Articles
Creative Commons-based peer production at its best
Dominick Chen, ccJapan · Tokyo (Japan) · 5/12/2006 16:59 · 29 votes
As you might know from the cliche, the culture of taking photos is very popular in Japan; but this special example also demonstrates how Creative Commons licences are being used in different ways in this country, thanks to the help of so many highly motivated and skillful individuals.
The regular activities of Creative Commons Japan (ccJP) - such as the licence translation, web deployment, event organization and promotions have been maintained with the intense participation of a few core members, consisting of lawyers and graduate students. But to be quite frank, the pressures of endless tasks were starting to weigh quite heavily on our shoulders, not to mention all the more adventurous projects we would have loved to implement. That was, until the day we welcomed the ccJP interns, who have lightened our load, and undertaken to translate articles about Creative Commons into Japanese.
Some of those who participated in the iSummit 2006 in Rio might remember the session titled 'CC Clinics', where several Creative Commons nodes (Poland, Italy, Taiwan and Japan) shared the problems they were facing and discussed possible solutions. One of the problems we shared from Japan was the fact that ccJP was not yet a legal entity (i.e. NPO or Charity) and thus it was difficult to fund official budgets or to maintain full-time dedicated administrative offices.
The idea of recruiting volunteer interns developed as a way to minimize the core members' tasks as much as possible. When we sent out a call for volunteers, we expected about three or four Creative Commons enthusiasts to turn up at the first meeting. But beyond our expectations - 18 people arrived, ranging from undergraduate to postgraduate students, from diverse backgrounds such as cinematography and international relations. We immediately realised that our initial assumptions about the internship program should be re-examined: the interns should not be considered a subsidiary manpower, but rather as an active task force dealing with new challenges to which the ccJP core members would not have been able to devote their time.
The focus of the internship program is the translation of news about or relating to Creative Commons, into Japanese. Each intern is assigned to either the CC headquarters team or to the iCommons team. This means that people who are interested in the more legal aspects of the CC movement work in the CC-HQ team, and those who wish to explore the cultural and business aspects of the movement, work in the iCommons team. An intern belonging to the CC-HQ team translates one entry of his or her choice per week from the Creative Commons blog; an iCommons intern translates one article every week from iCommons.org. We mainly use Mailman mailing lists, Google Documents and Spreadsheet, Google Calendar and Movable Type for telecommunications, and we hold a bi-weekly meeting (and drinking!) session to keep up-to-date.
This is the initial phase of the internship program that started in mid-October and so far, over 30 articles have been fully translated, peer-reviewed and posted onto the ccJP website, under the 'World' section. This is a great way to promote Creative Commons licences, as well as to illustrate the effective use of the licences to a Japanese audience; as reading articles in English is a challenge for the general public. The interns also benefit from learning about the trends in the Creative Commons and open source movements, in addition to refining their skill of English-to-Japanese translation.
At the moment, we are assigning our intern heroes into sub-groups such as 'public relations', 'license translation' and 'fundraising', so that the efforts by the core members over the last few years, can be strengthened and fostered in the future. So far, this is the best example of Creative Commons based peer production we've ever experienced at ccJP.
Please contact us if you are interested in a more detailed description of the organisation of this internship program: we will be happy to share our still incomplete but growing experience with CC nodes across the globe.
The regular activities of Creative Commons Japan (ccJP) - such as the licence translation, web deployment, event organization and promotions have been maintained with the intense participation of a few core members, consisting of lawyers and graduate students. But to be quite frank, the pressures of endless tasks were starting to weigh quite heavily on our shoulders, not to mention all the more adventurous projects we would have loved to implement. That was, until the day we welcomed the ccJP interns, who have lightened our load, and undertaken to translate articles about Creative Commons into Japanese.
Some of those who participated in the iSummit 2006 in Rio might remember the session titled 'CC Clinics', where several Creative Commons nodes (Poland, Italy, Taiwan and Japan) shared the problems they were facing and discussed possible solutions. One of the problems we shared from Japan was the fact that ccJP was not yet a legal entity (i.e. NPO or Charity) and thus it was difficult to fund official budgets or to maintain full-time dedicated administrative offices.
The idea of recruiting volunteer interns developed as a way to minimize the core members' tasks as much as possible. When we sent out a call for volunteers, we expected about three or four Creative Commons enthusiasts to turn up at the first meeting. But beyond our expectations - 18 people arrived, ranging from undergraduate to postgraduate students, from diverse backgrounds such as cinematography and international relations. We immediately realised that our initial assumptions about the internship program should be re-examined: the interns should not be considered a subsidiary manpower, but rather as an active task force dealing with new challenges to which the ccJP core members would not have been able to devote their time.
The focus of the internship program is the translation of news about or relating to Creative Commons, into Japanese. Each intern is assigned to either the CC headquarters team or to the iCommons team. This means that people who are interested in the more legal aspects of the CC movement work in the CC-HQ team, and those who wish to explore the cultural and business aspects of the movement, work in the iCommons team. An intern belonging to the CC-HQ team translates one entry of his or her choice per week from the Creative Commons blog; an iCommons intern translates one article every week from iCommons.org. We mainly use Mailman mailing lists, Google Documents and Spreadsheet, Google Calendar and Movable Type for telecommunications, and we hold a bi-weekly meeting (and drinking!) session to keep up-to-date.
This is the initial phase of the internship program that started in mid-October and so far, over 30 articles have been fully translated, peer-reviewed and posted onto the ccJP website, under the 'World' section. This is a great way to promote Creative Commons licences, as well as to illustrate the effective use of the licences to a Japanese audience; as reading articles in English is a challenge for the general public. The interns also benefit from learning about the trends in the Creative Commons and open source movements, in addition to refining their skill of English-to-Japanese translation.
At the moment, we are assigning our intern heroes into sub-groups such as 'public relations', 'license translation' and 'fundraising', so that the efforts by the core members over the last few years, can be strengthened and fostered in the future. So far, this is the best example of Creative Commons based peer production we've ever experienced at ccJP.
Please contact us if you are interested in a more detailed description of the organisation of this internship program: we will be happy to share our still incomplete but growing experience with CC nodes across the globe.
tags: Japan media-events
extracted from:Creative Commons
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