Working alongside non-governmental institutions, universities, and public agencies, Creative Commons affiliates and community in the Arab World have been impacting the growth and quality of the commons across all sectors, including education, science, and research, cultural heritage, data, design, and hardware.

The past two years have been specially vibrant, with a wide range of projects including the Open Book Project , a UNESCO regional seminar on OER in the GCC and Yemen,  Notre Dame University—Louaize in Lebanon signing an memorandum of understanding as an affiliate, Google hangouts on various occasions to tackle pressing issues in the digital ecosystem, and the Al Jazeera English translation of the The Data Journalism Handbook  to Arabic.

Other projects include #FreeBassel campaign support and the two historic meetings: the Regional Meeting to restructure, build capacity, share best practices, and the translation meeting to officially translate the 4.0 version of the CC license suite into Arabic. 2016 is also projected to have more exciting developments for the rapidly-growing CC community in the Arab world.

After an extensive process, the legal team finished the CC4.0 Licences Arabic Translation Draft for public consultation.

The public consultation is an open forum where everyone, including lawyers, active license users, linguists, translators, and others are invited to contribute to the project. If you have comments about different aspects of the licenses, particularly in regards to legal, linguistic or usability issues, please feel welcome to provide feedback and share your thoughts by replying to the thread in Arabic.

Comments should be submitted as soon as possible to allow enough time for review, so we encourage you to post here or to the CC Arab World list before the 21st of July 2016.

As efforts across the Arab world continue to expand and gather peer support, we hope that the this public consultation will foster more collaboration. Inter-jurisdictional support is a model that is particularly strong in the region, and hopefully it can become a viable approach for future projects.

Congratulations to the CC Arab World! We look forward to your public comments.

*An Arabic version of this announcement was posted to the CC Arab World list as well.