Board Reports/2008-12

Summary of CC Board Meeting 13-14 December 2008

1. Officers re-appointed for 2009:

• President & CEO: Joichi Ito
• Vice President, CC: Mike Linksvayer
• Vice President, SC: John Wilbanks
• CTO: Nathan Yergler
• CFO & Treasurer: Kevin Birtchnell
• Assistant Treasurer: Jennifer Yip
• Secretary: Diane Cabell

2. Key accomplishments in last 6 months.

2.1 - The Creative Commons Network launched October 15 with the fall fundraising campaign. The CC Network serves two public functions – a means for supporters to more strongly affiliate themselves with CC and a test bed for ccREL-based digital copyright registry technology. Internally we are using the experience to evaluate and improve community fundraising and digital copyright registry business models.

2.2 - The Free Software Foundation released the Free Document License, version 1.3 on November 3, making it possible for massively collaborative projects such as Wikipedia to migrate to the CC Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

2.3 - RDFa became a W3C Recommendation on October 14, the culmination of a 4+ year effort led by CC to integrate the Semantic Web and the Web that everyone uses. The CC Network and other CC services implement RDFa extensively. Early major adopters in the commercial and open source spaces include Yahoo! SearchMonkey and the Drupal 7 content management system.

2.4 - Legal and technical work on the CC0 waiver was completed on 1 December. Launch is pending. CC0 is a legal tool for waiving as many rights as legally possible, worldwide, superseding the U.S.-only public domain dedication, and crucially adding explicit support for freeing databases. Enhancement of public domain certification/assertion tools is an ongoing project.

2.5 - CC tools have been integrated into a variety of sites over the past six months, with about ten new notable implementations having launched including Google’s photo sharing site, Picasa, which re-launched in September with Flickr-like CC-licensing tools.

2.6 - The "Defining Noncommercial" study is underway with phase 1 interviews largely completed and phase 2 random panel and CC friends and family questionnaires in process.

2.7 - CC International reported that four new jurisdictions have launched: Romania, Hong Kong, Guatemala, and Singapore and three existing jurisdictions upgraded their licenses to version 3.0: Germany, Austria, and Spain.

2.8 - An innovative partnership with the Eurasia Foundation led to a competitive selection of affiliate institutions in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia and a regional South Caucasus workshop.

2.9 - We have organized or participated in several international conferences about Creative Commons in the past five months, including the CC Legal Day in Sapporo, COMMUNIA workshops paired with CC Europe meetings, Latam Commons, the Nordic Cultural Commons Conference, and the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit.

2.10 - New funding was received from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Social Science Resource Council.

2.11 - The annual fall campaign launched October 15 with the CC Network.

2.12 - Websites and policies were updated including the Privacy Policy. New Terms of Use were introduced. FAQs were upgraded and FFAQ were developed to simplify search for most relevant content. Science Commons revamped its site and content.

2.13 - Latham & Watkins became the most recent addition to our pro bono legal team.

2.14 - The Neurocommons project moved from R&D to release phase at the end of September with a stable version of the knowledgebase (KB). Science Commons began soliciting mirror installations, feedback, and use cases.

2.15 - ccLearn has added an open database of educational projects and organizations (ODEPO) as well as an interactive map of upcoming open educational events, based on the semantic mediawiki platform. We will also be hosting the OERfeeds.info site, which aggregates all of the OER feeds from participating projects into a single clearinghouse for easier use and dissemination.

3. Other items considered at board meeting

3.1 - 2009 budget approved.

3.2 - Reviewed progress on fall fundraising campaign, communications strategy and expansion of CC Network.

3.3 - Considered mechanisms for broader collaboration with international affiliates and efforts to promote adoption in the Middle East