Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Jonas Öberg <jonas AT coyote.org>]

Hi Ryan,

first off - don't be dismayed in any way by grumpy old men on this
list (me included). I believe we all have CC's best interest at heart,
which is why we're stubborn about it.
The basic premise of the List is good, and I appreciate the effort
that has gone into it, I think it will be a useful addition to the
sphere of apps that use CC licensing, and I do look forward to seeing
it in its first release! The idea of List Makers is interesting, and
I'm wondering what organisations you have in mind here? I would think
that Wikimedia, or subprojects of Wikipedia, would be good List
Makers.

I think storing data with Internet Archive is good. You do mention CC
Search as well in the specification, which makes me wonder, have you
thought about implementing some function of the List Makers app to
make it possible to search the public commons when you add items to
the list? I would think that a number of images sought after may
already be available, or it may be relevant to include additional
information in the "ask" that separate it from existing images.

On the subject of contributor agreements, I didn't know that you
already had external contributors to the List, but knowing this, I can
understand and appreciate the need for a contributor agreement. There
are some comments I would raise, but my overall recommendation would
be that you re-think the contributor agreement to use, to the extent
deemed possible, one of the template agreements from the Harmony
Project - http://harmonyagreements.org/agreements.html, or the
somewhat newer Contributor Agreements -
http://contributoragreements.org/

In terms of other priority projects, I would again like to highlight
CC-REL, as this is one of the pieces that can't really be forked. I'm
not sure there are any extensive changes needed to CC-REL, but having
a clearer idea of who is the owner of CC-REL and what the process is
to bring about changes would be useful.


Sincerely,
Jonas

On 15 December 2014 at 22:48, Ryan Merkley <ryan AT creativecommons.org> wrote:
> 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
>
>
> --
>
> Ryan Merkley
> CEO, Creative Commons
> ryan AT creativecommons.org
>
> +1 416.802.0662
> @ryanmerkley
>
> Get Creative Commons Updates http://bit.ly/commonsnews
>
>
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