Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Ryan Merkley <ryan AT creativecommons.org>]

Maarten, Bjorn, Jonas, Rob, Jonathon et al:

Thanks to all of you who have weighed in on the contributor agreement thread. I appreciate your honesty, and we are all listening to your feedback.

First off, I want to acknowledge that CC hasn’t done enough to engage its developer community in recent years. This is a result of many factors, but none sufficient to excuse those actions, or lack thereof. By announcing new tech projects before coming to you all for input, we have not helped mend the situation since I came aboard. That stops here.

We would genuinely like to rebuild this community. Our goal for the tech development community at CC is to maintain or tech infrastructure, and serve user needs, and create high-quality, freely-licensed software with contributions from an engaged community of developers.

The List apps are a place to start. In our excitement about the project, we forgot about all of the good reasons you might have for being hesitant about yet another CC tech announcement. That was a misstep. So let’s start over.

The background: The List, powered by Creative Commons is a new mobile and web application CC is developing with support from the Knight Foundation. We are still in the very early stages of development, but the idea is to allow people, projects, and organizations to create lists of items they would like to be photographed, and for users of these apps to snap photos of those items and then share them with the world under CC-BY.

Where we need your help: We are releasing test versions of the apps soon. We will need your help to make them better. The apps are licensed under the GNU AGPL v3. We are committed to having them be available as free software (a commitment we are willing to make as a legally-enforceable promise), and our original plan was to have contributors assign copyright to CC to make enforcement easier and in case we needed to change to a different free software license in the future. We are willing to rethink that approach.

With that in mind, we would like to hear from you. I’m interested both in your ideas on how to build the apps, but also about some of the other priority areas that were mentioned in this thread. There’s lots of work to do, and I appreciate your help and advice on areas to focus on going forward. We’re listening.

Best,

Ryan

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Ryan Merkley
CEO, Creative Commons
ryan AT creativecommons.org

+1 416.802.0662
@ryanmerkley

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