OS Redacted Report
Following on from the OS review of the free data model, The Guardian placed an FoI request for the report itself and received a redacted version. All in all it doesn’t say very much and Charles Arthur goes in to a little more detail. Ouch!! No holds barred on this article. As he points out, there is little justification for the selection of the comparative countries and no where does the £500-1000M quoted by Sir Rob Margetts come out.
On the one hand you have a series of government commissioned reports stating that releasing spatial data at marginal cost would generate significant economic benefits, including the Cambridge University study which looked purely at the economic drivers. On the other hand you have an internal OS report with some obvious flaws which Ed, rather bluntly, notes as “reads like a poor MSc thesis.” Pulling no punches there Ed! And who is the mysterious “internationally recognised expert”. After the way this report has been handled there is no hope in hell they will want to be identified as sanctioning “a poor MSc thesis” and without the name it remains a “poor MSc thesis”.
It’s about time someone put their hand up and said, actually we don’t really care about the country, economy or the quality of our GI. What we simply want to do reduce our published balance sheet. We don’t provide a service, we tick boxes. Now if only GI wasn’t quite so important…..