[cc-devel] Engaging the CC development community

[Ryan Merkley]

*

Maarten, Bjorn, Jonas, Rob, Jonathon et al:


Thanks to all of you who have weighed in on the contributor agreement
thread. I appreciate your honesty, and we are all listening to your
feedback.


First off, I want to acknowledge that CC hasn't done enough to engage
its developer community in recent years. This is a result of many
factors, but none sufficient to excuse those actions, or lack thereof.
By announcing new tech projects before coming to you all for input, we
have not helped mend the situation since I came aboard. That stops here.


We would genuinely like to rebuild this community. Our goal for the tech
development community at CC is to maintain or tech infrastructure, and
serve user needs, and create high-quality, freely-licensed software with
contributions from an engaged community of developers.


The List apps are a place to start. In our excitement about the project,
we forgot about all of the good reasons you might have for being
hesitant about yet another CC tech announcement. That was a misstep. So
let's start over.


The background:The List, powered by Creative Commons is a new mobile and
web application CC is developing with support from the Knight
Foundation. We are still in the very early stages of development, but
the idea is to allow people, projects, and organizations to create lists
of items they would like to be photographed, and for users of these apps
to snap photos of those items and then share them with the world under
CC-BY.


Where we need your help:We are releasing test versions of the apps soon.
We will need your help to make them better. The apps are licensed under
the GNU AGPL v3. We are committed to having them be available as free
software (a commitment we are willing to make as a legally-enforceable
promise), and our original plan was to have contributors assign
copyright to CC to make enforcement easier and in case we needed to
change to a different free software license in the future. We are
willing to rethink that approach.


With that in mind, we would like to hear from you. I'm interested both
in your ideas on how to build the apps, but also about some of the other
priority areas that were mentioned in this thread. There's lots of work
to do, and I appreciate your help and advice on areas to focus on going
forward. We're listening.


Best,

Ryan

*

[Jonas Öberg]

Hi Ryan,

first off - don't be dismayed in any way by grumpy old men on this
list (me included). I believe we all have CC's best interest at heart,
which is why we're stubborn about it.
The basic premise of the List is good, and I appreciate the effort
that has gone into it, I think it will be a useful addition to the
sphere of apps that use CC licensing, and I do look forward to seeing
it in its first release! The idea of List Makers is interesting, and
I'm wondering what organisations you have in mind here? I would think
that Wikimedia, or subprojects of Wikipedia, would be good List
Makers.

I think storing data with Internet Archive is good. You do mention CC
Search as well in the specification, which makes me wonder, have you
thought about implementing some function of the List Makers app to
make it possible to search the public commons when you add items to
the list? I would think that a number of images sought after may
already be available, or it may be relevant to include additional
information in the "ask" that separate it from existing images.

On the subject of contributor agreements, I didn't know that you
already had external contributors to the List, but knowing this, I can
understand and appreciate the need for a contributor agreement. There
are some comments I would raise, but my overall recommendation would
be that you re-think the contributor agreement to use, to the extent
deemed possible, one of the template agreements from the Harmony
Project - http://harmonyagreements.org/agreements.html, or the
somewhat newer Contributor Agreements -
http://contributoragreements.org/

In terms of other priority projects, I would again like to highlight
CC-REL, as this is one of the pieces that can't really be forked. I'm
not sure there are any extensive changes needed to CC-REL, but having
a clearer idea of who is the owner of CC-REL and what the process is
to bring about changes would be useful.


Sincerely,
Jonas

Post by Ryan Merkley
Thanks to all of you who have weighed in on the contributor agreement
thread. I appreciate your honesty, and we are all listening to your
feedback.
First off, I want to acknowledge that CC hasn’t done enough to engage its
developer community in recent years. This is a result of many factors, but
none sufficient to excuse those actions, or lack thereof. By announcing new
tech projects before coming to you all for input, we have not helped mend
the situation since I came aboard. That stops here.
We would genuinely like to rebuild this community. Our goal for the tech
development community at CC is to maintain or tech infrastructure, and serve
user needs, and create high-quality, freely-licensed software with
contributions from an engaged community of developers.
The List apps are a place to start. In our excitement about the project, we
forgot about all of the good reasons you might have for being hesitant about
yet another CC tech announcement. That was a misstep. So let’s start over.
The background: The List, powered by Creative Commons is a new mobile and
web application CC is developing with support from the Knight Foundation. We
are still in the very early stages of development, but the idea is to allow
people, projects, and organizations to create lists of items they would like
to be photographed, and for users of these apps to snap photos of those
items and then share them with the world under CC-BY.
Where we need your help: We are releasing test versions of the apps soon. We
will need your help to make them better. The apps are licensed under the GNU
AGPL v3. We are committed to having them be available as free software (a
commitment we are willing to make as a legally-enforceable promise), and our
original plan was to have contributors assign copyright to CC to make
enforcement easier and in case we needed to change to a different free
software license in the future. We are willing to rethink that approach.
With that in mind, we would like to hear from you. I’m interested both in
your ideas on how to build the apps, but also about some of the other
priority areas that were mentioned in this thread. There’s lots of work to
do, and I appreciate your help and advice on areas to focus on going
forward. We’re listening.
Best,
Ryan
--
Ryan Merkley
CEO, Creative Commons
+1 416.802.0662
@ryanmerkley
Get Creative Commons Updates http://bit.ly/commonsnews
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