The people behind AMEE, the ‘world’s energy meter’ (which we blogged about back in May), have been busy forging ahead into new areas of open service development. As well as ensuring AMEE conforms to the draft Open Service Definition (in short, open data plus open software) they’ve recently published a Memorandum of Understanding with terms and pricing information under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license.

The MOU specifies a broad range of rates – from free to thousands of pounds per month – that vary depending on the size, nature and estimated bandwidth requirements of the client. This is a pioneering example of the compatibility of open standards and commercial viability in web services. The AMEE team has had interest from over 60 different organisations since they launched the platform in June – from Defra to the RSA, from a national energy company to an international investment company. Last week they contracted with Torchbox, their first web agency, and today they announced a partnership with EEDA, the East of England Development Agency.

AMEE’s commitment to “sharing and collaboration” is particularly appropriate in the context of carbon footprinting – where relevant data is held by many different parties. In a screencast the developers succinctly state:

We believe sharing is the key to scaling. That to really, really scale, we need to share as much as we can.

They’ve initiated two threads asking for advice and comments on their licensing and access mechanisms for the AMEE code and data. It would be great if members of the open knowledge community could pitch in with advice!

Related posts:

1. AMEE: The Open CO2 Emissions Platform One of the highpoints of XTech last week was the presentation of Gavin Starks about AMEE (Avoiding Mass Extinction Engine). AMEE is a “a platform for collaboration on Climate Change and Energy Efficiency”. It combines together a whole bunch of...
2. Towards an Open Service Definition As mentioned previously on this blog recent developments, particularly the increase in ‘Software as a Service’ approaches, have created the need to think hard about what would constitute an `Free/Open Service’ (as opposed to just plain Free/Open Source software or...
3. An Open Search Service: Regulating Search the Open Way The inspiration for writing this, as well as much of the information contained herein, came from the search Roundtable which took place at the IDEI Toulouse ‘Conference on the Software and Internet Industries’ on January 20th 2007. An earlier version...