So after Royal Mail shut down useful community websites causing MP comments on the idiocy of Royal Mail, I was rather surprised to get this little thing in the post today:
That’s a postmark advert for “Celebrating 50 years of POSTCODES 1959-2009”. So this is what Royal Mail does with some of the money it makes from its claimed monopoly on postcode databases: it spends it on ink to celebrate postcodes in the bit where they can’t sell adverts.
After the postcode-takedown, I suggested deleting postcodes from all our co-op’s websites. Instead, another member has persuaded me to contribute to something like free the postcode, which I first saw on CycleStreets blog.
As well as slapping its customers, Royal Mail is also currently taking on its workers who are campaigning for sustainable jobs and against the recent increase in bullying and harassment cases. I already send most of my letters, invoices and so on electronically since our three nearest post offices closed last year.
I’ve noticed Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op switching to DPD and Terry Lane suggesting more online use. Are those good approaches? How are you adapting to the postal delays? Have you put your postcode into free the postcode or a similar site?
[…] Published Royal Mail Rub Our Noses in it http://www.news.software.coop/royal-mail-rub-our-noses-in-it/792/ […]
http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/blog/?p=511 summarises a cost analysis. Apparently it would be more profitable if Royal Mail didn’t restrict the database.
For many uses of this data, the location referred to by the post code is the typist’s home or workplace. You may not know where that is, but they do. So, why not try using freethepostcode (and/or the postcodedb if that ever takes off) and when that fails, ask them. In the case of freethepostcode, you need their location, and you can probably get to within a few miles with the current state of the database, so then you ask them to point it out on a page from openstreetmap, initialised to your nearest guess.
You’d also need to ask them for permission to submit the data (and their email) to freethepostcode afterwards of course (or agree something else with freethepostcode), but pretty soon that would fill in the gaps in the knowledge.
Cheers, Phil.
Having looked into that a little more there’s a problem with that idea. Openstreetmap is CC-by-sa licensed, whereas freethepostcode is Public Domain.
Grabbing locations off of the map could be considered to contaminate the freethepostcode with CC licensed data.
It seems very likely that all openstreetmap contributors would be happy for data derived in this way to be released into the public domain, but how does one track them all down *sigh*