Dear Cultural-patners-l and Commons-l,
As some of you know I'm currently in Qatar at the invitation of CreativeCommons Qatar talking to various GLAMs. We met with the good folks from Al Jazeera English the other day and discussed various ways that we could work together in the future - based on the great early work of the Al Jazeera CC portal: http://cc.aljazeera.net/ (copied in to this email is Bilal from Al Jazeera and Brian from CC.Qatar). One of the specific questions that they asked me was about why does Wikipedia use screenshots from those videos rather that using their still images from flickr directly. The reason is, as we know, was that the Al Jazeera photostream on Flickr was licensed as cc-by-ND.

So... It is now my pleasure to pass on a message from Bilal:

Hi Liam - I've updated our Flickr account and all images are now available under the CC share-alike option.

EXCELLENT! :-) Everyone, have a look at some of the gorgeous photos available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aljazeeraenglish/sets/ they cover topics from Hajj to the Gaza War, and many different countries involved in the "Arab Spring". Not only are these beautiful pictures with great provenance they are also extremely encyclopedic and impossible to replace. They are all taken by Al Jazeera journalists in the field. Furthermore, this is an amazingly fast turnaround time for changing a large institution's copyright policy :-)

Let's start getting these across to Wikimedia Commons in the Category "files from Al Jazeera" http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Files_from_Al_Jazeera and start integrating them into various WP articles!

Is there someone who can dedicate a bot to sucking these across to Flickr straight away?
Perhaps we can also create a nice "partnership template" too? http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Partnership_templates

Sincerely,
-Liam

wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata