Vancouver recently made the news with a new Open3 motion by the city council that advocates open data, open standards and open source. The preparations for opening their GIS data to the public required some deliberations by the GIS team. Jonathan Mark, the GIS Manager for the city, wrote about this experience for V1 Magazine:

“One of the biggest challenges was creating a terms of use statement that was acceptable to the City to ensure the City was adequately protected while not unduly restricting usage of the data. The City’s Law Department examined some of the terms of use statements from organizations such as Creative Commons as well as those used by other governments pursuing open data. However in the final analysis, Law developed its own terms of use statement that clearly protects the City while not restricting the use of the data (other than that the use must be for legal purposes). Users are also allowed to redistribute the data.”

Read his full feature here.

Read more related Spatial Sustain posts: