“But I’d rather start to find solutions from the assumption of free and open to the public, rather than the other way around, and in practice the web and community of open geo data have stepped up to fill this role.”

The problem with this is that governments have built their GIS infrastructure based on a pay system. For instance, in my County, the cities and townships pay for access to the data and support from our department. It would be difficult for us to turn around now and put all our data out there for free.

We do what we can, but it is a balance, especially when we are constantly requesting new large purchases such as new high-quality ortho photos, oblique photos, LiDAR scans, etc. Even if we bought these items as resales (when Microsoft or Google has already paid initial fees) it is still expensive.

Also, most requests for large datasets come from large companies, not citizens. If we receive requests from non-profits or universities, we usually can work out a data exchange.

For more on this check this post: http://bodbrain.blogspot.com/2008/04/geocode-money.html

The bill had received little support and a lot of opposition.

Thanks to everyone who helped spread the word and contact your legislators. You all helped kill this bad bill.

There is a hearing on the bill scheduled for April 16th in the Governmental Organization (though the committee clerk says it could be postponed to the 23rd).

For folks who live in California, the things to do are (in this order)
* contact your rep
* contact the chair of the Governmental Organization Committee.
* contact the members of the committee.
http://www.assembly.ca.gov/acs/newcomframeset.asp?committee=9

When you call, state your name, and that you are calling to oppose AB1978. (It’s important to state the bill number). Tell them why you oppose the bill, and be polite and brief (the staffers deal with a *lot* of callers on many topics).

Let’s not let this bad bill sneak through.

- Adina

Hi Mikel,

Google is actually a proponent of open transit data–as it happens, I
wrote an official
blog post on that very topic last week. BTW, if you’re interested
in learning more about the transit data efforts that are going on in
the developer community, check out the Transit Developers mailing list.

Anyway, thanks for shining a light on this bill. I think that AB 1978
would be a step backwards for California and a bad example for the
rest of the country.

Joe Hughes
http://headwayblog.com

Although the article on Nanaimo contains wording that makes it sound like we gave our data to Google, what we are actually doing is publishing the data in KML format. The only data of ours that Google serves is our orthophotos.

The imagery is certainly an area of weakness because of the terms of our last ortho capture contract, but hopefully we will be able to specify an open data license next time. Redistribution will be an issue (we don’t have the capacity in-house) but maybe OAM is the answer.

Jason