193 The PublicGeodata.org wiki and petition was started in early 2006 by Benjamin Henrion and Jo Walsh, with the support of the Open Knowledge Foundation, in an attempt to raise awareness among the open geospatial community about the INSPIRE directive and the political forces shaping the debate about open access to state-collected information across Europe. The European Parliament and the Commission are both strongly in favour of open access to geodata; the Council, conducting its business behind closed doors, subject to national-level lobbies, has been pushing for increased restrictions on the rights of European citizens to gain access to the data that describes the world around them, in disregard of the economic evidence supporting open access. Working together, European geospatial software developers and users may still have a chance of influencing INSPIRE policy in a positive direction; this is a discussion about how this may be achieved. FOSS4G2006 - Free And Open Source Software for Geoinformatics Birds of a feather II Jo Walsh jo@frot.org Jo Walsh jo@frot.org <MaKaC.conference.ContributionType object at 0xb483a16c>