Slides from the session at the 2019 CC Global Summit in Lisbon, Portugal: https://sched.co/MhKv CC Search is out of beta and provides access to 300 million images across 19 content providers, with more in the pipeline. The CC Search team will present the current state of CC Search, including a new vision and strategy for 2019, front end features, and how everything works under the hood, both technically and legally, including a new CC Catalog API that provides access to the catalog. In the second half of the session, we will host a Q&A and discussion on the ways we might internationalize CC Search, either via code, a push API, translations, or integration of image collections from different regions. We’ll also discuss new applications that could be built on top of the catalog itself that go beyond Search. Finally, we’ll also preview what’s coming next in the roadmap, and how anyone may get involved via the CC developer community and/or usability testing.

1. 2019 CC Global Summit
Creative Commons Search team
Led by Kriti Godey, Director of Engineering
Jane Park, Director of Product & Research
State of CC Search
"First Image of a Black Hole" by European Southern Observatory is licensed under CC BY 2.0

2. Agenda
‣ Current state of CC Search and team (6 members!)
‣ Vision & Strategy
‣ How it all works
‣ What’s next + how you can get involved
‣ Demo
‣ Q&A and Discussion

3. Current State of CC Search
• 300 million images, 19 providers
• Images of: art objects, graphic art & designs, flowers, science, a lot of
(but not everything) on Flickr, initial set of CC0 3D designs
• “One-click” attribution tools: rich text, html embed
• Redesign: cleaner home page, improved navigation & filters
• User feedback and usage analytics

4. CC Search Vision in 2016
“to build a ‘front door’ to the Commons with the ultimate goal to find and
index all 1.1 billion CC licensed works on the web”

9. CC Search Vision in 2019
“CC Search is a leading tool for creators looking to discover and reuse free
resources with greater ease and confidence”

10. KRITI GODEY
Director of Engineering
CC Search Team

11. SOPHINE CLACHAR
Data Engineer
CC Search Team

12. ALDEN PAGE
Software Engineer
CC Search Team

13. BRENO FERREIRA
Front End Engineer
CC Search Team

14. SARAH PEARSON
Product Counsel
CC Search Team

15. JANE PARK
Director of Product & Research
CC Search Team

16. CC Search Vision in 2019
“CC Search is a leading tool for creators looking to discover and reuse free
resources with greater ease and confidence”

17. 2019 Vision & Strategy CHANGE
optimization
pivot or persevere
PRODUCT
STRATEGY
(hypotheses)
VISION
(true north)
Value hypothesis — Users are motivated by ease of reuse of
free resources to come to CC Search
Growth hypothesis — Viral engine of growth through
attribution displayed prominently in all reuses
CC Search is a leading tool for creators looking to discover and reuse free resources with
greater ease and confidence
CC Search
CC API
CC Catalog

18. How we expect reuse to happen
Reuse somewhere out there
Download
Reuse on the discoverable web
(open & non-open)
Default
CC Search Front End
Catalog
Curation on
CC Search Front End
CC Search integrated in
other sites/software via API
Attribution Story
Journey
Impact

19. "click" by katie cowden is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

20. Current Product Stack
CC Catalog
CC Catalog API
CC Search Front End

21. CC Catalog
• CC Catalog is a growing collection of 300 million Creative Commons
works from ~20 different sources, collected by CC Data Engineer
Sophine Clachar
• That’s 288 million more works and 14 more data sources than we had
last year

23. How do we find CC content?
Common Crawl
‣ Useful for discovery - finding websites with lots of CC licensed works
‣ We can use Common Crawl to catalog works without even visiting the
source website.
Bespoke API integrations
‣ We write scripts to search for Creative Commons content on your website
and scrape them in bulk. ex: Flickr, Thingiverse, Cleveland Art Museum

24. The near future for CC Catalog
• Wikimedia Commons, Europeana, NYPL and Cleveland Library coming
soon
• Open Textbooks by the end of the year

25. CC Catalog API
• A simple open-source interface for searching hundreds of millions of
Creative Commons works in a few hundred milliseconds
• Responsible for filtering and ranking works. Which license has the user
selected? Which images have 404’d due to link rot? What’s the best result
set for a given query?
• A framework for indexing new Creative Commons content as we acquire it
in CC Catalog

26. Current status
• The API is open for developers to experiment with - visit https://
api.creativecommons.engineering
• Terms of use and rate limits
• If you find it useful, please contact us and tell us about your use case

27. Deployment and infrastructure automation
Back-end server language
Infrastructure host
Search engine
Database
Technical stuff

