Brief response to both streams of thought. The research I’ll be starting in the autumn will, I hope, focus directly on these issues which echo the point I made at the conference following your session, Nick, that we all have to understand the difference between public value and private value. And when I say ‘all’ I mean policymakers at the highest level and not just us folk.

Just as there ae different value chains driving both kinds of value so there is also the question of the ‘chain of understanding’ that is needed by those leading and delivering the services. It is much about culture as it is about definitions. So, as with horses and water, once all the right people are in the room there will be much exploration, demonstration and mentoring to be done. Vive la revolution!

I have a minor quibble… which is that the role of ‘copyright’ in this debate is somewhat tangential, or so it seems to me. Copyright and Creative Commons go hand in had for example. I might explicitly claim copyright over something that I’ve created in order to make it clear that I have the necessary rights to assign a CC licence in order to let you do what you like with it. In that sense, copyright empowers me to empower you to re-use. That is good.

The fundamental issue around openness has to do with sustainability doesn’t it? It’s about business models. It’s essentially about where the money comes from to keep things (people and institutions) going? If content used to drive a revenue stream then a move towards openness may leave a funding void that has to be filled in some other way. Right?

I don’t think this applies to much of the open government discussion so I’m not sure that is a useful parallel to draw on. Government data isn’t closed (in the main) because it’s been used to drive a revenue stream. It’s just been closed - full stop… that was the way of the world. So when TBL encourages government to be more open with their data, he isn’t (in the main) asking them to cut into a source of income.

What’s different about the cultural heritage sector is that greater openness does, potentially, cut into existing revenue streams. I don’t know the extent to which that is a ‘real’ problem or a ‘perceived’ problem but in a sense it doesn’t matter - the fact that it is sitting there on the table as an issue stops people doing things.

So I think your final call to “get them all in a room and working together” has to focus on sustainability of cultural services in an open world - and that has to involve very senior decision makers and funders because we need to change the way in which success is measured in an open world, we have to have widespread agreement that ‘open’ means ‘better for society as a whole’ and we ultimately have to think about where the money comes from to pay for that.

You know what, I’m pretty sure that getting the script kiddies and the serious suits into a room probably won’t help. You’re right - the views are so passionately held, so polar, that the outcome isn’t likely to be anything other than messy.

What I think we can (maybe) all agree on is that things are changing - radically. And yes, painful though it is, businesses are dying because of that change. Newspapers are going through it, journals are going through it, museums are going through it. How - really - does anyone expect things to stay the same when notions of value have shifted from one where scarcity defined the business model to one where scale defines it? And for that matter, how do museums make the scarcity that they necessarily have in the form of *real* objects translate into the scale that is asked for by users in the networked age?

I’m not sure anyone has the answers. I do know that we can’t continue to ostrich the problem. Locking down content clearly doesn’t work (people go elsewhere / steal it anyway / DRM is broken / they didn’t care that much anyway / etc). So how about we take up the challenge and try the alternative approach - try and get *as many people as possible* engaged with our content, and see how we can then re-determine value? Let’s at least die trying rather than try dying, as someone probably once wrote.

I’ve never been convinced by the “we used to be profitable and then the internet thing came along” argument anyway. Picture libraries (and they’re one of not very many cultural enterprises who claim to have been most affected by the networked world) have never been terribly good at publishing their before/after figures. I suspect they’ve always haemorrhaged cash, but maybe that’s just the ones I’ve been familiar with. But let’s see it - let’s run the experiment I suggested on MCG and do some measuring!

Although (as you know) my method in all of this is to be vocal in support of one particular direction, I think this is more about asking some questions than anything else. In a recent talk to some academic publisher (I got out alive), I asked the same questions. It wasn’t terribly comfortable, but then nothing about this *thing* we seem to have is comfortable. And as someone said at the JISC conference yesterday - “they [serious suits] are very ready to highlight the problems, but not one of them has ever come up with a solution”. Amen to that.

There is a level of nuance to all this that Kevin Kelly sums up rather well in his The Bottom Is Not Enough blog post. This isn’t (and wasn’t) an either/or discussion. But we should be prepared for it to be uncomfortable and radical, and not just some minor blip before we return to the good ‘ole world.