Happy New Year! We head into 2012 with exciting new CC developments from all over the world.

CC Kazakhstan and CC Rwanda

At the end of 2011, we announced two new CC Affiliates from Kazakhstan and Rwanda. Led by Rauan Kenzhekhanuly and including Almas Nurbakytov, Nartay Ashim and Balashov Talgat, the Kazakhstan team is supported by Wikibilim, a non-profit organisation which also operates as the local representative of Wikimedia. The Rwanda team, led by Jacques Murinda and including Fred Byabagabo and Prosper Birama, is working in conjunction with the Open Learning Exchange (OLE), an NGO supported by the Rwandan Ministry of Education, which aims to provide universal access to basic education by 2015. We welcome both these teams to our Affiliate Network, and look forward to working with them as they develop the CC community in their regions. This brings the total number of official CC Affiliates to 72, the highest level since the project launched in 2002. Read more.

Ugandan 3.0 Licenses now open for public discussion

Many of you already know that we have begun working on the next version of licenses, the 4.0 suite. Even while this process has begun, we are finishing a few remaining, important 3.0 ports. One of these is the Uganda 3.0 license suite, which we are pleased to announce is now open for public discussion. This is particularly noteworthy, as the Ugandan license suite is only the second tailored suite from the Sub-Saharan Africa region to reach the public discussion stage (after South Africa). These new licenses will be useful to many Anglophone African countries that share similar copyright laws and legal histories. We welcome all those who are interested to view the Uganda BY-NC-SA draft and contribute their comments this month. Read more.

CC and the 3D Printing Community

With the exception of CC0, the Creative Commons licenses are only for granting permissions to use non-software works. The worlds of software and engineering have additional concerns outside of the scope of what is addressed by the CC licenses. 3D printing is a new medium which encompasses both the creative domains of culture and engineering, and often 3D printed works do not fall neatly into either category. The purpose of the following article is to explore the similarities between the community that has grown around 3D printing and that of the commons which CC strives to empower. A later article will explore problems with adopting CC in the 3D printing community. Read the article here.

• Our campaign is still going on through January 15. If you haven't donated yet, now's your chance! (Thanks a million to those of you who have. We could not continue to exist without you.)

• The Creative Commons Board of Directors held its year-end annual board meeting on December 9, 2011.

• One week later, CC celebrated the 9th birthday of its license suite.

• We are still protesting SOPA and PIPA. You can, too.

• You can also apply for a 2012 Google Policy Fellowship with us. Deadline to apply is February 3, 2012.

• Or you can apply to be the CC Director of Strategic Partnerships! And be responsible for building and executing a comprehensive fundraising strategy.

• CC’s Russian affiliate Institute of the Information Society (IIS), in collaboration with the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies, organized an international seminar and expert meeting last month in Moscow.

• Lastly, we'd like to give a shout-out to some recent developments at Mozilla: the release of Mozilla Public License 2.0 and a great publication called, Learning, Freedom & the Web, based on Mozilla’s eponymous festival in Barcelona last year, published under CC BY-SA.