http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/writeup-WAS-Re-montreal-meetup-tp523p541.html
> > 3. Before we go off and spend a lot of energy on creating a logo to identify ourselves, I think we would be better served to spend some time getting better organized, develop a charter or vision, specific objectives. Otherwise we risk getting dragged into too many battles that don't really help our cause in the end. Case in point, if Civic Access is mainly about gaining access to geospatial data from government sources, let us not get caught up in other things such as PDF vs. OpenDoc, lets concentrate all our efforts on the one thing we wish to accomplish. Doing so will help give more credibility to what we are doing and will also prevent CivicAccess from being labeled as a bunch of wyners (is that spelled right?? My french is showing :)).
Yeah - the goal of civic access isn't just about geospatial data.
from your locol burrough's meetings. And it's also about formats. I
think that is reflected in the mandate we have currently written.
> FR-
> La ville de Montréal a des PDF de JPG de documents faxes sur son site
> web. Dory a mentionne un étudiant qui avait reçu des information en
> PDF plutôt qu'en format tableur ou texte. Statscan avait la base de
> données mais refusait de l'ouvrir dans tout autre format. La même
> chose est arrivée en Nouvelle Écosse: le gouvernement a essaye de
> répondre a une requête d'accès a l'information pour le contenu d'une
> base de données en donnant un PDF. En cour le juge a donne raison au
> parti politique qui demandait l'information, disant que la base de
> données en tant que tel devait être disponible. Mes horaires de bus a
> Halifax sont aussi en PDF, et on m'a refuse les fichiers texte.
>
> Voila donc certains exemples donnes pendant la discussion qui a amené
> Michael a parle de notre haine du PDF. On s'accordait tous a dire que
> le PDF est bien utile pour la dissémination de documents, mais ca
> n'est absolument pas adéquat pour le retrait de texte ou de base de
> données par moyens informatiques.
>
> EN-
> Montreal has PDFs of scanned faxes on its website. Dory mentionned a
> student who received information in PDF rather than as a spreadsheet
> or text. Statscan had the database but wouldn't offer the data in any
> other format. I know of two other similar examples in Nova Scotia, and
> a court case that told the province that PDF was not an acceptable
> substitute for a database in a FOIPOP request.
>
> Those are examples we spoke about during the meeting that prompted
> Michael to talk about our hatred for PDFs. We all think it's useful
> for document circulation, however it isn't appropriate for database or
> text extraction through software.
>
> -Daniel.
>
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