Governments and knowledge sharing: Difference between revisions

Knowledge transfer is a key part of official development assistance, and many government programs revolve around conveying knowledge to the community. Using open licenses for content is an important means of making that knowledge transfer effective.

Governments often develop content, e.g. for sustainability programs, and if open licenses are used, this can be shared and collaboratively developed between them, and with other groups, for maximum impact.

Governments and open content

United States

The US federal government has large amounts of public domain content, as under US law no work by an officer of the federal government may be copyrighted. See US federal government websites and public domain

Australian governments

The Australian federal government has been shifting towards open licensing, starting around 2009. The Australian Bureau of Statistics and Geoscience Australia using now the Creative Commons Attribution as the default licence for their websites.

The Mashup Australia competition was held in 2009 to encourage creative use of government data.

The Victorian state government in Australia appears to be seriously considering Creative Commons licenses as the default for all its public sector information.

The Queensland state government in Australia is exploring open licenses - the Government Information Licensing Framework (GILF) website "makes it easy for people who use public sector information (PSI) to understand the rights of use associated with PSI material."

For more information on Creative Commons Licensing by Australian goverments, see Creative Commons Australia, including the posts:

• Government 2.0 Taskforce gives CC a very big tick, 11 Jan 2010.
• More on Government Data - Geoscience Australia goes CC, 16 Dec 2009.

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