Elinor Ostrom / Prolineserver 2010 / Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA A collective sigh of sadness went around the Creative Commons community yesterday when we heard that Elinor Ostrom passed away. Elinor is greatly admired for her pioneering studies on the governance of common-pool resources (the Commons) and collective action across the fields of economics,…

Creative Commons is seeking highly motivated and organized individuals to fill two positions: Senior Project Manager and Senior Project Analyst.  Both positions are full-time with full benefits. Both positions will be key members of the team supporting Department of Labor TAACCCT grantees. Ideal candidates have contributed to open source, open education, open licensing, and/or other…

There are just 10 days left to submit your extended abstract for the 2010 Free Culture Research Conference (FCRC), which will take place October 8-9, in Berlin. The event follows last year’s one-day workshop at Harvard University and aims to further the exciting, interdisciplinary discourse on Free Culture. We hope you’ll consider applying. From the…

Slightly less than a year ago the count of CC-licensed images at Flickr surpassed 100 million. Over 35 million have been added since then. Now is a good time to look at changes over the last four years (for which we have data), in particular changes in the distribution of licenses used. We’ve heard many…

Our board member Hal Abelson points us to Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation , an important new paper by Carliss Y. Baldwin and Eric von Hippel. If you’re interested in the theoretical case for the ascendancy of innovation and creativity in the commons — and for policy…

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded today to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson for their research on economic governance. Ostrom’s award is particularly exciting, for it cites her study of the commons. Commons? That sounds familiar! Ostrom’s pioneering work mostly concerns the governance of common-pool resources — resources that are rivalrous (i.e., scarce,…

Almost one year ago we launched a study of how people understand “noncommercial use.” The study, generously supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, included in-depth interviews and two waves of in-person and online focus groups and online questionnaires. The last included a random sample of U.S. (geographic restriction mandated by resource constraints) internet users…

The Free Culture Research Workshop 2009 is looking for scholars working on: Studies on the use and growth of open/free licensing models Critical analyses of the role of Creative Commons or similar models in promoting a Free Culture Building innovative technical, legal, organizational, or business solutions and interfaces between the sharing economy and the commercial…

The UK Office of Public Sector Information has published a report on public understanding of copyright, in particular Crown Copyright, the default status of UK government works … and Creative Commons. It contains interesting findings, though I really wish it had included two additional questions. Among the general (UK) public, 71% agree that government should…

We’re thrilled to announce that the Social Science Research Center (SSRC) has awarded CC with a grant for the project Assessing the Commons: Social Metrics for the New Media Landscape. Thanks to the SSRC, George Cheliotis of CC Singapore and the National University of Singapore and CC will be researching the “global patterns of CC…