On 14/01/2011 10:24, Francis Irving wrote:
On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 08:58:44AM +0000, Mark Goodge wrote:
Secondly, and a point that's explicitly referred to in the press
release, is that the government wants to find a way to monetise all
the data that's going to be given away for free. The suggestion
seems to be that they want private sector investment, although it's
not clear what form that will take. I can think of three possible
routes this could take, which, from a user's perspective, are good,
neutral and bad respectively.
What are they?
Well, the simplest is that the government could invite private sector
sponsorship of data that's currently available - the government gets the
money, the sponsor gets the publicity. Or, for that matter, it could
simply sell advertising on the PDC website. I think that's neutral, I
have no particular objection to advertising or sponsorship per se
provided it doesn't have any editorial effect, so to speak.
The second is that the government could ask commercial organisations to
stump up the cost of providing data that currently isn't available for
free, either because it costs too much to collate or because it's
currently a revenue generator and the government doesn't want to lose
that. Again, this would be a kind of sponsorship deal, with the
commercial sponsor getting nothing specific to them in return other than
publicity - although they would, of course benefit from the release of
the data along with everyone else. I think that would be broadly
beneficial, especially if it results in the opening up of significant
additional data. The downside is the risk that the lack of sponsorship
might be used as an excuse for not providing data that otherwise could
have been.
The final possibility, and the one that worries me most, is that
commercial organisations could be invited to sponsor the cost of
releasing new datasets on the understanding that they would have a
monopoly on some or all aspects of its use. That would clearly be
undesirable from an open data perspective.
Mark
--
http://mark.goodge.co.uk
http://www.ratemysupermarket.com
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