Developer Challenges

We have ideas. Lots of ideas. And some of them might just be darn cool. So we challenge you, dear developer, help us out and win fame and glory (and maybe, just maybe, a job).

Some challenges have been met and completed -- those have been moved to the Completed Tech Challenges page.

How to Participate

Please read the How to Participate page in order to read how to contribute to the various projects.

Embedding Specifications and Implementations

Developer Aids and Libraries

Content Creation Applications

Content Player and Sharing Applications

Distribution & Deployment

Distro repositories

Help spread CC software by packaging and submitting it to Linux distro repositories. We need people who are familiar with the process to help shepard ccPublisher, [mozCC], ccHost, et al, into the official distro repositories. Contact NathanYergler if you're interested some knowledge about this and are interested in working on it.

LiveCD

Gnome has one. So does Mono. Why not CC? A successful completion of this challenge would produce an ISO image for a bootable system that would be filled with CC licensed content and whatever the state-of-the-art in CC enabled applications is at that time. You might base it on Knoppix, Ubuntu's Live CD, or roll your own.

License-aware Search Applications

Add license search to a major commercial search engine

Currently we have a demonstration search that works by telling AlltheWeb to limit results to pages that link to Creative Commons licenses. While useful, this is far from our vision of a metadata-aware search engine.

The first requirement for a Creative Commons license-aware search engine is that license metadata (RDF embedded in pages) must be indexed. It wouldn't be necessary to index arbitrary RDF initially -- indexing only Creative Commons license metadata would be a good first step along the path to a Semantic Web-enabled search engine.

Once you start indexing license metadata, you can do two obvious things with it:

Provide users with an interface to filter their results by license or license characteristc. The aforementioned AlltheWeb demonstration interface is an example of the latter.

Display license information in search results. This could be done even if a query does not involve a license filter. If you have license information for a result, display the license in proximity to the result.

As you index and understand more metadata, you'll be able to go beyond these basics, with enhanced format or domain-specific searches and richly annotated results.

We've started a benevolent cycle by making it painless and natural for people to publish quality metadata (automatically included in HTML generated for cut&paste publishing by our license selection application). Continue the cycle by enhancing search with metadata -- providing stimulus for users and other applications to generate yet more and better metadata.

CC search for content repository websites

eg improve http://flickr.com/creativecommons

could be done by outside developers in cases where web service api permits

Write a custom Creative Commons license-aware search engine

1 implementation

You'd have to work at a commercial search engine to tackle the previous challenge. However, an individual or small team could build a search engine exclusively for Creative Commons-licensed content, much as several have been built exclusively for searching blogs.

Update: Prototype up at search.creativecommons.org. Help improve this search engine at its sourceforge project.

TODO feature requests for cc/nutch

Source Query

"Who remixed me?" as the new "Who linked me?" This is along the similar lines as trackbacks for blogs which are used to see who is sampling which blogs.

Discovery tools

Add support for Creative Commons licensing to content discovery applications such iRate which help you find interesting media based upon your favorite playlists, friends choices, and what is popular.