Don your red cape and support CC!

Yesterday (US time) Creative Commons launched the annual fundraising drive for this 2010. Each year CC encourages its community to donate, to help them continue their important work. This year the campaign has a superhero theme. Although the CC logo might be sporting a shiny (Doctorow–esque) red cape, the campaign actually focuses on real-world CC superheros.

In Joi’s words:

Our challenge ahead is to join forces with this legion of CC Superheroes to fight the forces that don’t want an open web, or do not understand that sharing is a good thing. This fall, we’re recruiting a team of CC Superheroes to lead the world in the fight for creativity and innovation. We need to raise $550,000 by the end of the year to power up and support the work we’re doing. As a superhero, your role will be to donate, spread the word, and fundraise on our behalf. As an existing supporter of CC, you already believe that a sharing world is a good world. You have fueled our work and kept us going strong, and we thank you for that. It will take nothing short of a superhero’s strength to get us to where we need to go.

In the campaign’s announcement, CC CEO Joi Ito shared a few of the international CC Superheroes—including GlaxoSmithKline, Pratham Books and SoundCloud—so allow me to take this opportunity to tell you about some of our very own Australian CC Superheroes, using our amazing tools to save people from failed sharing.

Credits—Banner Photo: Adaptation (crop and resize) of ‘365_049‘ by Canned Muffins, CC BY 2.0 Generic. Image: ‘CC with cape‘ by Creative Commons Corporation, CC BY 3.0 Unported.

Roadshow Wrap-up

Roadshow Wrap-up Slides, snapshots of featured projects and attendees notes and reflections on the CC Roadshow 2010 Slides Rather than publish 6 sets of similar slides, we have produced and published a generic set of slides. These include Professor Brian…

Roadshow reflections

4 weeks, 6 cities, 30 speakers, 250+ attendees, countless questions and 280+ tagged tweets and the CC Roadshows are now over! The blog post is a few reflections from the ccAustralia on the roadshows. Please comment on this post with your thoughts; what worked? What didn’t? What information was good? What did we miss out? Which case studies and champions did you like?

For the slides, featured CC projects and other documentation see our roadshow wrap up.

We kicked things off in Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria on 1 September where the breadth of represented CC project tussled with the amazing lunch spread for the audience’s attention. Despite the amazing catering, Justin Schmidt‘s tales of syndicated Digital Fringe content on dental surgeries screens, Chris Chinchilla‘s challenge to take to copies of Aduki Independent Press‘ Stick this in your memory hole with scissors and glue and Andrew Garton‘s reminder that sometimes playing guitar in the bush is more important than thinking about rights management, the projects had the audience and the Twitterverse abuzz.

From Melbourne we flew straight on to Perth for the second event at the State Library of Western Australia on 2 September. The West Coast audience was especially attentive and engaged, in spite of the beautiful panoramic view from the Great Southern Room! As always, Tama Leaver gave a compelling talk about CC as a education tool and Luke Steele did a fine spruk for the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts record label, Slow Release (regardless of how nervous he was).

Credits—Image: Screen capture of Australia from OpenStreetMap, CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic. Font: ‘Rawengulk‘ by GLuk, SIL Open Font 1.1. Icons: ‘Remix’, ‘Noncommercial’, ‘Attribution’, ‘Share Alike’, ‘Copy’ and ‘No Derivative Works’ icons by Creative Commons Corporation, CC BY 3.0 Unported.

Connecting Tasmania

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Remixable art exhibition receives Catalyst Grant

Photo: Experiments with Long exposure and lights-015 by Tea, two sugars The Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, ccAustralia and the project coordinators are very excited to announce that etcc, has received funding in the inaugural round of the Creative Commons Catalyst Grants! We pitched for a touring remixable art exhibition that would not only see the production and exhibition of 10 – 20 new works that (legally) appropriate from CC-licensed content, but that would also encourage exploration of the ideas of creation and appropriation in the visual arts sector.

