The Astronomers' Data Manifesto was written to stimulate discussion on how we, the global astronomical community, should manage its data. It is not intended to be a final recipe for how we do this, but is rather a strawman proposal - an attempt to rough out how such a manifesto might look, to focus the discussion.
Why do we need to manage data?
Management of astronomical data is patchy. Some projects manage data very well. In other cases, data are gathering dust while people waste valuable telescope time re-observing, and new instruments fail to deliver the expected science because nobody thought carefully about how to manage the data. In about 2000-2002, we almost lost our ability to maintain large public-domain databases because international lawyers, seeing that we hadn't got our act together, proposed that international law should mandate a complex system of cross-licensing, which would have made our data centres (CDS, ADS, NED, etc.) unworkable and unaffordable. Luckily, that daft legislation was defeated (but only just!) but we should take it as a warning sign that if we don't get our house in order, someone else will do it for us, and we may not like what they do.
