[Legal-general] Introduction

[Sunburned Surveyor]

Eric:

I think increasing the collaboration between the National Map effort
and OSM would benefit all US tax payers greatly. As someone who sees a
large part of his paycheck dissappear to the tax man, I strongly
encourage you to keep thinking of ways to make this happen.

Licensing issues are a nightmare, but they don't have to absolutely
kill collaboration.

I think there is still room for a solution in which contributors like
myself upload data to a PD repository before uploading data to the
USGS. If the USGS could add data to the PD repository as well, a lot
of duplicated effort could be avoided. The USGS wouldn't catch all the
OSM data with this approach, but my guess is you would catch a lot of
it, especially after word got around. I remember quite a bit of
support for the PD concept not too many moons ago.

I also think having the expertise of the folks at the USGS in areas of
geospatial data availability, quality, and metadata would be a great
asset to any OSM PD effort, and would eventually trickle down
improvements to OSM itself.

Once again, I encourage you to keep moving forward. I'd really like to
talk more about this concept of collaboration between an OSM PD data
repository and the USGS, and I would like to learn more about how I
can help.

Landon

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Eric Wolf <ebwolf at usgs.gov> wrote:
> Thus begins the fun conversation that helps decide whether US tax dollars
> should go toward maintaining a basemap through duplicated effort or not. It
> can happen either way - either write your representatives in Washington
> telling them that you support USGS data being published under a more
> restrictive license (than PD) or you lobby the OSM Foundation to change OSM.
> Right now, the USGS wants to participate more in OSM but can't because the
> budget doesn't really support developing two base maps of the country (the
> one on OSM and The National Map). So we are stuck building our silos and
> interacting with OSM in a research capacity.
> I guess a third possibility is to lobby Congress to increase the USGS budget
> so we can do both. But that won't be viewed too kindly because OSM can
> easily be seen as an arm CloudMade. It would be akin to the USGS helping
> Google (or TeleAtlas or Navteq) directly develop their basemaps (instead of
> just providing everyone with the same data access). There are pretty strict
> rules about how much Federal agencies can help corporations develop
> products. And even though it's crystal clear to me that Cloudmade and OSM
> are distinct, I'm not the one who gets to make that call. Just the
> appearance of impropriety is bad politics.
> Personally, I'd rather see the USGS adopt a license that helps it get a
> little love back from data users (other than tax dollars). It would also
> mean we could direct our efforts at producing one really great map.
> -Eric
> -=--=---=----=----=---=--=-=--=---=----=---=--=-=-
> Eric B. Wolf                    New! 720-334-7734
> USGS Geographer
> Center of Excellence in GIScience
> PhD Student
> CU-Boulder - Geography
>
> GPG Public Key: http://www.h4h.net/ebwolf.public.key.txt
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 4:39 PM, SteveC <steve at asklater.com> wrote:
>>
>> thus begins the fun discussion that we should change to PD because USGS
>> wants us to, or we should keep BYSA because nearmap wants us to
>>
>>
>>
>> On Jul 19, 2010, at 8:27 PM, Eric Wolf wrote:
>> > I wanted to make a quick introduction. Some of you may know me already -
>> > but likely many of you don't know why I subscribed to the list.
>> >
>> > First, I subscribed because the OSM/PD page on the OSM Wiki said this
>> > was the mailing list to discuss PD map issues.
>> >
>> > Second, I am involved in efforts within the USGS to understand how to
>> > work with the OSM community. I've done this in the past through things like
>> > joining mapping parties and taking Steve Coast on a tour of Washington DC.
>> >
>> > Third, the primary hurdle between the USGS and OSM interchanging data on
>> > a large scale is due to licensing. The USGS is required by federal law to
>> > release all data free of any restrictions. Technically, it's not PD but it's
>> > a flavor of PD. I'm not a lawyer, so I won't even try to get into it.
>> > Essentially, the USGS would be putting some significant effort directly into
>> > the development of OSM if it weren't for the license issue.
>> >
>> > Fourth, I'm involved in a project where we are testing some of the
>> > software capabilities and social processes within the context of current
>> > USGS data compilation. We've already stood up an empty OSM software stack on
>> > our own server and have begun populating with some test data. It's a very
>> > controlled test and there is very, very little actual data.
>> >
>> > So, I am interested in the OSM/PD project and I look forward to the
>> > discussions here.
>> >
>> > -Eric Wolf
>> >
>> > -=--=---=----=----=---=--=-=--=---=----=---=--=-=-
>> > Eric B. Wolf                    New! 720-334-7734
>> > USGS Geographer
>> > Center of Excellence in GIScience
>> > PhD Student
>> > CU-Boulder - Geography
>> >
>> > GPG Public Key: http://www.h4h.net/ebwolf.public.key.txt
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Legal-general mailing list
>> > Legal-general at openstreetmap.org
>> > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-general
>>
>> Steve
>>
>> stevecoast.com
>>
>
>
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