IATI data licensing (for unencumbered data use!)

Hi Andy,
Sounds great! Imo these 4 points nail the license issue. Completely agree that we shouldn’t accept closed licences as a part of the standard. IATI is an open standard.

Thanks Andy for this very useful summary and list of actions! Agree as well.

Excellent, thanks Andy Lulham . I agree - this is a very practical list to implement

I guess if these aren’t updated, these datasets would either need to default to an open license or be removed in order to be consistent with the IATI Licensing Standard.

I see some difficulty here, as we are actually saying that non-open data would no longer be accessible via the IATI Registry? This should therefore involve a period of notice (as with the deprecation of version 1) to enable these publishers to schedule their action (if any)?

Just thinking this through for CSOs. Anything that makes it super-simple to do the right thing, for example making the license field mandatory and only making it possible to only choose an open license is very welcome. Looking at the dashboard, losing the ‘licence not specified’ would affect 1395 activities from 443 organsations, and losing the non-open options would affect 54 activities from 23 organisations.

I wonder if we should go further and reduce the number of options on the dropdown list (currently 10 excluding ‘not specified’) to just the 6 open data licenses that meet the open definition requirements plus one category that allows governments to show their data licensed under an OGL or similar.

Reason is that 2929 activities are currently licensed under the license “OKD Compliant::Other (Attribution)” and there are several more ‘Other’ options.

Given that licenses are there for data users to check how the data is allowed to be used, having undefined/vague license information is not very useful.

And for civil society data providers it’s already hard to understand the difference between CC and ODC - throw in an option for ‘Other’ and they will go for that by default (to see what I mean, see the list of organisations using the “OKD Compliant::Other (Attribution)” option.

What do you think?

Also, what about having an element or attribute in the Standard which defines which open data license is attached to the data? For example as an attribute of iati-activities? Then the license is right there in the data, the same way you can embed a CC license in other open works.

I’m not a technical person so it may have been considered before and thrown out! Mark Brough might know.

Thank you all for engaging in this really important conversation about licensing. In order to move things forward and action this, I propose the following step-by-step approach:

Step 1: Make the licensing field in the IATI Registry mandatory. We aim for this to happen in the next few weeks.

Step 2: We need an agreement on which types of licenses should be removed from the current list available on the IATI Registry. I propose the following and would really welcome views and discussion specifically on the ‘Other’ options and whether they should be kept or removed. If people can contribute by Friday 8th of March so that we can take a decision that will be much appreciated.

Remove the licenses below:

• License not specified
• Creative Commons Non-Commercial (Any)
• Other (Non-Commercial)
• Other (Not Open)

Discuss whether to remove the three licenses specified below:

• Other (Open)
• Other (Public Domain)
• Other (Attribution)

Keep the below list:

• Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)
• Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL)
• Open Data Commons Attribution License
• Creative Commons CCZero
• Creative Commons Attribution
• Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike
• GNU Free Documentation License
• UK Open Government Licence (OGL)

Step 3: The technical team will investigate what are the options for those publishers who are not using an open license, working with our registry provider Derilinx. Possible options being either automatically defaulting to an open license OR having the option to keep them as is.

Step 4: Update the drop-down list on the IATI Registry (following agreement on Step 1). Then update the licensing guidance on the IATI website to reflect the changes made and provide more clarity. The guidance will be improved as suggested below.

Improve the licensing guidance on the IATI site so that it is (i) self-consistent and clear that IATI data is open data (see: the contradictory wording that @siemvaessen flags on discuss) and (ii) provides a bit more explanation of why e.g. non-commercial (or closed more generally) is problematic.

Then we will inform IATI publishers affected by the changes through email to advise them on the actions they should take. This will include a set deadline, which will be appropriate to the requests made.

Please comment on which licenses should be removed and kept by responding to this post by Friday 8th of March.

Yes, thanks Petya Kangalova and everyone.

Re. Step 2: here are the lists of organisations using the “Other” open licenses:

• Other (Attribution)
• Other (Public Domain)
• Other (Open)

Would probably be useful to contact some of the organisations on these lists (e.g. UNOPS; Sida; EC DEVCO to name three) just to get an understanding of their choice.

Great to see this moving forward! 100% in favour of removing the first set (i.e. no longer allowing it to be selected, and encouraging publishers to re-select a compliant license).

I understand some of the “other” licenses can be country-specific variants of other CC licenses, e.g. similar to the UK Open Government License (which IIRC is more or less equivalent to CC-BY). I think several countries may have policies to use their own equivalents (e.g. France, Germany, USA), so might be worth checking with those publishers… But as Andy Lulham says, perhaps the fact that they have stated the license is OKD compliant is sufficient!

Hi all,

Just a note to say that an email will be going out this afternoon to our main contacts at all Orgs where their License type is one of the ‘others’; inviting them to join this discussion.

Hi there and thanks for your mail Josh. Back in the day, we chose: OKD Compliant::Other (Attribution) as a license, because in 2011 there’s was less developed Creative Commons guidance.

We would be fine to change our licensing to ‘OKD Compliant::Creative Commons Attribution’.

The question from my side is: now that we know that we would like to change the licencing category, how would we best go about it? Is there an option to change the status ourselves or would the technical team need to change the settings for us?

Best,
Maria / UNOPS

Maria Mo For UNOPS, it should be on this page: https://iatiregistry.org/publisher/edit/unops

The “License” dropdown ought to be the fifth field on the form.

In general, this page can be reached by:

1. Logging into the Registry here
2. Clicking My Publishers
3. Clicking on the name of the relevant publisher in the table
4. Clicking the Manage button

I guess the important bit to note is that the license is set for the publisher, not for the individual dataset(s).

Hope that helps.

Hi Andy

The above points sound good and I don’t have an issue with them. I just need to somehow review the licence for our organisation.

Hi all, thank you for your contributions. We’ll review this thread in the coming week, as well as the responses from organisations we’ve contacted and the Registry supplier.

We’ll then confirm the list of licenses we’ll keep and how we’ll progress this work.

Hi all,

Derilinx have been working on the changes to the License field on the Registry. The following changes have been made:

1. When a new publisher account is created, selecting a licence is mandatory.

2. When an existing publisher amends their publisher details, and they have not previously selected a license, they must select a license before they are able to update.

3. The following 4 options have been removed:

• License not specified
• Creative Commons Non-Commercial (Any)
• Other (Non-Commercial)
• Other (Not Open)

Derilinx are aiming to deploy these changes next week.

Hi all,

Please note that there has been a slight delay to the deployment, which is now due to take place today.

It is possible that the Registry will be down for a very short period (around 5 mins) while the site is rebuilt.