Poster by Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0

Over the past few months several of us at Creative Commons have been collaborating with our colleagues at Creative Commons Australia to create a collaborative system for promoting the great CC stories that will help the world understand how great Creative Commons licenses are for creative works. To highlight the global nature of this launch, it coincides with the CC Australia’s conference today (June 24, 2008), “Building an Australasian Commons” where this project is to be presented.

CC’s CEO, Joi Ito, said in the press release for this project that its important to realize that CC is not just a “cute idea,” but a crucial fact in the success of many businesses, artists, authors, and professionals. So, highlighted in the Case Studies Project are examples such as the Blender Foundation and their success with applying Creative Commons Attribution license to both of their Open Source 3D animations. Also, there are specific highlights on authors like NYTimes bestselling author Cory Doctorow’s overall usage of CC to support the dissemination of his books, all the way to detailed casestudies about Luxembourg-based (but global!) Jamendo and of course studies on Nine Inch Nails Ghost I-IV and The Slip album releases. Remember: The goal is to focus on the story of these successes.

We need your help.

We didn’t want to just build a system that is static like many corporate case studies that one might get at a conference and immediately chuck into the bin. Rather, we built this on top of our Semantic MediaWiki-based wiki (highlighted in the /participate page above) so that there is a simple human-readable form for adding and editing case studies that anyone out there may use. Since the system is a structured wiki, the data part of the system is sortable, queryable, and mashable. For example, here is a sort through the entire system alphabetically with four columns: pagename, Author, media format and country of the project.

Cory Doctorow by Joi Ito

This is an invitation to hop over to the Case Studies project right now, and help us make this project super solid. We need more case studies from around the world in any language. And, if you speak more than one language, please help by translating the casestudies. If there is something that bugs you about it, then help us out by committing: its a wiki! If you really want to be a saint, then direct your energy as well to our public roadmap for the project, jump onto our cc-community mailing list to express interest and chat with us on our IRC chat channel.

And, if that is not enough incentive to participate, Creative Commons Australia today has released at the Creative Commons Australia conference, “Building an Australasian Commons,” a printed booklet with 60 case studies from this system all professionally designed. There will be more printings of these case studies in the future which might include your contributions.

Look for presentations about this project at upcoming conferences this summer where newly added case studies will be highlighted on big projectors. Look for this project at Communia/CC Europe meetings June 30-July 1 in Belgium, FSCONS on October 25-26 in Gothenburg, Sweden and other conferences focusing on the local and global.

Hats off as well to all those who have helped including the project party: Jessica Coates, Rachel Cobcroft, Elliot Bledsoe, Timothy Vollmer, Cameron Parkins, Tim Hwang, Greg Grossmeier, and Michelle Thorne (who has Wikipedia real page!). There are many more that have helped as well. If you help, you get plugged!

Please help us by spreading the word on this project, blogging about Case Studies, and adding more to the system.