Europe seeking to make open mapping impossible - help!

Your help is needed to fight a move that could see all the geographic information in Europe locked away and available only to well-heeled corporations, but not to activists, nonprofits, individuals and startups.

The EU's INSPIRE directive is supposed to harmonize the way that European mapping agencies share their geo-data, but the process has been hijacked. Now it looks more like a proprietary, restrictive, monopoly pricing policy that guts open access.

Geographic data is a key to unlocking information collected by government on behalf of the public - census, voting, planning, utilities, environmental, transport information. Google Maps/Earth mashups are just starting to show us what can be done by overlaying different kinds of environmental and social information over freely available base maps.

The Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee of the European Parliament gets the chance to roll back some of these changes next Tuesday (21st March).

An open letter from Public Geodata urges the Committee to consider this not as a niche technical issue, but as a core component of the management of civil society in the information age. We need your signature -- and particularly the signature of your organisation -- on this letter to prevent the basic information about the lands where we live from being hijacked by a few companies to all our detriment.