“President-elect Obama has championed the creation of a more open, transparent, and participatory government.  To that end, Change.gov adopted a new copyright policy: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License:this weekend. In an effort to create a vibrant and open public conversation about the Obama-Biden Transition Project, all website content now falls under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

‘Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Content includes all materials posted by the Obama-Biden Transition project. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Change.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.’

Copyright Professor and blogger James Grimmelmann explains what this means:

‘Talk about doing the right thing. Now the collaborative power of Change.gov isn’t limited by what the transition team itself is able to enable. Anyone can take the policy points and discussions from the site and create their own remix or branch of it. This is a very good sign of the transition team’s attitude towards their task. It’s also a good license choice. Attribution 3.0 is the Barack Obama of CC licenses: modern, dignified, generous, and tolerant.’

Professor Lawrence Lessig also commented on his blog, noting the complexity of working through such issues: “This is great news about a subject that’s harder than it seems.”

This opening up of the content on Change.gov has the stated intent that “anyone can take the policy points and discussions from the site and create their own remix or branch of it.”  Here’s what a few other folks had to say:

• Politico – “The Obama transition made a subtle, but dramatic, change to its intellectual property licensing yesterday, and the groups pushing for freer use of content on the Internet are releasing a letter this morning requesting two more changes to the way the transition is handling its online content.”
• ReadWriteWeb – “This act of support for progressive intellectual property policy is big news, but it also makes us wonder – what’s next?”
• Joi Ito – “I know the transition team is super-busy right now with very important things and I’m very thankful that they had the time and the will to pay attention to this kind of important detail.”

Thanks to this important step by the administration, we were able to create both mobile and widget versions of the site using Cerado Ventana.

IPhone version (You can get the iPhone and other mobile versions here)

Widget version (You can get the widget here)

What does this mean?  It means the following:

When (technology + information + inspiration) are allowed to work together, astounding things can happen in the blink of an eye. Innovation can happen, anywhere, at near-instantaneous speed.

Thank you again to the Obama administration for opening up Change.gov with Creative Commons to make this possible, and thanks to everyone here on the team.  You have been building killer technology, and have enabled us to create this new conduit for citizens and government to connect.

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