Like the Remix My Lit project, etcc emerged because the coordinators perceived a lack of prominence of remix and open content licensing in the visual arts. While implicit and explicit appropriation is common, the visual arts community as a whole has been a slow sector in their consideration of rights management practices.

Credits—Photo: Adaptation (crop and resize) of ‘Experiments with Long exposure and lights-015‘ by Tea, two sugars, CC BY 2.0 Generic.

CC Roadshow 2010 – Speakers

Biographies of the speakers attending each specific event. Melbourne speakers Chris Chinchilla, Publisher, Aduki Independent Press CC snapshot presenter Chris Chinchilla runs Chinchilla Media is based in Melbourne, Australia. Chinchilla Media is home to Aduki Independent Press and Green Renters.…

We want the champions

It’s been one week since we announced the CC Roadshow 2010, our on-the-road national conference for this year, and already the RSVPs have been streaming in from all over the country (although Melbourne is leading the RSVP tally by miles!). As we start to get a picture of who is coming to each event, we’ve been using this information to help us craft the programs for each of the CC Roadshows.

But before the city programs get to full-up we want to give our community the opportunity to get involved in their local event. We’re looking for as many interesting CC champions in each location as we can. We want to feature the broadest cross-section of the Australian Creative Commons community as we can. So if you are a musician, filmmaker, policy maker, photographer, educator, lecturer, librarian or anyone else for that matter, and you’re using Creative Commons we want to hear from you. Send us an email, post a comment on this blog entry, at reply us on Twitter or post on our Facebook wall with details and we’ll get in touch. Help us make the CC Roadshows your event.

Bidding adéu to Jess

Photo: ‘wave goodbye‘ by Michael (mx5tx) As excited as we are about our double-whammy of announcements—the new website and the Creative Commons roadshows—we have another one to make. It is with mixed feelings that we announce that long-term staffer, Jessica Coates, has moved on. Of course we are sad to see her go, but we are also very excited for her as she embarks on a new opportunity in a new city.

Jessica played a crucial role with the Creative Commons Australia project over the past four years. Apart from responding to innumerable public inquiries and presenting countless talks on CC, Jessica passionately pursued the uptake of CC licences in the education and GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sectors in Australia. She authored a number of articles and reports about CC, not to mention most of the posts on the blog and spent countless hours coordinating our efforts on the Version 3.0 Australian CC licences.

Credits—Photo: Adaptation (crop and resize) of ‘wave goodbye‘ by Michael (mx5tx), CC BY 2.0 Generic.

ccAustralia hits the road with the CC Roadshow 2010

We are very excited to announce details of the next ccAustralia national conference, and this time we are taking a different approach. The previous conferences have been held in Brisbane, where we are headquartered. Although this helps keep our costs down, it has always limited who is able to attend. So this year we’re taking ccAustralia to a city near you!

Throughout September we will be hosting one-day mini-conferences in Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. Although we have released a preliminary template for the program, each city will be customised depending on who is attending. So if you’re interested in finding out about CC for the first time, looking for an update on recent developments and the Australian Version 3.0 licences, or wanting to know how CC is being used by people in your local area, register now! We’ll see you soon!

Welcome to the new ccAustralia website

You may have noticed a few changes at http://creativecommons.org.au. After three or so weeks of non-posting you now know why; we had the site on hold so we could finish off the new-look ccAustralia website! For about four years we’ve been talking about creating a new website for the CC project in Australia. We finally got around to actually doing it.

With this new site we’ve tried to make it much easier for you to find out about us and what we’re up to, learn more about how Creative Commons works through videos and factsheets and delve a little deeper through our research. Because the uptake of CC here in Australia is only becoming more prominent, we’ve also introduced sector launch pages that conveniently couple sector-focused information with filtered content about that sector from the main blog. Now it is much easier to keep up with information on CC uptake in the Creative Industries, Education or by Governments here in Australia.