Creative Commons - User contributions [en]

Grants/Images of People, Networks of Sharing: How Does Creative Commons Impact Flickr

2010-06-30T07:49:31Z

Remycross: Created page with '{{Grant Application |Project Title=Images of People, Networks of Sharing: How Does Creative Commons Impact Flickr |applicants=Chimaera Institute |contact person=Remy Cross, Ben L…'

{{Grant Application
|Project Title=Images of People, Networks of Sharing: How Does Creative Commons Impact Flickr
|applicants=Chimaera Institute
|contact person=Remy Cross, Ben Lind, Kelly Ramsey
|coordinator=Ben Lind
|start date=2011/08/15
|end date=2011/02/15
|Affiliation=Chimaera Institute
|Mainurl=chimaerainstitute.org/blog
|Affiliated=No
|description=We propose to study how Creative Commons (CC) licensed content is consumed and shared by audiences. Our intent is to study the photo-sharing service Flickr to assess (a) whether CC licensed materials reach more viewers than non-CC licensed materials, and (b) whether CC licensed materials encourage larger, more robust social network communities than non-CC licensed materials. Because Flickr allows for users to offer and share a variety of important network information we would like use this community as a test case to better understand CC media production and consumption. We will collect the data that Flickr makes freely available to the public and analyze it, analyze the data, and produce a report that will contribute to the understanding of how CC material is made and consumed.
|output=This project has two important forms of output: the data and the analysis. Our intention is to make both freely available to any and all interested parties so that our methods will be open to all and any followup research will have an excellent starting point. We will license the data, the code for data collection and analysis, and our report with Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution, and share-alike ownership.

In terms of data, we will gather a large amount of raw network data from a programming script that scrapes Flickr.com. This photograph data includes a page view count, CC or non-CC license, the date uploaded, comments, as well as the Flickr user network it is embedded in. After this initial dataset has been gathered we will also use it to produce a more refined, accessible dataset suitable for a variety of statistical and network analyses. Both the raw data and the cleaned dataset will be freely available, and our intention is to host the data through our website as we collect and process it.

The analysis will be presented as a white paper offering our analysis of how CC licensed material is shared and remixed by a community such as Flickr. The analysis will include a statistical comparison of CC and non-CC licensed works to test for differences in their respective online communities.
|community=Our beneficiaries will be websites that host - or are thinking of hosting - large amounts of user-contributed media content. Our analysis will show how the public accesses and organizes around this content when available under a CC license. This will help both website operators and potential users alike in that it will show them how their choice of licensing affects the kinds of communities that form around the content they share. If our findings encourage further usage of CC licenses, this would yield an increase in content available for the broader public to distribute, commercialize, or make derivative works when appropriate.
|community relationship=We are part of a 501(c)(3) (approval pending) nonprofit chartered for educational purposes. Our core mission is to conduct research and educate the public on issues of sustainable communities, open access to knowledge, and informed consumption of goods and services both tangible and virtual.

Our mission of providing open access to knowledge and informed consumption have lead us to become advocates of Creative Commons style production and practices.

We have over 20 years of combined research experience in both quantitative and qualitative research methods in our areas of emphasis, which include information technologies, social networks, and complex organizations.
|measurement=The simplest measure will be the amount of traffic generated as we make the data and the final product available. Because we are also part of a wider community of non-profits and academic institutions, as well as fellow CC enthusiasts, we will also send out occasional notification to these groups to make sure they are aware of the ongoing progress of the project.
|participants=This project will only directly involve the three primary researchers conducting the data collection and analysis activities. However, it will involve the indirect participation of Flickr users numbering in the thousands as the study pertains to their image sharing patterns. All information gained from these users is freely available to the general public through the Flickr website and all users agree to these terms. Flickr.com is also indirectly involved, as we will write robots to extract data from their website. Our robots will conform to their manifest on robot conduct (http://www.flickr.com/robots.txt). Additionally, we are open to collaboration and assistance from any interested parties who feel they have something to add to the project.
|impact=This project will create payoffs for both the scientific, cultural, and educational communities served by Creative Commons by providing valuable research data on how users incorporate CC licensed images in their Flickr experience.

