I’ve booked my travel and am in the midst of preparing my talk at State of the Map (SOTM) 2009 in Amsterdam.
Throughout co-founding Open Data Commons and drafting the Open Database Licence (ODbL), I’ve spent several hundred hours of attorney time, all donated pro bono. While I’m more than happy to donate more time to come speak at SOTM (including a day off work and about 2 days of prep time), I don’t want to be out of pocket on any of my expenses. Even though the licence may be free as in beer and free as in liberty, it isn’t free to travel from the UK to Amsterdam and stay two nights, especially in high season.
I’ve tried to travel and stay as economically as I can, and so I’m only asking for about 554£ to cover my expenses, which include:
– 159 € for return train travel Reading, UK to Amsterdam
– 280€ for 2 nights hotel
– 32 € for bicycle rental at Damstraat
– 75€ = 25 €/day for incidentals and food while traveling
– 100€ Community Passport registration at SOTM
Total 646€ (about 554£)
All money donated in excess of the costs of travel will go towards the goals of the Open Knowledge Foundation, a non-profit promoting open knowledge: that’s any kind of information – sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata – that can be freely used, reused, and redistributed. OKFN organizes events like OKCon, run projects like Open Shakespeare, and develop tools like CKAN and KnowledgeForge to help people create, find and share open material.
Please go to
http://okfn.org/support/donate/
.. to donate via PayPal and mark your donation “SOTM”
I also would very much like your suggestions on what I should cover in my talk – and if I don’t get a chance to address it feel free to come up and find me!
I think the most useful things you could address are to illustrate what one is and isn’t allowed to do by way of real world examples rather than the abstract form of the license.
For example: I print a map (picture) in a book: what obligations does that create for me for that page in the book and/or the whole book?
Or similarly: I use the map (by visually finding the location by reference to feature son the map) to geolocate a photo (embed the position of the photo in the photo file): can I use the information then embedded in the photo to position it automatically on top of a Google map?
Or: I make and sell a SatNav (let’s say, for novelty, one specifically designed for bicycles) storing, and perhaps updating, a subset of OpenStreetMap data itself (not just pictorial maps) inside the device. What are my obligations – do I have to provide some kind of interface for anyone to get the data out again to satisfy Share Alike conditions? If I change the format to suit my application, is it sufficient to reference the original data? Is the copyright on my software which makes the data visible and usable affected?
Etc, etc.