On January 8, 2011, Creative Commons held a board meeting in the San Francisco headquarters.

We discussed the CEO transition plan. I reiterated my commitment to continue working with Creative Commons in my new role as Chair of the Board focusing on international and in particular, the Middle East.

Our current plan is for the transition work to begin immediately, but for Cathy to come on board starting March 1. While the timing and the exact location are to be determined, we will be moving the headquarters from San Francisco to Silicon Valley to be closer to some of our funders and many of our core adopters coinciding with Cathy joining full time.

We reviewed and discussed the strategic plan and the board was supportive of the new structure and the objectives and metrics driven format. There was a discussion about the importance of developing the science and education sections of the vision and strategy more. We discussed the importance of involving the stakeholders and community in the conversation as well and looked to other successful models such as Wikimedia.

The board approved the budget which linked to the strategic plan and its objectives with the understanding that Cathy and I will be working on fund raising over the next few months and that certain costs such as the move and the global meeting were still only estimates. We agreed to return to the board with additional updates as they became available.

We discussed the commitment of the board to add additional board members from the international community and committed to publish the criteria within weeks. The board found no reason why board members couldn’t be added as soon as qualified board members were identified through this process. We hope to add two new non-US board members as soon as possible.

We discussed the global meeting and the board reiterated its support for the meeting.

The board discussed the website redesign. “Phase 0” the initial redesign was viewed as an improvement to the old design. (Data about the performance metrics support this.) The board supported the continuation of the website redesign, but asked staff to be prudent about the budget, interview stakeholders for feedback and input, and use internal resource where this made sense and were available.