Get Excited And Make Things by Matt Jones

We’re huge fans of the ideals of free and widely accessible information that Creative Commons embodies, and the work that they do to (as they put it) “increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content)…that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing”. We’ve written about them in the past, and furthermore, the proceeds from Get Excited And Make Things, the very, very nearly sold out edition that we put out with Matt Jones, directly benefit the organization.

If you’d like an idea of how the information-sharing endeavors of Creative Commons can function to make the world a better place, here are a few examples:

GlaxoSmithKline, a major pharmaceutical company, recently released its entire malarial data set using CC tools, speeding the urgent search for new medicines to tackle the devastating disease. Online communities at Flickr, SoundCloud, and Vimeo are making creative works available for anyone in the world to use freely and legally through license adoption. Publisher Pratham Books has begun to CC license more and more of the textbooks it provides to 14 million children in India, lifting them from a future of poverty and miseducation. When the earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, Google and Wired used CC tools to keep information widely available to relief workers, journalists, and governments worldwide.

These days CC deserves some more attention: they’ve very recently launched their Superhero fund-raising campaign, and are looking for supporters to help them reach a goal of $550,000 (after less than two weeks, they’ve already passed the $50,000 mark!)

You can read more about the campaign here, and go here support this cause of superhero magnitude.