NZCommons
Matt McGregor
Public
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CCANZ is launching a new website, called NZCommons, which will hopefully be an information and discussion hub for the various open movements in New Zealand, including education, data, research, glam and arts and culture.
The site will also feature information and discussion about copyright, written by New Zealand lawyers and law graduates.
The site is primarily intended to be an lively professional resource for those working with copyright and CC, though we hope that it will also energise and complicate public discussion around these issues.
Importantly, we'll also be working with groups that already exist in these areas -- like Open NZ and NDF -- to make sure we're not reinventing any wheels.
We're starting to invite contributors now. Any feedback or suggestions about the site are welcome! I'll share mockups as they come to hand.
Matt McGregor Thu 17 Apr 2014 5:10AM
@bronwynhollowaysmi Yes! Absolutely That's exactly what I'm hoping. The final site is going to have a few overlapping categories - education, glam, data, arts and culture, copyright, etc - with our friendly lawyers and law grads providing a necessary but minority voice.
At present, the dominant voices will probably be from the universities, though I'm hoping for as diverse a group of voices as I can. This, of course, includes everyone in CFF! Will send you all more information soon.
Richard White Thu 17 Apr 2014 8:49AM
Very pleased to see this happening. Great work (again) Matt.
Danyl Strype Thu 24 Apr 2014 7:13AM
I feel like CC ANZ has the mana and the track record of mutually beneficial partnerships with other libre movement groups to really make this work. I'm really excited by this project. Thanks Matt for your work on this.
One suggestion for a point of focus for NZ Commons. It's become increasingly clear to me that we need to be able to make a strong economic case for the libre licensing approach. Particularly challenging the false binary that we're asking creative workers, artists, programmers, academics etc, to choose between making a living and libre licensing. I recently got a guest blog published on theDailyBlog (their whole site is under CC-NC-ND 3.0), and immediately got comments asking how artists are to make their living without coercive copyright enforcement:
http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2014/04/18/guest-blog-daniel-bruce-internet-party-what-seems-ridiculous-to-the-old-often-makes-perfect-sense-to-the-young/
To help with this, another thing that could be part of the NZCommons is a repository of detailed case studies of people, project collectives, and organisations successfully covering costs and/or making a living, while releasing their work under CC, free code software licenses, or other libre licenses. Cases involving people from Aotearoa, or living here, would be an important part of it, but let's face it, we are part of a global movement working within a global, digital economy, and we need all the inspiration, and role models, we can get.
Deleted account Fri 25 Apr 2014 8:20AM
Good suggestion, Strypey. We could use a NZ version of "The Power of Open" (http://thepowerofopen.org/), not just for Creative Commons stories, but for stories about how open practices and strategies have worked for New Zealanders. Perhaps the NZ Commons site could be used to gather and discuss such stories and case studies that could then be published (in multiple formats to ensure good reach and accessibility).
Matt McGregor Sun 27 Apr 2014 11:52PM
Thanks both. Definitely recognise the need for more stories, and to give new life to the 40+ we've already developed. The pace of case studies has slipped for the last few months, though I'm building this back into my work. Suggestions for interviews are always welcome.
And while I can't prioritise writing non-CC specific case studies myself, NZCommons would definitely be a good place to publish them, if others were keen to write them up.
Danyl Strype Wed 30 Apr 2014 7:15AM
I love @markmcguire's suggestion for an Aotearoa 'Power of Open', and I definitely see NZCommons as a logical place to gather the material.
One thing about our existing body of case studies is that many of them were written about newish projects, particularly the earlier ones when CC licensing was still a bleeding edge experiment in Aotearoa. It would be good to follow up on some of those early adopters, and see whether they are still using CC licenses, and whether it has worked for them (economically and otherwise). Even "bad news" is useful (eg not using CC now, went bankrupt), if we get details of exactly what happened, and some analysis of why they think CC didn't work out for them. It's a bad habit of bleeding edge evangelists like myself to talk up the successes, and downplay the failures, which has the unintended result of making what I'm evangelizing seem 'to good to be true'.
Non-CC cases could be organised through other groups, eg the NZ Open Source Society email list occasionally has case studies of free code software implementation posted to it. I'm sure they'd be happy to share those with NZCommons.
Matt McGregor Sun 29 Jun 2014 11:31PM
Hi all,
A beta (of sorts) version of NZCommons can be found here: http://nzcommons.org.nz/
We'll be launching on 9 July. I'll be adding a few more pages, and making some changes to the sliders, but otherwise the site is getting close to completion.
Any comments before then are most welcome.
Please note: we aren't advertising the site until 9 July, so please don't disseminate the link too widely. Thanks!
Bronwyn Holloway-Smith · Thu 17 Apr 2014 3:27AM
This sounds like a great initiative Matt! A wee comment: could I politely suggest that the information & discussion about copyright isn't given over solely to the voices of lawyers & law grads? Artists, librarians, technologists and many others have valid things to add to this discussion...