Chief data officer as business developer (part 2)

[caption id=”attachment_18925” align=”alignnone” width=”640”] Photo: Code for America[/caption]

Chicago Chief Data Officer Tom Schenk has a great follow-up blog post riffing off my Friday commentary on the CDO’s role as business developer.

Tom talks about his first-hand experience on this front and the challenges engaging businesses, particularly around licensing.

From his post:

Nevertheless, some interesting challenges started to rise. While working with one large mapping company, we were making an effort to provide some of our maps that could be used in an application. We noted many maps were released using the very permissive MIT license. This license seemed to be the best poised to include in a commercial application. However, the following clause created an issue: “The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.” The application development team was unsure if such a clause could be included in the license. This was a bit of an impasse, but these challenges will pop-up that requires everyone to adjust. So, while including terms of open source licensing has become common for many enterprises, it still may be a challenge for others. Nevertheless, other proactive relationships with businesses do seem an important role for the CDO is the public sector. After all, we usually just supply the data, it’s you who makes it interesting.

Read the full post.