I’ve come across many examples over the years where a data set is “open” to the public and editable, then becomes locked down, or potentially sold to a large corporation. A good example of this in the past was IGDB being sold to Twitch, or GoodReads being sold to Amazon. I feel like a lot of great potential open source applications are just missing the option to hook into data, like health data, product meta data, etc.
Looking at what options are out there, I am struggling to piece together what alternatives there are besides one person/entity owning the data on a server. I thought maybe the Fediverse was an option with how BookWyrm is handling their process, but I’m not too sure if that’s doable for anything outside of content with the data being in one place versus another.
Another weird idea that came to my mind was treating it almost like how NetlifyCMS handles it with the data being pushed back to a centralized Git repo and the data being accessible there. Sounds like a super weird file database setup (or would have to change each DB change to be a migration), but a possibility.
What are your thoughts on this? How can data be better handled and still accessible to the general public?
OpenStreetMap is a large dataset that is and always has been open. Also, Project Gutenberg and archive.org.
The initiatives that stay open tend to be the ones that were specifically set up with the intent of being open, and organize themselves accordingly (as not-for-profits with the “open” part written into their charter, for example). Anything set up by a for-profit corporation will eventually either die or be turned into an income source. A single person collecting data that’s of interest to them is a crapshoot influenced by their individual ideals and how much money they get offered. The problem, as usual, is people, not technology.
There are a few types of data that absolutely should not be open, however. Most health data falls into that category.