I had been watching the growth of the free and open source software movements for a few years, and I was thinking about people coming together and collaborating. What was really making that world possible is that people devised these licenses that allow, for example, programmers to share their work with other programmers, who could copy it, redistribute it, and modify it. This licensing method took away a lot of concerns people had about sharing their work online. People didn’t mind other people taking their work and reusing it, but there are certain things they didn’t want other people to do, like close the source code, make it proprietary, or make it so that I can’t see the changes that have been made. I realized that this mode of collaboration was not really something that would be confined only to software. I realized a lot more would be coming, so I started thinking of what might be good to collaborate on. I had the idea of the encyclopedia.

The way I talk about this is as a reemergence of folk culture. For a long time, we thought about culture being more or less divided in two parts: We had pop culture, which was commercially driven, and then we had fine art culture, which was partially commercial but we felt it needed to be paid for by wealthy patrons or governments or something like that. But we also had folk culture—people sharing songs and stories passed down from generations. Now that we have all of these tools for communicating directly peer to peer, we are seeing a real explosion and reemergence of that kind of folk culture, and a move away from broadcast culture.

In a certain sense it is a very natural extension of what we always did; it’s just that we have the tools to do it much better than we ever did before. Everybody used to take pictures and share them with their friends, and some people got involved with photography as a hobby and met other photographers and joined photography clubs. Other people would sing songs and modify them and those songs would get passed around. Now all of those things can happen on a much larger scale simply because we have the tools available to do it—and a licensing framework set up that helps people make sure that what they are doing is legal and in accordance with what their values are.

I think that the separated factions of people who care about making money off of this and people who don’t isn’t really sustainable in the long run; I think that it really doesn’t make a lot of sense. What we are seeing is people reacting with a little bit of shock to this change, but in the long run these changes are here to stay. The Internet is here to stay. People sharing things online is here to stay. We still have a lot of innovations coming in terms of what kind of communities can be built and what kind of activities people may engage in online, but I think what we are going to see moving forward is really more of a spectrum, a continuum of activities: There are certain things that will be produced the old fashioned way as part of a commercially oriented broadcasted culture, and I think that’s fine and will stay the same; we are going to see people doing things like Wikipedia, which is spontaneously sharing with no commercial or career motive for the most part; and then there will be some in between, where people, especially younger artists, will get their start by becoming well known through the sharing culture, and then will go on to sell some of their work under a traditional model. Or we may see some existing successful performers who say, “Yeah I’m going to continue doing some of my work this way, but I’m also going do some of it in an attempt to have a bigger impact on the culture. I may release a song or a whole album in a way that allows people to modify it and let people take it and change it and build on it and do something different with it.” I think that there is no way we should be in a situation where there are different factions. I think all of these things are just tools that people can use for a variety of purposes.

Story as told to Eric Steuer. Click the play button below to listen to the interview on which this piece is based.



Eric Steuer is the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for creators to share their work with the rest of the world. It also provides tools to make it easier for people to find creative work that’s been made available to them—and the rest of the world—to use, share, reuse etc., freely and legally. This is the third in a series of edited and condensed interviews called “We like to share,” in which Steuer talked to people who work across a variety of fields who use sharing as an approach to benefit the work that they do.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Joi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons.

My entrepreneurial life happened when the internet started. And I think the biggest difference between my entrepreneurial life and the entrepreneurial life of some other people is the internet is all about—as David Weinberger would say—small pieces smoothly joined, and about people doing new things and connecting with each other. And so I built a bunch of companies on the internet, or using the internet, with the idea of everybody participating in a community and being able to innovate without asking permission. It’s a very different kind of entrepreneurialism.

Ever since the internet started, the cost of collaboration, and the cost of putting anything together, has continued to go down. It would have taken millions of dollars to create Google, or something even remotely similar, before the internet. With open source and the internet, the cost of creating a search engine went down dramatically. Today, it would even be cheaper. And so what that means with things becoming cheaper and collaboration becoming easier is that entrepreneurs can try more innovative things.

