 A few weeks ago I asked the community the following question: "What do you think was the most exciting thing that happened in the commons during 2006, and what do you anticipate for the future of the commons for 2007?"
We thought that answering this question could garner some interesting responses on what has been done well, or what has gone terribly wrong, and what we can work towards as a community for the future. In fact, we may just do this exercise again a year from now to see how things have changed, and whether our hopes for 2007 have been fulfilled! Read on for some fantastically varied opinions.
 "I think one of the biggest achievements for the commons community in 2006 was Microsoft's move to release a CC license plug-in for the popular MS Office Suite. If a traditional behemoth like Microsoft is starting to acknowledge the importance of 'Some Rights Reserved', then it's a good indication that the rest of Big Business will follow... hopefully in 2007!"
- Colin Daniels, New Media Strategy Manager, Sunday Times South Africa
 'The constant growth of CC during 2006 was amazing. Truly this is a global, participatory and inclusive movement that has the support of key figures on the international stage, from Gilberto Gil to Vieux Farka Touré.
For 2007, I look forward to more growth, more people stepping up to the plate and saying, 'Hey, here is an alternative for the future''.
- Keri Thompson Project Manager VoiceboxCreative, San Francisco
 'Hearing so many references to and discussions about CC at the UN Internet Governance Forum in Athens was really great. CC no longer needs an introduction, everyone knows about it and what it stands for. I'm looking forward to more squirming by the big music labels in 2007, as the changing dynamics of music consumerism forces them to change. CC will be an important and legitimate factor in this necessary evolution.'
- Steve Vosloo Reuters Digital Vision Fellow Stanford University, California
 "I think the biggest achievement from 2006 was the full-scale uptake and validation of Wikipedia in popular culture and the wide-scale usage of CC by large corporations like Microsoft and Google. The biggest anticipation for 2007 is version 3.0 Creative Commons licenses and 2007 as the year of Creative Commons licenses being used for commercial enterprises. I also look forward to 2007 as the year iCommons comes into its own with concrete projects that are recognized large-scale clearly and publicly with the iCommons brand."
- Jon Phillips, Creative Commons and Open Clip Art Library
 "Looking back, one of the good things that had happened in 2006 was the decision by six of the eight research councils in the UK to mandate open access to research funded by them. Earlier on the Welcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have implemented a similar mandate.
Looking forward, I think the New Year has begun well for the open access movement, I expect both the European Union and the US Government to mandate open access to all research funded by them. I also look forward to similar mandates to be adopted by the larger developing countries, such as India, China and Brazil. Another expectation I have is for the Indian Institute of Science to place full texts of all its papers published in the past more than 98 years in the IISc EPrints archive and for the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy to set up and populate archives with full texts of all papers by all their Fellows. I would also want Bioline, MedKnow and NIC to add many more titles to the lists of OA journals they publish."
- Subbiah Arunachalam, Fellow of the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation
 "For me, the most exciting thing to happen in 2006 was the landmark of having 100 Wikipedia languages with at least 1,000 articles. The growth of free culture globally is one of the biggest unreported news stories. Everyone likes to talk about what is going on in English and a handful of other languages, but the web of sharing is really taking off all over the world.
The main thing I anticipate and hope for in 2007 is the long awaited compatibility between the GNU FDL and CC Attribution-Share Alike."
- Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia
 'The two most exiting things for me with respect to the commons in 2006 was the Asia Commons conference, titled 'Asian Conference on the Digital Commons', and the Nepali and Hindi edition of 'Guide to Open Content Licenses' making its importance felt in remote corners of the developing world. It was a great year to understand the commons more thoroughly and enrich the commons with new publications and digital contents. Hopefully 2007 will be a major milestone for building the commons agenda in the region'
- Hempal Shrestha, Programme Officer (Open Development), Bellanet Asia, C/O SAP International, Kathmandu, Nepal
 "2006 was the year that reuse really started to happen. For example, ccMixter continued to grow, but two new companies (Splice Music and JamGlue) launched with Flash-based remix software, bringing audio creation to a much wider audience.
Creative Commons has been amazingly successful at getting content licensed with their licenses, but creativity and reuse of all that content has lagged behind. Flickr's embracing of CC licensing led to widespread reuse of their images, and dozens of fascinating applications.
In 2007, I think this trend will accelerate, and we'll see the really interesting work done in this area of true reuse, with successive versions of a work and group collaboration being brought for the first time to domains such as audio, video, and drawing. 2007 will be the year of reuse."
- John Buckman, Magnatune
 "There is little question that the commons broke into greater public view than ever before in 2006. We saw usage of Creative Commons licenses soar (more than 50 million web trackbacks), the growth of the international licensing project to more than 60 nations, the explosion of social networking communities and Web 2.0 applications, a new public respect for Wikipedia and wikis in general, the steady expansion of free and open source software development, continued progress in open access scholarly publishing, and the recognition of a powerful new breed of open business platforms.
After years of patronizing the online world, traditional mass media are starting to recognize the vulnerabilities of their own business models, and are beginning to explore how they might exploit the efficiencies and social energies of the commons. This is serious progress!
These trends are all likely to expand further in 2007 and beyond. The only question is when they will be accorded the full mainstream visibility and respect they deserve. Yet the commons in 2007 will not just be about the information and creative sectors, but equally about democratic practice and environmental protection. Many people increasingly see the commons as a useful way of conceptualizing their fights against reckless market expansion and abuses. They are invoking the commons, and inventing new commons-based policy tools, to limit global warming, stop water privatization, preserve public spaces and public lands, defend the sovereignty of local communities, and expand democratic participation.
