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CC News: Open Government Policy Developments
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While we gear up for the CC Global Summit that is just a week away, governments around the world continue to open up their data and adopt policies for maximum transparency and citizen engagement.
Open government developments in Austria, New Zealand, and Australia
In Austria, the City of Vienna, along with the Chancellor’s Office and the Austrian cities of Linz, Salzburg and Graz, coordinated their activities to establish the Cooperation OGD (Open Government Data) Austria. In its first session, the group agreed to eight key points, the first of which was, "All public administration will be free under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), meaning it can be reused and shared for any purpose, with only attribution necessary.” Read more.
In New Zealand, the Ministers of Finance and Internal Affairs adopted a statement detailing a new Declaration on Open and Transparent Government that directs, encourages, and invites various departments, state services agencies, and state sector agencies to commit to releasing high value public data actively for re-use, in accordance with the Declaration and Principles, and in accordance with the NZGOAL Review and Release process. Read more.
In Australia, AusGOAL, the nationally endorsed Australian Governments Open Access and Licensing Framework, recommends the suite of CC licenses for copyrighted material and the CC Public Domain Mark for non-copyrighted material. Read more. CC Korea also recently translated the excellent Australia Gov 2.0 Taskforce Report to further open government in their own region.
CC Global Summit Updates
The Global Summit Poster Competition was a huge success with 38 entries from around the world; winning designs have been added to the Global Summit wiki and will be printed and featured prominently at the lovely Primates Palace in Warsaw. We also invite you to collaborate on music for the CC Salon at the Summit by remixing tracks from two of the main Polish acts under CC BY-NC-SA. For those of you attending the summit, and for those of you who just want to follow along, we will be using the #ccsummit2011 tag on social media and across media platforms for blogs, photos, and videos. Please see the Global Summit wiki for more on this, and a preview of the program and cultural events!
In other news:
- $20,000 is available via the Open Textbook Challenge by the Saylor Foundation. If a textbook is submitted and accepted for use with Saylor.org's course materials, then the copyright holders receive $20,000 while the referrer receives $250.
- Our affiliates in Europe have published a new dossier on the EU sound recording copyright extension.
- We also filed brief comments for the EC consultation on scientific information in the digital age.
- In response to the Moore Foundation's call for community feedback, we developed this idea on Data Governance. We hope you participate and vote, and not just on our idea — participation in processes like this is a great way to increase their usage by foundations in making funding choices that can benefit the commons.
- The Technical Working Group is underway for the Learning Metadata Resource Initiative (LRMI). EdTechMag recently covered LRMI in this great article. To learn more, sign up for the first in a series of webinars on LRMI.
- We documented the present state of CC licensing options in a summary on CC Labs.
- And we updated our Kickstarter page with a couple new CC licensed projects seeking sustenance. Check it out, and let us know if you are using CC for a project with an upcoming deadline.
Banner photo by brewbooks (cropped) – CC BY-SA 2.0.