Had a meeting yesterday with Catalina Martinez, an economist from OECD, Susan D'Antoni from Unesco, and Hal Abelson and Paula La Dieu from Creative Commons. The meeting was brought together by Jan Hylen who is coordinating the OECD Education Open Educational Resources project.

The meeting was intended as informal and the discussion was wide ranging.

A number of things came out of the meeting.

One was the need to specifically promote Creative Commons within the educational world. Many of the 'stories' Creative Commons tells as the moment are directed at creative professionals (not to say educationalists cannot be creative but you know what I mean). Linked to this was developing a strategy for gaining acceptance of the Creative Commons License in education. most of us felt that it was like pushing at an open door - many people working in education would be very happy to use Creative Commons but did not know about it.

Any strategy needs to be pursued at a number of levels, including institutions and political. the research councils may be important in this regard.

Hal gave us an interesting update on the development of the Scientific Commons License - which he explained was far more complex than perhaps had first been thought.

For some time I have had a thing about it being too difficult to insert Creative Commons Licenses - particularly into written text. the majority of university research seems to me to be distributed as Word and PDF downloads. We need a plug in for Word and Open Office making it possible to insert a License form the toolbar. Similarly, a widget could be developed for Firefox to create and embed RDF into web pages. Everyone seemed to agree this was a good idea so I will pursue some funding for this.

As at so many meetings about Open Source and Open Content which I have attended in the last few months, the issue of coordinating developments and exchanging experiences on a more on-going basis was raised. There is a growing need and desire for such coordination in Europe. The problem is, no-one knows quite how to do it. On the one had in requires money - though that is not impossible. On the other hand it needs to be representative and inclusive and that is much more difficult.

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