The free data revolution started by Gordon Brown's government, and the Coalition's opening up of government procurement to smaller companies as well as its implementation of "agile" implementations through the Government Digital Service GDSS) has changed the face of government radically since January 2010.
Outside of the free data access model pursued by the US and other countries, many NFIs share plot information only with select collaborators, while others, including China in the past, carefully restrict data access.
By providing free data to anyone with an Internet connection, the architects of the ambitious 5-year project hope to usher in a new egalitarian era of astronomical research.
Unlike with the mobile hotspots sold by mobile operators, Karma users are encouraged – and incentivized – to share their connection by earning free data for doing so.
As the Guardian notes, last summer, a report commissioned by the Cabinet Office identified the lack of free data as a barrier to the knowledge economy.
The other method adopts a virtual mobile operator that enables its subscribers to act as mobile Wi-Fi hotopotserveserve non-subscribers by offering some free data quota.
A company called the Climate Corporation was formed in 2006 by two former Google employees who wanted to make use of the vast amount of free data published by the National Weather Service on heat and precipitation patterns around the country.
You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results.
It remains to be seen whether the U.K.'s National Data Guardian will seek to provide some guidance here (following controversy generated by the original DeepMind/Royal Free data-sharing data, Caldicott has been looking into how data was shared between the pair).
Karma, the portable Wi-Fi hotspot offering a contract-free, pay-as-you-go service and the ability to earn free data by sharing your connection with others, has now started shipping its latest devices to pre-order customers.
