paul perrin wrote: > For some time I have thought that the public should boycott post > codes... develop an open source alternative and use that...
How can you boycott postcodes? If you don't put postcodes on your mail there's an increased chance that it will be delayed or lost in the sorting offices of the Royal Mail. > Couldn't postcodes be extracted from a public source via an freedom of > information request? How would that help? It's not a problem of getting at the data (you could just buy a copy of the PAF from the Royal Mail if you really wanted to), it's being able to use it. Just because you get some information via FoI, it doesn't mean that you can use it however you want. > It can't be difficult - and if the switch over make is difficult for the > authorities, that is their look out... should have listened earlier. If the switch over is made difficult for the authorities then they simple won't bother doing it. As Royal Mail probably sorts and delivers the majority of your mail I think they have the upper hand in enforcing a system for identifying addresses. :) Besides, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with postcodes as a concept, the only issue is that the data (more specifically the mapping from a location to a postcode and back again) is not freely available for anyone to use. It would be much better to see the data made available rather than invent an entirely new and unsupported system to do the same thing. Paul -- Paul Waring http://www.pwaring.com _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
