It will be interesting to see how well the UCGIS guidelines on data sharing take to trickle down to local authorities across the country. Given the myriad of responses you received and the usual variety of arguments for not sharing it makes a solid case for having some standardized state parcel databases and policies in place mandating access.

It would be a lot of duplicative effort for ~300 towns to develop and build new policies and platforms for data sharing, but a state sponsored effort can share resources and coordinate the data. Now that the whitehouse has open-sourced the data.gov platform and the CKAN.org system is open there are some very easy, low cost ways for states to support their municipalities in this way, it just takes us making noise to get our leaders to step up and take the initiative!

The piece about the outsourced parcel data jobs resonated with me too, it’s crazy that government can be so short sighted as to contract out core functions and then not even own their own data. That’s public information! And we the public don’t even own it or the right to access it? That’s seriously screwed up, but it happens locally for us with other data, say foreclosures…

thanks again
Spike
Urban Strategies Council

I haven’t read through it yet, but I’m looking forward to! As someone interested in the subject matter but currently without access to paywalled journals, I really do appreciate your decision to publish with an open access journal.