[Geodata] Geodata Mission

[Jo Walsh]

dear Bitner, Frank, all,
On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 08:39:16PM -0500, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> I find it interesting that your tasks do not include advocacy to encourage
> free distribution of data, nor work on devising/vetting/promoting/educating
> around appropriate licenses for free geodata.  I originally thought of those
> two things as the core of the geodata committee mission...
> could be considered "inactive" responsibilities but I don't think they
> should disappear altogether.

Right, my main reason for stepping down as Committee chair was to be
able to focus on just this issue; providing support material for
organisations who want to open license data, but are worried about the future
implications of picking different licensing styles. 

http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Guide_to_Public_Geodata_Licensing
is the start I have made - basically an outline with no content yet. 
Note this is very specifically directed at *public administrations*
and thus has a different emphasis from all the licensing work that is
being done by the OSMF, particularly Richard Fairhurst, which centres
(from what i see) on issues of individual contributions to a
collective work, re-use alongside other massively collective works
like Wikipedia, and Fear of Takedown Through Copyright Infringement. 
Public authorities don't have these concerns, at least not yet. 

I've had expressions of interest in participating (providing accounts
of "decision workflow" or whatnot, being a contact point for other
agencies) from a couple of agency representatives and i hope a decent
draft will encourage more to crawl out of the woodwork. But I want to
have a lot more written, before i even start punting this round the
people i know who are self-educated experts on this and related topics
- Richard, Frederik Ramm, many not even on this list - so that there
is something "solid" before it goes further than the group of people here. 
That's the main reason i haven't talked about this on the list yet :)

> Collecting, processing and offering free geodata via various services is
> also of interest, but I think we have seen that this can proceed reasonably
> well without a committee to guide it.  In fact, it has pretty much had to
> go underground in order to avoid "Too much wanking keeps things from
> getting done."

I want to help out with providing search backend / UI / packaging
for this, but am not going to have "free" time for it until next year.
And yeah, this is paradoxical for me. Everything i've learned
about ground-up geospatial metadata has been from the group mind
represented by this committee, especially from the first few meetings
and the social support offered for the INSPIRE response/analysis stuff. 

This has directly led to me getting paid to do geospatial work 
*for the first time ever*, rather than having to scrape by either on
charity or by doing piecemeal Web 2.0 gruntwork, then burning out again.
So paradoxically i am less useful here because i'm finally on a geo
commercial/open-source path. I hope it will all balance out soon enough.

In the meantime i really appreciate the recent bout of soul-searching.
It does seem like we are stuck between two stools where a lot of the
"less geeky" of the original members of the Committee/list have gone
off to the Edu group where they are able to help more (Ned, we miss you!)
and the "more geeky" are into their own specialist niches but not so
interested in building "mass market oriented" services. The few people
who have done *a lot* on the systems at telascience - crschmidt,
MartinSpott - are scratching their own itches. Well, no-one scratches
other people's itches for free. Would money even help, given we know
we're building something to give away? Are we all just dreaming in
Google's matrix? Sigh, such blather is for the blogosphere, and i'll
try to stick to open data licensing here ;)

love,


jo
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