Case Studies/Travellerspoint Travel Guide
(c) Travellerspoint.com, used with permission
If you love to travel (or just love to plan travel, not exactly the same thing), this terrific site compiles the sort of information that'll make you crave a hiking tour of Scotland, a backpacking jaunt across Northern Thailand, or six months of blissful budget living as you finally venture out the see the world beyond North America... — USA Today
Overview
Travellerspoint.com is a travel community created by Samuel and Peter Daams, brothers based in Norway and Australia respectively. The stated aim of the website is "to create an international meeting point for travellers worldwide, whether they are planning their travels, currently travelling or have returned from their travels and want to stay in touch with (or find) those travel friends they met while travelling in the past."
In 2007, Travellerspoint added a wiki-based travel guide to its website, with a Creative Commons License.
License Usage
While the rest of the website does not have a Creative Commons license, the wiki travel guide has a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
One of the challenges experienced by Travellerspoint when it introduced the travel guide was how to integrate non-Creative Commons content with Creative Commons content. As Travellerspoint travel guides often include photos taken by members, which are copyrighted and belong to the photographer, these photos are marked as copyrighted content. An example of this can be seen on the Melbourne travel guide.
Motivations
The decision to choose a Creative Commons license for the travel guide was logical. Creative Commons is the best way to create great works of crowdsourced content online in a global community such as Travellerspoint.
As of July 2009, over 2,600 articles and some 11.5 million characters have been contributed to the travel guide. The Creative Commons license has encouraged rapid growth, as it has provided an incentive for Travellerspoint members to contribute to something with wider reach and which can be freely shared.
One of the additional benefits of going with a Creative Commons license is the excellent support given and shared across Creative Commons websites, as well as from within Creative Commons itself, to highlight companies and organizations using the license.
