By mgilbir – CC-BY at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mgilbir/3716465898/

I had a great time and really enjoyed getting to meet many of you. We raised 175 pounds and my total expenses ended up being:

• €124 for return train travel Reading, UK to Amsterdam (savings of €35 from projected 159 €)
• €301 for 2 nights hotel (and breakfast) (€21 over the projected 280€)
• €0 for bicycle rental at Damstraat (savings from the projected €32 – the hotel was closer to the venue than originally planned)
• €45 (15/day) for incidentals and food while traveling (a savings of €30 from the projected 75€ at 25/day).
• 0 Community Passport registration at SOTM (a savings of €100 due to the kindness of SoTM — thanks everyone!)

New Total 470 Euros or 403 pounds (Was 646€ a savings of 176).

We’re still short £223, so please donate.

At SoTM, I presented on who Open Data Commons and the Open Knowledge Foundation are, how the project came about, and where we are going. I also covered in detail how the Open Database License works in practice, and answered lots of questions, both on stage and in great conversations with all of you. I also got to have great chats with many commercial users and supporters, including Yahoo! and Lonely Planet.

Thanks again to everyone that contributed to the development of the license, especially the OSM legal working group and OSMF’s legal counsel.

Wikipedia Loves Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum is a free content photography contest organised by the Victoria and Albert Museum, Wikimedia UK and other Wikipedians. It is due to take place in February 2009 and is part of the wider Wikipedia Loves Art project that month.

The objective for the V&A is to compile a public digital collection of the major art pieces held at the museum. For Wikipedians, the objective is to collect images and use them to illustrate articles throughout Wikipedia.

The goal is to create open content or public domain images of either public domain works or works whose copyright is owned by/held by the Victoria and Albert museum. Essentially, this is crowdsourcing digitisation.

http://ur1.ca/y41

This survey is very important as people have a difference of opinion on some of the boundaries of what non-commercial means. For a public licence, such as Creative Commons licences, having community input on the meaning of more ambiguous terms such as this is key to building a common understanding: It keeps the “Commons” part a common understanding and not a difference in law for people to argue over.

I have some background research on the non-commercial termm that I’ll try to post over the next few days.

We are pleased to release for public comment the next beta draft of CC0 Waiver, which comes several months after the last draft of CC0 was published in April. You can view the beta draft 3 at ccLabs.

While this draft is being released later than planned (more on that, below), we are very excited about the progress we’ve made on CC0 in the interim. We look forward to receiving your comments and suggestions for improving CC0 still further. Read on to hear more about what has changed and our plans for finalizing CC0 this fall.

Full draft here.

The Institute has a position available for a (junior) researcher to work on an ongoing research project on Open Content licensing. IViR is legal partner of Creative Commons NL, which has received substantial funding from the Dutch Ministry of Culture for a variety of Open Content related activities, including legal research.

Full details are available here: Jobs.ac.uk | University of Amsterdam

The Power of Information Taskforce is helping government become more open, transparent and effective through better use of published information.

This competition is asking for your help in developing better ways to publish the vast swathes of non-personal information that the government collects & creates on your behalf

Public data is your data. Tell us what you’d build with it and you could win £20k to develop your idea to the next level.

The main licence for the government data (non-Ordnance Survey) is the Click Use PSI licence by the Office of Public Sector Information, which is quite liberal in its terms. It meets the terms of the Open Definition by the Open Knowledge Foundation as an open licence.

State of the Map is the annual conference for Open Street Map.

Registration is now open.

Coverage: Read Write Web | CNET | o’reilly

To get access to the content, you go to the album site:

http://www.supernaturalsuperserious.com/

It is a really neat flash site with a really cool way of integrating the videos. Down on the lower right corner are the track/video numbers. If you click on them, you get the download in a massive ZIP file. I downloaded number one and it was 245MB — this is because they are High Definition mp4 files. I didn’t see the actual license on the page, and it wasn’t included in the download ZIP file.

The Artistic License is an interesting choice as it is built for software and not content, though I’ll have to dig further into it and how they’ve labeled the content.

Attributor, a Silicon Valley startup, helps content owners track their intellectual property to find examples of infringement. But until now, no one has really thought about a better way to license content on the Internet, so that both large and tiny publishers have an incentive to avoid simply stealing stuff.

That’s where GumGum comes in. Images today are generally licensed for a flat fee, exclusively or non-exclusively. GumGum founders Ophir Tanz and Ari Mir think a better way is to charge for impressions, or on an advertising-supported basis. But tracking image impressions isn’t trivial, so they first had to build a platform to do that.

Images are available either ad-supported or on a cost per impression basis, and are in flash to serve the ads or track the impressions (as appropriate). Interesting way of monetizing content on the web.