Data Lifeboat Development: Flickr Foundation Awarded Mellon Foundation Grant

From a Flickr Foundation Blog Post by George Oates:

We’ve been awarded a grant in the Public Knowledge program of the Mellon Foundation to continue our development of the Data Lifeboat. Yay!

It’s a 12-month grant, and mostly involves using the prototype work we’ve been doing to demonstrate and discuss the concept with our community. We can’t wait to hold the two events we have planned in the (Northern hemisphere) autumn, and we’ll likely be having them on the East Coast of the USA, and in our homebase, London. If you’d like to learn more about attending one of these small meetings, please let us know via hello [at] flickr.org.

We expect to also iterate on the software itself, but we’re not quite sure where we’ll end up just yet, especially if all our conversations result in us needing to pursue different directions.

What’s a Data Lifeboat again?

A Data Lifeboat is an archival piece of Flickr, not all of the 50 billion images and their metadata. For example, a Lifeboat might contain all the photos tagged with “sunflower” or all the Recipes to Share group submissions. Whatever facet of the data you can think of, you could generate a Data Lifeboat for it. We envision an archival sliver richer than a mere folder of JPGs: one where you can navigate the content to explore and understand its networked context. Even better, an archival sliver that is updated if things change at flickr.com.

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Our prototyping stage is nearly done now, within which we expect to come out with some Data Lifeboats to look at and critique, some “prototype policies” for Flickr members, Data Lifeboat creators, and possible “dock” operators. We are also doing some foundational work on models for sustainability, because, as you will know, to date, we’ve been largely quite bad at planning for long term life for our digital projects.

Learn More, Read the Complete Post (about 500 words)

Filed under: Data Files, Funding, News