On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 9:20 AM, Daniel Joseph <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I was wondering if anyone had experience conveying to local government all > the reasons for opening up data.
This is one of those situations where you have to choose the person/people you talk to carefully, depending on where you live. If you live in a large city, then you're going to run up against different obstacles than you would if you were dealing with a small town or county government. In a large city, you want to look for someone in a position such as public advocate or ombudsman. These people may be more open to hearing an argument about government transparency and open data. You may also want to talk to your local city representatives. The arguments to be made are fairly good, and actually fairly non-partisan in that you can argue them to either side. For a liberal, you may want to argue this is the public's data and paid for by public funds. And for a conservative, or a libertarian, you may want to argue that this is a matter of government transparency. Obviously the exact method you use will depend on the individual. If you live in a small suburban or rural area, you may want to talk to the GIS department head, or even the mayor about it. In some cases, you may find that they think the data is already in the public domain. Or you may find that they are unwilling to modify the license but would be willing to license the data out to OSM. - Serge _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
