Cost Minimisation

[edit] About

The purpose of this project is to categorise the costs to participants of open data and identify tactics to minimise those costs.

Category	Cost	Strategy	Tactic	Details
Infrastructure	Bandwidth	Distribute costs to consumers of data	Use torrents to distribute dumps of data	Torrents are an effective way to distribute data in a secure manner. They work on a peer-to-peer basis. This prevents a central server becoming exhausted.
Infrastructure	Bandwidth	Distribute costs to consumers of data	Create a shared file system for suppliers and subscribers
Infrastructure	Bandwidth	Distribute costs to consumers of data	Create a shared file data store for suppliers and subscribers
Infrastructure	Bandwidth	Eliminate storage and distribution costs	Freebase.com	Licence your content under CC-BY. This means that Freebase.com, now Google Inc., will take over the costs of distributing the data. This requires that the data is graph-shaped, which is generally fairly easy for things about things.
Infrastructure	Storage	Distribute costs to several large, participating organisations	Use an system (BeSTGRID, KAREN) to distribute load between providers	Examples include: National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Distributed Active, Archive Center's under the Earth Observing System Program and the Long Term Ecological Research Network (See Reichman & Uhlir, 2004)

Category	Cost	Strategy	Tactic	Details
Legal	Licencing	Use consistent licencing	Use standard licences	Promote the use of Creative Commons licences for data in New Zealand. New Zealand doesn't suffer from the same problems as other jurisdictions re copyright of data.
Technical	Computation	Share computation	Use a shared Freebase Gridworks project to clean data	Freebase Gridworks is a project that makes cleaning up data sets very easy. It's possible to create and share projects between reusers simply. This means that reusers don't each need to clean up the data.