Free doorstops for everyone!
Here’s an innovative approach to the commercialisation of government data and publications: a U.S. not-for-profit is asking consumers to order their government documents, data and video through them. Public.Resource.Org will then seed those documents online, making them available to everyone.
I don’t know if this approach will be viable around the globe. Apparently, the U.S. government does not retain copyright on its publications. In Canada, many agencies retain Crown copyright and nominally require that permission be secured before their doucments are duplicated.
June 10th, 2007 07:27
I used to work at CanLII.org, a website dedicated to free access of legal sources and judicial decisions in Canada. The Legal Information Institute idea is a movement towards open and free access of the law to maintain institutional transparency. Partners included Australia (AustLII.org, the first website of this type), Hong Kong and AsianLII among others. CanLII was funded by the Canadian Bar Associations.
CanLII.org is a great resource, the team advocated and used Open Source Software and believed in capacity-building around the globe to bridge the digital divide. It’s too bad the Canadian federal government doesn’t engage external stakeholders to come up with different avenues towards transparency.