Hi all,
We are an organized group of volunteers supporting Wikipedia outreach in New England. We are currently in the process of forming a regional chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, the international non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia and its sister projects, including Wiktionary, Wikiquote and Wikinews.
One of our group’s goals is to work with governmental, cultural and educational organizations in New England to expand the public’s access to knowledge and creative works. Much of the cultural heritage of our region is not online or is available only under restrictive copyright licenses that make it difficult for citizens to use, share or build upon these works. If this material becomes available to the public under a less restrictive license, it can be used in myriad ways, such as in Wikipedia articles or student projects.
We would like to meet with you to discuss changing the licensing of the photos your office already posts online on Flickr. Right now, the license terms your office uses prevent us from using these photos on Wikipedia. By making this change, you can help insure that Wikipedia can use high-quality photographs to illustrate articles on public officials, government agencies and programs.
Your office is currently releasing these photos under <>, but we would like you to release the images under a CC-BY or CC-BY-SA license. CC-BY allows anyone, including commercial entities, to distribute the work and to adapt or remix it, under the condition that the work be attributed to the original creator. CC-BY-SA adds an additional condition that anyone who alters your photograph must release their version under the same license. Implementing this change is trivial – it simply requires adjusting a setting on your office’s Flickr account.