[GSDI Legal Econ] GSDI Legal and Economic Working Group update

Wed Feb 7 04:19:25 EST 2007

Dear all:
This message gives up an update on the activities of the Legal and Economic Working Group.  It's a long message, so please bear with me. In line with the work plan drafted at the open meeting in Chile, we have worked out a tentative schedule for 1) briefs (as blogs), 2) WebEx presentation, and 3) workshop at PCGIAP meeting in Korea  [See attached table]. Other items such as the Working Group's name change, related events, other matters also are addressed in this message.

1) briefs (as blogs)  
Provided below are the tentative titles of what the brief will cover and the tentative months in which the briefs will be discussed.  The idea is every month or two, there would be a dialogue on a legal/economic/social topic of interest. The briefs will frame an issue (a summary of the 'why it matters' and why it's not a clearcut issue) and then there will be an open call for the listserv/working group members to respond and debate. 
[March] Legal disclaimers for web mapping and web visualization (Jeff Labonte, NR Canada) 
[April] Spatially enabling government (Peter Holland, Geoscience Australia)  
[June] Understanding how and why practitioners evaluate SDI performance (Kate Lance, ITC)
[July/August] Linkage(s) (often absent) between Public Sector Information infrastructures/frameworks (in different access regimes) and the potential impact on SDIs in those same regimes (the resulting focus of his PhD research)  (Roger Longhorn, Info-Dynamics Research Associates Ltd.)
[September] Understanding the legal framework for SDI - starting with terminology? (Katleen Janssen, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) 
[October] Garfield Giff: Access Policies in Europe: Are they within the spirit of the INSPIRE Directive? (Garfield Giff, Delft University of Technology)
[November/December] SDI and Privacy Conflict of Interest? (Bastiaan van Loenen, Delft University of Technology)

If others are willing to contribute a brief on a topic of interest, you are most welcome (e.g., Francis Harvey, perhaps we could count on you to provoke some thought?).  Most of the existing contributors are flexible as to the month they've been scheduled.  If we want to be mellow for the time being and still keep the schedule to having a brief/discussion every 1-2 months, we could schedule tentative ideas for January and February 2008.

Roger has volunteered to be an initial responder to each brief, to get the dialogue going, in case some people need a nudge.  He also is willing to take on the 'synthesis' role, if necessary. We still need to 
consider how best to synthesize and format, i.e. "Here is the brief and here are the comments" or "Incorporate the comments received into the original brief document".

We still must wait for the GSDI Board to decide upon GSDI website upgrades -- i.e., I can't yet say if the brief will be presented as blogs.  A group of Board members are looking into the various options and costs for web upgrades (including the blogging or wiki capability that the Working Group requested).  Regardless of the website functionality, the ‘briefs’ still are a concrete and useful output of the Working Group, and we have the fall-back option of circulating the briefs and discussing them via the GSDI Legal and Economic Discussion List. 

2) WebEx presentation   
The Working Group recommended that we try out the WebEx facility of FGDC to have a virtual presentation and question/answer session.  Leslie Armstrong (USGS/FGDC) has offered to pilot this effort with a presentation on:
"US Geospatial Line of Business: Overview and goals, business requirements process, budget data gathering and analysis, performance metrics, and investment strategies and planning." 
 This can take place any time after mid-February. The WebEX forum is available for us to use whenever we want to 24/7, so it will come down to us deciding on a time that would suit the time zones of interested group members. 

