Creative Commons (CC) is adopting a brand new organizational strategy in 2021, just in time for our 20th anniversary. As part of the organization's evolution in alignment with the new strategy, Alden Page, Brent Moran, Hugo Solar, and I (Kriti Godey) will have departed Creative Commons by the end of December. Moving forward, the CC staff engineering team of Timid Robot Zehta and Zack Krida will focus on supporting a smaller set of core projects.
We are extremely proud of the work we have done together to build CC's vibrant open source community over the past two years. And of course, we're thankful for all the amazing contributions that all our community members have made. We've made significant improvements to existing tools, and launched entirely new projects with your help. We created Vocabulary, a design system for Creative Commons and launched half a dozen sites using it. We added dozens of new sources to CC Search and improved its accessibility. We released tools such as the CC WordPress plugin and CC Search browser extension that integrated CC licensing with widely used software. And, there's so much more.
Community Changes
The CC Open Source community remains central to our engineering work, and we will continue to support you in every way we can. However, based on the new staff capacity, we will be making a few changes to our community processes:
- Community Team members will no longer have access to CC's Asana. Most tasks are tracked on GitHub, and managing Asana adds unnecessary complexity to the community team.
- We will invite all Community Team members to meetings and documents open to the community, regardless of role.
- We will deprecate the "community-team-core" mailing list in favor of a single "community-team" mailing list.
- We will have a new monthly Open Source Community meeting and cancel the existing biweekly Engineering Meeting.
- We will no longer have a paid Open Source Community Coordinator, relying instead on volunteers to help assist new community members, maintain our Twitter account, etc.
We welcome new Community Team members and we will continue to participate in internship programs such as Google Summer of Code.
Project Changes
With a smaller engineering team, we will need to support fewer projects. Please see below for the current status of all projects with at least one Community Team member.
Active Development
We will continue to actively develop the following projects:
- CC Search Browser Extension (maintainer: Mayank Nader)
- CC Open Source website (maintainers: Zack Krida & Timid Robot Zehta)
- CC WordPress base & child themes (new maintainer: Zack Krida)
- CC Legal Database (maintainer: Timid Robot Zehta)
- CC Chooser (maintainer: Zack Krida)
- CC Link Checker (maintainer: Timid Robot Zehta)
- License Buttons (maintainer: Timid Robot Zehta)
- Platform Toolkit (maintainer: Timid Robot Zehta)
- Vocabulary (maintainers: Zack Krida & Dhruv Bhanushali)
- WordPress Plugin (new maintainer: Zack Krida)
Maintenance Mode
The following projects are entering maintenance mode. The services will remain online, but we will not accept any new pull requests or deploy new code after Dec 15, 2020.
Catalog, API, and Linked Commons contributors are encouraged to contribute to our other Python projects such as the CC Legal Database or the upcoming CC Licenses project. If you are a CC Search contributor, we recommend checking out frontend projects such as the CC Chooser or Vocabulary.
Thank You!
We cannot express our gratitude for our community enough. You are all an absolute pleasure to work with, and we're looking forward to continuing to collaborate with you for years to come.