We are also seeing a growing theoretical sophistication about the commons as new types of commons proliferate and new types of analyses and distinctions are needed. Activists and thinkers will continue to develop a discourse of the commons in 2007 because it helps open up a necessary conversation about the proper limits of individual property rights and market activity. It also helps us imagine different governance systems for managing the shared resources that we all depend upon, whether they are cultural (non-depletable) or physical (depletable). We need not look only to markets and governments, each with their inherent limitations, to solve our problems. We can look also at the under-leveraged powers of the commons, a sector of great variety that is struggling in many different ways to assert a new, affirmative vision."
- David Bollier Editor, OntheCommons.org
 "The most exciting thing that happened for the commons in the year 2006 was the phenomenal spread of mobile phones to people of all kinds across the planet'making it clear that mobile phones are a key tool of the commons. By the end of 2006 there were 2 billion mobile commoners. Half of the world's population of 6.6 billion people are likely to have mobiles by the end of 2007, and the momentum will continue. The use of mobiles are largely being pioneered now in emerging countries. Mobile phones bring individual people together, they support economic enterprise, they connect cultures and they promise to unite us all through the virtual online commons."
- Judy Breck, GoldenSwamp.com
 "The greatest challenge that the Free Culture movement will face in 2007 and the coming years is the need to discuss our goals and ideals. Today, it's hard to talk about a movement: there are several organisations that carefully avoid it, while undertaking different projects, rather talking about why they do it. Creative Commons, whether it wants it or not, is a political organisation - or a network of organisations. It is political, because its actions result in social change.
Today, CC has achieved tremendous success with license promotion, but at the same time has utterly failed in the ideological field. I am very happy whenever ideological discussions take place, like the one between Benjamin Mako Hill and Lawrence Lessig in Berlin (during the Wizards of OS 4 festival) or the recent one about the relations between iCommons and 'piracy' (on the iCommons mailing list). I hope that through such discussions, what started as an organisation can become a broad social movement.
Actions that CC undertakes as a movement will fail without defining anew the concept of freedom in an information society, without discussing inalienable rights of the users of culture, or setting strategic goals. The ideological bankruptcy of the open source movement can serve here as a good example - after a few years it lost to the free software movement. The open source movement suited everyone, but that was a short-term advantage that at the same time led to countless errors being made when strategic decisions were needed.
I believe that we cannot work on further versions of free licenses without a well-defined ideological underpinning, understood as an agreement, even minimal in scope, to the fundamental principles of the movement. For this reason I am happy that Wikipedia is based on the GFDL license, as the Free Software Foundation guarantees its freedom in the future.
With regard to CC, it is hard to expect anything without a convincing definition of freedom. Licensing compatibility is one more important task at hand. I believe that compatibility is also a type of freedom, since without it we divide the Free Culture movement into a series of enclosures. Instead of proper conditions for the remix culture to flourish, we create ghettos. Instead of uniting - we divide. At the 'Modern Poland Foundation' we have undertaken a project to create Free Textbooks in Poland and for this reason we will use the GFDL, even if BY-SA is a much better choice from a technical viewpoint."
- Jaroslaw Lipszyc
 "As an artist, deviantART's support for Creative Commons licenses is large stone in the stepping stones of creative freedom and collaboration. Now the largest online art community can choose to license any submission under a Creative Commons license right there and then by answering three simple questions. Rock on.
2007 will hopefully be an exiting year for the commons. I anticipate it growing yet again by a large leap. The number of millions of license link-backs are only bound to rise. Otherwise I would totally love to see a Creative Commons office on another continent."
- Pascal Klein, artist and free software enthusiast
 "The most exciting thing that happened in 2006, certainly from my perspective, was the increased frequency of Creative Commons licenses on blogs and content sharing sites.
I have been blogging for just over two years and I have started seeing blogs published under Creative Commons more and more and that means that there is a growing awareness of Creative Commons licenses in the blogosphere. The addition of Creative Commons licensing options in sites like Flickr mean that users can publish their content under far less restrictive licenses schemes than was previously possible. Of course an important development here is that users have the choice, not just which content to share with their friends, family and the world at large, but also how to share it. That is a tremendously empowering development and very apt given the phase the web is currently in. As much as there is a greater awareness of Creative Commons and the options available through the various licensing options, it still seems to be in use by a very small group of publishers and users who are perhaps better described as early adopters than representative of mainstream users.
Looking ahead to 2007 I would really like to see this awareness go mainstream and not just with users themselves. I would like to see the mainstream music industry start to publish their music under Creative Commons and independent musicians shift to a Creative Commons-based model. I am also curious how Creative Commons would fit into mainstream publishing (books and journals specifically). What would the business model be where the content is more readily available than was previously the case under copyright? How would a major publisher publish a book under Creative Commons and how would that impact on the way books have traditionally been published? Will books and music be published using more than one medium and under different licensing schemes?
When it comes to the blogosphere, I would like see more blogs published under Creative Commons because publishing them under copyright hinders the global conversation that spans in excess of 63 million blogs (according to Technorati). Blogs are, to me, an expression of the essence of 'The Cluetrain Manifesto' which stated that markets are conversations before we had a blogosphere to speak of. Blogs should facilitate conversations and one way to do that is through Creative Commons."
- Paul Jacobson, Chilibean.co.za
 "The biggest progress in the commons was Universal Studio's decisions to sign Star Wreck. Star Wreck is a fan made full-length movie that was distributed under a CC-license. The movie was downloaded over 4 million times during 2006. The new imperial edition DVD was released before Christmas and is distributed by Universal Pictures.
- Herkko Hietanen, ccFinland lead
 "Estudiolivre.org and estudiolivre.org 2.0!"
- Alexandre Freire coordinated the Digital Culture project in the Ministry of Culture in Brasil.
Lead Photograph: Lights, Camera, action - this is an interview with the commons, by Gerard Yates, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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