Free Our Data: Make taxpayers' data available to them

location based services


What's it all about?

On March 9 2006 the Guardian's Technology supplement carried an article called "Give us back our crown jewels". The argument is simple: government-funded and approved agencies such as the Ordnance Survey and UK Hydrographic Office and Highways Agency collect data using our funds, but then charge users and companies for access to it.
That restricts innovation and artificially restricts the number and variety of organisations that can offer services based on that most useful data - which our taxes have helped to collect.
Making that data available for free - rather as commercial companies such as Amazon and Google do with their catalog and maps data - would vastly expand the range of services available. It cannot make any sense that Google, an American organisation, is presently more popular with people aiming to create new map applications.
More questions? Why not read the frequently asked questions.

What can you do?

In the first place, lobby your MP; lobby your MEP about the iniquitous Inspire plan (you could join the Public Geodata campaign too). You could subscribe to the blog; and add your own comments too.

Campaign blog

We'll aim to have news, opinions, strategies, and the latest thoughts and information from the campaign here. You can get the RSS feeds on the page. (What's an RSS feed and why can it help me?)

Links

Other people have had the same problems; some have succeeded in overcoming them. This by no means exhaustive set of links aims to be a pointer.

Contact

If you'd like to help by providing technical expertise (which could include layout tips..), or want to tell us about your experiences, you can contact Charles Arthur or Michael Cross (who jointly wrote the original article) via the Guardian. Its switchboard number is +44 (0) 20 7278 2332.

A Guardian Technology campaign