Today we interview The Guardian's Technology editor Charles Arthur on the Free Our Data campaign, aimed at persuading the British government to stop charging for non personal data collected at the taxpayers expense....
MT Your Free Our Data campaign aims to persuade the British government to stop charging for data collected by public bodies at the tax-payers expense. Can you tell us why you think this issue is important?
CA Because if you set a price on data - any sort of data - then you naturally limit the number of people or organisations that are going to use it....Price limits use. Economists know that....So why is the price important when it comes to information and data collected by UK government organisations? Because the information is being collected on our behalf, as taxpayers and government subjects (what a horrible phrase that latter is; I'm sure no American thinks of themselves as a "subject") - no, better to say as taxpayers and *citizens*. If the government, or its organisations, aren't collecting the data in order to benefit us as citizens, then they should not be collecting it. But if they are collecting it, then they should make it available to us. The experience of the web shows that the zillions of people out there can make more interesting use of the data that government generates than government itself can. The example of theyworkforyou.com is a wonderful one. The data there is what Parliament generates....Searched through Hansard, it's pretty hard to navigate. Searched via TheyWorkForYou - which is what MPs do - it is much easier; that and publicwhip.org, another MySociety.org mashup, are the sites that MPs use. Isn't that indicative? A non-government site is the one which MPs use to find out about what's been going on in Parliament?...
The lost opportunity that setting a price barrier to data access means that we can’t see how people might use OS data to even better effect than there already is....
A US research paper suggested that the US private sector is much bigger in these fields because the US government provides data for free, on the basis that taxpayers have already paid for it. That's why NASA pictures are free for reproduction: that's why you all know the name of NASA, see the pictures from the Hubble Telescope, and so on. By contrast, can you name the place where European Space Agency rockets are launched?...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/27/2006 01:46:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
