[geo-discuss] Reaching out to petition signatories

[Jo Walsh]

dear all, 

Markus pointed out that the petition has just gone over 3000
signatories and that this would be a good opportunity to make some
positive noise. http://petition.publicgeodata.org/

For a little while on irc we also have been discussion emailing all
the signatories asking them if they would like to submit short
testimonies or statements of support, expressing why they are
convinced that public access to geodata would be good for their
business or research effort, and how much value, both social and
economic, open access to it can offer. 

So it would be a good opportunity to talk, in an outreach email about
next steps; finding out how INSPIRE policy is being created within the
ministry that is forming advice for the environment minister from each
state, who is in turn bringing policy recommendations to the Council.

And that would be a good chance in turn to set out positive messages
regarding the benefits of open access, to bring more voices into the
discussion and help generate more awareness locally. 

Out of curiosity i was wondering about simple email feedback systems,
we could send an email that had in the From: field that had a simple
alias that would register peoples' interest in talking to others,
local to them, who would like to make effort towards this. I have some
email bot code that i could quickly customise to do this, people would
send to interest+de+[some confirmation mechanism if necessary]@publicgeodata.org 
if enough people registered their interest, at a certain threshold,
that could trigger the creation of a mailing list and activity page.

Maybe this is getting carried away, and i certainly shouldnt delay on
getting to work on testimonies by thinking about this too much longer.
This image of who signed up from where is pretty interesting to me:

+----------------+-------+
| country        | total |
+----------------+-------+
| Spain          |   983 |
| Germany        |   741 |
| Italy          |   588 |
| United Kingdom |   516 |
| France         |   123 |
| Poland         |   106 |
| Portugal       |   100 |
| Netherlands    |    86 |
| Sweden         |    79 |
| Austria        |    78 |
|                |    62 |
| Finland        |    47 |
| Slovakia       |    46 |
| Belgium        |    44 |
| Denmark        |    20 |
| Ireland        |    19 |
| Czech Republic |    16 |
| Slovenia       |    12 |
| Greece         |     7 |
| Latvia         |     6 |
| Luxembourg     |     4 |
| Hungary        |     4 |
| Cyprus         |     2 |
| Estonia        |     2 |
| Malta          |     1 |
+----------------+-------+

This says to me, well, that barrapunto made a lot of difference,
brought a lot of people to this. I am surprised to see the UK so low
down as it is, relatively, given how much awareness among developers i
know there of the OS and its practise, and the need for open
licensed geodata.