I know Jo's on here anyway, but this has ramifications for the OpenGuides project so it's worth considering.

Cheers,

Dominic.

----- Forwarded message from Jo Walsh jo@frot.org -----

Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 18:14:36 -0800 From: Jo Walsh jo@frot.org To: openstreetmap@vr.ucl.ac.uk User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i Subject: [Openstreetmap] Please Help Petition for Public Access to Geodata in Europe X-Spam-Status: No, score=-2.6 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham version=3.0.3

dear openstreetmap list,

Please sign the petition: http://petition.publicgeodata.org/ Yesterday the INSPIRE Directive on European "spatial data infrastructure" began its second reading in the European Parliament. Within a few weeks or months it may entrench a policy of charging European citizens to access public information they've already paid to collect. Members of the European Parliament think this an obscure and dull technical issue; but free public access to geographic information is essential for economic innovation and civic co-operation.

Benjamin Henrion and I are starting the above petition to MEPs to reject the current draft of the INSPIRE directive. It's all rather last-minute; we may have as little as a month before the Directive gets through its second reading; so it's important we try and get as many signatures as we can, as soon as we can, and get the word out.

People writing open source software, people who create a lot of GPS information as a byproduct of being a hiker or cycle courier, people who love cartography and just want to improve the representation of the world around them, all over Europe, are getting together through http://openstreetmap.org/ to create and share geographic information.

New data exchange standards, at both ad-hoc and industry level, allow for more of the creation of maps and description of the environment to be carried out by people who know the location well; map data, census information and other essential data about how people and places interact, which is used to manage civic society.

INSPIRE ignores all these trends. It is a narrow view that was formed without a full survey of what's being done with spatial information - especially with GPS and GSM positioning based media, new kinds of transport logistics systems, and the upcoming GALILEO satellite network. GALILEO will guarantee a reasonable quality signal for free to all citizens. A Directive about access to state-collected public geographic information, should guarantee freedom of access to data.

If you are in Europe, please help us raise awareness among MEPs that this is a much bigger issue than it seems, and shouldn't be rubber-stamped! Help us by signing http://petition.publicgeodata.org/ . Please tell other interest groups that you're a part of - non-geo, or even non-geek - and ask other European friends to help us by signing the petition. Please feel free to forward this mail, or bits of it, onwards.

http://publicgeodata.org/ is a wiki for collaboration on research into the issue, into some of the history and context around this legislation, also providing a quick rough guide for focusing energy when contacting your MEPs about this regressive, short-termist law.

If INSPIRE passes its second reading with this wording, all our in-car navigation systems, mobile phones, local search services, will become more expensive and less useful; INSPIRE threatens to set back economic innovation in location aware technology in Europe by many years.

-jo

_______________________________________________ Openstreetmap mailing list Openstreetmap@vr.ucl.ac.uk http://bat.vr.ucl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstreetmap

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