We love creative commons. But what is it? And why would an association want to freely share their content?

What is creative commons?

Creative commons is a license, multiple licenses actually, that let's other people use your work in varying degrees. As explained on the creative commons web site, there are four primary considerations. Source: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-types-examples/

Tendenci is the Open Source AMS so obviously we are big proponents of sharing if the content creator chooses to. You don't have to! Some content should be protected and remain private (thus all of the security built into our AMS). Nothing wrong with all rights reserved, we just think you should have the option.

A good example of sharing via creative commons licensing is in the photos module where you can specify the license per photo.

Not surprisingly given we are the only Open Source Association Management System, we are also huge supporters of Creative Commons Licenses. Not all the time, but sometimes, you want to share and remix.

That is why in the Tendenci AMS photos module you are given the option to specify all licenses. For example with this little guy you will see a drop down allowing you to specify everything from all rights reserved to creative commons. (I took this photo in New Mexico years ago. He visited us every day and loved Fruit Loops!)

First - meet Fruit Loop from New Mexico.

When you are editing a photo, or builk editing a photo gallery, you can specify a license. In this case I licensed "Fruit Loop" as "Creative Commons Attribution." That looks like this:

It's that simple! 

And what's even better is you can actually license pretty much any of your content by simply typing below it the license you want to apply to it. In the articles module you can just say "This content is licensed CCA" and it also helps to link to their site as I did for people who aren't familiar with creative commons. Most of the photos on our founders flickr stream are also CCA.

Why should your Association Management System provide you with a CC option?

Because photos are super popular. Google analytics shows you the top ranked page, but using photos as an example, it is unlikely one photo would move to the top. People don't interact with photo galleries that way! They click through them, right? Tendenci's analytics are built for AI and aggregate data by module. In this image, called "the event log summary report" it shows activity by module and highlights the popularity of photos (hint: photos are the blue bars).

 

You can learn more about reporting in Tendenci at https://www.tendenci.com/reporting/

You can (and SHOULD!) learn more about creative commons licenses on their site at https://creativecommons.org 

In closing, remember, you don't have to use Tendenci to specify a license. You can simply type it below your content. And done! Happy content creation y'all!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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