[okfn-discuss] Open Data is Civic Capital: Best Practices for "Open Government Data"

Wed Jul 1 11:10:53 UTC 2009

2009/6/20 Josh Tauberer <tauberer at govtrack.us>:
> On 06/08/2009 05:04 AM, Rufus Pollock wrote:
[...]
>> One extra item that is worth thinking about is how these kind of
>> principles will play outside of the US -- attitudes to Government data
>> in, e.g. European countries, is often rather different than in the
>> States (where we have federal data in the Public Domain by default).
>> For example, item 8 from the original 8 principles saying "data is not
>> subject to any copyright, patent, ..." is simply not true in the UK.
>
> True vs not true is the wrong words, right? Definition/requirements are met
> vs not met. In places where there is crown copyright, this definition will
> simply never hold. Too bad for them: they don't have an open government.

I think there was a misunderstanding here: what I meant was that in a
lot of jurisdictions (most of those which are not the USA!) government
content or data does *not* start out "not subject to copyright, patent
..." (whereas in the USA, at least in theory, for federal data/content
it does).

Thus, in many places, to make the data "open" it needs to be
explicitly licensed/dedicated. Now that could be by
licensing/dedicating to the public domain or, as is the case with the
UK PSI click-use license, making the data freely available for use and
reuse but subject to an attribution and (minor) integrity requirement.

At least in this second case, though the data is "open", that does not
mean it is "not subject to any copyright, ..." -- just in the way that
code licensed under the GPL or content under a Creative Commons
attribution license is open but the material is still "subject to
copyright".

> But I think as opposed to in the legal world where we want to say whether a
> software license is met or not met (for instance), in the practical world of
> government policy things need not be binary. It will be rare that we find
> data that meets all of the principles that I've pulled out for open
> government data. And that's fine.

Absolutely: a dataset may comply on some but not all criteria. This is
a little like what we are already doing with the resources listed on
CKAN, for example, see this list of items tagged with "gov":

<http://www.ckan.net/tag/read/gov>

We've used ticks and crosses to indicate how well a package does on
the two basic openness criteria: a) being openly licensed 2) being
available (for download in a simple, bulk form).

Regards,

Rufus