On Thursday last week, Aged Care Queensland launched their new eMentoring Handbook CD Rom, designed to assist aged care workers with training and mentoring advice and opportunities. Excitingly, they’ve published the entire resource under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia licence. This means the material on the CD Rom can be redistributed, remixed and repurposed.

The publication of a single CD Rom under a CC licence might not seem like a big step, but it’s one of the first examples Australia-wide of a community service organisation working at the ground level putting real time and thought into providing the most appropriate copyright policy for their resources. The licensing makes the CD Rom much more valuable to the community it is seeking to service. Not only can it be spread far and wide, aged care workers in the field can create customised versions for their regions, teachers and trainers can feel confident reproducing and distributing the information for their classes, and workers from other sectors can use it as the basis for eMentoring Handbooks relevant to their own workers. The whole licensing initiative is primarily due to Aged Care Queensland’s eMentoring Project Officer, Sarah Stewart – you can find her musings on the whole licensing process on her blog.