Incidental Contemplations

I’ve just been skimming the new report(pdf) from the UK Department for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform. It goes by the completely uninspiring name of “Models of public sector information provision via trading funds”, though the contents are anything but uninspiring. Broadly speaking, it outlines the economic benefits to society of making government data available at marginal cost (ie, $0; Ordinance Survey data by bittorrent? Note 19, p34).

So far I haven’t understood much beyond the executive summary (it’s full of the sort of maths and dry theory economists salivate over), but I believe this report will have a profound impact on the way governments handle their responsibility as custodians of information about society. It won’t be due to any altruistic motives, but rather down to the almighty dollar (or pound in this case). If you’ve ever had the misfortune to be ear-bashed by me over a few beers, you’ve probably heard me say “if you want to know what’s happening, follow the money”. Now the money has a reason to set the data free in a way we’ve previously intuitively understood but haven’t been able to prove. This report demonstrates some impressive economic returns that are possible from setting significant data sets free, such as the Ordinance Survey. It will take some time, but I believe we are now on a one way path towards liberalising the distribution of government generated data.

WALIS Forum has started, and we have our OSGeo booth. Many thanks to our sponsors Gaia Resources, Lisasoft, Maunsell and Lat-Lon. WALIS was started by the Western Australian Government in 1981 for coordinating across-government access and delivery of the geographic information held by WA Government agencies. I was going to write a few words about how great WALIS is, but Marnie Layborne, Director of WALIS says it so much better;

WALIS is all about participation and cooperation. Our role is to advance the spatial information industry in Western Australia and WALIS has traditionally coordinated the sharing and access of geographic information across government. We are now expanding beyond government to include the private sector, academia etc as the only way we can really realise a global vision is to include all the players. This is why we have as our theme for this forum, public private partnerships.

WALIS forum is held every 18 months, and has been consistently growing bigger. It’s just been announced there are over 800 registrations. Everybody who’s somebody in the spatial industry in Australia (and many from overseas, particularly NZ) is here. We’ve only just started, and already we have had healthy interest in not just what OSGeo is doing, but more importantly, what everyone can do with open source themselves.