The most significant inventions of our time are made from a plentiful, non-polluting, easily processed material: information. Like other resources that power our daily lives, information resources must be protected, or they will be lost.

		Josh Knauer is director of advanced development for South Side-based MAYA Design (www.maya.com).

You may not think a lot about it, but chances are you're benefiting from the information boom. For example, your pharmacist now has a tool that automatically flags any negative interaction among your prescriptions. Small neighborhood libraries, which in the past could offer only a limited periodicals selection, now give you free access to newspapers and magazines all over the world via the Internet. The list goes on.

The good news: more exciting developments are in store. Product design companies like the one I work for are in the middle of a renaissance of invention, using information as our medium.

The bad news: the more valuable products and services we make from information, the more in-demand information becomes. The predictable result: Organizations and people who have the resource begin to charge for access and restrict its use. This includes government, traditionally the keeper of free, public information.

We're seeing this here in Western Pennsylvania. Allegheny County government recently approved a $500,000 contract to purchase satellite photos of county locations. These photos are so clear that you can see the pitcher's mound at PNC Park in a photo of Downtown that the satellite took from space. These would be a gold mine for people developing tools that would benefit the public -- for example, for neighborhood revitalization planning. But there's been talk among government leaders of charging for this information, thus restricting its widespread use.

This comes in the wake of contractual and legislative confusion about whether Allegheny County would allow Dallas-based Tyler Technologies to charge the public $30 a month for access to specialized property assessment data, which had previously been available at no charge on the county Web site along with basic data. Although most of the information on the assessment site remains available, this episode illustrates how political choices can imperil free use of our data.

Here, and all over the country, government is making decisions for us about what public information we are allowed to see and use. Economic pressures, legal questions, technology limitations, political concerns -- all of these can lead to government cutting off free, easy access to the information we've funded with our tax dollars. This matters, because without a free flow of many different types of public information, the potential for new and exciting discoveries that benefit the public is severely impaired.

To understand why this free information flow is important, think of medical researchers investigating the incidence and causes of disease. They may start with information that shows a significantly higher-than-average incidence of childhood disease in a given area. However, that information alone isn't enough. To find the cause and develop a plan of action, they need a way to easily look at and combine many different types of information that might be related -- economic conditions, access to health care, nearby pollution sources, demographics, etc.

	For more background on Pennsylvania's current open records and open government laws visit our First Amendment Forum.

Various government agencies collect most of this information, but it's stored in different places, in different ways, with different levels of access. If even one or two of these information pieces are unavailable, researchers may not get the full picture of what's causing the high disease levels.

There are many examples of this; when we're denied access to taxpayer-funded information, it's more difficult for us to improve our well-being.

In addition, information, like other resources, can become extinct. The classic example is the burning of the library at Alexandria, where priceless original texts were lost to history forever. A more modern example is old birth, death and marriage records. These records, so valuable to today's genealogists, are at risk as long as they exist in only one or two places. The government tries hard to maintain these records -- but they're not easy to get to, and can easily be accidentally misplaced or destroyed.

So, what can we do? The keys to claiming ownership of public information and protecting it for public use are duplication and distribution. Unlike physical resources, which are most secure when they're tightly guarded, information is safe only when it's available to everyone.

Many non-profit organizations across the country recognize the benefits to preserving information resources for the public. My company works with 3 Rivers Connect, a Pittsburgh-based non-profit creating a regional, Internet-based "Information Commons." This commons will provide citizens easy access to all of the public information available in the Western Pennsylvania region.

Much of this information can already be found scattered throughout the Web sites of various government and non-profit agencies in the region. But, the continued availability of the valuable and expensive information contained in each Web site is at present at the mercy of the policies or whims of the agency or individual who controls it. New tools such as the Information Commons would liberate this resource from individual control and make it available for all citizens to use and share.

The possibilities are virtually endless, and most of them are within reach. The information that will be used to build new and useful inventions already exists. But most of it is fragmented, and trapped behind the walls of various organizations away from the public. It's time for all of us to recognize the value of untapped information resources, and band together to claim them as our own.