The end product will hopefully lower the barriers for future CC licensed projects and products and will spur more people to opt to use CC to release their work. In this way it should increase all three types of creativity among “the commons”.
|tech needs=Our project will use web-scraping robots to collect the data as well as statistical and network software for the analysis. The web-scraping robots will be created through code written in R (http://cran.r-project.org/), relying largely upon its "XML" package. One of our researchers brings expertise in writing robots in R, as he has created similar robots to extract newspaper data from ProQuest and Google News Archive while acting as a research assistant for National Science Foundation grants at the University of California, Irvine.

The data analyses will also be performed in R. R is an open-source statistical software package commonly used in academia. Beyond its powerful base packages that allow for a great range of statistical analyses, it has a rich community of contributors who write specific software packages. For our network analyses, we will draw upon the "sna" and "network" packages.

The three lead researchers have over twenty combined years of experience with statistical and network analysis during their advanced graduate training at the University of California, Irvine. This includes coursework, research assistantships, and direct research pertaining to publications, conference presentations, and theses.
|challenges=We expect that Flickr will require some delay when accessing their webpages using an automated script (robot). To overcome this challenge, we will incorporate page access delays into the script's code. This will lessen the burden on the site's bandwidth.

We also anticipate some difficulty in producing a representative sample that includes CC licensed photos, as the collecting data on the population would be impractical and unwieldy. We will overcome this challenge by sampling from Flickr's recently uploaded photos both at large (http://www.flickr.com/photos/) and also specific to CC-Attribution (http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/), CC-Attribution-NoDerivs (http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-nd-2.0/), CC-Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-nc-nd-2.0/), CC-Attribution-NonCommercial (http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-nc-2.0/), CC-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-nc-sa-2.0/), and CC-Attribution-ShareAlike (http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-sa-2.0/) licenses.

Lastly, we anticipate some challenge in finding adequate community involvement behind a number of these photos. Indeed, many of the photos uploaded have relatively few views, comments, and have never been "favorited" by Flickr users. To overcome this obstacle, we will also sample from Flickr's "interesting" photos (http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/) by date. Sampling from these photos ensures ample community involvement and it allows us to test how frequently CC licensed materials make Flickr's "interestingness" threshold.
|sustainability=Should we be awarded Creative Commons funding, after the funding period we plan to sustain the project in two ways. First, we will apply for additional grants to extend the study to other mediums such as user-generated music and film. Second, because all of our output from this project will be CC-licensed, we encourage future researchers to use and modify our data and methods.
|scalability=This project is scalable in that its sample size may grow as researchers wish to analyze more photos and Flickr users. This can be done through increasing the sample size or the frequency of the sampling procedure. Further, the code may be adapted for other websites featuring different mediums. While pairing users across different web services is highly difficult, we can compare aggregate findings and trends across different websites.
|resource needs=Our hope is that Creative Commons will provide some funds to pay for the time of a programmer who will write the automation scripts and for the time and expertise of the data analysts who will clean and process the collected data. We also hope that Creative Commons will provide online web-hosting support to aid in disseminating our materials and knowledge gained.
|communication=Currently we maintain an email list for interested parties and our board members. We are in the process of building our website and are looking at a late summer launch for it. We are also actively engaged in the professional communities of our interest and are regular attendees at professional conferences and seminars.
|budget=Flickr project and cc.ods
|legal=Yes
}}

File:Flickr project and cc.ods

2010-06-30T07:48:58Z

Remycross: Budget for Images of People, Networks of Sharing project.

Budget for Images of People, Networks of Sharing project.

Grants/Stories of Creating Commonly

2010-06-30T07:38:23Z

Remycross: Created page with '{{Grant Application |Project Title=Stories of Creating Commonly |applicants=Chimaera Institute |contact person=Remy Cross, Ben Lind, Kelly Ramsey |coordinator=Remy Cross |start d…'

{{Grant Application
|Project Title=Stories of Creating Commonly
|applicants=Chimaera Institute
|contact person=Remy Cross, Ben Lind, Kelly Ramsey
|coordinator=Remy Cross
|start date=2010/08/15
|end date=2011/01/15
|Affiliation=Chimaera Institute
|Mainurl=chimaerainstitute.org/blog
|Affiliated=No
|description=We propose to conduct organizational reviews of culture producing institutions that have partnered with or produced Creative Commons (CC) licensed materials to better understand the process that potential and future artists and organizations may follow. Because CC is still very much an emergent paradigm there are many potential users who may not know exactly how to approach business partners, colleagues, or potential funding sources in a way that will encourage them to support a CC licensed product. By studying the paths that other groups and individuals have taken we hope to produce a guide that can offer a number of viable blueprints for future projects based off of the lessons learned by past projects.
|output=This project has two important outcomes: the data and the analysis. Our intention is to make both freely available to any and all interested parties so that our methods will be open to all and any follow up research will have an excellent starting point. We will license the data and our write-up with Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution, and share-alike ownership.

