Data Day

Postcodes: Adam Crozier letter

From MP Tom Watson.

From me:

I will follow this issue with interest: thank you for raising it. And for pursuing it further.

I think a nice balance between sympathetic commercial realism and community challenge on matters of 'public' data.

My website has a postcode location facility to help, amongst other things, people to locate each other to facilitate reuse swaps, etc.

I think I paid for that, a long while ago.

Now many folk, especially new registrants, are complaining that their postcodes 'don't work'. I'm guessing boundary changes or additions.

Now as a commercial business I can see how things that take money to create need to be compensated, but I do get interested when the ways such data are gleaned are less clearly defined.

And, as stated above, when there is a clear public benefit to having access to information about themselves.

I believe the Guardian has been on this case also for quite a while: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/free-our-data

Taking a tip from another poster, as Junkk.com also finds itself followed in, but (until now, for monetary reasons, poorly serving) the USA, this is pretty significant, and cheering:

Federal Register in XML

Postcodes that don't zip?

Top 1,000 most polluting postcodes

I guess if you're not on the list that is a chance to be Much Smugness-in-the-Mire, but without knowing the scope of the parameters it's hard to see much value to this either.

And it does rather tar the 'good' with the 'bad'. Which makes me nervous when box-tickers see money to be made without worrying to much about detail.