM2007 had a large demographic of Open Source developers working on graphics applications, there was much discussion about open content, standards such as XMP and what projects like Inkscape, Gimp, Scribus and Krita are going to work on as projects and inter-project.

Please check out my slides from the presentation I gave about the concept of creating Open Content Libraries beyond Wikipedia and Internet Archive, to the point where every niche, locale, special-interest, and so forth, and so on, might create a library to house whatever media one sees fit. In this possible future, the importance is not one major silo for content, but many different silos that rely on open standards and Creative Commons licenses for auto-negotiation for the machines to work out so that us humans can get what we want.

In future posts, I will explore these concepts more as they relate to business and how to implement this future through standards like the Sample Pool API that ccHost-powered, ccMixter.org uses.