Last week we launched the Creative Commons annual fall fundraising campaign. Goal: US$500,000.

We also launched a redesigned creativecommons.org site (more on that below) and now have matching campaign buttons:

Get one for your site or blog!

As you might guess from the buttons above, a map theme runs throughout the campaign, including on the super cool campaign t-shirts (there’s only one way to get one…), see right.

This includes the most immediately noticeable addition to the CC homepage: a dynamic donor map, showing where in the world contributions to the fall campaign are coming from (no personal information is exposed). One cool thing about the donor map is that it’s built with OpenLayers, a completely free software dynamic mapping library.

While maps make great eye candy, the most significant changes to the CC site fall into two categories: international exposure and information architecture.

We’re now aggregating CC jurisdiction project blogs on the CC homepage. Aggregated feeds will be available soon, and announced here. We’ll be doing a lot more in the coming months to shine a light on vital jurisdiction project activities.

Information architecture-wise we’ve made a bunch of small changes to make the CC site (actually sites) easier to navigate and use, with more coming. Three of note:

This now omnipresent set of navigation tabs is self-explanatory and points to the other two changes.

First, a completely revamped projects page. If you want a very concise guide to current and ongoing projects of CC (the organization), with pretty icons, go there. Of course most of the projects represent iceberg tips, both within the organization and beyond.

Second, the participate tab points to our wiki, now restyled to match the rest of the site. One of the cooler things we’re doing with the wiki is adding Semantic MediaWiki annotations. The short explanation is that this allows us to use information in the wiki as if it were in a database, without creating a custom database application. See a very early and trivial application of this on our content directories page.

A number of CC staff are directly responsible for the rollout of campaign and site refresh features, including Asheesh Laroia (OpenLayers integration), Jon Phillips (information architecture), Nathan Kinkade (sysadmin), summer intern Thierry Kennes (Semantic MediaWiki integration and Wiki theme work), Cameron Parkins, Rebecca Rojer, and Tim Vollmer (asset creation and wikifarming). Melissa Reeder, Eric Steuer, and Nathan Yergler provided fundraising, editorial, and technology oversight respectively. Alex Roberts imagined all of the visual concepts, made everything pretty, and wrote lots of the code.

The best ways to congratulate Alex & co. are to provide support for their continued work and spread the word.

Thank you!