[Qgis-user] Public Sector Mapping Agreement

[Andrew Chapman]

Ordnance Survey is introducing their "Public Sector Mapping Agreement for
England and Wales" as of 1 April 2011. This is a major change to their
licensing and will provide free access to OS MasterMap and other layers to
all public bodies, layers of local government (including the approximately
10,000 parish councils)... and also permit free sub-licensing to
subcontractors. Directly and, indirectly, this could dramatically increase
the number of potential users of QGIS. Details can be found at
www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/business/sectors/government/publicpsmafaq
s.html.
I'm a member of a parish council, but am working with the county council
(plus Environment Agency, Highways Agency, etc) in different areas looking
at local community sourcing of GIS data, but especially relating to
flooding.
To encourage take-up for both GIS and QGIS, it may help if there were
tutorials to take a new user of GIS through the steps to download data from
Ordnance Survey (probably only in GZ format for the topology layers). 
To date I've been getting data as shapefiles - when I last tried (an earlier
version) QGIS wouldn't load .gz and the support for .gml may have been
incomplete.
Is anyone else using Ordnance Survey .gz files directly?
Would the best advice for users new to GIS be to convert to shapefiles or
use a database (something I've not yet managed to do)?
Are there any UK users involved with town or parish councils?

Andrew