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What's the risk of giving up information?
There are risks in giving up information.
This is a sensitive project: operators are being asked to provide
their knowledge (or intellectual property) in the form of personal
fishing information accumulated over long periods while being uncertain
about how the information will eventually be used.
Industry's biggest fear is that information provided by fishers’
will be used against them. There are also concerns that commercially
sensitive information will be made public, and there are tensions
between the sectors about overlapping use of some grounds.
We are addressing industry’s uncertainties in a number of
ways.
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Most importantly, the project team
maintains a high level of communication with the Associations,
and with individuals through face-to-face contact in ports and
regular phone contact. This enables discussion of the prospective
benefits from sharing and combining information.
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We register all incoming and outgoing data and maps, and there
is strict security for electronic and paper copies of industry
data.
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The project is structured to allow
industry to deliver their knowledge in a staged way with individual
contributors and the Associations reviewing broad scale maps
before release and having approval over what, and when, fine
scale information is released.
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The contributions of all parties and the ways in which project
outputs will be released have been made explicit in a contract
— a memorandum of understanding.
As a result, industry is ‘on-board’: the project has
strong (but not unanimous) support from the Association executives,
and strong support from many individual operators - but opposition
from others.
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