Dear Colleagues,  At our most recent board meeting - June 19-20 - we presented your letter to the CC board.  The reaction to your suggestions was entirely positive.  The board already had on the agenda a discussion of ways to increase both the focus on CC's international network and to improve our strategic planning and intra-CC communication.  Your letter fit nicely into both and there was board consensus around the following points. 
 
1.)  We want better information flow internationally, more transparent decision making processes, and a greater attempt to get input from our global network on key decisions facing CC.  We don't see one simple solution however.  On large policy shifts or new initiatives the answer is clear, but as one tries to get more responsive beyond that there are real difficulties of implementation in terms of staff time, speed of response and so on.  Part of the answer will come from increased staff attention to making sure that network consultation and notification is routine on important matters.  That we are committed to, within the constraints imposed by manageability, fundraising and time-pressure.  We would like your feedback as our attempts move forward.  (Obviously Catharina has worked really hard on this already.  She deserves our thanks.   Some of you have also mentioned as good beginnings Mike Linksvayer's recent work, for example, or the kinds of discussions that happened at the iSummit's around moral rights or database rights.)  We try to use electronic tools as best we can.  But clearly things could improve further.  We want to make the board more geographically diverse (right now the only non American citizens are Joi and me) a task that is complicated by a pressing need to recruit board members who have considerable financial resources as part of CC's attempt to build towards permanent sustainability.   The ones who have resources and are interested in CC have tended disproportionately to come from the US – just as almost all of our funding comes from the US.  But of course, managed the right way, increasing diversity could help solve that problem.  
	What is the bottom line?  I think you will find in the future that Joi and I will more frequently reach out to you collectively and individually for your advice.  In the long run, I'd like to have the Chair or CEO send out a brief six monthly report on strategic goals to the country leads for them to comment on and make suggestions.  Right now Joi and I are running as fast as we can just to fundraise and manage the transition as Larry moves back to the board.  We certainly want to make sure that major initiatives or themes are both run by the network first and then communicated to you in the final form before anyone in the public sees them.  We will do our best to make it easy for jurisdictions to do planning and fundraising around those themes.  But we do not have some grand structure that would solve the problem at a stroke - more like a commitment to a continuing process.  This leads to the second point...
 
2.)  We want more focus on our global network - and in ways that go beyond license porting:  As an organization, our network coordination has often flowed well out of the pursuit of particular tasks - for example, porting the licenses.  The result has been a network with far greater capabilities than porting alone.  We should probably learn from that experience.  The board would like to start a conversation with the CCi network and in particular with the jurisdiction leads about projects beyond porting that could be pursued globally or regionally - serving the public interest and helping to raise money internationally by making greater use of the fabulous network of professionals that we already have.  Here are two examples of such projects that have come up recently - one from within ccLearn and the other more general.  We use them only as illustrations; you might have other ones to suggest and we are sure you would have useful tweaks to these thought experiments.
●	Explaining copyright and open licensing to educators:  There has been considerable interest in explaining copyright, its limitations and exceptions and the ideas of open licensing to educators and students - groups who have particular need for the information.    Misinformation abounds, the existing resources are dense and hard to understand, and have frequent national or regional gaps.   If funding could be procured to support it, might groups within the CCi network be interested in producing materials explaining those issues for each country in the network? We might start with some pilot projects, collaboratively producing high quality research, developing some designs and improving human readability - good graphics, interactive tools, high production values - and then getting other countries in the network to "port" the materials into their own legal system - something which would require considerable research and adjustment and might generate interesting research and publication opportunities for those who were interested. 
 
●	Developing tools for identifying, marking and tagging the public domain: The rules about what materials are in the public domain - indeed the very existence of the idea of the public domain - vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, often raising a big barrier for librarians and archivists, but also for citizens.  Might CCi jurisdictions be interested in beginning an international effort to explain the rules about when works pass into the public domain, and even to provide templates that would allow volunteers within particular countries to identify and then mark or tag works that are in the public domain?
 
I pick these examples simply to give some concreteness to the discussion, and because I think they are fundable (a key criterion)  not to suggest they are the only ones.   All of you might come up with better ones – and then we could talk about what made sense to do with the CC brand; what globally, and what regionally.   The question this letter poses is whether the people in the CCi network think it might be interesting to pursue the general idea of  CC global and regional projects (whatever those projects might be)  further:   not so much starting with a grand structural plan for the organization, but starting with particular worthy - and collectively chosen - projects out of which a more global (or regional?) structure might begin to coalesce.  The benefits could be considerable.  Better coordination and information flow, possibilities to raise funds both within our own countries and internationally, public service in solving problems that relate to CC's core mission, increased prominence and focus on the CCi network and jurisdictions,  research opportunities, network building.  The difficulties would be considerable too, but the question is whether it is worth beginning the discussion.   If there was interest, we might think about arranging some meetings on the subject.  Jamie cannot be in Sapporo but Joi and other board members and staff will be.  Perhaps the discussion could be pursued further then? 

So if we could sum up:  we wholeheartedly agree with the basic thrust of your letter, but in addition we would like to go further by exploring the possibility of particular global or regional projects involving the jurisdictions. These projects would be worthy for their own sake, but the hope would be that they are also the kind of concrete tasks around which the structure of a more truly global CC might accrete in an organic and webby kind of way.   
 
These answers are only beginnings of course, and one we would like to discuss more widely and beyond this group,  but they do indicate the lines along which we are thinking. We look forward to your feedback. 
 
Warmest regards,
 
Jamie and Joi