The data portion of this project will consist of interviews and organizational observations of the participating groups and individuals. Once collected, these data will be coded for similarities in approaches to producing CC licensed materials. Both the raw data and the coded segments will be made available to any interested parties and our intention is to post both to our website for comment and use.

The analysis portion will produce both a white paper drawing conclusions from the analysis and also a guide for potential CC content producers that will attempt to offer step by step or best practices for getting their CC content made and distributed.
|community=Our beneficiaries with this project will be content producers who are considering releasing content under a CC license. This will benefit these people and groups by providing a potential blueprint, or at the very least a collection of accounts, for how others have gone about producing similar content.

Additionally this project could be of use to existing producers of CC content by contributing to a greater understanding of the processes that others have gone through in bringing their work to fruition.
|community relationship=We are part of a 501(c)(3) (approval pending) nonprofit chartered for educational purposes. Our core mission is to conduct research and educate the public on issues of sustainable communities, open access to knowledge, and informed consumption of goods and services both tangible and virtual.

Our mission of providing open access to knowledge and informed consumption have lead us to become advocates of Creative Commons style production and practices.

We have over 20 years of combined research experience in both quantitative and qualitative research methods in our areas of emphasis, which include information technologies, social networks, and complex organizations.
|measurement=The simplest measure will be the amount of traffic generated as we make the data and the final product available. Because we are also part of a wider community of non-profits and academic institutions, as well as fellow CC enthusiasts, we will also send out occasional notification to these groups to make sure they are aware of the ongoing progress of the project.
|participants=This project will involve the primary research team at the Chimaera Institute as well as any willing participants who wish to share their experiences. All members of the team have experience with government mandated human subjects protocols and intend to maintain this high level of ehtics throughout.

For participants our hope is that they can enrich their own creative commons experiences though the accounts offered by others and by giving their own accounts so that others may follow in their footsteps. Additionally we are open to collaboration and assistance from any interested parties who feel they have something to add to the project.
|impact=The end product will hopefully lower the barriers for future CC licensed projects and products and will spur more people to opt to use CC to release their work. In this way it should increase all three types of creativity among “the commons”.
|tech needs=We plan on using interview and participant observation techniques to collect and code the data. Several of the researchers have extensive training in these methods and years of experience collecting and coding field data. In terms of technical needs most of this type of work can be done with nothing more than notebooks and pens, though some interviews may be recorded if the subjects are willing to make transcription and coding easier. The coding process will likely use either a pre-existing coding program or one custom made for the project.
|challenges=We expect that the biggest challenge will be one of access to the people who have already engaged in CC licensed projects. It is our hope that CC will provide some assistance in tracking down initial subjects. If not, we do have some personal contacts within relevant organizations and we can likely snowball out from these data points to additional ones, but this may slow down the progress of the project.
|sustainability=We have every intention to continue this project after the initial funding has expired. As part of our stated mission we want to investigate how people are using open source and creative commons type of publishing and production regimes to share their creations with the world. We are also committed to seeing these practices spread more widely and would like to continue to do work that investigates the best ways of doing this.
|scalability=While we see this project reflecting a first cut it is important to realize that it is just that, a first cut. As creative commons practices become more widespread and accepted we can expect that the norms for their usage will continue to evolve. While we see this project as creating an important first step into how this is done it is only a first step and we want to continue to study this in a longitudinal manner.
|resource needs=Our hope is that Creative Commons will provide some funds to pay for the work of the field workers and the coding, both of which are time and expertise intensive. Additionally, we hope that Creative Commons will be willing to give us some access to their extensive contacts with other CC endeavors so that we have copious data sources.
|communication=Currently we maintain an email list for interested parties and our board members. We are in the process of building our website and are looking at a late summer launch for it. We are also actively engaged in the professional communities of our interest and are regular attendees at professional conferences and seminars.
|budget=Cc interviews budget.ods
|legal=Yes
}}

File:Cc interviews budget.ods

2010-06-30T07:27:25Z

Remycross: Budget for Stories of Creating Commonly

Budget for Stories of Creating Commonly