On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 3:01 AM, Stephen Wanjau
<stevewanjau@wikimedia.or.ke> wrote:
Thats tremendous progress Abbas!
Yes, thanks, Abbas, for this report, and I applaud your decision to share it in this manner with the WMKE membership!
Thanks!
One point I'd like to highlight is that we should be quick to offer mass volunteer effort _for the commercial repository_.
Indeed. Right now, it is not yet clear if we'll need more manpower, but yes, I'll definitely consider calling in more volunteers as and when needed.
We should generally stand for the principle of "cultural artifacts created with public funds should belong (and be made accessible) to the public", and (at least somewhat) resist the commercialization of these old photos.
True. I can boldly claim that I tried by very best to preach non-commercialization (along with my colleague from Creative Commons). But really, we were less 10% of the quorum that were talking about this, and I can only hope that our cries did not fall into deaf ears. However, on the bright side, I appreciate that we were invited to talk about non-commercialization -- and this shows that they were interested in us, and would consider our option. Moreover, I can say that the Kenya ICT Board is becoming a supporter of Creative Commons, and they are even considering licencing the Kenya Open Data Initiative under a CC licence, so I don't expect that much resistance from them :-)
We should also remind everyone that at least the pre-colonial ones are no doubt out of copyright and _do_ in fact belong to the public.
Ha! I didn't know about this. Is there a law or something that I can use to back this argument? At the workshop, we did talk about the legal stuff and copyright infringement -- so this is definitely something I will raise in our next meeting.
Of course, if it's either a commercial repository or no digitization at all, it's certainly better to have a commercial repository, to at least ensure the survival of this material given the deterioration of the physical sources. But it is not in our interests to provide free labor to commercial enterprises.
Precisely. If all the work will be outsourced, then there is no need to involve volunteers. However, depending on how much content will be donated to Commons, we might need some volunteers to do the work from our end.
One way to go about it would be to do our best with the "small subset" of images that would be donated to Wikimedia, per Stephen's excellent suggestions quoted below. After a while, we could present glowing results with the small subset -- improved metadata, dating, setting in context, etc., -- and contrast them with the inert digital objects in the commercial repository. Perhaps that would make our point and convince decision-makers to free up additional content.
+1.
Thanks for the feedback,
Abbas.