Getting customers has always been one of the key factors for success or failure. The big portals were all about getting everybody signed up, and then making switching expensive—the old term people used to use a lot was “stickiness.” Now the user is much smarter and, they know that they can use bits and pieces from different places, and as the net has become more and more open, you don’t gain customers by putting up barriers, and you don’t hear the word “sticky” as much anymore. It’s really more about how do you become part of this conversation, how do you become one of the tools that users use to create the experience that they’re creating, and how do you join this little ecology of small companies.

One of the big failures of the whole web 1.0 thing was when AOL and all these other guys packaged everything up into these walled gardens. Everybody—both the users and the entrepreneurs—have realized that that doesn’t work. Google, Microsoft, and others are still trying to lock you in, but a very different way. Facebook is, as well. They’re trying to become a platform for other people to come and share and communicate with each other. So the architecture has changed. It’s not that everybody is completely altruistic and giving, but I think the layer of content, the layer of connection that used to be closed, is open.

We’ve reached a point where it’s technically feasible to do all kinds of things, like put together academic databases, or communities of people to mix music or video. But it’s currently very legally cumbersome to do this, whether it’s the universities not having compatible contracts or users not being able to separate the content that wants to be shared from the content that doesn’t want to be shared. Most of the cost of transaction, or the cost of collaboration right now, is the fact that you have to have a lawyer involved every time two services, or two people, want to interact with each other at the content layer. And this also is very divisive in terms of the communities. So these legal things only surface once you actually try to do something, and Creative Commons solves that by providing a standardized license and a bunch of technology to help you track that, which means you don’t need to involve a lawyer every time you try to mash things together. I think that Creative Commons will enable a whole sort of explosion of innovation at the next layer and up.

Story as told to Eric Steuer. Click the play button below to listen to the interview on which this piece is based.



Eric Steuer is the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for creators to share their work with the rest of the world. It also provides tools to make it easier for people to find creative work that’s been made available to them—and the rest of the world—to use, share, reuse etc., freely and legally. This is the third in a series of edited and condensed interviews called “We like to share,” in which Steuer talked to people who work across a variety of fields who use sharing as an approach to benefit the work that they do.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Peter Murray-Rust is a chemist, a reader in molecular informatics at the University of Cambridge, and a Senior Research Fellow of Churchill College.

I’m a chemist. I’m very interested in how the enormous amount of information that’s being put on the web can be used for science. The possibilities of doing things with that information are enormous. What we need to do, however, is to be able to access it. One of the frustrations that many scientists have is that they find the key bits of data they want aren’t available. I discovered this in chemistry—there’s lots of data out there, but only a very small proportion of it is easy to get without having to pay for it, or without having to ask permission to use it. As a result of this I, along with others, came up with the idea of open data—the assertion, if you like, that certain types of information should be inexorably free for the human race.

It’s discipline dependent, and the behavior varies by scientists—chemistry is a fairly conservative discipline in this area, while astronomy and particle physics make all of their data freely available. But there’s an increasing realization that if work is funded from public or charitable sources, then there’s a requirement on the researchers to make their data available. The various parties responsible for grant making in the United Kingdom, the United States, and in many other places are now actively starting to put requirements on grantees to make not only the textual publication work available, but also the data on which it rests.

There are two or three objective problems; one is that making data available is not trivial. It’s easier to make a single document (a copy of your publication, for example) available, than it is to package your data in a way that other people would want to use it. So there are technical aspects. There’s also inertia. It’s not common for many scientists to share their data; they don’t realize the value of doing it. So they need to change the way in which they work and the culture of how they reach out to people. Of course many scientists are naturally competitive because funding depends on publication; the more you get published, the more you are likely to receive. So people are naturally jealous of their results and in many cases, they don’t want to make their data available because then their competitors might be able to see things in their data that they hadn’t been able to see.

