We were thrilled to help support SAHRIS at their Media Launch back in March. The event was held in Mapungubwe to coincide with the Sacred Sites Conference.

Sadly, we were stuck in the studio and didn’t get to go to Mapungubwe but we did get to support our great friends at SAHRIS, WikiAfrica and The Heritage Portal.

Here are extracts from the show. For a full of videos list go to SAHRIS blog

Have you got a little time to spare to help us convert our legal code into HTML code? We would SO appreciate your help to make the SA Web just a little more robust and legally healthier for its citizens. Our great bearded CC SA tech lead, Paul Scott has been overwhelmed with work and we need a helping crew. Please.

Why does this matter?

Even though the global, unported Creative Commons license will serve you well in crafting the copyrights that you choose for your digital works across the Web, local is lekker when it comes to more surely enforcing your rights where a South African judge would be presiding.

Remember that Creative Commons licenses have a spectrum from public domain, through simple attribution (where people who use your work must credit you), to allowing remix or derivative works (fan-fiction, sampling, building on your video or 3D schematics or even your photos) to the non-commercial license (where you happily exercise financial benefit from your work, but legally stop others from using your work commercially). This all makes the Web more pliable and legally clearer for us to BUILD on each other’s brilliance, and so we evolve faster, and make the Web a much richer, less top-down-consumer-broadcast-limited-access kind of wonderland.

Many countries around the world have taken the set of licenses, and “ported” them into their own jurisdiction. Meaning the legal code written in a way that makes it understood easily within the legal system of THAT context and country.

South Africa has a heritage of being one of the earlier countries to have a local set of licenses, thanks to the pioneering work of legal scholar and CC Legal Lead, Andrew Rens, with a host of support. Now thanks to our African regional coordinator and ZA Legal Lead Tobias Schonwetter, we have updated to Version 3 of the South African licenses. I realise this may not be thrilling to all who hear this, but it is quietly monumental for nurturing copyright freedoms in South Africa. (win).

The CC licenses have 3 codes to help them work well in various worlds: the human-readable (symbols and plain language), legal code for the lawyers & courts, and machine-readable code for the bots. We need your help in getting that middle code up for the lawyers, so that there are no fuzzy areas for those who choose to license their work more openly.

Are you in?

If this sounds like something you could do in a heartbeat, please let us know!
We have 5 licenses (each a few pages in clean text) – if you could do ONE in some spare time this week, we would lavish much love and credit to your marvellousness online.

How now?

1. Click and mail Tobias with a YES I’m in (below blue link).

2. He’ll send you the doc and template

3. Craft up the code when you can

4. Send it back, and we celebrate you widely.

 Count me in for a license translation >>

PS. if code’s not your thing, but you’d still dig to come help us expand how we can share and build (legally) on each other’s creative, scientific, educational and cultural work in SA. Whatever makes the Web a little more intelligent from your perspective, bring it. Please let me know: max@creativecommonsza.org or @maxkaizen

Discover glorious photographs, shared under Creative Commons licenses that help make our Web more beautiful. Thank you to Babashynam http://flickr.com/photos/babanshyam/ for this one, licensed non-Commercial Share-Alike

Recently I was asked to do a interview for VodaCom on my experiences volunteering. As the CC network is almost entirely built on the passion of 100′s of volunteers dedicating their valuable time (me being one of those 100′s) I spoke mostly on my experiences with Creative Commons.

To check out the interview please go to the VodaCom website.

We are always looking for new talent, spirit and energy on the CCZA team. Please contact any of us for more information.

CC is 10 years old! Come help us celebrate 10 year of openness.

Please join us and WikiAfrica for a year-end braai, #CC10 celebrations and a brief talk by Nick Wiltshire with SAHRA speak on the importance of open culture on heritage.

Lots to celebrate this year
- WikiAfrica successfully reaching 32,500+ contributions to Wikipedia
- Tobias Schonwetter appointment as co Creative Commons Regional Project Manager for Africa.
- All the tremendous success by Siyavula

Wine has been sponsored by the Africa Centre & WineWeb.co.za
Venue has been donated by Muti Films
Boerie rolls will be served

We welcome donations to help us cover our costs.
Street parking available

RSVP: http://cc-braai-sa.eventbrite.com/

The first will facilitate the WikiAfrica Cameroon Project at doual’art in Cameroon. The other will be based with WikiAfrica at the Africa Centre in Cape Town, and will concentrate on assisting, training and supporting the content partners that are part of WikiAfrica’s Share Your Knowledge project.

