[open-government] 1. It's not Open Data, so stop calling it that...

Wed Jul 28 12:41:45 UTC 2010

Greetings all;

I am really glad that Glen created that post and Jonathan circulated
it.  The problem he identified is recognized here in Ottawa and a
process is in place to address that Terms of Use.

The City of Vancouver Open Data advocates created this ToU without
much thought, and the City's legal team accepted it.  City legal teams
are not necessarily experts in these matters and tend to be very
conservative, risk averse and are not necessarily aware of what is
going on the world of technology and data.  The 3 other cities that
opened their data found it easier to just copy the Vancouver ToU.  The
legal team figured that if one city accepted it, it must be good
enough for them to.

When this ToU was implemented in Ottawa, users voiced concern,
especially the open street map folks on a listserve called
civicaccess.ca. As a result, I communicated with the City and created
a legal advisory group with the Canadian Internet Policy and Public
Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) (http://www.cippic.ca/en/) who agreed to work
on this issue and dedicated research resources on this topic for the
summer.  I also conducted a public consultation at Change Camp Ottawa
2010.  CIPPIC is now reviewing a draft memo on this topic and we
should have something to go out to consultation next week.

The City of Ottawa has started a working group on this topic with the
other "open data" cities and it is expected that the recommendations
on modifying the ToU will be adopted.

Citizens like myself would not have been able to have the ear of the
City of Ottawa and any of the other "open data" cities, if we did not
have this public interest legal clinic. Lawyers, it seems, listen to
other lawyers, and it is very hard to find pro-bono lawyers to do this
work, let alone for a citizen to convince a city to hire a team of
lawyers to modify something they see as non-problematic, and then
share those resources with other cities.

Here is a link to a write up
(http://traceyplauriault.ca/2010/07/21/changecamp-ottawa-2010-open-data-terms-of-use-session/)
on the consultation that was held in Ottawa.

Your input is of course most welcome.

Sincerely
Tracey
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

PS  I gave CIPPIC a large reading list which included licensing work
from GEOSS, Global Map, IPY, SCAR, CC, ODpl, GeoConnections, etc.
This was new material for them and it was incredibly useful to be able
to refer to that excellent work.