Discussion

AfricaMuseum refuses to release Congo geological archive to US mining company, despite pressure from President Trump

The AfricaMuseum in Tervuren (Flemish Brabant) is refusing to hand over geological archive material on Congo to an American mining company that wants to use the data to map valuable raw materials. ‘We want to digitalise the archives ourselves and not leave it to a private company,’ the museum says. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is increasing pressure through diplomatic channels.

mikkupikku: Yield to a US mining corp. Title buried the lead.> The AfricaMuseum in Tervuren (Flemish Brabant) is refusing to hand over geological archive material on Congo to an American mining company that wants to use the data to map valuable raw materials. ‘We want to digitalise the archives ourselves and not leave it to a private company,’ the museum says. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is increasing pressure through diplomatic channels.Yeah I'm with Africa Museum on this one. This said, there is a broad problem of getting old records digitized in African libraries. Very often these library and archive building are very old, don't have working climate control, and the records are often irreplaceable cultural artifacts that are rotting on the shelves for lack of funding to rescue them.

doctorpangloss: i'm with the museum too, but: the default HN critic is unsympathetic to people seeking to exploit some data. except when the default HN critic stands to make a lot of money exploiting some other data. what is the line? like i could easily flip this on the museum: what right does this museum have, it is a public institution, criminals are welcome to visit it and learn whatever the hell they want, for any exploitative reason, why draw the line at miners? why do they have an exclusive right to systematic data use? why is it even theirs, exclusively, to begin with? there is no simple, objective framework for this stuff. that said, i think we would all be better off if non-entertainment information were free and easily scrapable.

sam_lowry_: Africa Museum is a few km from where I live, I know a cople geologists that worked there and I followed reconstruction works at the museum and all the controversies around them.I feel like money is not an issue for the museum. Conscientous use of money is another problem.Wasteful mismanagement of public funds is a plague of Belgian public service.They could have striken a deal, e.g. let the U.S. company digitize the records on premise and make them public.

wiz21c: > Wasteful mismanagement of public funds is a plague of Belgian public service.Please don't propagate rightwing ideology. There are plenty of public services and servants who do their job very well. I worked in several administrations with them as an IT manager.Sure there is "corruption" and other things but in my experience, not that much.

sam_lowry_: It's a bit off topic, bit my favourite corruption story that I tell non-Belgians is the titres-services/dienstencheques racket.Titres-services/dienstencheques is a kind of money that can be used only for household tasks. Think cleaning lady. At the introduction, they costed ~4.70€/hour to the public while designated organisations cashed in 21€/hour. The gap narrowed later, after creating a few nouveau riches, and after several scandals that were mostly about these people disrupting the office space market with their money.The subsidy, initially at 16,30€ for every hour worked, came from public money, the stated reason was to draw household workers from black market, the second reason was to achieve the goal of +100,000 jobs that the then Prime Minister set, the real reason was to enrich the few insiders, my memory does not serve me well, but IIRC the party affiliated with public service workers profited the most.The guy who orchestrated this is the Social Security Minister now.

wiz21c: I don't think any policy is ever 100% success for the government, especially if it implies collaborating with the public sector. I came to the conclusion that it is a fact of life.Another case: present government (rightwing) has lowered the taxes (very significantly) you have to pay when buying a new home. Objective: help people with less financial resources to get a home. What happened so far: price of the houses raised to absorb that new purchasing power. Minister's comment: "people now can buy better quality homes".