Mapping Hacks

Last Thursday’s Forum on open geodata in central London went fascinatingly. The CTO of the Ordnance Survey attended, as did apparently the head of their PR department, and a cluster of GIS policy advisory professionals, and a veritable collective of UK open map hackers.

Further information including slides and a sound recording are provided. The Open Knowledge Foundation provided invaluable logistical support for the event.

I heard cited several times from those i talked to, a recent freedom of information paper by Peter Weiss, which is now mirrored here. Here is an excerpt:

Although these arguments are convincing to many (the entire US open access policy is based on them), they are not strong enough to convince all governments to adopt open access policies which maximize economic benefit, particularly jobs and wealth, encourage scientific and technological research and development, and thereby ultimately maximize general tax revenues in the longer term. Accordingly, this paper provides an argument to go towards open access policies: maximizing state revenues through taxable business, job and wealth creation. This paper puts aside abstract freedom of information concepts in favour of economic reasoning suggesting that open access policies are beneficial in the short term as well as in the longer term for the general public, the private sector and also for government entities.

Giles Lane, a director of the Urban Tapestries project put forward a license, based on the Creative Commons licensing model, which they have offered to the Ordnance Survey in the context of non-profit use of their data products.

These seem like interesting times and i hope to see some good practical upshot of this in the future!

Posted in policy |

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