- What's wrong with the way things are organised at present?
- Why isn't this site on the Guardian's main site?
- How long will the site be here?
- Can you make any difference?
- Who would benefit from this campaign?
- Wouldn't a better strategy be to create an open-source database of geographic and other points?
- Are you going to move this page/site to a wiki format?
- Why isn't this site on the Guardian's main site? Because the short time constraints on setting it up didn't allow for the careful construction that would be required to integrate it into the Guardian Unlimited site. This doesn't mean it won't move there in time..
- How long will the site be here? Until it's integrated into the Guardian's site, or until the campaign succeeds, or there's no further use for it.
- Can you make any difference? We can all make a difference - by lobbying MPs and MEPs and illuminating the absurdities and distortions that are created by a system whereby the government owns the data collection agencies and then forces them to charge to distribute the data - acting as companies instead of government bodies.
- Who would benefit from this campaign? Anyone who wants to create a site or service which uses government data. Potentially, that means all of us, since government data is about us. According to a paper by the late Peter Weiss, the UK economy could be millions of pounds better off if it shifted the responsibility for making money out of data to the organisations best fitted for it - non-government ones.
- Wouldn't it be better to create an open-source database of geographic and other data? Much though we admire the stoicism of the people at OpenStreetMap, when you compare it to the Post Office's thousands of postcodes - which it has to verify - and the Ordnance Survey's billion-odd bits of data, which would cost perhaps £200m in taxes to keep updated to their present quality - that is, about £4 per taxpayer per year - you have to say that it makes more sense to free the existing data than to reinvent the wheel. It's a very large wheel.
(Note: Steve, who runs the OpenStreetMap site, responds: "This misses the point of what's useful. We don't have to have millions of postcodes to be useful. We don't need to know where trees are to the milimeter to create a map that's 99% useful." Certainly there's room for both projects, and we do applaud Steve's efforts.)
- Are you going to move this page/site to a wiki format? Might do. It would certainly make the process of updating links and pages like this simpler. I'm investigating the TiddlyWiki system, though it doesn't work on every browser (for editing; you can still view content from a TiddlyWiki in any browser). Your views are welcome.
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