Creative Commons International

A Collected Memoir

Invitation to contribute

Tyng-Ruey Chuang, Mike Linksvayer

CC0 1.0

Dear friends,

We are gathering personal essays and reflections from people who helped build and shape Creative Commons during its CCi years: roughly 2003 to 2013, when Creative Commons International coordinated the worldwide porting of CC licenses and connected an extraordinary network of volunteers, scholars, artists, lawyers, educators, and technologists.

This decade marked a period of vibrant experimentation for Creative Commons with initiatives such as iCommons, Science Commons, ccLearn, and ccMixter that expanded the CC vision far beyond licenses. It was also a time when people across continents adapted CC to their local languages and legal systems, convened their own summits and workshops, and translated “the commons” into lived practice.

Together, this constellation of projects and people created an era of extraordinary collaboration that culminated in the launch of the global 4.0 license suite in 2013 and the transition toward the Creative Commons Global Network.

The project

Creative Commons International: A Collected Memoir is an open (CC BY-SA 4.0), multilingual anthology of first-person stories from that formative decade. Its purpose is to preserve the diversity of experiences that shaped CC’s early international growth before those memories and archives fade.

We invite contributions from anyone who participated in Creative Commons during that time, whether as: members of CCi local teams or affiliates; participants in iCommons, Science Commons, ccLearn, ccMixter, or related efforts; CC staff, board, or legal experts; volunteers, event organizers, translators, or community advocates.

If you were part of Creative Commons’ global work in those years, your perspective belongs in this collection.

What to contribute

We welcome short written pieces (10,000 characters maximum) in any language. Possible directions:

  • How you first became involved with Creative Commons
  • The local, regional, or thematic projects you worked on
  • Moments of collaboration, translation, or cultural adaptation
  • Reflections on successes, challenges, or lessons learned
  • How that experience connects to your later work or current views on openness

You may also include photos, documents, or links that help illustrate your story.

How to contribute

  1. Email your contribution to cci-memoir@commons.tw and specify its license (CC BY-SA 4.0 or any compatible license).
  2. Contributions are welcome on rolling basis.
  3. The first tranche of essays will be published online not long after 2026-09-17, on the 15th anniversary of the CC global summit 2011 in Warsaw. (Pushed back from the 21st anniversary of the first global CC summit at Harvard in 2005.)

Why this matters

The CCi decade was a legal and organizational experiment—and a human one. People around the world took a set of legal tools and turned them into a shared cultural movement. Capturing those experiences now will help future generations understand how Creative Commons became a truly global idea, and how much of that success depended on volunteer imagination, cross-cultural dialogue, and trust.

Your memories, however small or local, are part of that history.

Thank you for adding your voice.

Warm regards,

Tyng-Ruey Chuang and Mike Linksvayer

p.s. We’ve sent this invitation to potential contributors who we readily had contacts for; please feel free to forward to others we may have missed.

p.p.s. We plan to post updates on the website cci-memoir.commons.tw and @cci_memoir@social.coop.

Updates

  • 2026-09-17 We will be publishing the essays in tranches, the first later this month. Additional submissions will be welcome for some time after as we hope and expect more commoners will be moved to share their memories upon reading!
  • 2026-06-07 Over 40 CCi-era commoners have contributed essays so far, with many more needing additional time, as do we (TRC and ML), so we have updated contribution due date to 2026-07-31 and are now targeting 2026-09-17 for online publication of the collection.
  • 2026-02-16 Creative Commons is assembling a zine commemorating its 25th anniversary with the theme remix is resitance! Consider contributing to both this independent memoir and the CC zine.
  • 2026-02-16 Updated contribution due date to 2026-05-03 on account of slowness in getting invitations out.
  • 2026-01-16 First finished contribution received.
  • 2025-12-03 Invitation finalized and first invitation sent.