Wellstone Action!

posted by Maggie Jacoby

AUGUST 13, 2009

Here at Wellstone Action, we are dedicated to disseminating leadership tools and campaign organizing best practices to a diverse range of people in the progressive movement.  In that spirit of openness, we have now made our website more accessible by adjusting our copyright status using Creative Commons.  

I hope the idea of copyrights has not already bored you because this is way more exciting than your standard copyright. Creative Commons allows us to have more control over our copyright. In this case, instead of 'all rights reserved,' we have 'some rights reserved.'  More specifically, we have an attribution-noncommercial license.  This means that you can tweak or remix our images, print our articles, or reproduce any content as long as it is for non-commercial use and you give attribution to us.  Besides those restrictions, you have the freedom to use our articles and redesign our pictures and put them to your own use.

Creative Commons is dedicated to making information on the internet free, easily accessible, and open for collaboration, all according to what the creator wants.  We share these values with Creative Commons and believe that the same spirit should be applied to the progressive movement and the skills and education needed to be better candidates, organizers, and activists.

Creative Commons has created special projects such as Science Commons, which makes it faster and more efficient to search for scientific research.  They also created ccLearn, which seeks to support educational resources and limit legal and monetary obstacles.  Many prominent universities have made learning material available through Creative Commons.  Musicians hoping to encourage creativity with their work have also licensed it freely.   If you want to learn more about Creative Commons, visit their website.  

So explore our website and let us know if you found a creative way to engage with it.  Redesigned a picture? Upload it to our Facebook page!  Want to share our Organizing Tools with your local community group?  Print it out and share it!  We hope that this is only the beginning of our foray into sharing information online, so tell us what you think about it.