And following Mia’s residency in the Labs we were excited to find out collection data ended up being toyed with at THATCamp.

Patrick Murray-John wrote up his experience with our data, reflecting many of the same issues that Mia cam across.

He calls out our CC0 licensing –

If the data had been available via an API, that would have put a huge burden on my site. I could have grabbed the data for the ‘period’, but to make it useful in my recontextualization of the data, I would have had to grab ALL the data, then normalize it, then display it. And, if I didn’t have the rights to do what I needed, I would have had to do that ON EVERY PAGE DISPLAY. That is, without the licensed rights to manipulate and keep the data as I needed, the site would have churned to a halt.

Instead, I could operate on the data as I needed. Because in a sense I own it. It’s in the public domain, and I have a site that wants to work with it. That means that the data really matters to me, because it is part of my site. So I want to make it better for my own purposes. But, also, since it is in the public domain, any improvements I make for my own purpose can and should go back into the public domain. Hopefully, that will help others. It’s a wonderful, beautiful, feedback loop, no?

As a fork of CC-0 content from github, it sets off a wonderful network of ownership of data, where each node in the network can participate in the happy feedback.

Go read his full post.