On 27/09/2007, Tom Holden thomas.holden@gmail.com wrote:
They're collecting an archive of images of listed buildings taken by members of the public.
Do you think it would be worthwhile contacting them to ask if they'd be prepared to send a mass e-mail to their volunteer photographers saying something like the following:
No. No no no no no.
If someone came to us (and they do, fairly often) asking us to do this to our users for some random other site, we'd send them away with a flea in their ear. It's randomly fishing for material, it's rude.
What might be appropriate is contacting them and asking if they'd be willing to have some opt-in method where their photographers can choose to release the photographs under a free license - and mark them as such on the site - which would allow it to be reused etc etc etc. We can evangelise very efficiently in this sort of message about the wonderful effects of such a policy :-)
But asking if we can just have images for Commons gives the impression all we want to do is make our site better, not make *their* site more useful. It's arrogant *and it will sound it*.
(It seems crazy that they didn't make release under a CC license a criteria for acceptance as a volunteer photographer... One of our goals as a UK organisation really ought to be lobbying people like the Lottery Fund to get them to mandate "free" licenses on work like this they fund.)
Bear in mind the context here. It's an English Heritage project; essentially an adjunct to the national listed-building registry, and it's being run for their purposes; they want archival photographs of all listed buildings for future reference purposes, and they have a strong motive to get those photographs as good (in a technical sense) as possible, which means taking pains over their photographers.
If you look at who they've recruited, they're mostly "real" photographers; perhaps some professionals, mostly serious amateurs; skilled, selected people, not random applicants with a camera - and then they've doled out specific tasks to them. One of the inducements given is that the rights remain with the photographer (and they have some expenses funded); mandating open licensing would probably make it a lot harder - or at least a lot more time-consuming - to get good-quality recruits.
Them putting it online is nice and handy, and I believe they got funding *for that part*, but the real goal is to have it as a safely stored archive - things like public access at all are incidental, and the project would probably exist without the website.