Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Maarten Zeinstra <mz AT kl.nl>]

Hi Jonas,

Dogfooding is a good way to ensure that the tools that are developed can be 
used by affiliates. Basically CC.org should consider themselves as an 
affiliate itself. In such a way that when a new WP theme, license selection 
tool, API, etc. are developed that cc.org uses the same codebase as 
affiliates can use. That probably means that some of the current systems need 
to be disentangled to be used separately and disseminated among affiliates 
and activist. For example, make the license selection tool a WP-plugin that 
can be used by all affiliate websites. 

I think we can agree that the licenses can be excluded from the dogfooding. 
However, the deed pages should be considered as a product as well and that 
product needs to be as transparent as possible. One of the reasons why this 
thread started..

Is that what you mean Jonas?

Cheers,

Maarten 

On Mar 5, 2013, at 8:21 , Jonas Öberg <jonas AT coyote.org> wrote:

> Maarten,
> 
> something that I've always been keen to put forward is the idea that
> CC HQ ought to be using the same technology and tools as everyone
> else. This means for instance that the license chooser used on cc.org
> should not be different from the license chooser offered through the
> partner interface (they should at least be built on the same
> infrastructure) and the web site theme should be the same one used by
> the affiliates, or at least inherited from it, and so on.
> 
> Do you think, if doing so, that this might help? My hunch is that it
> would necessitate a larger degree of openness and collaboration around
> common assets, which would be good. I'm not sure to what extent that
> would happen though: a lot of the work of regular maintenance and
> infrastructure would logically fall on CC HQ, but we all know how
> difficult it is to do infrastructure work if you only have manpower to
> do fire fighting.
> 
> Jonas
> 
> On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 12:28 AM, Maarten Zeinstra <mz AT kl.nl> wrote:
>> Thanks Bjorn,
>> 
>> Another example that both Bjorn and I worked on in the past are Wordpress 
>> Themes for Affiliates. It is silly that affiliates need to recreate 
>> templates without support of CC International and that when we grab the 
>> current theme of CC.org that the quality of the theme is lacking so much 
>> that it needs a fundamental strip and rebuild before it can be used by 
>> affiliates.
>> 
>> Basically I am talking here about an askew relationship between tech 
>> development for cc.org (basically cc US that pretends to represent the 
>> globe) and its affiliates. Who (the affiliates) have turned to themselves 
>> for development of tools, sites and other infrastructure as we see of the 
>> low number of participants on this list.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Maarten
>> 
>> 
>> On Mar 4, 2013, at 12:45 , BjornW <burobjorn AT gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> +1
>>> 
>>> My experience as an external volunteer developer is the same as Maarten.
>>> This actually made me more or less stop contributing to CC.
>>> I'd also like to see a more future-proof solution where some thought has
>>> been given to prevent the mistakes from the past, instead of quick 
>>> 'fixes'.
>>> 
>>> grtz
>>> BjornW
>>> 
>>> On 04-03-13 12:08, Maarten Zeinstra wrote:
>>>> Hi Dan,
>>>> 
>>>> There is no documentation for a start. It is a very value adding
>>>> feature of the deed page but without documentation is probably
>>>> sparsely used and hard to convince third parties to use RDFa to enrich
>>>> their rights statements.
>>>> 
>>>> But frankly and if you read closely this entire thread is not about
>>>> the metadata scraper. It is about the lack of transparency, direction
>>>> and general documentation, as well as leadership in the technical
>>>> infrastructure of CC.
>>>> 
>>>> The entire community basically consist of recent departures from the
>>>> CC tech team and me. In recent years I've tried on multiple occasions
>>>> to contribute on the codebase/ infrastructure of CC but I always run
>>>> up to a barrier of having no central team that can support efforts to
>>>> such an extent that is adds value.
>>>> 
>>>> With this thread I don't want to hear quick fixes or answers to my
>>>> direct questions. I want to receive some confirmation (in
>>>> policy/roadmaps/support) that cc-technologies is not at a dead end.
>>>> 
>>>> Best,
>>>> 
>>>> Maarten
>>>> 
>>>> On Feb 28, 2013, at 19:46 , Dan Mills <dan AT creativecommons.org
>>>> <mailto:dan AT creativecommons.org>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Hi Maarten,
>>>>> 
>>>>> I actually thought I'd sent a mail to this list, but indeed,
>>>>> apparently I did not! So, let me fix that right away :)
>>>>> 
>>>>> Hello. I'm Dan Mills, the new Director of Product Strategy at
>>>>> Creative Commons. In short, I'm a technical product guy with roots in
>>>>> open source and the Web. You can read a little more about me here:
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://creativecommons.org/staff#danmills
