Kasabi is part of a wider community of data users and publishers on the web. As as part of that community we want to encourage some “community norms”—a general code of conduct that encourages respectful collaboration around the curation, sharing and consuming of data online.
We thought it would be useful to outline our expectations, and encourage you to embrace these norms as Kasabi grows and we add more data to the system. We’ve been particularly inspired by some norms from the Open Data Commons, but we’re not requiring anyone to agree to those. We’ve found that good practice is often well established, but not often spelled out. It might be because they’re mostly common sense, but we want to encourage people to follow them.
It also lets us highlight where we’ve built specific features to encourage this code of practice.
Share You Work
All user-contributed content (not data) in Kasabi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. This ensures that when you share comments, SPARQL queries, or other text, you’re sharing this with the wider community.
We open-source our client libraries, tools and documentation, and you can find it here. We encourage you to do the same.
Give Credit Where Credit’s Due
Some datasets in Kasabi have specific terms and conditions that require you, as a user, to attribute your sources. But—let’s face it—attribution is a fundamentally good thing to do, even when it’s not required. It’s simple respect for the people putting time and effort into curating the data or APIs we’re using.
We’ve built the Attribution API to make it simple to insert attribution into any webpage or look-up relevant links and logos from an application.
Attributing sources also enables people to find high quality data sources to use in other, interesting ways.
Open Formats (and Protocols)
In Kasabi, we build on existing open data formats and protocols wherever possible. Nobody should be excluded from using data because of proprietary technology.
By providing tools for you to build your own APIs, we let you expand the range of data formats that are available for people to work with—improving the system for everyone.
When we do create new protocols or formats, we share their specifications under a Creative Commons Attribution license so anyone can re-use them in their own products.
Respectful Contribution
Please be respectful of others as you contribute to Kasabi. Remember that the effort other people have made in creating data and resources enables you to build upon in your own work.
It should go without saying that we don’t tolerate trolling. We encourage the open discussion of data, documentation, APIs and anything else. We hope that as a community, we can provide mutual feedback and the opportunity to help each other out, but this can’t happen through flame wars.
Think we’ve missed something? Tell us.
