And, you can be too! 2008 is half over. Seriously, this is a massively overdue in praise, adulation and support for Tim “TVOL” Vollmer and Rebecca “RRR” Rojer who started last summer 2007 at Creative Commons as interns along with the oustanding still-CC-blog-superstar Cameron Parkins tasked with specific projects all have seen through this blog.

Rebecca Rojer, Original Photo by Joi Ito

Last summer I brought Tim on-board to work on developing the LiveContent project which he successfully masterminded through two iterations to date. Along the way he was responsible for massively cleaning up old content from the prior Creative Commons website (can you find on Wayback Machine and comment on this post with url?) and doing huge amounts of what we affectionately called “wikifarming.”

Timothy Vollmer, Original Photo by Joi Ito

And, Rebecca, came on-board CC to work on the Marking project which focused on creating creative assets for marking works with CC licenses. Once I figured out how awesome Rebecca was at creating graphics with my beloved Inkscape and Gimp, Rebecca helped revolutionize how CC works with external projects to create mockups and other ways to make Creative Commons integration clear, and that helped relieve Alex Roberts (CC’s Real Design Guru).

Rebecca led the efforts to create the “Sharing Creative Works” comics

And, the Summer of Curry ended, and TVOL and Rebecca had done so much work, I couldn’t imagine working CC full-time without their help. I found a way to hire them as Business Development Assistants part-time while they were both in school. All along the way, they excelled at all tasks given, became great friends of all those working at CC, and helped develop amazing infrastructure like their combined efforts on the Documentation project, countless integration of CC projects (which you may or may not see), and raised the general level of community and business development for Creative Commons globally far beyond what I’m writing about in this blog post.

This first chapter of Tim and Rebecca’s work at CC has just recently come to a close. Tim recently graduated from University of Michigan’s School of Information and has taken a job as a technology policy analyst at American Library Assocation (ALA). Rebecca is heading back to Harvard to finish up after going offline for the summer (See what Jon Phillips can drive people to do!). And, just as I have returned from my Chinese base in Guangzhou for the Summer of Curry 2 (Summer Interns) in Creative Commons San Francisco office, I’m saddened to not have my comrades Tim and Rebecca here in all things CC. Thus, I wanted to express my deepest congratulations and respect to Tim Vollmer and Rebecca Rojer as they enter a new chapter. And, as Glenn Otis Brown, now at Youtube, has shown us: once CC, always CC ;).

Coming shortly in another post, welcome to the summer class of 2008 interns for Creative Commons doing Community and Business Development…
.

Today VIA launched their OpenBook, an innovative subnotebook platform. You can buy it now and also download the raw CAD files released under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareaAlike 3.0 license, meaning you can get the raw machine files to make whatever case or version you want, as long as you release your modifications under the same license and give attribution back to VIA. The VIA press release today states:

The VIA OpenBook mini-note reference design introduces a host of new innovations, including the next generation of VIA Ultra Mobile Platform, based on the VIA C7®-M ULV processor and the new all-in-one VIA VX800 digital media IGP chipset. Together, this ultra compact, power efficient platform delivers richer computing and multimedia features, including a stunning 8.9” screen and greater video playback support, in a compact and stylish clamshell form factor that weighs just 1kg.

The VIA OpenBook features a flexible internal interface for high-speed broadband wireless connectivity that provides customers with the ability to select from a choice of WiMAX™, HSDPA and EV-DO/W-CDMA modules appropriate to their market. In addition, under a unique collaborative approach, the CAD files of the external panels of the reference design are offered for download under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license to give customers such as OEMs, system integrators, and broadband service providers greater freedom in tailoring the look and feel of their device to meet the diverse needs of their target markets.

And, some blogs are praising its coolness like what crunchgear had to say (which hints at business strategy of companies like VIA):

Do you own a small fabricating plant in Taiwan? Do you have an engineering team of ten PhDs? Do you want to make small laptops? Has VIA got a deal for you. The VIA OpenBook reference design is not actually a product — it’s more of an idea. Because it is ostensibly open (the CAD plans are available on the VIAOpenBook site) you simply buy the chips from VIA and use the plans to build your own cases, keyboards, and I/O systems.

Here is my quote about the release :)

“VIA is a forward thinking company that has realized that sharing enables a healthy ecosystem which helps them provide an innovative product which supports their core business,” commented Jon Phillips, Business and Community Manager for Creative Commons. ”Making the actual raw CAD files available under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license is a brilliant first step that clearly and legally allows others to emergently build upon VIA’s open innovation.”

I’ll add that this is a very interesting project that ups the “Open” ante of the ASUS EeePC’s involvement in free and open culture beyond the software that ships on the platform, it competes strongly against the One Laptop Per Child XO-1, and the Intel Classmate, which are the predecessors of this generation of subnotebook. In fact, it appears that chip companies are realizing that in order to sell more chips, it is good to give away some parts of a product for free, or ship a free operating system which further reduces the cost barrier to selling more silicon. As an aside, this also mirrors what Nine Inch Nails did by releasing part of their product as an entry into more specific and special packages.

