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Monthly Archives: March 2011
Senator Kate Lundy on Open Government and Citizen-centric Services
On 1 March 2011, Senator Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Citizenship, spoke at the Citizen Centric Service Delivery 2011, Canberra on the topic ‘Citizen-centric services: A necessary principle for achieving genuine open government’.
Senator Lundy opened her speech with the meaning of Open Government, which relates to “accessible and transparent data, the extent government engages with citizens in decision making and accessibility of government itself.” With that in mind, she focused her speech on the “three pillars of Open Government”: Citizen-Centric services, Democratizing Data and Participatory Government.
In terms of Citizen-Centric services, Senator Lundy envisioned central and tailored data services for the public, such as mash-ups utilising interoperable data. She cited existing initiatives such as Australia.gov.au and Centrelink’s online profile management system (among others) as good examples of information management.
According to Senator Lundy, the next pillar of open government, Democratising Data, is about “recognising that government data is a public resource”. She emphasised that it is about “ensuring that at the point of creation, government data is assumed to be destined for public release, unless there is a specific reason not to.” This means from creation:
- data should have a permissible copyright license such as Creative Commons,
- data should be stored in an open data format such that it is not locked into a specific product or technology,
- data should be machine readable so that people can create applications that can use the data for new services or analysis,
- there should be a strategy for whether and how to keep the data set up to date, and how updates should be published,
- data should include useful metadata such as date of creation, author, any geospatial information, keywords, to ensure the data is able to be re-purposed on other ways such as by plotting the data on a map.
She pointed out that many government documents and cultural assets have already been released under a Creative Commons licence, including the Federal Budget under a CC BY licence – a world first of which they were proud of.
Credits—Photo: Adaptation (crop and resize) of ‘ Senator Kate Lundy talking about Gov2.0 at SFD Melbourne‘ by Chris Samuel, CC BY 2.0 Generic.
Putting the R.E.M in remix
To coincide with yesterday’s release of R.E.M‘s new album Collapse Into Now, the American alternative rockers announced their first remix competition. Stems from the song ‘It Happened Today’ from the new album are available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Stems (legally) up for grabs include percussion, brass, piano, celeste, vibraphone, guitar, drum, banjo and mandolin stems and of course Michael Stipe’s vocals. If Stipe isn’t enough for you there’s even a bit of Eddie Vedder on the track!!
Jacknife Lee, who helped produce Collapse Into Now with R.E.M, said that “Right from the early stages of recording this song in New Orleans Michael wanted to share the files with people to hear their different ideas and versions.” This was the impetus for the remix project and that’s exactly what Stipe has got!
Credits—Photo: Adaptation (crop and resize) of ‘R.E.M. – Arena, Verona – 21 luglio 2008‘ by Andrea Sartorati, CC BY 2.0 Generic.
ACMI generates rights literacy by releasing quality media products
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image joins a growing list of Australian and international arts institutions making resources available for reuse and remixing under Creative Commons. In September last year ACMI launched Generator, an online creative studio space for students and teachers to access and engage with screen content. This week ACMI expanded on its commitment to teaching screen literacy through dynamic programs by relicensing the downloadable media resources on Generator under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical 3.0 Australia licence. The 1000+ media products available in the Free Media Library go beyond being passive teaching aids – they are now part of the wider commons of legally reuseable content.
The ACMI has spent over 20 years delivering dynamic screen literacy programs that create deep and engaging learning spaces for young people to be active producers of screen content. ACMI’s Generator project was initiated as a concerted effort by the Centre to address changes in teaching screen media. It is the outcome of funding from the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development to develop premium content for the FUSE Portal, a State-funded repository of content and resources to help teachers Find, Use and Share quality Education resources. To further that aim, ACMI looked to CC.
Credits—Photo: ‘Chunky‘ by Yun Huang Yong, CC BY 2.0 Generic.
Dr Tama Leaver talks up CC for education
We just got word from long-standing friend of ccAustralia, Dr Tama Leaver eloquently discusses the CC licensing suite and it’s application to teaching and learning. Published by the College of Fine Arts and the University of New South Wales as part of their ‘Learning to Teach Online‘ video series, Tama takes us through the licensing protocols and each licence you can apply to your work, the metadata associated to CC licences and why that is usesful, how to choose a licence and motivations for why you might want to use CC.
Credits—Photo: Adaptation (crop and resize) of ‘
Credits—Photo: create environments for learning doodle‘ by Inha Leex Hale, CC BY 2.0 Generic.
Posted in ccAustralia, Education Tagged COFA Online, Dr Tama Leaver, UNSW, UNSW College of Fine Arts Leave a comment
ccAustralia office reopens
We are very happy to announce that the Creative Commons Australia office has reopened as of today. The information on our contact page is up-to-date. Our sister projects in the QUT Law School Intellectual Property: Knowledge, Culture and Economy research program have also reopened.
Credits—Photo: Adaptation (crop and resize) of ‘ IMGP6046_floods-museum-dinosaur‘ by Rae Allen, CC BY 2.0 Generic.
