[open-heritage] Tate Online Strategy 2010–12

[Rob Myers]

On 11/22/2010 03:43 PM, ianibbo at gmail.com wrote:
>
> I'm more than happy to raise the issue of licensing the data with
> them...

That would be great!

> Question (For my own benefit really)... apart from being good
> citizens.. whats in it for cultural orgs to adopt these licenses? I'm
> always worried that my answers to this question is badly lacking, and
> that prevents uptake of the licenses... Any suggestions?
> (If we can come up with some I can start a page on the wiki - toolkit
> for explaining the benefit of OKD-compliant licenses to cultural
> institutions or something akin to that)

A wiki page is a great idea. I'm sure Wikimedia will have some good 
explanations of why working with them is good for museums, and that can 
be easily generalised.

I *must* have some resources for this somewhere on my blog or the old 
FCUK wiki but I can't find anything just at the moment. So, anecdotally:

Being a good citizen is of value to the institution. It benefits the 
institution by encouraging contributions from individuals and companies, 
co-operation from other institutions, and support from funders.

State-funded institutions that use restrictive licencing are denying 
value to taxpayers and displacing private competitors who could use the 
data.

Using more restrictive licences will restrict the institution as well: 
they cannot incorporate corrections, improvements or additions to their 
data if their licence is noncommercial and they themselves stand to 
profit from it, or if the licence doesn't allow modification.

Not having to police commercial use of the work saves administration 
costs. Not having to worry about how much more money could be made from 
access to the data if it was charged for rather than given away 
non-commercially (probably less than the administration costs ;-) ) 
removes pressures on the project that might skew its outcomes.

Licences that encourage the maximum distribution and use of data and 
other resources will provide the maximum network effects to raise the 
institution's profile and increase demand for its non-reproducible 
assets: the experience of its actual collection and location. This blog 
post from the Australian Powerhouse museum points out that Wikipedia is 
a major driver of traffic to their website:

http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2009/04/02/working-with-wikipedia-backstage-pass-at-the-powerhouse-museum/

(There's some more good posts on that blog as well about how working 
fairly with the right free projects can benefit museums -

http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2009/08/14/some-clarifications-on-our-experience-with-free-content/

http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2010/01/25/why-flickr-commons-and-why-wikimedia-commons-is-very-different/

http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2009/04/08/one-year-in-the-commons-on-flickr-statistics-and-a-book/ 
)

The classic example of the success of an OKD-compliant-licenced-project 
is Wikipedia. Whether a similar project using a non-free licence would 
have succeeded as spectacularly isn't a theoretical question: I worked 
for h2g2.com, which failed at the same time that Wikipedia was taking off.

- Rob.