I received an email this evening from a member of WikiMedia Australia with some exciting news about where content on the ABC is beginning to head.
In a first for the ABC, their collaborative Pool project will be releasing content under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. Why is this exciting? Why should you care?
Creative Commons AU elaborates better and more originally on a posting today:
This means that people can tweak, twist and remix the files to create their own creative interpretation of the themes of evolution and mutation, and share these results with the rest of the world. The idea is to build a whole community up around the project, remixing and reusing the ABC archival material in new and previously unthought of ways. This all culminates in a public exhibition of Gene Pool pieces at Melbourne’s RMIT on November 24th - the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s book The Origin of Species.
As far as we’re aware, this is the first time ABC archival material has been released for remixing under a Creative Commons licence - and we’re very excited. Just imagine what gems might be hidden away in ABC filing cabinets, waiting to be discovered and put to good use by the population that payed for them in the first place.
So keep an eye on Gene Pool, and see how you are inspired by the material they release. Next up is a video from ABC TV’s Monday Conference in 1971 featuring entomologist Paul Ehrlich talking about climate change. Yes, that’s right - climate change in 1971. Just imagine the potential.
I couldn’t have put it better. Imagine the potential. Well, you don’t need to imagine the potential as it is quite visible.
The public broadcaster (the ABC) is funded by Australian taxpayers and therefore it makes sense that a good deal of that content should be immediately available for those who ‘own’ it to reinterpret and share. This is not to say that all content should be released to do so, but each piece of content should be considered.
Furthermore the period of time under which new material or existing archived material is also released needs to be discussed.
For example, the remix culture of Gen-Y have become used to using digital sources such as Wikipedia as starting points for reference material. The opening of archived material of the ABC related to education and research to reinterpretation, citation or creative works would raise the standard currently seen in purely user-generated environments.
There is a lot of reporting on the gradual, and somewhat murkey, commercialisation of the ABC (their digital content like news and weather are licenced off to companies like Bigpond who earn revenue from selling advertising around the same content for example). The ABC’s reasons for doing so is to reduce the reliability on tax-based-funding for broadcast content (and a habit that has evolved from selling CDs/DVDs/merchandise to offset funding cutbacks on ABC funding under the Howard government).
Somewhere, a happy balance needs to be found between user-generated-content and quality content that is funded by the Government through tax and consumers through merchandise/post-broadcast-sales. To adopt a blanket policy would be folly; the result being either the ABC becoming irrelevant to the next generation or becoming another YouTube largely devoid of any quality content.
Notes/further reading:
* Post header image via francois@flickr
* Original 2008 press release for the launch of the Pool project can be read here.
