Dave Lester’s Finding America

I’m happy to announce that all blog posts on Finding America are now released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. This was both an obvious and difficult decision. On one hand, I’m fairly active in the open source community and sharing is second-nature to my work. However, I was previously concerned about how my words could be used. It was R. Stuart Geiger’s blog post, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Attribution-ShareAlike” and our subsequent twitter conversation that sold me on the idea (he goes by @staeiou on Twitter).  I’m a Creative Commons convert.

Now that my data is out there (as if it never was in the first place), I’d like to see my colleagues and the greater blogging community join me and release their content under Creative Commons. I’m hardly the first person to go CC, but I was surprised to find out which of my favorite blogs are licensed. It’s easy to do: you specify the types of uses of your content on CC’s License Your Work page, and you’re provided the appropriate code to embed the CC badge on your website.

I challenge you to release your blog’s content under CC, or at least justify your reason for not doing so to add to a larger discussion about licensing academic blogging content. Feel free to leave comments here, or use the #ccchallenge hash-tag on Twitter. Here’s the start of a list of bloggers whose content I’d like to see under Creative Commons: Timothy Burke, Rob MacDougall, Jeremy Boggs, Dan Cohen, Matt Gold, Mark Rice, Sterling Fluharty, and Tom Scheinfeldt. This is just the beginning of the list, really..

Props to many individuals who are way ahead of me on Creative Commons, including Stuart Geiger, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Amanda French, Jim Groom, Citizen of Somewhere Else, Dave Parry, Richard Urban, and Matt Kirschenbaum.

I hope the rest of us can catch up, soon.