[Publicwhip-playing] Re: [geo-discuss] Re: [Openstreetmap] Coders needed for similar project & UK FOI act request update.

Jo Walsh jo at frot.org
Sat Nov 12 13:33:36 GMT 2005


On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 09:26:41PM -0400, Daniel Haran wrote:
> > absurdity in the fact that, as Rufus points out in theory every UK
> > citizen could make the same request for e.g. BoundaryLine and be
> > granted 'access' to it?
> How much does it cost to file a FOI request? Absurd can make for good
> political theater.

i believe it is 10% of the cost of processing the request, "plus a
reasonable return on investment", up to a maximum of 55 pounds. 
Heather's 'Your Right To Know' book has a good guide to the steps of
the request and appeal process. As this is a digital resource and all
the effort involved in packaging it appropriately and publishing a
location for it or otherwise having a mechanism to distribute it... so
the cost for servicing one request should drop off very rapidly.  

Perhaps the argument is, 'It is possible to provide a mechanism by which 
any uk citizen who wishes can gain free access (leaving aside the question of
redistribution), perhaps registering personal details, but a process
not needing human intervention. The cost of this is the cost of
bandwidth and of server/storage resources. The current state is a process
whereby each citizen has to be charged for the time spent by a person 
processing their request to gain access to that same data. This
obstructs access, this generates unnecessary and unmeaningful
financial barriers to information access.'

Just being able to play with BoundaryLine, explore it would be
interesting to me. Perhaps in order to avoid distributing the data one
could build a http application which uses the data, and distribute the
application, or, I wonder if one could do an AJAX type thing where a
script is pointed at a local copy of BoundaryLine and the data never
technically leaves the client machine. Whether that's pushing it a bit
far.


-jo




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