I'm sorry that I cannot support with more than interest because I'm very
busy at the moment, but if anyone (yes, also you, anonymous reader!)
writes good press releases, information material, plans for activities
etc. I'm sure that there will be ways how Wikimedia Foundation and/or
local Wikimedia chapters will can help with both it's popularity and
financial support if needed.
Greetings,
Jakob
Jo Walsh wrote:
dear Jakob et al, thanks a lot for your interest and
energy. I
apologise for the long lag in my response; i've been offline for the
last 5 days on a long driving trip, and just got back to participate
in another binge of publicgeodata / INSPIRE outreach.
I'm cc'ing here Benjamin Henrion, who is doing the Brussels running
and press negotiation for
publicgeodata.org, in the rare moments of spare
time allowed him by his day job with
FFII.org . He's the expert on
tone in lobbying activities.
On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 02:00:25PM +0100, Jakob Voss wrote:
>> There is an oportunity - no: necessity -
for active lobbying for Free
>> Knowledge in the European Union. The Proposed European Commission
>> Directive on European Spatial Data Infrastucture (INSPIRE) is
>> endangered to put more intellectual property rights on geographica
>> data in the European union.
>>
>> See
http://publicgeodata.org/WhatIsInspire and
>>
http://space.frot.org/docs/inspire_directive.html
>> Any suggestions? I'm still searching for an occasion and easy example
>> [2] to convince your grandma, get into the media etc.
> I will look into this and possibly try to contact the right people here
> in Poland. Since we already have one win in this field, maybe we could
> follow up on that.
Thank you for following this. We should use the
popularity of Wikimedia
to get more attention to this in the public, parliament and/or where the
important people are but I don't know how. I press release "Wikimedia
criticises Inspire" is missing a specific occasion. But Wikimedia and
Wikipedians are mostly busy with other stuff. Maybe Stefan Kühn
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Stefan_K%C3%BChn
is interested to help and/or can give you more contact - he is doing a
PhD in cartography and is very active in the German Wikipedia with
Geodata (see link below).
Jo Walsh can probably give us hints where to do lobbying with which
arguments (hi Jo, are you reading this?). I hope that he has some good
examples. We can also show what is possible with free geodata and Wikipedia:
http://publicgeodata.org/ActOnInspire is the brief-notes practical
guide to lobbying INSPIRE.
http://publicgeodata.org/Arguments
currently shows Benjamin's list of what touches MEPs minds most
directly.
I would say that part of what has made focusing on what's wrong with
INSPIRE difficult, is how many angles there are by which to look at
it. I would say that the strongest ones are these:
- Commercial copyright and licensing of geodata risks suppressing
innovation, leading to less job creation and less economic activity
for Europeans in next-generation location services built on GALILEO
- Geodata is a public good and has many use cases not addressed by the
market - allowing citizens to find recycling facilities, disabled
access facilities, etc. It actually is more expensive to distributed
data than to give it away.
- The aims of INSPIRE and related programs are to facilitate sharing
of data between member states, especially in order to respond to
environmental emergencies and to model sustainable alternatives.
There are huge translation and taxonomy problems involved. The
quickest way to resolve these is to put the data into the public
domain.
- INSPIRE has been designed without consultation of the broader
academic, freelance research and business interests which depend
heavily on how much European citizens have to pay for the geographic
information collected on their behalf.
A lot of our earlier writing on the subject of INSPIRE -
http://space.frot.org/docs/uninspired.html in particular i have seen
quoted back at me recently - was addressed to a technical/professional
audience. I tend to get caught up in the philosophy, carried away with
words; Benjamin is very much immersed in the EU process.
http://rejectinspire.publicgeodata.org/ is our best ongoing shot at a
populist rendition of "why sign the petition".
How can you help us? Let me count the ways:
- We are gathering testimonials from SMEs and research users of
geodata. Markus Neteler of the GRASS project is hopefully offering
one on behalf of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.
This would be a great thing to have the Wikimedia Foundation do.
http://publicgeodata.org/Testimonies
- Now we have a decent signup base on the petition, we hope to do more
widespread, popular oriented publicity for publicgeodata soon. It
would be great to be able to
* Take this out of the English-speaking, UK-oriented medium more
* Take this into paper press - Le Monde, Financial Times etc
This is an area in which the Wikimedia Foundation could be really
useful, both in offering a press release of its own, and helping us
get into conduits that reach through to the "mainstream" media
throughout Europe, more widely.
- PR and rewriting advice, to help get the message across in different
ways, is always appreciated.
Definitely; i've learnt from long experience that pointing and
shouting at neat hacks like
fundrace.org, or the myriad sites that use
geocoder.us to do spatial things, aren't convincing to Europeans;
people need to see maps of where they are, places they understand and
feel really connected to. It's chicken-and-egg for us; we could build
the convincing demos given access to state collected geodata!
Markus just showed me this slide from a GRASS talk he is giving:
http://mpa.itc.it/markus/grass61/demos/rlake/trento3d_flooding_before_after…
The geo-discuss list at OKFN is the central place to talk about all
this, and would definitely be the best place to braindump any
followups to this discussion:
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/geo-discuss
We also have an irc channel on irc.freenode.net#publicgeodata
(i am 'zool' there, Benjamin is 'zoobab')
Thanks again so much for your interest; my apologies again for the
long delay in followup; look forward to finding out more about your
end of this conversation.
-jo