Cc-hk mailing list

[Henry Oh <henryoh AT gmail.com>]

Wow, this list has been very active for the past few days.  Kudos to all of
us for keeping up.

I think we have all gone to enough conferences or "events" to have a pretty
good sense of what we like and what we don't like.

And what we don't want is two things:

1)  A conference that gets no attention, nobody comes and we are left
speaking to ourselves.

2)  The launch to hinder the growth of Creative Commons HK into a social and
technological force that people look at and envy.  I think a little friendly
competitiveness in the CC community can be a good thing as long as it helps
speed the spread of the ideals and capabilities we all hope CC can bring to
the world.

What I can offer is this.  I worked on a few conferences in law school.  As
student-run conferences go, they weren't the best events, they weren't the
worst events.  So I have some experience in conference planning.  One
conference was an event with Professor Lessig as the main speaker so I have
some insight into the difficulties of coordinating his schedule to our
schedule.  :-) 

And as I see it, fundamentally, at this stage, we need two things:

1)  The right people working on the right tasks.  Committed manpower.  And
we need to do a good job on figuring out what these "right tasks" are and
their order of execution.

2)  Cash.  The more the better.

I have two ideas for both.

One is the Hong Kong Stanford Club
(http://e.stanfordalumni.org/Clubs/hongkong/index.asp).  I have a connection
there and they obviously have a connection to Professor Lessig and would
have their own interests in being associated with an event like this.  I
can, with Dr. Li's help, reach out to them.  They can be a good source for
#1 and #2.  I have no prior experience of being involved with them but it
would be very easy to be.

The second is a funding model that can be a part of the overall
multi-funding model that CC HK's launch requires.

It's been a few years but I believe the budgets we had for these conferences
were somewhere between (HK$240,000-HK$320,000), if not higher.  I've seen
some outrageous conference funding figures.  If the exact dollar figures are
important to anyone, I can track them down.  This is just the figure that
comes to mind and it seems to fall into the range of what we are looking to
raise for the launch event.

For us, we raised the money for these conferences by hitting up law firms.
We got them to buy ads in the conference program's guide.  It was
astonishing to me to see how much they were willing to pay for these ads.
There were certain "forces" at work in our favor and I do not have the local
knowledge to know if these same "forces" are at work here.  If so, I have a
lot of 2nd degree connections to a lot of lawyers at a lot of law firms.  I
can track them down and try to convince them to help us get the money we
want from these law firms.

If any of these ideas do not pan out or if you the rest of you do not think
they are worth pursuing, no problem.  Just tell me what to do and I'll tell
you if I can do it or not.  I have no problem handing out conference name
tags.  :-)

In terms of THE MEETING, I may or may not be able to make it.  I will be out
of town on business starting somewhere between the 21st or 22nd.  And I may
be gone for as long as six weeks.  The timing is pretty indeterminate at
this point.  My apologies in advance if I can't make the meeting.

Another long email to get through (and I'm sure many more will follow).
Again, kudos for keeping up!  :-)

-Henry