It’s fair to say that not all data can be made universally available, and that’s particularly true when you’ve got patient or sociological data which relate to human services. There do have to be areas where privacy makes it impossible to share data universally. But in many branches of science—and this is particularly true of physical science, material science, and so on—there’s no reason in principle why the data shouldn’t be made available. There has been a history of controlling data through commercial means, and there are a lot of organizations which up until now have made an income by collecting data from the community and then packaging it and selling it back. That was a reasonable thing to do in the 20th century. But in the 21st century, so much information is now born digital that it makes sense to think of an economy where as we create the data, we release it to the community rather than locking it up.

Story as told to Eric Steuer. Click the play button below to listen to the interview on which this piece is based.



Eric Steuer is the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for creators to share their work with the rest of the world. It also provides tools to make it easier for people to find creative work that’s been made available to them—and the rest of the world—to use, share, reuse etc., freely and legally. This is the third in a series of edited and condensed interviews called “We like to share,” in which Steuer talked to people who work across a variety of fields who use sharing as an approach to benefit the work that they do.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

In academic publishing, the volume of what is published has increased phenomenally in recent years, because the higher education sector has increased globally quite a lot; there are more academics, more people writing, and so more material is coming out. And its all very competitive as to whose voice is being heard.

Bloomsbury Academic is a very new imprint. We started it last September and the business model is a very simple one: We want to give academics what they want and expect from a quality academic publishing house. Firstly, that means all the pre-publication work—selection of peer review, editing, formatting—and then, coming closer to publication, we are talking about the marketing function. At the time of the publication itself, we are putting the work online with a Creative Commons attribution, noncommercial license at the same time we are producing the print copy. Looking at the post-publication phase, we are going to be keeping books in print for as long as there is a demand. We have a lot of options at our disposal for print: we can publish it in the conventional way or, if it’s a slow seller for a small audience, then we can start out with print on demand. That allows us to reduce the risk of holding large amounts of books in warehouses. So we are trying to marry the old with the new by using digital technologies, and by using creative commons licensing, but also giving the academic what they want, which is a quality publication.

So much of academic output is now available on the web, and when you talk to academics they are not 100 percent happy with how difficult it is becoming to find their works. They are looking for tools; a digital means of selecting, filtering, and ranking the materials they are using and recommending. We are actually in a period of transition where we are still relying on the old, but wanting to experiment with the new. People like myself who spend a lot of time with the open access crowd can kind of forget there are a lot of academics who aren’t so vocal, who are primarily interested in producing their content, getting materials in front of their students, and getting their promotion and their recognition for work that they produce.

In this period of transition there is a lot of investment required in experimenting with new technologies. And with the experimenting of new technologies, we have to make sure the recognition and the openness is absolutely essential and part of it. Many of the big companies have got the resources to do this, but they are also the companies that have the biggest investments in the old ways of doing things. The smaller companies don’t have the money, but they have the inclination. With Bloomsbury Academic, I’m extremely fortunate because I’m working with a company that hasn’t been known in the past for its academic publishing, it doesn’t have a huge infrastructure for academic publishing, but is still one of the 10 largest companies in the United Kingdom in publishing terms. The general publishing infrastructure is all there, so we can take a new path without having to jettison the old way of doing things, and we can set up our systems to be open from scratch.

Story as told to Eric Steuer. Click the play button below to listen to the interview on which this piece is based.



Eric Steuer is the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for creators to share their work with the rest of the world. It also provides tools to make it easier for people to find creative work that’s been made available to them—and the rest of the world—to use, share, reuse etc., freely and legally. This is the third in a series of edited and condensed interviews called “We like to share,” in which Steuer talked to people who work across a variety of fields who use sharing as an approach to benefit the work that they do.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Curt Smith is a musician and a co-founder of Tears for Fears.

I got my first record deal when I was 18 years old—next year that will be about 30 years ago, so I have been doing it for quite a while. The industry when I first started was very much one-sided in the sense that it favored the industry and not the musicians. We would sign deals when we were quite young that were pretty bad across the board: from record deals to publishing deals, even management deals and touring. You just didn’t make as high of a percentage as you would now. But of course that has changed over the years, especially in the last few years with the internet and sharing your music with people.

