On Feb 16 2010, Rob McKinnon wrote:
On 16 February 2010 16:41, Timothy Green <[email protected]> wrote: Your volunteers are welcome to help me maintain any data I may make public. One of the licenses I'm considering using for the primary PPC data allows for commercial reuse without a charge, ie the same licensing approach taken by Openly Local: http://openlylocal.com/info/licence_info
Well, I don't see much point in using volunteers multiply to develop essentially the same data. I take your point on alternative licensing schemes.
As to be expected there are many tricks involved in this sort of project. Currently on Edmund's website the PPC lists contain several MPs that are not restanding in the 2010 election. Another issue to consider is the implications of republishing PPC biographies verbatim - is there a risk of copyright infringement?
I'd expect that those sort of mistakes would be pretty quick to clean up, especially with volunteers. Copyright on biographies, I imagine something will be worked out, depending on whether those or some abbreviated form would end up in the final interface anyway.
I agree that value-added data will attract more public and commercial interest. Having accurate and well sourced primary data is crucial. A business model that allows for resources like this to be financially sustainable after the election would be the ideal outcome.
It seems to me that the best way to have accurate primary data is to avoid spreading effort over multiple attempts at compiling a database. I'm not sure why a list of PPCs would be financially sustainable after the election, unless I misunderstand you?
I'm not intending to get into an argument over this, just I think it'd be tragic to end up with a whole bunch of partially complete databases rather than a single complete one.
Rob
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