Past editions

About this project

The Association for Progressive Communications (APC), funded by the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (Osisa), is running a 6-month awareness-raising project in the SADC region to inform potential partners about the role of Creative Commons as an alternative to traditional intellectual property rights management. This initial phase of activity in southern Africa starts with identifying key organisations and individuals in SADC that may be interested in developing Creative Commons projects in their countries, and providing them with the necessary information to initiate such activities.

Another critical element of the project is to support the Creative Commons South Africa web portal in showcasing regional initiatives that make use of the Creative Commons licences, as well as to conduct two workshops on Creative Commons licencing in Africa.

The first workshop was held at the Kofi Annan Center of Excellence in ICT during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) African preparatory meeting in Accra, Ghana during January, 2005. This workshop was aimed at initiating a discussion amongst West Africans about the relevance and viability of Creative Commons in their region.

The second and third workshops were held at the LINK Centre in Johannesburg and at Bridges.org in Cape Town with the aim of eliciting public comment on the Creative Commons South Africa licence, as well as enabling some SADC legal professionals to learn from the process of developing a local licence.

The final workshop will be held in collaboration with Sangonet's Thetha series, and will be dedicated to gathering SADC organisations together to discuss the practical implementation of Creative Commons in their organisations.

If you're looking for the Commons-sense conference, see http://www.commons-sense.org.