It should also be noted that this valiant efforts follows up the great work that FIC’s Openmoko, Open Source Cellphone, did by releasing their CAD designs, which has already led to multiple efforts to create different cases and a great set of community pages on howto get your designs manufactured. Also, we worked with Keith Packard at Intel to release some specifications of graphics chips by Intel around the same time, which has helped for more companies to realize this same level of openness, and more importantly has allowed for developers, other companies, and people to more easily support and buy more Intel chips.

If you have a product similar to the above, or something you think could benefit from Creative Commons licensing in this way, please do contact me (Jon Phillips), contact us, or comment on this post. Let’s *open* it up.

If you haven’t been to Amsterdam or checked out what great work Paul Keller and CC Netherlands is doing, then I highly recommend you A.) get here when you can by jet, or B.) tap into their great projects on the net. In particular, I’m referring to the big premiere 2nd Annual Blender Peach Open Movie in Amsterdam last night. I had the great honor of speaking before the premiere which actually felt more like a warm-up gig — I took it on myself to get people pumped up for the film (laughing, chanting, etc). You can also see my slides here which debut a new style using the CC Sharing Creative Works Comics (which you may download now and translate, just as CC Netherlands has done and made availabe in a booklet here).

And finally, I spoke on a panel today called “Commons-based Peer Production” at the Economies of the Commons conference put on by CC Netherlands and others:

Strategies for Sustainable Access and Creative Reuse of Images and Sounds Online

International Working Conference
Amsterdam & Hilversum 10, 11 & 12 April 2008

This dossier documents and brings together background materials for the international conference Economies of the Commons. This public working conference and its side programs address the remarkable cultural, educational and societal significance of the new types of audiovisual commons resources that are currently being created on the internet. Sustainable public access and enhanced opportunities for creative reuse of these resources are the particular focus of this conference and this web dossier.

My panel and fellow panelists are described below:

described below:

After the lunch we continue with the second session about Commons-based Peer Production. How do new developments of creative reuse hold out against market-based production? With Felix Stalder (Open Flows), Jamie King (Steal This Film), Jon Phillips (Creative Commons) en Sebastian LÃŒtgert (oil21.org).

The panel came down to Ton Rosendaal from Blender Foundation describing his model for sustainability for Open film projects (something you will hear me describe in more depth coming soon) and Jamie King’s promise for creating a better voluntary donation system. I took the position as the realist on the panel to reel in the gradient between what commercial entities are presently doing to sustain content distribution (and production in some instances) with the approaches outlined to provide a path of realidad ;)

CEO of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig along with VP of Science Commons, John Wilbanks, and myself, Jon Phillips holder of the title of the “human inbox” of Creative Commons [1] will all be participating at the 1st International Creative Commons Korea conference, “Open Culture in CC” on Friday, March 14 in Seoul, Korea. Lessig will go big with his keynote, Wilbanks will be presenting “Information Sharing: A Universal Solvent for Life Sciences” and I will round up the CC pack with my new presentation: Share or Die: Collaborative Media Projects from Art to Business. Yes, that’s right! I will be wearing more of my art hat at this one, but will round it up by discussing how individual practice must be sustainable all the way up the ladder to a large scale web company.

These presentations are the tip of the iceberg as brilliant Korean colleagues will cover many topics as they relate to Korean society in the large global context and Chiaki Hayashi from Loftwork in Japan will discuss running a business where Creative Commons licensing is core to its daily function.

I’m quite eager though to interact with our Korean colleagues on the recently announced Creative Commons licensing integration into Naver. And, I should note that by looking at the web traffic at http://creativecommons.org, there is a massive surge from Korea since the Naver announcement. The CC Korea blog states:

On 26 February, Naver, one of the major portal service providers in Korea, announced that it officially introduces Creative Commons License to its blog and café services and began a grand campaign for promoting CCL with cartoons, videos, etc. As for the largest portal service provider in user size at home, Naver has been struggling with copyright infringements, content and blog posting piracy activities of users. In a hope to find a reliable solution against them, Naver has chosen to introduce the CC license scheme. And it is very welcomed.

Relatively belated, but thanks to their introduction, most of the Korean portal sites take part in CC licensing. With this announcement, Naver becomes the third next to Daum , which has already adopted CCL to its blog service in 2005, and Paran in 2007. These portal sites are known to grab more than 90% of Korea’s portal market.

The key thing to note with Naver’s CC licensing integration and as a service that effectively everyone with a net connection uses, is that Koreans now have CC licensing front-and-center. Many know that Korea takes the crown as the most wired nation with 95% broadband penetration inside the home [2]. Korea, is a hyper-connected homogenous society that now has CC licensing on the most used service in the country. How long will it take for Korea to take the title of the country with the highest level of Creative Commons license adoption per individual?

UPDATE: Michelle already wrote a stellar blog post about the conference btw.

[1] Ok, ok, my long form title is Community and Business Development Manager.
[2] Trust me. From living in Korea, I’ve seen four year olds with cellphones on the Internet! What? And, now that I’m living 50% of my time in Guangzhou, China (the other 50 ‘cent in San Francisco), I’m feeling the burn without that 100 megabit in the home. Try 1 megabit for me…if I’m lucky!