[geo-discuss] rejectinspire.org

Wed Feb 15 16:40:49 UTC 2006

hi daniel,

On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 04:24:31PM +0100, Daniel wrote:
> 1) Where's the petition's text ? (upon Inspire, not about OMC ?). And 
> why dates in 2001 ?

It is at http://rejectinspire.publicgeodata.org/ now
There was a brief time when there was some php loop error which i
fixed which meant it didn't show up on some pages.
Dates in 2001... where?  sigh, this is done using a really old,
unmaintained php petition pile of software. But It Works. Some text is
hard-coded in weird places. If you can provide a URL for this kind of
error please send that to me and Benjamin (bh at udev.org) directly

> 2) What are the connections between these inititiative and 
> http://www.okfn.org/geo/manifesto.php ?

http://www.okfn.org/geo/manifesto.php sets out the positive vision for
a model which allows open public access to state-collected geodata
using a shareAlike license, encouraging the participation of
grassroots projects like http://openstreetmap.org/ 

http://rejectinspire.publicgeodata.org/ is a specific petition to 
*reject the INSPIRE Directive on Europe's "spatial data infrastructure"*.
It is intended to have much more mainstream appeal.

The central problem with INSPIRE is that it legislates a position
which encourages state-run data collectors to "recover their costs" by
selling back, to citizens and other government agencies, the data
which they have gathered as an essential civic service. 
http://publicgeodata.org/InspireTimeline shows some of the changes to
what will be available to the public and on what terms, as the spirit
of the INSPIRE Directive has become more proprietary and less open
during the committee stages, gaining an "intellectual property" emphasis.

http://rejectinspire.publicgeodata.org/why_sign.php offers some
reasons why anybody, not just geodata and GIS and policy specialists,
should consider signing the petition and getting involved in the
awareness campaign. The second reading could be over in as little as a month; 
the time to encourage MEPs to pay attention to the issues is Now.

The INSPIRE petition is separate from the manifesto because
 - the manifesto was part of the journey of getting people to this
   point
 - the Reject INSPIRE petition is only relevant immediately to people
   who are in Europe. Though every state-run data collecting agency in
   the world may ultimately be affected by Europe's decision, the only
   people MEPs represent are European citizens. The open geodata
   manifesto is just statements of common sense that anyone in the world
   might feel like agreeing with.

http://bat.vr.ucl.ac.uk/pipermail/openstreetmap/2006-February/002461.html 
is a bit more info about what is specifically wrong with INSPIRE and
what has been emphasised or de-emphasised in the supporting material
so far. 

> 3) When the official launch is scheduled ?

Release early, release often; http://rejectinspire.publicgeodata.org/
is basically public now, i have been encouraging people just in one or
two forums to sign, and gauging reactions about how the material is
presented, there. it has like 60 signatures already. I kind of want it
to gather momentum quietly before it goes to any big or really public
lists. I did drop a link to it on mappinghacks.com as well. I wrote an
editorial about it for directionsmag.com, which they talked about
*possibly* getting into tomorrow's edition, more likely 2 weeks time.

The wiki needs a bit more presentation work on it; Benjamin
said he would have another pass on the CSS this evening; we have both
been short on time to really focus on this. But this is also somethign
that can grow over the coming days and weeks; we hope to gather
statements from some national mapping agency representatives in
different countries and to encourage people to leave testimonials
about really large and or value creating projects that would really
benefit from a climate of open access to geodata. 

If people want to help, just pile in; come and talk on #publicgeodata
on irc.freenode.net; i think there is some a.v. material that could
really use editing...

I'm going to be mostly offline for quite a lot of the next few days :/
but i will look in while on the road, when i can. 

Thanks for encouragement Daniel, and all who've written...

-jo