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 Display, Player, and Sharing Applications

Browser toolbar or plugin that extracts and displays license metadata embedded in a page

1 implementation

You've probably seen our "some rights reserverd" and "no rights reserved" (for public domain works) buttons on many web pages, but there's more. Whenever a user copies HTML generated by our license selection application they get the button and also a block of metadata describing the licensed work and the license it is offered to the public under. You can't normally see that information without viewing the web page's source. A toolbar or plugin that exploited this hidden information could take many forms. One possibility: If a page has valid license metadata, place a (cc) icon on the toolbar. Mousing over the icon brings up a transient window which displays the license characteristics associated with the license and any descriptive metadata also present.

Update: Nathan Yergler has created mozCC, a browser extension for Mozilla-based browsers. It's a start, but we know there are other browser in use. So how about similar functionality for IE, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany or something else?

Integrate CC Metadata into Browser Aides

CC isn't the only metadata game in town -- browser tools like the Google Toolbar, Piggy Bank, the Alexa Toolbar and others all expose additional information about a page in your browser. A successful answer to this challenge would explore adding CC support to an existing browser aide and make it happen.

Media player and file sharing applications that read, verify, and display license claims embedded in files

Media players and file sharing applications should read, verify and display license claims embedded in files. Two example scenarios:

Media Player: When playing a MP3 or OGG file, the player software should look for a license claim and attempt to verify the claim against the verification URL specififed in the claim. If RDF metadata at the verification URL does verify the embedded claim, the player should give some indication of such. For example, a (cc) icon in the player's imitation LCD screen. The icon could be an active link to the verification page. Also, any work metadata found at the verification URL may be used to further enhance track information displayed to the user. Any single file should only need to be verified once, not every time it is played.

File Sharing Client: A file sharing client could do everything that a media player does above (indeed, often a media player is built into file sharing clients). In addition, verified licenses should be included in search results. Again, a (cc) icon, or perhaps a green light (sharing ok), might be displayed next to search results. Note that in search results all metadata (including everything from filename to license information) comes from other clients. After downloading a file, the local client should verify a license claim for itself before displaying a positive indicator in a "media library" view or exporting license metadata in respose to external searches. Again, any single file need only be verified once.

Verify is a program for OS X by Oyez tech lead Chris Karr that demonstrates some of the above features in a stand-alone application.

Limewire, a popular file-sharing client, has integrated CC support into their Open Source codebase. Is there's the only way to do it? Probably not, but it should give you an idea or three.

Advanced Media Player Search/Browse UI

Searching by artist or album is so 2005; we challenge you to implement a user interface for a media player which allows searching and browsing files based on CC metadata properties or other interesting metadata. One (perhaps the preferred) way to meet this challenge would be to utilize whatever OS level support is available.

Automatic Sense Candy and "Art" (Re-)generation

1 implementation

Screen savers, collage makers, mood music generators and similar could make excellent use of CC-licensed work, and automatically create derivative works. Networked and "smart" versions thereof could usher in a new age of bad art, and some great art. This challenge, inspired by Nathan Yergler's ccSaver, is one that could use many highly variable implementations.

See the challenge detail page for content pools you can draw from.

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.