It’s a ccSalon… with a twist of sausage.

Down south in South Africa we have the much-revered summer practice of the ‘braai’. The braai is just like a barbeque, except with a better selection of meat and southern blue skies. At a braai the norm is for people to bring their own meat and drink. Salads, breads, desserts and cold-drinks are usually supplied by the hosts. Hence we call it the ‘bring ‘n braai.’

Interesting but not relevant you may think. Have we confused CC with Wikipedia? Indeed not. On 20 April Creative Commons South Africa is hosting its second ccSalon at The Independent Armchair Theatre in Cape Town, aka the Mother City. And we’re challenging creators to add to the pool of free culture by CC-licensing and uploading their creative digital works via the ccSalon’s bring ‘n braai website. Folks coming to the ccSalon are urged to bring their iPods and memory sticks where they can download these works via the Freedom Toaster. So – it’s a bring ‘n braai.

To help us jam, remix, share and braai, Larry Lessig and Jimmy Wales will be at the salon as part of the SA Free Culture Tour which takes place from Wednesday, 18 April to Friday, 20 April 2007. The tour has already received a great deal of publicity in the blogosphere and a buzz amongst mainstream SA media.

It’s a ccSalon… with a twist of sausage.

Down south in South Africa we have the much-revered summer practice of the ‘braai’. The braai is just like a barbeque, except with a better selection of meat and southern blue skies. At a braai the norm is for people to bring their own meat and drink. Salads, breads, desserts and cold-drinks are usually supplied by the hosts. Hence we call it the ‘bring ‘n braai.’

Interesting but not relevant you may think. Have we confused CC with Wikipedia? Indeed not. On 20 April Creative Commons South Africa is hosting its second ccSalon at The Independent Armchair Theatre in Cape Town, aka the Mother City. And we’re challenging creators to add to the pool of free culture by CC-licensing and uploading their creative digital works via the ccSalon’s bring ‘n braai website. Folks coming to the ccSalon are urged to bring their iPods and memory sticks where they can download these works via the Freedom Toaster. So – it’s a bring ‘n braai.

To help us jam, remix, share and braai, Larry Lessig and Jimmy Wales will be at the salon as part of the SA Free Culture Tour which takes place from Wednesday, 18 April to Friday, 20 April 2007. The tour has already received a great deal of publicity in the blogosphere and a buzz amongst mainstream SA media.

From the Science Commons blog:

A commissioner of Science and Research for the European Union has called for “knowledge” to be added as the fifth community freedom. The four other freedoms recognized from the EU Treaty are goods, services, capital and labor.

Janez Potocnik proposed this idea at the launch of his green paper, “The European Research Area: New Perspectives”, last week. The paper outlines the components necessary to maximize the potential in the European Research Area (ERA) with a new emphasis – the movement of knowledge. […]

More after the jump …

Creative Commons has an opening for a full time administrative assistant in its San Francisco office. See the job description and how to apply.

Also see our other openings.

Voting for the NetSqaured Innovation Awards, previously blogged here, runs today through April 14. Update: Voting has been extended through April 16 at 5PM PDT.

You must register and vote for five to ten social enterprises. Twenty winners will receive expenses for two staff members to attend N2Y2 and participate in the NetSquared Technology Innovation Fund.

Here are four projects with free culture connections to strongly consider voting for:

• Open Community Radio: KRUU-LP 100.1 FM. Taking community radio to the next level with 99% locally produced content, running on 100% open source, promoting CC licensed content, and with a fantastic free culture interview show. More about KRUU in this previous post.
• Telecommunications and Microfinances for The Poor and The Poorest. A project of Free Culture Peru.
• OpenStreetMap. Street maps and other geodata under CC Attribution-ShareAlike.
• Open Source, Open Standards Video. Why this is important.

Addendum: In other voting news, Wikitravel (see our featured commoner interview with Wikitravel’s founders) is nominated for a Webby award in the travel category. Several other CC-friendly sites are also nominated, including Flickr in many categories. Anyone with some time to look at a lot of sites can vote. If you do, cast one for Wikitravel!

