Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

[Danyl Strype <strypey AT riseup.net>]

Kia ora koutou

Matariki is upon us, a good time to take stock and prepare for the
coming year. With a new Memorandum of Understanding between CC
international and the Royal Society in the works, it seems like a good
time to compile a list of the priorities for building on what we've
achieved so far with CC ANZ (Creative Commons Aotearoa/ New Zealand.
I've come up with a list of what I see as the core responsibilities of
CC ANZ, some proposals for activity, and a blue skies brainstorm of some
more ambitious things we could do.

Thoughts?

Nga mihi mahana ki a koutou
Danyl Strype


Core responsibilities:

Legal
1) supporting our legal team in the tasks involved with keeping the CC
ANZ licenses up-to-date, by monitoring changes to the generic and UK
licenses on which ours are based
2) facilitating communication between the legal team and the wider CC
ANZ network on any significant changes to the licensing framework
    a) changes coming down from CCInternational
    b) changes requested by the user community in Aotearoa

End User Support and Advocacy
1) Giving existing and prospective license users non-legal advice on the
appropriate application of licenses, and use of associated technologies
(tagging, search etc). This involves the website and fora,
correspondence with admin staff and volunteers, enquiries on the email
list, and workshops and talks.
2) Larger scale advocacy efforts that might involve a series meetings,
and seeking written opinions from the legal team to support the argument
for CC licensing (as in the recent case of the proposal to use CC in
place of Crown Copyright)

Proposed Activity

CC hui/ 'BarCamp'
1) General meeting or conference to bring together CC people from around
the country to meet with reps from Royal Society
2) Nominate and select a steering group/ board
3) Sector workshops
4) Regional hui time etc

Regional Sector Workshops
This has been on paper since the sector workshops that were held at the
launch of the localized licenses at the National Library. The follow up
was to include a repeat of that focus group process, to be held in
different regions around the country. This will both require and help to
develop a network of local contact people in the different regions. The
general hui proposed above might be a good place to get some concrete
planning in place for these.

Local Public Meetings and Events
One outcome of the sector workshops could be to plan at least one
well-promoted CC promotional event in each region during the following
3-6 months. The nature of the event would depend on which sectors were
most strongly represented at the workshops in each region, eg if one
area had a strong music-makers presence in the arts sector workshop,
they could look at organising a cross-genre musical event to promote CC.

Community/ Networking
1) Linking people working on related projects
2) Facilitating new projects that use to CC licenses to add new tools
and creations to the Commons, and promote creative re-use of material
licensed into the Commons.
3) Liaising with other free culture organisations on shared work, eg:
   - InternetNZ
   - Creative Freedom Foundation
   - Electronic Freedom Foundation
   - Linux User Groups (LUGs, LinuxChix chapters etc)

Website Revamp
1) Redesign the website to make it more interactive and user-friendly.
2) Add support for an events calendar, preferably with capacity to
export in iCal to other websites, desktop calendars, mobile device
calendars etc
3) Add wiki, it would be great to be able to put up documents like this
where people with a login on the site could see and collaboratively edit
them
4) Add support for OpenID
5) More user profiles
6) Pull in an RSS feed of the CCInternational blog, CC OZ blog etc and
display blog entries chronologically in their own 'international news'
box on the front page


Blue Skies

To some degree our strategy depends on our funding situation.
Promotional events could also double as fundraising events, but if we
have sufficient funding, we could instead spend money on free
promotional events.

If we had unlimited funds, what would we be paying people to work on?
Researching profiles on Aotearoa CC users. Development of fora
(promotion, regular posting etc). More regular additions to the blog on
CC.org.nz. We could have an approved pool of bloggers write about
CC-related issues. Each post is automatically added as a new topic on
the appropriate forum, using a tagging system. The post can be then be
commented on and provoke discussion in the forum. This would create a
constant flow of new content on the front page, and draw site visitors
into participating in the forum. Allowing OpenID login, and making it
possible to post to the forums using Identi.ca/ Twitter/ an IM client/ a
FaceBook group/ a MySpace account/ a blogging account etc would reduce
to barrier to casual comments (ever decided not to bother posting a
useful comment on a blog because you can't be bothered registering for
the site first?).

What we also need is activity that involves 'push' of our message out to
potential CC users (both authors/ artists and audiences), as well as
'pull' systems like the website that people need to seek out for
themselves. Merchandise (t-shirts, hats, badges, stickers etc) with
cheeky remixed messages like "I only date boys who CC license?" ;)

Another push promotion would be a project I wanted to do as part of
Indymedia, but never got around to it. I nicknamed it 'Oggle'. We
solicit music, video, graphic art, etc from kiwi artists who have chosen
to CC license (or who are convinced as part of the outreach process ;)
and make up collection disks using open formats:
1) a graphic art CD, with all art in open formats, and free code
software for displaying and editing them
2) a music CD, using Ogg FLAC or Ogg Vorbis formats, and free code
software for listening to Ogg and sound manipulation
3) a video DVD, using Ogg Theora, Dirac, or VP8 formats, and free code
software for watching the videos, and video editing

All software where possible would be cross-platform (GNU/ Linux/ Mac/
Windows), definitely with display and play software for each platform
(either/or standalone players and plug-ins for popular media players)

I've also got some thoughts on the proposed 'Indigenous License', which
was one of the deliverables for some of the funding we got while Brian
Opie was driving things along. That's quite a bit topic so I'll write a
separate email for it.