[geo-discuss] Re: [Openstreetmap] Coders needed for similar project & UK FOI act request update.

Thu Nov 10 20:59:23 UTC 2005

hello clive, list,
On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 05:05:26PM +0000, Clive Galway wrote:
> On a side note, as a result of this project, I am currently trying to push through a Freedom of Information Act request on the British Government to get them to release UK political boundary data (eg counties etc) into the public domain on the grounds that political boundaries of our country are the property of the populace and not Ordnance Survey as they are saying.
> The original request was denied, it is currently on appeal and I am in talks with the ombudsman's office ( The governing body one appeals to if they feel the request / appeal has been unlawfully denied ) who seem to be quite outraged that this information is not free and they think I am in with a half-decent chance.

This sounds greatly promising! Is there an archive of your
correspondance about BoundaryLine online? Are you pressing for rights
to redistribute as well as freely access the political boundary data,
what kind of arrangement for publishing the updates are you envisaging
once this data can be got into the public domain? 

I hope you are not too discouraged by the pretty dire situation re.
our rights to freely access state-collected geodata, or the difficulty
in building our own alternatives from sources tainted by commercial
copyright. OSM's clean room approach as an ethical stance can be
complemented by other 'prongs' towards open access, especially FOI
law, creating more publically accessilbe, annotatable geodata without 
risking a situation where we are brandable as 'data pirates'
by trespassing against commercial interests. :/

re. the relevance of FOIA and the Public Sector Information directive
of which it is an implementation, to open mapping projects, you might
find the talk Chris Corbin gave at Wsfii useful:
http://nodel.org/wsfii/wsfii-day2-audio/10OpenMaps.mp3 
about 1/3 of the way through.

A lot of local authorities and other 'public sector' bodies like
health authorities, i think TfL came up here, are geodata holders.
TfL's public transport routing material is a goldmine and i would like
to know what grounds they would have for denying a FOIA request for
it. Heather Brooke's excellent book on FOIA and how to go about
getting data from different agencies has a lot of harsh words for
particularly TfL and the OS. also blog: http://yrtk.org/ 
(Your Right To Know)
and Heather and Chris Lightfoot's talks on this file:
http://nodel.org/wsfii/wsfii-day2-audio/11OpenCivicInfo.mp3

good luck and let us know how you get on!

-jo