# Freesouls and Photo Commons

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2007-06-18T10:29:29Z


Last month, I blogged about one of my new "missions" - to take photographs of people and post them under a CC-BY license so that Wikipedians and other people writing articles have access to photographs that they can use in articles. There is a problematic lack of usable photos of most people as any Google Image search will prove. I've been talking about this a bit more and Larry suggest we start a "freesouls" movement to encourage people to post take and post their photos under a free license.

I've started tagging any decent quality images of people on my Flickr stream tagged with their name and the tag "freesouls". If you're interested in joining, just start using the tag.

I did a workshop about photography at the iCommons Summit and discussed freesouls. One of the issues that came up about portraits was the issue of moral rights, model releases and privacy. We've decided to make the photography discussion at iCommons a permanent thing and will be setting up a "node" for this. If you're interested in discussing these issues, please join the node and the mailing list I'm setting up. For now, you can just sign up on my wiki or the Flickr group until we have a more permanent place for the node.

We'll mostly be discussing norms and legal issues around taking and sharing portraits as well techniques, tools, services and events. We'll also try to put together a tutorial online. We're planning to do the workshop again at iCommons Summit '08 in Sapporo.

Update: You can sign up for the Photo Commons mailing list here: http://labml.ito.com/mailman/listinfo/photo-commons_labml.ito.com





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#### Categories

Creative Commons, Photo