[Foundation-l] Fight for Freedom of Geographic Data - how can Wikimedia help?

[Jakob Voss]

Łukasz Garczewski 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
>>
>> Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia chapters and Wikipedians obvoiously 
>> should be interested in changing the European Directive to free 
>> Geographic Data.
> [cut]
>> 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. Who knows, maybe we'll all have a chance to say 
> "Thank you Poland" once again. ;)

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).

> And yes, simple and convincing examples would be a huge help. Perhaps we 
> could work on those on meta?

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://www.webkuehn.de/hobbys/wikipedia/geokoordinaten/index_en.htm

Images are always more convincing.

Greetings,
Jakob