A Wikipedian in Residence is an experienced Wikipedian who works with organisations and activates communities in order to share and open up cultural, arts and heritage content to the world through Wikipedia and related Wikimedia projects.

WikiAfrica Cameroon is a pilot project whose goal is to generate around 1000 contributions (image, text and other media) to Wikipedia. The project will conduct outreach programmes for Wikipedians in Cameroon (including initiating the Wiki Loves Monument Competition), and will also create articles written in French and English that will provide support information on the subjects required by primary school pupils in order to prepare for their CEP diploma. The WikiAfrica Cameroon Wikipedian in Residence must speak both English and French and will play a vital role in activating and training the growing community of Wikipedians in Cameroon.

The Wikipedian in Cape Town will be based at WikiAfrica at the Africa Centre

in Cape Town, and will concentrate on assisting, training and supporting the content partners that are part of WikiAfrica’s Share Your Knowledge project. A Wikipedian in Residence is an experienced Wikipedian who works with organisations and activates communities in order to share and open up cultural, arts and heritage content to the world through Wikipedia and related Wikimedia projects.

The WikiAfrica project is an international collaboration between the Africa Centre and lettera27 Foundation that redresses the imbalance of factual heritage and cultural knowledge about Africa on Wikipedia by promoting a new approach to knowledge. Its mission is to assist and support the growth of Wikipedia as a free and open encyclopaedia that provides greater access to Africa’s wealth of contemporary and historical realities.

For more details, please read the call for applications here. The final deadline for both applications is the 26th November 2012. Applicants applying to WikiAfrica Cameroon should contact marilyn.doualabell@doualart.org. Those seeking to apply for the WikiAfrica at the Africa Centre, should contact islahf@africacentre.net For more information on the project, please visit: www.wikiafrica.org

A month-long international photographic competition, Wiki Loves Monuments, kicked off in South Africa 1^st September and finishes September 30th.

Members of the public are encouraged to celebrate South Africa’s living heritage by taking photographs of heritage sites (including buildings, sites of struggle and memory, graves, monuments, archaeological sites, etc.) and uploading them either via mobile or their computers to the competition website (www.wikilovesmonuments.co.za). A panel of South Africa’s most celebrated photographers will judge the uploaded photographs, and the winners will receive significant prizes. In addition, the best photograph from the national competition will be put forward for the international Wiki Loves Monuments prize.

To be eligible for entry, competitors must register on Wikimedia Commons via the www.wikilovesmonuments.co.za website, link the photo to its SAHRA number (or nominate a new site), and release the photographs under the CC-BY-SA licence for usage on Wikipedia and its aligned sites.

The international Wiki Loves Monuments project is organised by the Wikimedia community that created Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, and built the free media archive Wikimedia Commons. The competition runs from 1st to 30th September 2012 and is being held to capture and contribute images and media of the world’s culture and heritage to the Wikimedia projects.

The ambitious goal of the global Wikimedia movement is for every person in the world to freely share the sum of all human knowledge. Since 2001, and through various projects, chapters, and the support of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, volunteers around the world have been contributing to the Wikimedia projects to achieve this goal.

The Wiki Loves Monuments competition is one way of doing this. A significant proportion of heritage photographs on the Wikimedia sites were created during the 2010 and 2011 versions of this competition. During the 2011 competition, 165,000 photographs were uploaded from 18 countries across Europe. The 2012 competition has more than 34 countries participating in the project.

Winners announced at a prize giving ceremony in Johannesburg in early November

Wiki Loves Monuments is being launched in South Africa by Wikimedia South Africa, in partnership with WikiAfrica (wikiafrica.org). Current competition collaborators are the South African Heritage Resource Agency, Heritage Western Cape, Art South Africa and the National Heritage Council.

The commencement of the Wiki Loves Monuments South Africa competition on the 1st September 2012 coincides with the official launch of the South African Wikimedia Chapter.

