It has been a little over a month since I joined Creative Commons as Community Support Intern, and now that I’m in the thick of things, I wanted to share with you what I’m working on this summer.

Allow me to introduce myself. I am currently a Master’s student at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Prior to undertaking graduate studies, I worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. I am very interested in the international open movement, and am hoping to apply what I learn this summer in the field of public policy.

At CC, I am working to support the international affiliate community. Currently, I am developing toolkits that will help CC country teams educate the public in more than seventy countries about the benefits and appropriate use of CC licenses.

The toolkits I’m working on at the moment cover CC license use in three important areas: government and public sector information, journalism and blogging, and new business models.

Government agencies collect and analyze huge amounts of information, developing databases and producing reports, all of which are funded by taxpayers. The use of CC licenses allows the information captured to freely flow among government agencies, as well as out to the nonprofit and private sectors, where it could be reused, built upon, and remixed in new and unexpected ways, maximizing the benefits for society at large.

In contrast, the journalism industry has already been in turmoil for the last decade as widespread adoption of the internet disrupted traditional business models for publishing news. However, new publication models are emerging, some taking advantage of the pre-cleared permissions contained in CC licenses to quickly disseminate information for maximum impact. Additionally, blogs, social media, and collaborative production platforms like Wikipedia have risen to become an important source of analysis, commentary, and even breaking news. Authors using these platforms frequently reuse text, photos, and videos from other sources, which may claim copyright for the materials. They must be educated about copyright as well as the advantages of using materials released under open content licenses in order to maximize creative expression within the existing framework of copyright law.

Finally, my goal in developing a toolkit on business models is to better inform CC license users about the new open business models that are emerging as internet platforms grow and develop. The message will be that choosing open content licenses for your work does not necessarily mean forgoing an opportunity to make money, and is in fact an important part of many online revenue models.

The toolkits will include information on how to use CC licenses in these spheres, frequently asked questions, relevant articles, case studies, videos, etc, and will be available for all users on the CC website, under a CC license, of course.

I would love for anyone who is interested to contribute by letting me know about materials that you know of or use regularly on these topics. Please e-mail me at info@creativecommons.org.

I will highlight materials that are especially high-quality or interesting in a future blog post.