Yeah. But even if you gave me access to every data set worldwide I still would have trouble making head or tail of it. but it's a start
"Software Diffusion, infer relationships about these tables and create an explorer for me."
jancsika's comment [1] in a thread on The Cypherpunk Manifesto:
> There should be a sustainable solution to bootstrapping civic databases to archive and make available/discoverable all the shits citizens care about without waiting 70+ years for it to enter the public domain.
> It's absurd as it is now. We've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it.
My upshot was: sci-hub/libgen is a civic database. It exists. Frankly, its current content is some of the most important content that could populate any database.
Given that, what are the most sensible political policies/processes that could stand a chance of keeping it from burning down the way previous civic databases did?
Judging by the responses I got, there may not currently be enough public policy domain expertise on HN for such an effort to succeed. (And almost surely not enough time to organize before it burns down.) But I think it's still worth pursuing, if only to begin to generate that experience in the first place.
Whatever the case, if you're talking about which data fields ought to populate which structs, you're quite far afield from the effort I was trying to describe. That's why I started by asking: what would a cipherpunk not do? That was meant to be tongue in cheek, but let's take it seriously and call it plaintextpunk. :)
As for having time to lobby for change, I only have optimism to fall back on. But we should try anyway.
There was a disgraceful episode where th City Of London police allowed themselves be mobilised as useful idiots at the behest of Elsevier etc, against SciHub, spreading factually misleading information. I discussed this with several leading security researchers who all recognised it as cheap politicisation of fake-security news and fearmongering.
It may very well be the case that law enforcement overreach and corruption is gnawing at the very pillars of civilization.
Glad it reverberated a little across this corner of the internet.
It's a great term - conveys what we mean. Maybe "Civic DataSets"