Useful links

• www.wikilovesmonuments.co.za
• www.wikilovesmonuments.org
• www.en.wikipedia.org
• www.commons.wikimedia.org
• Mobile Android App: Google Play
• Facebook
• Twitter:  @WLM_ZA

Media release by Africa Centre on behalf of: Wikimedia South Africa

For media queries contact:

Isla Haddow-Flood

Cell: 071 491 4101

Tel: 021 418 3336

Now  you can apply CC licences to your Instagram pics. We’re blown away by i-am-cc.org a new program that allows you to easily apply CC licences to your Instagram’s. Started by Philip Neustrom @philipn co-founder of Local Wiki  with 629 users this morning (and counting) it looks like it’s set to make a major impact on open culture.

Here is Philip’s manifesto

Manifesto

Flickr has something like 200,000,000+ images licensed under Creative Commons, making them the biggest repository of Creative Commons work in the world. CC work from flickr is regularly used by Wikipedia, magazines, books, bloggers, everyone! It’s downright fantastic!

Instagram gets something like 5+ million new photos a day. If we could get just a small fraction of people to agree to CC license their photos we could make a huge impact on the free culture movement.

Right now I just provide a simple way to agree to license your existing photos + photos you’ll take for the next 3 months under a CC license. I kept the timeframe 3 months because I don’t want people to forget that they signed up for this — I want this to be a really legitimate repository of free images. I’m capturing all of the Instagram API details and the i-am-cc.org API exposes most of them. Geo API support coming soon (like next week, when I have time)

Let’s make this happen! Help spread the word!

—philip

Go to  http://i-am-cc.org to register your Instagram’s

A first for the continent almost 50 CC volunteers from more then 15 countries across Africa all meet up together in Entebbe Uganda. The CC Uganda team held host to us in their breathtaking country while we discussed Creative Commons and Africa. With the generous support from the Macarthur Foundation this was the first opportunity for many of us to put faces to names and a true opportunity to share successes and lessons amongst each other.

The Convening also announced the new Regional Project Managers for Africa this position will be shared between South Africa’s Legal Lead Tobias Schonwetter and Kenya’s Alex Gakuru. These positions are designed to help enhance the role and profile of the affiliate community.

As a group we decided on future goals for the direction of CC Africa with support from Tobias and Alex. The priority projects included open educational resources, government adoption of open policies, and health initiatives, while a proposed activities included a touring bus promoting open projects and the creation of a centralised African repository of CC materials.

For more information about the convening can be found on the meetings wiki page.

We are thrilled, thrilled thrilled, Cape Town based animated explainer video company Blink Tower won the Creative Commons’ Why Open Education Matters video competition. The competition launched in March 2012 and was designed to make creative videos that explained simply why Open Educational Resources — or “OER” matter.

The competition received over 60 qualified entries. The judges included a panel of experts including Davis Guggenheim, Nina Paley, Liz Dwyer, Anya Kamenetz, Angela Lin, Mark Surman and James Franco (sadly we’re told Mr. Franco did not come to Blink Tower to personally deliver the winning cheque)

Please join us in celebrating with Blink Tower for helping to explain to the world why Open Education truly does matter.

For more information on the contest and to watch other videos please check out http://whyopenedmatters.org/

A surge of fresh energy has awoken among the African regional teams, as we have the pleasure of announcing the double-strength power of  two new Creative Commons Regional Project Managers for Africa.

Our particular privilege is that we have one of the new leaders really close-by; our Legal Lead for CC South Africa: legal scholar and open advocate Tobias Schonwetter.

From the heart of the burgeoning East African tech space, our Kenyan team’s telecommunication and access specialist Alex Gakuru.

Together they will be bringing the wealth of their extensive knowledge, experience and vision to help us build formidable African CC projects through the next 18 months. Congratulations fellows.
We’re thrilled, and ready.

Our heartfelt thanks to our outgoing, but no less outstanding, African Regional Lead - Creative Commons counsel,  Aurelia Schultz. She brought her love for the continent, fierce advocacy for open access, helping IP law move into the 21st century (and of course, her glorious fashion sense) to nurturing the affiliate teams in Africa. With which we have been enriched! Thank you so much Aurelia.

Onward, the Continental-Sized Quest

The focus of the African teams is to promote Creative Commons licensing, with a special emphasis on open education and open access. We believe that robust, interoperable flows of culture, knowledge and research can flip the fate of our continent.

Opening the paths for intrepid learners, creators and innovators, to traverse with easy-to-understand legal and technical tools, is a mission we have seen kindle liberation, genius, health and hope. Help us clear the blockades. Let’s work together!