Hi all, The government have a consultation going on at the moment about the future of the Public Data Corporation. The PDC is responsible for commercially valuable public data including Ordnance Survey, Land Registry and Met Office data. While the government is releasing a lot of data under the Open Government License (which is compatible with Wikimedia's content as it basically boils down to government-branded CC BY). In fact, we have added OGL photos to Commons and some of them are now in use on enwiki. But the data controlled by the PDC could potentially be of use to Wikimedians: the Ordnance Survey and Met Office data could be used to produce better, more detailed maps of Britain and those images can be reused by projects like Wikipedia (to illustrate place names), Wikinews (for original research stories), Commons, Wikibooks/Wikiversity (for geography textbooks/tutorials etc.). Being able to merge government-produced data that we have funded the creation of (through taxation) with volunteer produced content (through Wikimedia, Open Street Map, free and open source software) could dramatically help our mission of supporting the spread of free and open knowledge. The Dutch government recently agreed to release a lot of their geographical information for free, and it'd be great if the UK could too. Is there any interest in putting together a response to the government's consultation on the Public Data Corporation basically saying we're firmly in favour of the government releasing as much as they possibly can under free licenses. We could do this either as Wikimedia UK or, if that isn't kosher with the charity application, as "Wikimedians in the UK" or something. ;-) Yours, -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org