Some background on this document, its history and impact, in rough chronological order.
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April 4, 2013. @JoshData worked with the DC Council to get the DC Code released under a CC0 public domain license, following a kerfuffle raised by @tmcw over its prior lack of public availability outside of a locked-down vendor.
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May 9, 2013. The White House published a Memorandum on Open Data Policy (M-13-13) and a related executive order. The policy recommended the use of "open licensing" for all open government data. @JoshData wrote that this was a step backward.
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May 31, 2013. @JoshData's contract work for HHS also gave him the opportunity to try out some very simple, best practice license language on a CKAN extension he worked on for HealthData.gov.
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May-June 2013. The White House released Project Open Data, its guidance for agencies in implementing the Obama administration's open data executive order. @JoshData and @konklone, along with others, opened some discussions with Project Open Data, encouraging its licensing section to have stronger language and clearer norms around the nature of license-free US government information.
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August 19, 2013. To clarify the issue, @JoshData, @konklone, and @jwyg, with help from @tvol and @punkish, produced version 1 of this guidance document, referencing the two previous in-government examples @JoshData had worked on, and he blogged about the motivation.
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August 25, 2013. Partly in response to our nudging, Project Open Data (POD) began the process to re-license itself --- the POD schema and associated code --- as international public domain under CC0, and completed re-licensing on October 17, 2013. (This also yielded an interesting discussion around Unlicense vs CC0.)
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September 3, 2013. The CFPB then licensed its qu project internationally as CC0, explicitly citing our document and the prior Project Open Data thread as motivation. In that qu thread, @Burton indicated our document applied more to data than software - so our v2 added a paragraph about that.
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October 22, 2013. The @cfpb then also took its eRegs platform and licensed it as CC0 internationally, citing the Project Open Data and qu threads.
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December 12, 2013. Version 2 of this document was released at theunitedstates.io/licensing. It includes a rewritten introduction, guidance on licensing software, and a number of other tweaks. A breakdown and some discussion of the changes can be found on pull request #1. This version was signed onto by a wide variety of people and public interest organizations.
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April 7, 2014. Creative Commons added its name to the guidance as a supporter and co-author.
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May 9, 2014. On the 1-year anniversary of the Memorandom on Open Data Policy, the White House released a U.S. Open Data Action Plan, using language from our guidance (see page 2) to release the plan into the worldwide public domain.
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July 29, 2014. 18F, a recently created technology and services team inside the General Services Administration, publicly adopts an open source policy that incorporates this project's recommendations into its default software license.
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August 12, 2014. The United States Digital Service (USDS) launches, along with a "Playbook" including a checklist on defaulting to open that specifically calls for dedicating government data to the international public domain and cites CC0.
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November 23, 2015. The District of Columbia makes CC0 the default for all DC open source projects.