The purpose of this page is to collect references to sources relating to the quantification of online commons.
Finding and Quantifying Australia's Online Commons
Creative Commons Semi-Official Statistics
Change in apparent Creative Commons usage, June 2006 - March 2007
Initial uptake of Creative Commons version 2.5 Australia licences
The future
This all started when I presented a paper at the 2006 Unlocking IP conference, titled Finding and Quantifying Australia's Online Commons. This has recently been published, after much revision and editing, in SCRIPT-ed, a UK law and technologies journal. In this paper, I collected some data using Yahoo advanced search, in an attempt to ascertain how many web documents existed that were part of the commons, focussing mostly on AEShareNet and Creative Commons licenses, but also considering other licenses such as software licenses, and the public domain. The published version is available in the following dot point. The original version presented at the Unlocking IP conference is still available here. The spreadsheet where I stored my data and made my graphs for this article is available here (the June '06 / UIP conference version is here).
The Creative Commons Wiki has a page on licence statistics. It includes a brief note on methodology, numbers and trends in repository data (Flickr, etc.), a few simple graphs, and a bunch of links to Creative Commons blog posts about quantification, trends, distribution, etc.
When revising the paper for publication in SCRIPT-ed, I updated my data to include the new Australian Creative Commons version 2.5 licences. This gave me an interesting chance to compare the data sets collected in June '06 and March '07. I didn't have time to include these data and a discussion of their meaning in my article, but I did publish some interesting graphs of apparent change in usage on The House of Commons. The specific post if available in the following dot point. The spreadsheet where I compared data and created the graphs for this is also available here.
In an effort to gauge the accuracy of these methods, I collected some more meticulous data on the growth of the Australian Creative Commons version 2.5 licences. That data can be seen in this graph. It graphs a by-hand estimate of how many distinctly different uses of the licences are returned by Yahoo. E.g. when a whole web site is licensed with a given licence, it is presented as many results by Yahoo, but for the purposes of this data collection, such a web site is considered a single use. However, Yahoo will not return more than 1000 results for a given search, so this data collection was only possible while the take-up of the new licences was still in its early stages. The spreadsheet where I stored data on the uptake of the Australian Creative Commons version 2.5 licences is available here. This spreadsheet also tracks the growth of the apparent usage of these licences as expressed by Yahoo search results in the "of about" field (i.e. how many distinct URLs Yahoo believes it was able to find).
This list of resources presented here is just a start, and community participation is encouraged in the broadest sense. If you have or know of any other sources relevant to quantification of commons - either actual data or methodologies for their collection - please contact me at ben.bildstein(AT)student.unsw.edu.au.