3) Joint PCGIAP/GSDI workshop at PCGIAP meeting, 12 June 2007, Seoul, Korea 
The topic of the workshop will be 'spatially enabling government' and will be organised by PCGIAP working group 2 (chaired by Professor Ian Williamson from Melbourne University), Bas Kok and Peter Holland. It will run in the afternoon of Tuesday 12 June at the COEX Convention Centre in Seoul and will be an open workshop. More information will be provided as details firm up. (Contact: Peter Holland, peter.holland -at- ga.gov.au)  

Other items:

a) In order to change the Legal and Economic Working Group name to Legal and Socio-Economic Working Gropu, we have put forward a motion for the next GSDI Board Conference Call (February 14) 
Motion: The GSDI Board fully supports changing the name of the "Legal and Economic Working Group" to the "Legal and Socio-Economic Working Group" and urges approval of such a bylaw change by the Council at its next meeting.

b) A couple research abstracts have been added to the Working Group research web page, http://gsdidocs.org/lewg/GII_research.htm, and at least one other colleagues (Abbas Rajabifard) indicated he will be sending his shortly.  It is hoped that others still will share a research summary and will seek out and encourage additional researchers to get involved.  

c) Literature was contributed by Zorica Nedovic-Budic and has been added to the existing SDI literature search engine, http://www.otb.tudelft.nl/NGII/db.cgi?db=default&uid=default&view_search=1.  There's been further dialogue on how to establish a user-driven (user-updated) database of literature.  This would be the solution to populating a database of literature.  Since there is no staff to take care of this, individuals would need to do so themselves directly.  

d) The GSDI Association plans to update the global survey of SDI initiatives, and this would provide an opportunity for identifying new materials of existing SDI efforts/practices. The effort would be based on an online questionnaire.  A group of volunteers is needed who would like to contribute to the design of the questionnaire.  The GSDI Association will be forming a task team to work on this.  If you are interested, you can let me know, and I will pass on your name.

e) Wageningen University, together with GSDI, KU Leuven, Melbourne University, Ravi, Geoconnections, and Delft University have been granted an extension of the Space for Geoinformation project "Development of framework to assess National SDIs worldwide". Part of this extension is a workshop on different ways of looking at the success of SDIs, which should result in a book tentatively entitled "Multi-view framework to assess National Spatial Data Infrastructures". A workshop, to explore and discuss different ways of reviewing and assessing SDIs, will be held May 23-25, 2007 at Wageningen University.  (Contact: Joep Crompvoets, joep.crompvoets -at- wur.nl  )

f) In conjunction with this same Dutch project, ITC, Wageningen University, and the Netherlands Institute of Applied Geoscience (TNO) are planning a workshop for January 2008 on "Measuring SDI performance as a function of budgeting processes".  The workshop will look at the relationship between performance measurement, budgetary practices, cross-agency relations, and public service delivery.  Results from this workshop will be assembled into a web page within the Working Group web pages. (Contact: Kate Lance, lance -at- itc.nl). See: http://ijsdir.jrc.it/research_articles/lance_georgiadou_bregt.pdf 

g) Paul Uhlir is working on putting together a proposal for an international workshop, tentatively entitled: "Improving Understanding of the Effects of Different Policies for Access to and Use of Digital Public Sector Information: A Review of Assessment Criteria and Methods", which he hopes to hold in early or late summer 2007, most likely in Paris. This would be mostly a methodological survey and discussion, and it would be focused primarily on government data, including of course geospatial data.  (Contact: Paul Uhlir, puhlir -at- nas.edu )

h) We have not addressed the language issue (e.g., that all the dialogue is taking place in English).  Regrettably, we do not have the resources to translate materials.  However, we recognize that being multi-lingual would make us more inclusive.  So, if there are colleagues out there who, for instance, would be willing to translate a brief or prepare a brief in Spanish (or French for that matter), that could be a step in the right direction.  

i) I have a suggestion for something else this working group could do in 2007.  I suggest that we create a wikipedia page on "spatial data infrastructure," since it doesn't yet exist, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page.  Best that it is defined properly with a socio-technical slant emphasis, no?  If you're interested/willing to take the lead on this, please let me know.

j) Some of those cc'ed this message have yet to sign up for the GSDI Legal and Economic Discussion List. [Please, if you could sign up, I would appreciate it, as I would prefer to use the Discussion List as the means to get messages out to the Group.  You could sign up for the 'Digest' to minimize the number of messages you might get].  

k) Finally, I encourage everyone to contribute to the content of the Working Group Discussion Lists.

Regards,

Kate

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