Cc-hk mailing list

["Rebecca MacKinnon" <rebecca.mackinnon AT gmail.com>]

Hello everybody!

Sorry for the long silence. Many people were away in August, then things have been very hectic at HKU with the start of the new semester.

I have several developments to report:

1. LEGAL WORK:  Our legal leads at the HKU Law Faculty, Professors Yahong Li and Alice Lee, have recruited two graduate students to work on localization of the CC license into HK law. I've just added them to the list so hopefully they will introduce themselves. 

If all goes well, our legal team hopes that drafts of the licenses will be available for your comment by the end of the year. Then after an appropriate comment period (the length of which depends on the community), we hope that the licenses can be finalized and CC-HK can be launched by the middle of 2008.

2. CC CONTENT DIRECTORY PROJECT: Two other new additions to this mailing list are Prof. Thomas Lee of the HKU Computer Science department and Gary Tsui, a graduate student in the CS department. They are interested in exploring the possibility of creating some kind of directory of Hong Kong CC content and also possibly Chinese-language CC content more generally. Of course, we first need to localize the license in order for such a project to get fully underway, but it's worth starting to think about. So we welcome ideas and interest.

3. HK GOVERNMENT CIO: The government CIO's office has expressed an interest via Thomas in learning more about Creative Commons. Thomas and I will probably go and talk to them some time in early October just to explain more about how CC works and what it is. Then, I hope that after the license gets localized for HK law, our community can encourage them to use it.

4. NEXT MEETING?  Some people have asked when we will have another meeting or get-together. Others have said they think that the next time we meet, we need to have very specific goals that we want to accomplish in order to make it worthwhile. I welcome your thoughts about whether people think it would be useful to hold another meeting sometime in October, and if so what the objectives of the meeting would be, or whether people prefer to wait until we have a draft of the licenses for comment.

5. BEN CHENG: Ben Cheng, who attended our July meeting, has been hired part-time by my Journalism & Media Studies Ctr here at HKU to help us out with a number of things, including CC-HK community building, organization, and relations. When we get further along in the license-porting process and start to think about a launch date, etc., he will be a key person to help coordinate activities and projects. 

Any further questions, ideas, thoughts, opinions, etc. are greatly welcome. 

If any other people who recently joined the list would like to introduce themselves, that would also be great. 

Cheers,
Rebecca


-- 
Rebecca MacKinnon
Assistant Professor, Journalism & Media Studies Ctr.
University of Hong Kong   (http://jmsc.hku.hk)
E-mail: 
rmack AT hku.hk | Tel: +852-2219-4005
Blog: http://RConversation.blogs.com
Co-founder: http://GlobalVoicesOnline.org
"The world is talking. Are you listening?"