>>>>> 
>>>>> More specifically on roadmap--I have been reviewing the existing
>>>>> infrastructure and identifying the most urgent fixes we need to do,
>>>>> while at the same time thinking about what the forward direction will
>>>>> be and what kind of team we will need.
>>>>> 
>>>>> What are the burning issues with the scraper form your POV?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Dan
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Wednesday, February 27, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Maarten Zeinstra wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Oh come on!
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> That simply is not good enough.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> We CC-affiliates / open activists need to be able to do our work. I
>>>>>> raised this question because I do work for Europeana, The European
>>>>>> version of the DPLA, but 5 years ahead. they were instrumental and
>>>>>> the first adopter of the Public Domain Mark. Europeana works with
>>>>>> 2600+ cultural institutions and has about 5 million works PD/CC0
>>>>>> marked. Now when one of those institutions mails me and asked me why
>>>>>> there is no extra metadata on PDM pages coming of Europeana, I need
>>>>>> to be able to say that there is possibly a script blocker on the
>>>>>> client side and that Europeana and CreativeCommons.org
>>>>>> <http://creativecommons.org/> are functioning properly, see this
>>>>>> page for more information (no page or documentation to be found...).
>>>>>> When I cannot do that I cannot do my job. When I cannot do my job I
>>>>>> cannot convince these institutions of the merit of CC licensing or
>>>>>> PD marking. When I cannot do that they will be less likely to use
>>>>>> the tools. That is bad for our global access to culture. (I use
>>>>>> myself as an example, this could happen to anyone who wants to
>>>>>> promote CC).
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> We all want more open content and correct rights labelling right? I
>>>>>> need to be able to rely on that infrastructure of CC.org
>>>>>> <http://cc.org/> to be able to do my job in this.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> It is completely absurd that you cannot get your act together and
>>>>>> provide us with a decent technological infrastructure and support to
>>>>>> help convince the world that a) open content is a good way to go and
>>>>>> b) rights labelling is important and c) (most importantly) we have
>>>>>> their backs in that.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Also, where is Dan Mills in all of this? He's been on the job for
>>>>>> like two months now right? Why is it that he hasn't even introduced
>>>>>> himself on this list yet? I hope he consider the licenses and their
>>>>>> backing technology as part of the product of CC..
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I think it is unbelievable that you can laconically state that you
>>>>>> wish you had better answers…
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Feb 27, 2013, at 18:15 , Greg Grossmeier <greg AT grossmeier.net
>>>>>> <mailto:greg AT grossmeier.net>> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> <quote name="Maarten Zeinstra" date="2013-02-27" time="12:18:05 
>>>>>>> +0100">
>>>>>>>> I was wondering if there is a roadmap for the development of the
>>>>>>>> metadata scraper of the deed pages.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> This is on a roadmap of some sorts; I can't remember the specific
>>>>>>> timeline right now.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> As of now it only support RDFa, maybe we want to add other formats as
>>>>>>>> well?
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> That is the idea, indeed.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Also I could find very little documentation about the workings of the
>>>>>>>> scraper directed at non-developers. Where can I point to when no
>>>>>>>> scraped information shows up because of a script blocker?
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Nothing at this time :/
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Wish I had better answers,
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Greg
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> PS: As of Feb 19th, I now work for the Wikimedia Foundation, so my 
>>>>>>> time
>>>>>>> on these type of issues will be radically lower now.
>>>>>>> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-February/066672.html
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>> | Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
>>>>>>> | http://grossmeier.net <http://grossmeier.net/> A18D 1138 8E47
>>>>>>> FAC8 1C7D |
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>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
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>>> 
>>> --
>>> 
>>> met vriendelijke groet,
>>> Bjorn Wijers
>>> 
>>> * b u r o b j o r n .nl *
>>> digitaal vakmanschap | digital craftsmanship
>>> 
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