Technology has changed so much that now, people are quite capable of making records themselves. It used to be a very expensive process, but its not anymore. In the past, the industry controlled how your music got out there, so if you didn’t have a record deal it would never be on shelves; there was no Amazon, there was no iTunes. There was basically just radio, and the record companies controlled that as well. Now, with the freedom of the internet, people can go and discover your stuff.

The down side is that there is now so much music, some form of filtering tool is required. That’s starting to happen more with sites where people vote on music—you can breeze through a site, listen to different genres of music, and see which songs are being appreciated the most. But I think one of the big challenges is finding a good system of filtering so you can far more easily find music you may be interested in.

A bigger challenge, from the perspective of the artist, is how to get yourself seen. How do you stand out from X-million people on MySpace or however many there are now? Some of it you can get through hard work—live work, for example, is far more important than is has been in a long time, because that’s something you can’t replicate online. So building up a live following holds the value that it used to do, only now the word of mouth will spread more quickly due to the internet.

Artists have always created things with the goal of sharing them with people, and that idea goes way back. If you wrote music, you would go out and perform it on the street corner or you would perform it in a club; you wanted to be heard and share it with people. So I think the primary reason to make art is to share it with people. I don’t primarily make music just for me, I want it to be listened to by other people, I want people to take it apart, I want people to delve into it and get the different textures and different meanings of lyrics. That kind of stuff I find fascinating. I like to delve into music or any form of art; then I actually feel like I’m involved in it. The difficulty right now lies with how we monetize that. Without sounding completely cold, unless we find a consistent way of monetizing it, then we can’t do it any more. We love the stories of the starving artist, but there is only so long you can starve before you are actually going to have to go out and find a job. Those are the problems we have yet to completely solve.

Story as told to Eric Steuer. Click the play button below to listen to the interview on which this piece is based.



Eric Steuer is the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for creators to share their work with the rest of the world. It also provides tools to make it easier for people to find creative work that’s been made available to them—and the rest of the world—to use, share, reuse etc., freely and legally. This is the third in a series of edited and condensed interviews called “We like to share,” in which Steuer talked to people who work across a variety of fields who use sharing as an approach to benefit the work that they do.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

David Bollier is the co-founder of Public Knowledge, author most recently of Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, and the editor of OntheCommons.org.

I spent many years in Washington, mostly in the public interest community, with Ralph Nader and the head of the auto safety agency. Over time I came to see that the commons was a way of protecting shared resources and using them in ways that the market didn’t. In other words, how sharing resources—be it in culture, or resources like water—was something I was concerned about as an activist and as a citizen.

I wrote a book called Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth, which described all sorts of different collective resources that we own, either morally or legally, that are being essentially privatized or commoditized for the market. And around the year 2000 I realized that copyright was playing a very harmful role in many aspects of culture and democracy, and I focused much more on internet policy and copyright.  That lead me to co-found Public Knowledge, the Washington, D.C., advocacy group which deals with a lot to tech policy, copyright, and intellectual property issues. I saw once again that the commons was a very useful way of describing resources that didn’t really have a name and therefore couldn’t be adequately protected under the law.

I’ve just completed a book called Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, and it tells the history—from the creation of free software in the 1980s through the present—of how commoners in different fields helped create a legal and technological infrastructure (and the social communities) for sharing resources in the commons. We can see it in the remix community of music, or video mashups, and we can see it in academia, where scientists and other scholars are trying to find new ways to share their academic output. It’s proliferating in the open education movement, with things like the One Laptop Per Child initiative, open access scholarly publishing, and new kinds of journals. And you can see it most obviously in the development of open source software, this new mode of sharing creativity in order to create valuable things. So the book describes the breath of activity going on where the commons is the basis for creating new kinds of value. It shows that sharing and access don’t have to be against one’s business interest. The real challenge is to develop new business models that can exploit the capacities of the internet in new ways, and to start to shed or migrate away from the old business models of the 20th century.

