Public Address | Cafe | Hard News: Uncapturing Content

Damian Stewart

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 00:33:05 +1300

Interesting.. As a musician (blatant plug: http://www.frey.co.nz) I'm more interested in the ideas surrounding Goal 2 (about New Zealanders being "at the forefront of creating and sharing digital content"). And this all seems in pretty good order.

I like the emphasis on the ideas of sharing, in particular the second…

Jason Kemp

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 22:50:46 +1300

The close off date for responses to the discussion paper is – 5pm, Wednesday 20 December 2006.

Is it also worth noting the feedback prefences or is this too prescriptive? (35 & 36) may help to provide some shape for the policy group who will be assessing various contributions.

Note this…

Rich of Observationz

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 13:29:50 +1300

Andrew: Creative Commons licenses (like most open source licenses) can't be effectively revoked (see [http://blog.tph-lex.com/archives/weekly/week_2003_02_23.html#removing])

Because you've granted a perpetual license to whoever downloaded the work to copy *and redistribute* it, they're entitled to keep on redistributing your work – so any attempt to yank it back is futile.

Andrew Dubber

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:21:55 +1300

I think it's worth noting for the record that New Zealand is miles ahead of the game in this area. Even if it's just in the territory of draft discussion documents, rather than actual policy, it's certainly heartening.

Despite what the BBC might have you believe, Creative Commons is far…

Compie

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 14:24:33 +1300

exactly what would be left for the Ministry of Information.

Russell Brown

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 13:49:01 +1300

As an example, I would be really interested in an interconnected world of ontologies that enabled a ubiquitous information environment.

Heh. You might have trouble getting that past Cabinet. Most of them would probably think you were taking the piss ...

Compie

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 13:39:16 +1300

Tom,

my fascination with data official and unofficial is in how can we make this data available to all, platform independent and context aware. Diving into the realm of Ontologies and how do data sets talk to each other is fascinating stuff being done by some very clever computer science…

Russell Brown

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 12:59:06 +1300

I don't entirely agree. Perhaps they shouldn't be in the business of presenting it, but they should be able to host it in a raw, documented, machine readable form, and leave it up to the creativity of others to present it in exciting and informative ways.

I actually think they…

Tom Beard

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 13:39:15 +1300

Russell, Rich:

The LINZ data is in a form known as the "Bulk Data Extract": basically, it's just a dump from their relational database, rather in a GIS-ready form. That makes a lot of sense, in a way, since they can make it available relatively cheaply (yes, $270 isn't too…

Compie

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 12:37:59 +1300

Frank

Good point about the digitalisation of cultural heritage. There is a lot of fluf in this document, but it is at least an acknowledgement of the difficult decisions and planning that is needed.

Russell,

interesting where one get's their collective knowledge these days. My weather sources are all over…

frank stark

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 11:47:18 +1300

First a disclaimer – as far as possible.

I work for the New Zealand Film Archive, a government-sounding, but actually independent, not-for-profit organisation which preserves all forms of New Zealand moving image material. Anything below which looks like, but is not explicitly stated as Film Archive policy is probably just…

Rich of Observationz

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 11:26:28 +1300

I think the government should be making as much information as possible accessible. The argument *for* charging for public sector data, of course, is that it costs money to collect/create, a minority will use it, so why should the general public purse subsidise that minority with free information (where have…

Tim Darlington

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 07:17:27 +1300

Your National Library action point sums up the big problem libraries have in taking this kind of thing on: we're usually official and public representatives of large organisations (city councils, universities, central govt in NLNZ's case), but constrained from making any decisions on that organisation's behalf. The bigger the organisation…

Russell Brown

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 22:03:43 +1300

Just as with the weather, the metservice will continue to provide the official word, but if you are like me, I have dozens of weather cams bookmarked that actually make my NZ weater picture, not the time delayed official picture.

The weather one's a really interesting example. Rick Huntington had…

Compie

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 20:05:29 +1300

Hey all,

I am currently in the last few weeks of my Masters thesis in Design looking at weather representation and information design.

One large component of the thesis has been user driven content and in particular folksonomie. I find this stuff fascinating, it would be a goal to develop…

David Slack

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 18:44:49 +1300

Have a look at North Shore City's Geographical Information System. I don't know if it's still leading-edge, but it was when they launched it.

Perhaps they might be persuaded to permit some of the liberation Tom has in mind?

Russell Brown

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 17:20:18 +1300

All of this is so frustrating because geodata is among the most mash-up-able. The amount of productivity and creativity that could be unleashed if it were freely available is astonishing (mashing it up with ZoomIn or Google Maps to create your own demographic or social analyses, for example), and when…

Tom Beard

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 16:16:26 +1300

There's a very gradual process of opening up one particular type of digital content: geographic data. In that case, there's generally not even any digitisation work required, since it's already in digital form, but the government gave the rights to SOEs and commercial companies so of course they want to…

Public Address

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 16:16:26 +1300

Discussion from blog post.