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(a)frot.org> -----
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 18:14:36 -0800
From: Jo Walsh <jo(a)frot.org>
To: openstreetmap(a)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
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Openstreetmap(a)vr.ucl.ac.uk
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----- End forwarded message -----
--
Dominic Hargreaves |
http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
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