A lot of the difficulty in moving free culture and other commons initiatives forward is public education; it’s often hard to explain those ideas to people and get them to understand their value. The problem is that so many people come at this from different perspectives, cultures, or creative sectors, so there is not necessarily a shared vocabulary for approaching this, and there are often very different purposes depending on the history of the particular creative community or the medium that they are working in. Scientists are dealing with something quite different from mash-up artists or performance artists. So you have such a diverse mix of creativity going on that it can be difficult to see what is shared in common. I think that remains an ongoing challenge for the free culture movement. In other ways this diversity is extremely healthy, and I think that we find people coming from different places helps invigorate the whole creative field. People can find new things they hadn’t expected, and that is what makes this kind of creativity so exciting—that it’s not all fixed within the same historical frame, but anything is possible.

Story as told to Eric Steuer. Click the play button below to listen to the interview on which this piece is based.



Eric Steuer is the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for creators to share their work with the rest of the world. It also provides tools to make it easier for people to find creative work that’s been made available to them—and the rest of the world—to use, share, reuse etc., freely and legally. This is the third in a series of edited and condensed interviews called “We like to share,” in which Steuer talked to people who work across a variety of fields who use sharing as an approach to benefit the work that they do.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Andrew Shapiro is the founder and president of GreenYour, an online resources for sharing  facts, tips, and products about sustainable living. 

My colleagues and I have been working in the green business space for some time, but a number of us have backgrounds in IT and the internet, and so we started looking at the landscape of web properties that were focused on the interest of consumers going green. We felt that there was something missing, and so decide to start this site called GreenYour as a search resource to help people find out how to go green.

We’ve got the basics like, How do I green my home, what kind of lighting can I get, I hear tips about compact florescent lights, which ones are high quality, where do I buy them? You can click right through and get to sites like Amazon or Walmart and actually buy green products. Then there are also a lot of tips that are not purchase oriented, like finding ways to take old clothes and reuse them or recycle them, or insulating your home or doing something like that.

We are still in the early stages—we’ve just done a beta release of GreenYour—but as time goes by we are hoping to see contributors adding their own tips for how to go green in any area, whether it’s greening your home, your travel, your office, your pet, your girlfriend, or whatever it might be. And we’ve built the site on an open platform that will hopefully allow us to make it endlessly extensible. We are still figuring out the careful balance between opening the thing up completely so anyone contribute anything, and having some safeguards on it, because the environment is an area where accuracy and trust are really important. So even as we are trying to share as much information with the world as possible about how to go green, we are also trying to make sure that the information is accurate.

We believe in collective intelligence and tapping the power of a broad group of people who have expertise and information to share, and using it in a useful way that makes the site scaleable and makes it diverse and rich with information. And this gives us a chance to, again, strike that careful balance between a trusted and authoritative resource on the one hand, but also getting intelligence and knowledge of lots of folks in different areas. We invite debate, so there are areas of the site where we ask what is better, paper vs. plastic at the grocery store, or whether or not organic coffee is as good as fair trade, or do you get both, etc. We always want to invite debates, and having our users and contributors involved makes that work.

We’ve got folks of different ages, backgrounds, credentials, and perspectives—from the dark green folks who are true environmentalists already living green and doing everything from buying green power to composting, and to the folks who are new to it. We are really trying to be a site and a resource for everyone. We are not trying to just cater to the one deep green consumer; we want the light green consumer, we want the person who’s never thought of themselves as being green, but has finally said, Hey I want to buy a hybrid or I want to buy cleaning products that are not toxic or I want to find a smart, cost-effective way to reduce energy use in my home.

One of my favorite stories is that we are starting to see kids in classrooms use GreenYour in school projects. There was a classroom in Hawaii where they actually sent us a whole host of new tips and facts that they have created about greening your wardrobe. And kids came up with great ideas on how to buy organic products online, and how to reuse and reduce consumption. I think those are some of the greatest examples because we’ve got young people who are going to inherit this earth that we have burdened with our waste and our consumption. It’s a great way to get them engaged and ultimately contribute to the knowledge resource we are developing.

