Creative Commons Photobook In The Works

Photo: Peter Morgan

I wanted to keep this under wraps until it was well under way, and that's pretty much the case at this point. I'm heading up a project to put out a photobook of Creative Commons licensed photographs. The idea came a few weeks ago at breakfast with Aaron and over the few days afterward it kept nagging at me until I jumped on it.

The book itself is going to be entitled "Photos From the Commons 2006: Some Rights Reserved". It's broken into 12 sections: one for each month of 2006. In each section are photos taken during that month. The text of the book will talk about Creative Commons, how it works and why it's a good idea. All of the proceeds will be donated to Creative Commons.

I've recruited a team of editors (and there are a couple more I haven't gotten a chance to talk into it yet) who are busily using a set of tools I wrote (derived from this code) to help with the process to select photos for inclusion. Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be putting the book together to get it ready for publication.

I've got several goals for this project:

• Raise some money for Creative Commons.
• Show people just how good the Creative Commons licensed stuff can be.
• Encourage people to put their own content under CC licenses.
• Just plain get the word out about Creative Commons.
• Do an annual edition of the photobook.
• Expand the idea into essays, short fiction, etc. as enough content becomes easy to dig through.
• Vanity. Look it's a factor that I want to see my name listed as an editor on a beautiful photobook. I'd be naive to pretend it's not.

For this round, I've kept the team small, but would like to use 2007 to work out models for more widespread contribution while making sure to acknowledge everyone's contribution. Those collaborations are worked out in software, but need to be tweaked to work for this slightly different content.

I bought the domains fromthecommons.com/org with the idea that the expansion can happen with nice URL's for them as well, i.e. photos.fromthecommons.com, essays.fromthecommons.com, etc. The biggest barrier to moving beyond the photos is that, ironically, text under creative commons is harder to dig through. That's because, since photos have nearly *no* searchable data, their metadata gets attention and you end up with really searchable databases of photos like Flickr.

Searching for text content doesn't work nearly as well. For instance, it's plenty easy to find content that *contains* a given keyword, but your typical short story doesn't contain the words "short story". The metadata for license embedding is starting to get a toehold, but since hardly anyone is tagging this content the same way, other anthologies are currently more difficult to do the initial content nomination on.

At any rate, I'm aiming for a fairly aggressive schedule to get this thing out. Since the idea didn't come until late December, this needs to be done quickly in order for a book of 2006 photographs to still be somewhat relevant. I'd really like to have it available for sale by the end of the month.