Creative Commons has just concluded another successful summer internship program! This year, we welcomed six students to the San Francisco office:

Tomas Ashe was our very first graphic design intern, who came from the Cork Institute of Technology in Ireland. Tomas spent the summer working on updating our presentations and presentation style; a fresh new board report; some exciting concepts for creativecommons.org; and some great new info flyers.

Lee-Sean Huang was the International Outreach intern, who spent the summer asking questions and designing solutions for our efforts to support this community, with particular attention to OpenEd. Open education is a global phenomenon, and is supported by a global community. His work on translation, compelling images, and other key messaging issues is helping to globalize our work and bring greater coherence to the many OER projects around the world. We will be publishing a report on Lee-Sean’s work and recommendations soon.

Michelle Hugard was a Legal intern, who will be beginning her third year at UC Davis School of Law this fall. Michelle was busy with building and populating the UCOP database, as well as analyzing university copyright ownership policies and drafting a report about them. Please watch for the publishing of this report, but feel free to contribute to the UCOP database now!

Joe Merante was our other Legal intern, who is also starting his third year at New York Law School this fall. Joe’s primary focus over the summer was researching accessibility policies of institutions publishing content believed to be in the public domain. His research and recommendations will inform Creative Common’s future work on the upcoming Public Domain Assertion tool. That tool will allow organizations and individuals to mark and tag works believed to be in the public domain with facts supporting that conclusion.

Parker Phinney was the Technology intern who came to us after his first year at Dartmouth College. Parker spent the summer giving much needed attention to the code and interface for search.creativecommons.org. Thanks to his work this summer we’ve cleaned up the interface, added support for Google Image search and identified and prototyped several opportunities for further improvements.

Aurelia Schultz was our first Google Policy Fellow, who completed her final year at Vanderbilt University Law School. Aurelia focused on two interrelated projects this summer. First, she analyzed the WIPO development agenda to determine possible strategic areas of overlap and coordination on understanding, marking and tagging the public domain. Aurelia has created a draft strategic plan for CC’s engagement with WIPO and its members at both a policy and project level. Read her recent blog post for most information about her work in this area. She also spent time developing a strategic plan for CC’s outreach in Africa. The plan includes recommendations on expanding our license porting projects as well as through participation by CC in local activities focused on education and the public domain. Aurelia is going to continue researching these policies for us this fall, thanks to Vanderbilt’s public interest initiative funding.

It was a pleasure having these fine students here at the Creative Commons office. On behalf of the CC staff, we thank you for your beautiful presentations, innovative thinking, and enthusiastic work ethic.