Interview as told to Eric Steuer. Click the play button below to listen to the interview on which this piece is based.



Eric Steuer is the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for creators to share their work with the rest of the world. It also provides tools to make it easier for people to find creative work that’s been made available to them—and the rest of the world—to use, share, reuse etc., freely and legally. This is the third in a series of edited and condensed interviews called “We like to share,” in which Steuer talked to people who work across a variety of fields who use sharing as an approach to benefit the work that they do.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Nora Abousteit and Benedikta Von Karaisl are co-founders of Burda Style, an online resource and community for modern sewing.

Burda Style is an open door sewing platform. We offer copyright-free sewing patterns that you can download and print out. Around the sewing patterns you find a community and a “Sew-pedia” that explains sewing terms, helps with how to do things, and offers tips and tricks.

We publish one pattern a week, or one sewing project a week, and sometimes also a technique, or some other little side project. And our users always have the chance to upload their own patterns and project ideas, so it’s reciprocal; It’s really a mix of user-generated projects and Burda Style projects. But what you have to understand that it takes a long time to create a pattern—it can take 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 hours, and our users do that work, upload the results, and share that with everyone. Which is absolute amazing.

We didn’t start by asking the community to upload their immense amount of work and give it out for free. But we started doing it ourselves because we felt that a sewing pattern for a new generation needs to have new qualities that allow people to not only apply their own design, but possibly even support their independent businesses with it. We wanted to give people access to the tools for making their own styles out of the basic patterns we offer. And then we show you how to change it and how to develop it further. And the community, of course, thrives through this. They can take these patterns and apply their own tastes. But if they create something and share it, they benefit because other people can help them get their products into a better place.

We have one girl working with us right now who has her own line that she sells on Etsy. So she’s doing exactly what we were hoping to give the people tools to do. She’s using our patterns, so she can refer to the great fit of Burda and make her customers understand that whatever she made is based on that great fit, but she applies her own style and sense of design to it.

Any creative process should apply this concept—you can apply it to any kind of craft, design, or art. The bouncing of ideas and sharing of resources just brings much better results. It’s so exciting to see an idea get put out there, and to see it become a much bigger idea, with so many more perspectives and angles if you really share it. If you don’t know in the beginning what the benefit is, you’ll see in the end something great will come out of it through the community. It’s amazing.

Interview as told to Eric Steuer. Click the play button below to listen to the interview on which this piece is based.



Eric Steuer is the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for creators to share their work with the rest of the world. It also provides tools to make it easier for people to find creative work that’s been made available to them—and the rest of the world—to use, share, reuse etc., freely and legally. This is the third in a series of edited and condensed interviews called “We like to share,” in which Steuer talked to people who work across a variety of fields who use sharing as an approach to benefit the work that they do.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Jesse Dylan is a filmmaker, commercial director, and creator of will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” music video.

The benefit of the internet and how things are distributed now is that you are exposed to more than you ever have been before. The downside is that much of it is heavily copyrighted. With current copyright law, it’s hard to use anything legally, and patent law is stifling innovation; for example, science isn’t going to be as powerful in a world where you can patent an organism or a gene, because scientists won’t want to use the research if they have to deal with the patent holder. Creative Commons lets you license things with a clearly defined idea of how others can use it.

One of the great things about Creative Commons for me as a filmmaker is the fact that people who give CC licenses to their imagery make it very easy for me to use it and give attribution. I’m always looking for useful imagery—I use hundreds of images in a piece—and if I had to individually contact each creator, it would be an impossible task, and I wouldn’t end up using any of it. With Creative Commons, there is a huge database of stuff (imagery, songs, paintings, etc.) that I can use without worrying about anything except for simple attribution and making sure that I comply with the license. The internet becomes a platform that everyone can plug into to get things and see things and reuse things.

