We’re happy to announce that for the fourth year Creative Commons will take part in the Google Policy Fellowship program. Submit your application by February 3, 2012.

The Google Policy Fellowship program offers undergraduate, graduate, and law students interested in Internet and technology policy the opportunity to spend the summer contributing to the public dialogue on these issues, and exploring future academic and professional interests. Fellows will have the opportunity to work at public interest organizations at the forefront of debates on broadband and access policy, content regulation, copyright and trademark reform, consumer privacy, open government, and more.

The 2012 Google Policy Fellow will receive a substantial grant to work at Creative Commons’ office in Mountain View, California. We are looking for motivated candidates with partially-developed ideas in exploring a particular interest/expertise area, short research project, or related activity within the broad spectrum of open licensing and the commons. Past Google Policy Fellowship projects have included an analysis of the WIPO development agenda in relation to its effect on access to public domain materials, crucial research on the welfare impact of Creative Commons across various fields, and an investigation of the characterization of Creative Commons within U.S. legal scholarship over the past 10 years. We are very flexible in accommodating project ideas that will be mutually beneficial to the candidate and CC. We are interested in a wide range of activities, which could include conducting original research, researching and developing educational materials, or assisting in the development of activities/projects useful to our wide-ranging global community. Potential topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:

Encapsulated research within our CC contribution-study project. Examples include:

• Studying changing license adoption patterns in a specific community (can be quantitative, qualitative or comparative, with analysis depending on relevant applicant background)
• Studying changing license adoption patterns within a specific platform
• Studying the contribution of the platform in a specific context (applicant choice or our direction)
• Studying the contribution of the CC network in a specific context
• Studying CC’s contribution to the movement (with or without a human rights perspective; along the lines of expanding creation/data contribution to otherwise “distant” communities/persons/places/domains)
• Studying CC’s contribution to novel cultural fields
• For all the former: design DB (data gathering)

CC and the School of Open

• Help design challenges/courses around CC licenses, with a particular focus on how to certify and assess expertise on CC licenses and topics.
• Work would involve testing/evaluation with a user/creator community to measure effectiveness of courses.
• Develop documentation/case studies for different user/creator communities.

Research and development of CC related toolkits and guides

• Researching trends in CC usage, messaging around trends, development of high quality case studies and toolkits.
• Depending on applicant interest and CC needs, could create for CC in government adoption/public sector information, CC and innovative business models, etc.

International activities

• Translation projects (requires familiarity/experience with CC community)
• Community management projects (requires familiarity/experience in community management skills; applicant could usefully work on volunteers or team-model working groups projects)