Two days ago Wikimedia Australia (WMAU) submitted a consultation paper for Future Directions to Stephan Conroy’s Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. This was almost entirely collated and authored by the very dedicated Liam Wyatt and Nathan Carter on behalf of WMAU.
The main points put forward by WMAU in the paper are:
* open access to public sector information
* developing Australia’s knowledge and skills base, and
* ensuring Australia’s regulatory framework enables the digital economy.
The document can be obtained and read here via Wikimedia Commons. I would appreciate, if you had a spare five minutes, if you could take the time to read it.
Regardless, I felt compelled to post the full overview of our position on open access to public sector information as I feel this is the most relevant and critical area of discussion:
Wikimedia Australia strongly supports the proposal to open access to public sector information (PSI) and believes there are many and varied benefits from opening PSI
for use and re-use. By opening PSI, the government will benefit individuals, business, the education sector and cultural institutions. Wikimedia Australia could improve the quality of content on Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia and Wikibooks. Contributors would be able to reference open PSI, which could be then verified by those using Wikimedia resources for educational and other purposes.Wikimedia Australia applauds the Australian Bureau of Statistics for its recent move to a Creative Commons licence for all information on its website and would like to see other government departments and agencies moving to a similar model in the future.
A number of cultural organisations in Australia are currently pursuing or have commenced increasing access to materials over the internet through digitisation. This allows Australians whose access is limited by geographical barriers to view parts of their collections.
What categories of Public Sector information are most useful to industry and other stakeholders to enable innovation and promote the digital economy?
We support the submission of the Australian Digital Alliance (ADA) and agree that it is difficult to predict what information will be useful to its users. From Wikimedia Australia’s perspective, the most useful PSIs are maps, archival audio-visual recordings, photography of public officials and of landmarks (both recent and historical). Significantly, government funded cultural works such as documentary film footage and radio broadcasts held in the National Archives and National Film and Sound Archives are held with great restriction on access and use. Opening such PSI would enable us to further develop content on Wikimedia projects using high quality supporting materials.
If PSI is made open access, what are the best formats to enable and promote use and reuse?
Wikimedia Australia supports the submission of Electronic Frontiers Australia in its call for the use of open standards. This refers especially not only to publishing PSI using the de-facto standards of information delivery, but also to publishing using the agreed interoperable and open standards of the relevant industry. For example, this means that although Microsoft’s proprietary .doc format is a commonly used document format, its open standard equivalent is .odt. Open standards have much greater possibility of remaining usable into the future as methods of accessing information change because they are not reliant on the patronage of a particular corporation. Furthermore, using open standards lowers the barriers to accessing PSI because, unlike proprietary standards, as there are no licensing fees required to be paid by the end user.
If PSI is made open access, what licensing terms would best facilitate the use of PSI?
It is the opinion of Wikimedia Australia that PSI belongs to the public and therefore should be treated as public domain by default. Any restrictions placed on the reuse of PSI should be justified on a case by case basis.
Wikimedia Australia would like to see Australian government works released in a similar fashion to those of federal government employees in the United States, that is straight into the public domain with no restrictions. It is this licensing scheme that has served to distribute United States PSI so broadly and thereby contribute to the wide distribution of American cultural works. For example, NASA’s deep space photography is available for all to use whilst content created by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation contains great restrictions on access and reuse. Consequently, few may access the ABC whilst all are aware of the works of NASA.
Should licensing terms distinguish between commercial uses and non-commercial uses and reuses?Should the government be unwilling to release PSI into the public domain, Wikimedia Australia believes that the Creative Commons Attribution licence would best facilitate use and reuse.
We strongly discourage any differentiation between commercial and non-commercial use of PSI on the basis that such limitations will only serve to limit usage of Australian government content in the broad range of cultural works which may be intended for sale.
Is there any additional economic modelling or other evidence to show the benefit to
Australia from open access of PSI?Creative Commons Australia has undertaken significant research into proving the commercial viability and distributive power of using open access models. Their case studies enumerate the advantages of open access, and especially the advantages of derivative works, for a variety of industries – including commercial, cultural and public sector.
Further reading:
* Complete Wikimedia Australia submission (PDF).
* The DBCDE consultation draft (PDF).