It should be clear to artists why they should publish their media for everybody to use. Using Creative Commons doesn’t mean giving up your copyright; it just means making it possible for your work to be licensed a different way. This doesn’t mean you can’t get a record deal, it just means you want to share your work and make it possible for other people to use it in their own creations. I think that is an important message, which is why copyright and patent law both need to be refined.

Will films, commercials, and ad campaigns become truly participatory, where the media changes to be something that isn’t delivered to people but is given to them to play with and be a part of? I think the market will drive whether people truly want that level of interactivity. I think that it will be easier and easier to do, but whether it becomes a really useful aspect of the web, I’m not sure.

I think you will see really interesting projects like Jonathan Harris’s work. He created We Feel Fine which pulls from a bunch of different sources around the world and kind of brings it all together. What comes out of it is this amazing way of looking at the world that only the web can give you. And I think Whalehunt.org is probably the best example of a new type of story telling: It allows the audience to watch and follow that story in whatever way they feel like slicing it.

My great sadness about it all is that I don’t think there are enough people who are up to speed technologically and artistically; we are not yet seeing the full might of what the internet can give us. So the fact that data visualization is at such a primitive stage is something that hopefully, over the coming years, will keep evolving into something more and more sophisticated.

Interview as told to Eric Steuer. Click the play button below to listen to a full version of the interview.



Eric Steuer is the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for creators to share their work with the rest of the world. It also provides tools to make it easier for people to find creative work that’s been made available to them—and the rest of the world—to use, share, reuse etc., freely and legally. This is the third in a series of edited and condensed interviews called “We like to share,” in which Steuer talked to people who work across a variety of fields who use sharing as an approach to benefit the work that they do.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Chris DiBona is the Open Source Programs Manager for Google.

I’ve been a programmer since I was 12 years old, so I always knew I would get into computers, computer science, or information technology. I started using Linux when I was in college back in 1995. Then as my professional career developed I realized I really liked Linux and the ideas behind it, and I liked the ideals behind open source and free software. That lead me to where I am today. Right now I’m Google’s open source program manager. What that means is that I monitor open source compliance for all the open source software that we use with the company. I also make sure that stuff that we release is under a proper open source license and, in the case of content, is under a proper Creative Commons license.

When you get involved with broad open-source movements—like Linux or Creative Commons—which are about sharing your work and expanding computer science for everybody, you actually get a lot from it individually. It’s incredibly fulfilling in ways that just programming for a large company wouldn’t be. Having the ability to go out there and be part of that means a lot to me. So at Google I get to help people release code and data using these licenses. I know I can look back on my time at Google (and previously at Linux) and say I didn’t just make myself or my employer better; I made computer science better.

When we were working on the Android cell phone operating system, we didn’t start from scratch; we started from Linux and open source libraries and then we built a ton of software around that. So now, for instance, if you were to build a new phone you might consider starting with Android rather than starting from Linux like we did, or from the bare metal skeleton the way that some manufactures will. So, when I look at computer science going forward I think to myself, Well wait a second, there’s three and a half billion lines of open source software out there on the internet; think of how much functionality that is; think of how foolish you would have to be to rewrite things that you don’t have to rewrite. I think that people want to concentrate on creating the new thing. But if you can start with this enormous base of functionality, why wouldn’t you?

I wish I could tell you that I had some great understanding of why regular people out there are so eager to share the things that they do with the rest of the world. I think I do understand it from a code perspective, but when it comes to sharing music and the rest, I think people get out of it what you get out of sharing anything: You get to find other people who are interested in those same kinds of things. You can share a piece of music and then, through either the criticisms or the adulation you receive, you might become a better musician. You get to make that which you share better, and I think that’s the coolest thing of all.

Interview as told to Eric Steuer. Click the play button below to listen to a full version of the interview.



Eric Steuer is the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for creators to share their work with the rest of the world. It also provides tools to make it easier for people to find creative work that’s been made available to them—and the rest of the world—to use, share, reuse etc., freely and legally. This is the third in a series of edited and condensed interviews called “We like to share,” in which Steuer talked to people who work across a variety of fields who use sharing as an approach to benefit the work that they do.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.