Creative Commons is working with Bienes Comunes to create Argentina jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses.

CCi Argentina List

Project Lead: Professor Ariel Vercelli.

• License draft (PDF).
• English explanation of substantive legal changes. (PDF)
• Post a message.
• Subscribe to the discussion.
• Read the discussion archives.

More about NGO Bienes Comunes

Bienes Comunes is a non-profit and non governmental organization (NGO) founded in 2005 and located in the Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is formed by people interested in the research, promotion, regulation and protection of the commons of our societies. Its mission could be synthesized as the study, research, development, promotion, spread, citizenship education in its use and production, protection, conservation, defence, assertion and regulation of every unalienable commons that conform and sustain our human condition.

Bienes Comunes can be graphically understood as a laboratory of the nature, reach, regulation and fate of cultural, digital, biological and material commons. Bienes Comunes works as a hub between private, public and communal networks, connecting and collaborating with researchers, technicians, institutes, research centres, libraries, laboratories, enterprises, non-profit civil associations, foundations, cooperatives, chambers or governmental agencies interested in the commons.

During 2005 Fundación OSDE gave support to Ariel Vercelli and the NGO Bienes Comunes in the first phase and translation of the Creative Commons licenses in Argentina. The NGO Bienes Comunes leads the Creative Commons local chapter and during these years has developed many projects related to free and open licenses for all kind of intellectual works: among others, Negocios Abiertos [a project to work, design and share open business models in Latin America], Aprender la Libertad [an initiative to work with digital commons and collaborative production of educational contents] and Librecultura [a space to promote and define the free culture movement in Argentina and Latin America].

For more information about NGO Bienes Comunes visit http://www.bienescomunes.org/. Please contact Ariel Vercelli and the NGO Bienes Comunes for any issue related with the local chapter:

More Information

Creative Commons also offers ported versions of its six, core licenses for many jurisdictions (usually jurisdiction = country, but not always). Over 50 ported license suites exist. These ported licenses are based on and compatible with the international license suite, differing only in that they have been modified to reflect local nuances in how legal terms and conditions are expressed, drafting protocols and, of course, language. The ported licenses and the international licenses are all intended to be legally effective anywhere in the world, and have the same legal effect.

Upcoming Launch Dates

• Chile 3.0 Upgrade: Fall 2010
• Egypt: Fall 2010
• Armenia: Winter 2010
• Azerbaijan: Winter 2010
• Georgia: Winter 2010
• Jordan: Winter 2010
• Ireland: Winter 2010

When we launched version 3.0 of the CC licenses February 23 we also switched on a number of graphical, language, and technical updates. This is the first of a very tardy series of posts about those updates.

Creative Commons license deeds are the “human readable” explanation of the “lawyer readable” licenses (e.g., see the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 deed and Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 legalcode) and have always (see Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 as captured by the Internet Archive in 2003) used icons to represent the requirements and prohibitions associated with a license.

Coinciding with 3.0 we’ve started using icons to call out the freedoms granted with a license:

The “remix” building blocks icon is derived from the FreeCulture.org logo:

Thanks for the great idea!

FreeCulture.org is “an international student movement for free culture” and a great way to get involved. Check out their suggestions ranging from 5 minute projects to starting your own chapter.

We’ve featured FreeCulture.org events a number of times on this blog, including a recent Creative Commons art show by Free Culture Florida.

Creative Commons is hiring a web developer/sysadmin (let’s call it a web engineer) for its San Francisco office. The technical requirements are broad but not deep — the ideal candidate would have the ability to learn quickly and willingness to tackle any technical task with gusto — from IT drudgework to developing cool web apps. See the job description for application details.

Please forward to anyone who would be interested but just happens to be offline for a spell. What other excuse would they have for not reading the CC blog? 🙂

Also check out our openings for General Counsel and CC Learn Executive Director.