At Seneca we showed that the Creative Commons registry is technically doable and we wrote software to show how. Now the project needs to be taken over by another organization interested in running it. We don’t have the infrastructure at Seneca to host it.

I would love to one day see Wikimedia (perhaps via Wikidata) and the Internet Archive running the system.

Wikidata’s raison d’être seems to fit perfectly with the goals of this registry, but I don’t know anything about their systems or APIs. I suspect that they have a specific way to receive, query, and provide data which is incompatible with ours. The registry server is running custom software and its core can’t be replaced without ballooning the hosting costs (see the Architecture post).

The Internet Archive is also a perfect match for the registry – they are already trying to store everything, including all freely licenced images. But again – they would need to add a hook to their software that will call a hashing function and a web API to register the image, that’s custom work that they don’t currently have.

I’ve worked on this project with my students and it’s really cool stuff. Unfortunately I have a full time job which means I can’t be the one taking care of this system in the long term, but I would be very happy to discuss it with anyone who is interested. I can explain what we’ve done, explain the code, help with setup, and really help in any way that’s not a long-term committment.

Please get in touch if this sounds like something interesting to you!