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Hey Philip, thanks so much for joining us. You are behind projects like LocalWiki and DavisWiki. Tell us a little bit about you.

You just released i-am-cc.org a service that lets you publish your Instagrams under a Creative Commons license. What’s the idea behind the service and why do you think we need it?

The idea is really simple: give people a really easy way to license their Instagram photos under a Creative Commons license and make this database of Creative Commons photos easily accessible. I-Am-CC.org is needed for two reasons: to empower people to share their photos under the license of their choice and to help people find Creative Commons photos more easily. Flickr has been such a tremendous source of progress for the free culture movement, and I wanted to do something to help push things in the right direction again.

An important part of i-am-cc.org is the API. What would you really like to see built upon it?

The first thing I’d love to see is integration into Creative Commons search engines like search.creativecommons.org and photopin.com. Beyond that, the sky’s the limit. Pretty much anyone who’s been using the Instagram API should think about using the I-Am-CC.org API.

One thing I’ve been really interested in, and what spurred me to work on this stuff, was to be able to find freely licensed photos for particular geographic areas or inclusion in LocalWiki projects. Building an easy way to filter and import photos into LocalWiki instances would be really fun.

Do you have any future plans for the service? More features?

When I get a spare moment I’d like to add a simple search to the UI. I’d also like to display a lot of the metadata we’re capturing but not displaying, such as tags. Beyond that, the most requested feature is the ability to selectively license photos under CC instead of a blanket license. I totally understand this, but it’s actually kind of tricky. When I hacked i-am-cc.org together I just wanted it to be a really simple time interval because that was the easiest way I could see the service working without using too many Instagram API requests. We’ll figure something out.

Would you shut down your service, if Instagram would add Creative Commons to their settings, like Flickr does?

Assuming they provided API access, it might make sense to shut it down, yes. I’d be delighted! I’d only shut it down after providing a static dump of the database, of course.

I was thinking of providing some non-instagram license bridges later on, though, hence the generic domain name. The basic idea of using OAuth to ‘hack’ a service into allowing external license agreements is fun.

Lastly, what is the best Instagram picture you recently found, that is licensed under a creative commons license?

There are so many! I’ve really been digging cyberdee’s photos from Croatia: i-am-cc.org/instagram/cyberdee.

You can find Philip Neustrom on Twitter: @philipn.

We used tamyal3ryaniis photo for the illustration above.