Hey Dude where’s my data? A question of continuity

April 17th, 2007

Since a few years publishing educational material (in words and pictures) is not solely a matter of publishers and bookshops. Last week a Danish publisher announced that he would publish educational books for free on the Internet. The money for this commercial activity comes from the advertisements published within the books. Educational institutions and individual content providers publish also on the Internet for various reasons.

Open Content and its motivation

Broadly speaking there are four (non-commercial) reasons I can think of to publish something online. It is about sharing, storing, tooling or availability. Either you like to share or show your material to the world (or to your students) or you might want to simply store your material on the web since it is a cheap way of storage and the tooling and software behind the website you use offers a good way of organising and managing the content. If you want to show the content in a hypertext like manner, you need at least a site to publish and there are many repository sites available that offer search facilities and other tooling on top. Last but not least, having your content on the web, makes it available also when you are at home or at location.

Luckily there are good OS-software based websites available to do your publishing and often they are for free. Sites like Del.icio.us and Flickr for example give away a free place to publish and they offer tooling for tagging, commenting and categorising the material. The extra value of these features should not be underestimated. Tagging for example can enrich the content with a kind of meta data that facilitates the easy retrieval and also links content to other content.

But having the reasons of publishing online in mind, the question is whether these advantages can be guaranteed in the future. Whereas there might be agreements on the services offered by and the consequences of publishing at a certain site now, these services and rights might change and violate users’s expectations. Therefore some people like to have more control over their published content.

What might go wrong?

I was thinking about a few worst case scenario’s that could cause disappointments or even serious loss for the publisher of Open Content. Not that these are likely to occur, but they have an influence on how people and institutions think about publishing their content online and sometimes they do occurr. Universities develop their own educational publishing system to publish on their intranet for the students just to remain in charge of their content and who uses it.

Imagine the scenarios that in increasing order of ‘damage’ cause the material not to be available. The site might be temporarily offline or malfunctioning which would be bad for showing, sharing and availability purposes. The repository site might have deleted your material which is especially unpleasant if you used it for storage and have no local copy. Or even worse, when the site disappears because of a bankrupt or other reasons. Where does the data go and is the license still enforced? What happens to those millions of videos if the case between Viacom and Youtube leads to such a loss of YouTube that it can’t maintain the site? Will there still be time for the owners of the videos to download them? And what about users that used a YouTube video within their presentation? The change of tooling like tagging or searching in a repository might have such an essential influence on the use of it, that migration to another site is necessary. Most sites though offer a kind of backward compatibility of the essential services. The last scenario which is the one most frightening to users, is that the site does not prevent malicious use of the content. Although infringing copyrights happens with hardcopy books too, copy-paste on the Internet is of course much easier. But the case remains the same, the only thing is that psychologically data put really out there is more beyond control.

How to deal with it…

The solution, in my opinion, is to have OS-software to make sharing optimally possible by means of a distributed peer network of publishing sites where the publishers themselves hold full control over their content. Their content is close to them since they have a server of themselves running the software or they hire space and put the software there. Hiring space goes with a service contract of the ISP which guarantees more or less the continuity.

This way the data stays closely to the content provider offering more (psychologically) control and guarantee of continuity plus the advantages mentioned before. What makes it different from other repository solutions, is that there is a strict separation between the interface that can be accustomed to the community (see an earlier article of me: Sharing is a joy for all) and a kernel that can easily be extended and modified so that with some effort a personalised repository can be built that talks with other repositories to share the information.

In Opendocument.net and a few other projects* we are working with a very small software package consisting of a set of script files that requires a minimal out of the box installation. It gives you a repository that is split in two distinct parts: a user interface that can be replaced by any appropriate customised piece of software as long as it is compliant with the interface to the other part, the repository kernel.

If you like to read more about the goal and results of the experiments with this software in the OpenDock project, visit http://www.opendockproject.org/ or have a look at the running demoversion http://opendock.opendocument.net.

References:

*Opendock project/

*Designshare project (no webiste yet)

Del.icio.us

Flickr

Case of Youtube

Entry Filed under: Repositories, Open Content, Content Storage