I’ve written before about our interest in ‘open data’, and brought that right up to date at the end of last month when I was able to point to the new Open Data Commons license which we funded Jordan Hatcher and Charlotte Waelde to prepare.

As part of that drafting process, we - and they - were always keen to invite widespread consultation and engagement. This falls into two main areas, namely;

• explaining why ‘open data’ needs to be protected by a license at all, when surely the whole point is to make it as open and accessible as possible;
• assessing the legal rigour of the licenses as drafted.

On both counts, there has been a lot of discussion, and Jordan has been doing a great job of tracking conversations on numerous lists and blogs, and then abstracting common themes in order to address them more fully on his site in a series of posts.

This consultation process is drawing to a close, but there’s still time to have your say on the license and what it’s trying to do.

We’re also hard at work on the next stage of the work; finding a good neutral home in which the finished license can grow and be nurtured over the long term. We’ll certainly use the license, and support its upkeep, but we’re probably not the best place to maintain it.

In related news, I blogged previously about an upcoming trip to San Francisco. I was pleased to see that Marc Canter will be leading a workshop on Open Data there, and look forward to further discussion of the Open Data Commons licenses and their implications in that forum.

Technorati Tags: Linked Data, open data, open data commons, Talis, web20summit, web2summit

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