Government releases response to Government 2.0 Taskforce report
On 3 May 2010, the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, the Hon Lindsay Tanner MP released the Government Response to the report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0. The response was released under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 2.5 Australia licence. A blog post from Finance Minister Tanner announcing the release of the response is available on the AGIMO Blog.
The response is a positive one - it generally agreed to 12 of the report's 13 recommendations.
The Government agreed in principle to Recommendation 6, which provides, among others, that:
6.1 By default Public Sector Information (PSI) should be:
- free
- based on open standards
- easily discoverable
- understandable
- machine-readable
- freely reusable and transformable
6.3 Consistent with the need for free and open reuse and adaptation, PSI released should be licensed under the Creative Commons BY standard as the default.
In a final blog post as Chair of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, Nicholas Gruen commends the Australian Government's acceptance of the CC BY licence:
Now the government has accepted our recommendation that CC be the default, and indeed that the default be one of the most permissive licences CC-BY which allows complete freedom to reproduce, and remix subject only to the acknowledgement of the original source.
So having advocated what I used to see as no more than a small commonsensical change, I’m pleased to see that it’s been adopted, with the response to the Government 2.0 Taskforce being one of the first cabs off the rank to be licensed CC-BY. Australia will be one of the first governments in the world with such a policy.