Today in The Guardian: Berners-Lee talks; who should we be chasing?
Today in the print edition of The Guardian, the Technology section has two pieces in the Free Our Data campaign:
- Ordnance Survey challenged to open up
Sir Tim Berners-Lee wants access to Ordnance Survey data – and the freedom to manipulate it as he sees fit. Plus: the row between the Office for Public Sector Information and the OS - Government organisations under pressure to make money
The focus of the campaign this past week: which organisations to tackle and what data do they hold?
Unfortunately the table in the second piece hasn’t reconstituted at all online – I may have a go at putting it in a more readable HTML form, at least for use here.
And anyone who would like to suggest some wiki software (thanks for the pointers to forum software) is welcome to, since I think we’ll need it to corral all the data about who does what and what they own and charge.
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- Where we are today: chasing half a dozen ministers who won't take responsibility (12 October 2006; score: 37.33%)
- Tim Berners-Lee agrees: our data should be free (17 March 2006; score: 32.08%)
- Gordon Brown announces OS maps to be free online (18 November 2009; score: 30.86%)
- Sounds like a good idea: Sir Tim Berners-Lee goes to Downing Street to talk open data (15 September 2009; score: 25.15%)
- Which organisations should we be chasing? Let's make a list.. (16 March 2006; score: 24.48%)
March 23rd, 2006 at 10:20 am
Opensourcecms.com does in fact cover wikis as well as forum software. http://tikiwiki.org isn’t there but you might want something simpler than mediawiki or tikiwiki such as PmWiki: http://www.pmwiki.org/ The PmWiki users page has a couple of ugly but interesting examples:
http://www.scgis.gov/?n=Main.Mission
http://www.mkedata.org/
Whether you use PmWiki or not, I hope you’ll use something like its Lens or Neutral skins instead of the horrible “stripe down the middle” designs that are everywhere these days.
March 23rd, 2006 at 12:57 pm
It might help if you provide people with links to the Open Rights Group http://www.openrightsgroup.org/ they are lobbying the government on behalf of users in relation to DRM. Also if you really want to make a difference you can help them with their submission to the Gowers review.
If you’d like to take part in the Gowers Review of intellectual property in the UK, then the easiest way to do so is to leave a comment on the new Open Rights Group Gowers Review blog, http://gowers.openrightsgroup.org/ where they have sliced the Call for Evidence into bite-sized chunks, each of which you can comment on. Ideally, they would like to hear your first-hand experiences of dealing with intellectual property, whether that’s DRM, copyright, patents, orphaned works, or any other aspect. If you have a story to tell about IP, this is your opportunity.
March 31st, 2006 at 10:57 am
Geodaten und Kronjuwelen…
Die Diskussion über die freie Verfügbarkeit von Geodaten ist hier ja schon mal behandelt worden. In Großbritannien gewinnt die Auseinandersetzung gerade ein besonderes Profil: Der Guardian hat unter dem Slogan Free Our Data eine Kampagne lanciert, …
March 31st, 2006 at 2:55 pm
The campaign has received a good deal of attention, and support in many of the postings, so I’m surprised that last week’s article has received only three comments. In particular I’m surprised that nobody has picked up at all on the latter end of the article, which talked about the review by the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) looking at OS’s status under the Information Fair Trader Scheme.
OPSI are surely central to the debate on access to public sector information. As it says on their homepage ( http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ ) they are at the “…at the heart of information policy, setting standards, delivering access and encouraging re-use of public sector information. ” In effect they are the industry regulator that is there to ensure that the Trading Funds do not get carried away by their financial ambitions.
Michael & Charles may be planning to write about current regulation policies later in the campaign. If so, I apologise for jumping the gun.
The article about OS and their IFTS review seemed to cover the facts without ever passing comment, so perhaps it is not out of place to make one or two observations on the situation.
Firstly, the points made in the review seem to match the experience of many who get caught up in the net of licence restrictions put in place by OS. The very first recommendation in the review hits the nail on the head precisely. It says under actions required “Ordnance Survey carry out a re-assessment of its understanding of these objectives of IFTS, and whether its current culture and practices are effective in delivering them”. The remaining 15 recommendations suggest strongly to me that they are not committed in any real sense.
The culture of the organisation goes to the heart of these matters. The different Trading Funds identified in the campaign are getting different levels of criticism. Ordnance Survey are at the top of the list. Why? Because OS’s culture and interpretation of their obligations is very different to some of the other Trading Funds.
There are many ways to substantiate this fundamental difference in approach. Lets take just one that comes directly from the OPSI report on OS. The article reports that OS responded to the OPSI review. Indeed it did! The paper – published by OPSI on its website, tho’ not, as far as I can find, on OS’s own website – amounts not so much to a response, more to an outright rebuttal. OS claim that OPSI “…draws a causal link between alleged but unspecified deficiencies in our licence terms and conditions and the suggestion that we are not achieving fairness in some equally unspecified way”. My reading of the OPSI report is that it does indeed draw a causal link, but that it then goes on to illustrate the link in a very direct manner. In the next paragraph OS goes on to accuse OPSI of not understanding the business environment and Trading Fund framework that OS work within.
Two key points emerge from this exchange. Firstly that OS see the fulfilment of its objectives towards IFTS as being at the expense of its objectives towards Trading Fund returns, or vice versa. This is just plain wrong. We should expect our public bodies to operate within all the ground-rules they are set by those that govern them, not to be able to pick or choose which ones they favour. This might set up tensions common to many organisations working within the public sector, but that’s what the management of the organisation (who set the management culture) are paid their salaries for.
The second point is probably even more important in the current campaign. If OPSI is the watchdog set up by government to guard the crown jewels that Michael & Charles have described, when is it going to at least growl to show that it means business? So far, when threatened by a Trading Fund which reckons that it has might on its side in rejecting the findings of its IFTS review, the response has been to give OS a year to think about things. This hardly seems like something that will keep the top brass at OS awake at night!
The timing of the publishing of the IFTS review at OS and your campaign fit nicely together. It will be a shame if we have to wait a year to see whether OPSI really can bite. For many organisations struggling with OS’s draconian licensing system the problem is one that won’t wait. They must hope that Free Our Data gives OPSI the courage to show that at least the existing rules can be policed.
April 21st, 2006 at 9:36 pm
I’ve yet to see a convincing explanation of how giving ‘free’ access to OS and other data would do more than subsidise a few entrepreneurs to make profits from data that millions of UK taxpayers pay to have collected. The general lack of letters and emails in support of the campaign appears to demonstrate that most Guardian readers appreciate that data collected by government on our collective behalf has real value and should not be handed out free just because a small number of people want to get it without paying the rest of us a realistic price. I would support a campaign to allow free re-use of public data in order to provide free services for all UK taxpayers, but I haven’t seen any references to such altruism. It seems the campaigners want to have the whole of our joint cake and then re-sell it to us! The campaign does the reputation of the Guardian no good at all.
April 22nd, 2006 at 10:06 pm
Brian, the argument is pretty simple. There would be entrepreneurs – sure. They would set up companies which would employ people, and the company and its employees would pay taxes that they could not have before (because the price hurdle of getting the data was too high before).
The employees would also spend money with shops etc. This leads to general happiness. Much simplified, that’s the idea: that private companies will do more things and generate tax revenue that offsets the extra tax through getting public companies to give away the data they collect.
There were plenty of letters about this; and comments keep coming here. We remain confident that people want this campaign to succeed.