[Openstreetmap] Please Help Petition for Public Access to Geodata in Europe

[Jo Walsh]

dear openstreetmap list,

Please sign the petition: http://petition.publicgeodata.org/ 
Yesterday the INSPIRE Directive on European "spatial data infrastructure"
began its second reading in the European Parliament. Within a few
weeks or months it may entrench a policy of charging European citizens 
to access public information they've already paid to collect. Members of 
the European Parliament think this an obscure and dull technical issue;
but free public access to geographic information is essential for economic
innovation and civic co-operation. 

Benjamin Henrion and I are starting the above petition to MEPs to
reject the current draft of the INSPIRE directive. It's all rather
last-minute; we may have as little as a month before the Directive
gets through its second reading; so it's important we try and get as
many signatures as we can, as soon as we can, and get the word out.

People writing open source software, people who create a lot of GPS
information as a byproduct of being a hiker or cycle courier, people
who love cartography and just want to improve the representation of
the world around them, all over Europe, are getting together through
http://openstreetmap.org/ to create and share geographic information. 

New data exchange standards, at both ad-hoc and industry level, 
allow for more of the creation of maps and description of the
environment to be carried out by people who know the location well; 
map data, census information and other essential data about how people 
and places interact, which is used to manage civic society. 

INSPIRE ignores all these trends. It is a narrow view that was formed
without a full survey of what's being done with spatial information -
especially with GPS and GSM positioning based media, new kinds of
transport logistics systems, and the upcoming GALILEO satellite
network. GALILEO will guarantee a reasonable quality signal for free
to all citizens. A Directive about access to state-collected public
geographic information, should guarantee freedom of access to data.

If you are in Europe, please help us raise awareness among MEPs that this
is a much bigger issue than it seems, and shouldn't be rubber-stamped!
Help us by signing http://petition.publicgeodata.org/ . Please tell
other interest groups that you're a part of - non-geo, or even non-geek
- and ask other European friends to help us by signing the petition. 
Please feel free to forward this mail, or bits of it, onwards.

http://publicgeodata.org/ is a wiki for collaboration on research into
the issue, into some of the history and context around this
legislation, also providing a quick rough guide for focusing energy
when contacting your MEPs about this regressive, short-termist law.

If INSPIRE passes its second reading with this wording, all our in-car
navigation systems, mobile phones, local search services, will become
more expensive and less useful; INSPIRE threatens to set back economic
innovation in location aware technology in Europe by many years.


-jo