[dylan604]

> The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?

This is how NASA operates with the data/images collected from the tax payer funded operations it runs. There is a period of exclusivity allowed for some projects to allow the people to work with the data, but anybody can go down load high res imagery once it has been released.

[cipehr]

Awesome, thank you for the input. I suspected NASA was operating this way, but I had no idea there was a period of exclusivity. In the case of NASA, the private companies are those like JPL and the sorts I guess?

I assume it is/was similar with other data collected, like weather data/radar, oceanic current/buoy data, etc?

[dylan604]

I read about this regarding Hubble imagery, but pretty sure it applies to all missions funded by tax payers. The teams requesting time from the platforms are granted exclusive time to work out what they need so they can publish their papers for credit and what not.

One of the great things here is that most of the teams are so focused on their specific criteria in the data, they sort of lose the forest in the tree. Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations. It's space, so most things only need to be imaged once per sensor. It's not like setting up a trap camera hoping to see big foot the one time he strolls past. The universe changes on a much slower scale so the data is still relevant for much longer.

[cipehr]

Fascinating thank you.

> Once that data has been released to the public, more and more interesting things are being found in the existing data rather than requiring new observations.

Really highlights the value of the data being public, which I feel is often overlooked now a days. Hard to tie KPIs to value that comes like this.