29. Near term search improvements
• Using some popularity-based ranking to determine which works have
been linked to the most
• Using AI to automatically tag images
• Collecting more metadata about images
• Smarter querying using boosting

30. The future of the API — content discovery
• The “Push API” - instead of us manually finding CC works, trusted institutions can send
them to us!
• Wilder, pie-in-the-sky idea: we crawl your works the instant you publish them on the
internet
‣ The user embeds a CC button image next to their work
‣ We track the image to find out where the work is located, dispatch a crawler to pick
up machine-readable attribution information (ccREL), and add it to the catalog
‣ Glaring issues: misattribution, vandalism, privacy, moderation, lack of tools for
generating ccREL

31. CC Search Front End
A web application designed to facilitate discovery and reuse of CC-
Licensed works, providing users with a friendly UI driven by the CC
Catalog API.

32. How does it work?
Vue.JS AppCC Catalog API CC Search Frontend

34. Legal considerations
• Copyright
• images hosted elsewhere
• embedding as © use?
• Attribution and licensing information
• wrong info
• insufficient info
• Future decisions: updating & verifying catalog, dealing with takedowns

35. Validated Learning
Fancy way of saying that everything we build is for our users,
that we will learn about how and why they use CC Search,
and that we incorporate that learning back into the product.

36. Usage data
• Graylog dashboard for CC Catalog API usage
• Google analytics
‣ Attribution button clicks
‣ GA referral links
‣ Html embed

37. User feedback & usability testing
• User feedback survey
• Image reuse survey
• Github repos
• #cc-usability channel on CC Slack, #feedbackfridays
• support-search@creativecommons.org
• Monthly usability tests

38. User research to come
• User research centered on “Creators making new works using existing free
content”
‣ Creators making designs, imagery and art works (commercial or independent)
‣ Creators illustrating a text or text-based resource (blog, journalistic articles,
educational/academic texts or presentations)
‣ Creators making a video
• User research for adding open texts, e.g. “Educators seeking access to free
textbooks in one place”

39. CC Search — Agile Development Process
• 2019 Roadmap broken down by quarter
• Quarter broken down into two week sprints
• Twice weekly “stand-ups”
• Releases of CC Search and the API every Thursday
• Community feedback on Fridays (#feedbackfriday)
• Everything tracked openly on Github

40. How you can get involved

41. CC Search Development Community
• Two ways to join the developer community
• Help us improve the CC Catalog, API, and CC Search
• Integrate the CC Catalog API into your own projects (experimental)
• We’ve had a lot of amazing community contributions already

42. Old CC Search layout

43. New CC Search layout

44. CC Search Development Community
• Visit the CC Open Source website: https://creativecommons.github.io
• List of CC projects
• Contribution guidelines, including how to find things to contribute to
• CC Technical blog
• Project ideas for new CC related products

45. Development Community: Google Summer of Code
• CC will have five students working with us full-time this summer via
Google Summer of Code, including
• CC Catalog data visualization
• CC Search browser extension
• CC WordPress plugin updates, including CC Catalog API integration
• Follow along on #cc-developers and #cc-gsoc on Slack

46. Development Community: Open Source Session
Come to our Open Source at Creative Commons session
tomorrow at 1:30 PM in the New Delhi room!

47. Join a monthly usability test
• Email jane@creativecommons.org if you’re interested, and I’ll add you
to the queue
• Join the #cc-usability channel on CC Slack and provide feedback on
#feedbackfridays

48. ✓ Catalog 325 million works
✓ Ship product vision & strategy
✓ Ship CC API strategy
✓ Ship developer documentation
✓ Ship “Attribution in Frame” MVP
✓ Determine metrics & set up for validated learning
✓ Complete QA sprint to ship CC Search 1.0
✓ Ship CC Search 1.0 as default
✓ Soft launch CC API
✓ Make CC Search accessible
✓ User research for open texts
✓ Run usability tests
✓ GSoC (usability)
2019 ROADMAP
(subject to change)
Start of Q1 (January)
End of Q1 (March)
Global Summit
End of Q2 (June)
End of Q3
(September)
End of Q4
(December)✓ Integrate open texts
✓ User research for open audio
✓ ID API partners
✓ Run usability tests
✓ Branding for CC Search
✓ GSoC (usability)
✓ Integrate open audio
✓ Prototype API partner
integration
✓ Run usability tests
✓ GSoC prototype integration

50. Q&A

51. Discussion

52. Discussion
1. Why do you use CC Search? (e.g. to find images for a blog post)
2. Is CC Search useful for this purpose?
3. How can it be better? e.g. How can we make the tool more relevant to
your region?
4. What collections would you like to see in CC Search? Can you help
connect us to those people?