[Aust-NZ] Geoscience Australia goes CC-BY [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[John Smith]

2009/12/7 Gavin Treadgold <gt at kestrel.co.nz>:
> Adopting CC is the start of a slope that is ultimately going to end up with government agencies having to either provide a process of accepting edits/corrections from citizens, or having citizens maintain their own more accurate derivations of datasets because the official release is not being funded to maintain it to an acceptable level of quality. I think the take-home point here is that funding needs to be made available to agencies to ensure that the owner of a dataset is able to accept end-user corrections. Note that not all datasets need this, but some such as roads, walking tracks etc change frequently and need corrections applied. Those derived sets that are the result of analysis and calculation are far less likely to require end-user correction - although this will depend on the changes in the factual datasets that are act as inputs. But the factual datasets will - we do after all live in dynamic communities, landscapes and infrastructure and we need agencies to reflect changes in these datasets in a timely manner.

This article is very interesting, by giving away data for free, the US
govt made more money indirectly than the EU does directly by selling
the data.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/mar/09/education.epublic

Pira pointed out that the US's approach brings enormous economic
benefits. The US and EU are comparable in size and population; but while
the EU spent €9.5bn (£6.51bn) on gathering public sector data, and
collected €68bn selling and licensing it, the US spent €19bn - twice as
much - and realised €750bn - over 10 times more. Weiss pointed out:
"Governments realise two kinds of financial gain when they drop charges:
higher indirect tax revenue from higher sales of the products that
incorporate the ... information; and higher income tax revenue and lower
social welfare payments from net gains in employment."