creating data commons - by commoners for commoners

Control of Data  and the desire to control even the Commons is what many Governments want to do . And do. I know that from personal experience. Trying to access so called Public and even Private collections is worse that trying to extract a tooth (without anesthesia) from those tasked with  managing them.

The ease with which the National Archives and Commons can now be controlled just makes the battle for them much more important.  Luckily for us our ability to  create a licence fee and hassle free Commons  in the new digital duniya  is seeing more than just a flicker of hope.

 Photographs and  Art works don't just have to disappear into the dark depths of Government and Private Collections. They should not.


For most of the last decade, the greatest repository of freely available images has beenFlickr, a privately-owned public space that hosts more than 240 million creative commons images, dwarfing the 14 million items in the Prints & Photographs Division of the U.S. Library of Congress. Pick any Wikipedia article at random; if it has an image, there’s a good chance it comes from Flickr.

But Flickr has become a ghost town in recent years, conservatively managed by its corporate parent Yahoo, which has ceded ground to photo-sharing alternatives likeFacebook (and its subsidiary Instagram), Google Plus (and Picasa and Panoramio), and Twitter services (TwitPic and Yfrog). [4] An increasing share of the Internet’s visual resources are now locked away in private cabinets, untagged and unsearchable, shared with a public no wider than the photographer’s personal sphere. Google’s Picasa and Panoramio support creative commons licenses, but finding the settings is not easy. And Facebook, the most social place to share photos, is the least public. Hundreds of millions of people who have photographed culturally significant events, people, buildings and landscapes, and who would happily give their work to the commons if they were prompted, are locked into sites that don’t even provide the option. The Internet (and the mobile appverse) is becoming a chain of walled gardens that trap even the most civic-minded person behind the hedges, with no view of the outside world.



Canton Public Library, 1903, Canton, Ohio; entry in the Wiki Loves Monuments USA contest. [Photo byBgottsab]






Imagine the photographers of the Farm Security Administration — Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Marion Post Wolcott — uploading their work directly to Wikimedia Commons. Many federal agencies do in fact have Flickr profiles where they release images into the public domain; Flickr has even created a special license (“United States Government Work”) for the White House photostream. [6] But imagine the federal government financially supporting a socially-networked photo-sharing site as it does the Library of Congress and giving it the resources to survive Facebook’s walled-garden challenge. It’s easy to marvel at the powerful new tools the Internet has given us. But let’s not forget how much better, how much more public they could be.