[geo-discuss] updating the open letter and resending

Wed Jun 7 19:21:35 UTC 2006

dear Rufus, thanks for this, it seems like a good idea and something
that can be done very quickly.

On Tue, Jun 06, 2006 at 02:11:53PM +0100, Rufus Pollock wrote:
> We should update and resend the open letter which was sent before the 
> ENVI committee meeting:
>   http://www.publicgeodata.org/Open_Letter

http://publicgeodata.org/Open_Letter_Second_Reading is a start at
this. Trivial edits to reflect change in time, plus added an extra
paragraph describing ENVI's rejection of the Council position, with a
quote from the Rapporteur's recommendation for second reading.

[[On March 21st the ENVI Committee of the European Parliament voted
against many of the Council's amendments to the original wording. The
ENVI Rapporteur recommends "intellectual property rights to be deleted
from the list of exceptions that would restrict access to
environmental information... access free of charge, must be guaranteed
not only for search services but also for view services."]]

The original had 2 appedices one of which we should definitely keep -
the summary of studies in support of open access to geodata - the
second was a detailed breakdown of the most crucial amendments coming before
ENVI. Some of this would still be re-usable, but we're unlikely to
have time to go through all the new amendments (will they be published
online long before the 12th if at all?)  

I'm completely perplexed by the rapporteur's statement that INSPIRE is
going to go through conciliation and third reading no matter what
happens in the vote in plenary on the 12th. If the vote makes no
difference at all to the outcome, then why is it happening? Simply as
a vehicle to collect a final batch of amendments before conciliation?
Will third reading involve another vote in plenary?   

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detailed_walk_through_the_codecision_procedure#Second_reading
may not be the most definitive description, but it's definitely the
clearest one i have read ;) )  

> wants to have a go first please feel free. We should then send it no 
> later than thursday (next week is a plenary week and will be very hectic 

I'm in California right now, but would be up for doing this very late
this evening / early your subjective morning. Another email mailout of
a PDF, or is on-the-ground pigeon-holing in any way possible?
(Benjamin, is this even something that FFII have fax facility set up
to do already?)

http://okfn.org/geo/mep_email_addresses.txt is the last list of email
addresses I have for MEPs, these were screen-scraped from an FFII page
with slightly dodgy encoding that had links to all the MEP member
pages. Of 732 members, 489 published an email address on their profile
page in March. I noticed some have URLs but not email contact details. 
One can predict
[firstnameinitial][lastname]@europarl.eu.int for the rest, and a lot
of them will probably get through. 

jo