Here's a draft. Mr. Sullivan's name came from one of the FOIA answers, I do not know him, but would call him prior to sending the letter:*
* *Paul C Sullivan Manager Delivery Systems 475 L'Enfant Plaza SW Rm 5821 Washington, DC 20260-5821 Dear Mr Sullivan; I am writing to propose a data sharing collaboration with the postal service. I map with "Open Street Map", where we have mapped many USPS Blue Boxes: [INSERT IMAGE] However there is lag between the USPS removing or adding a collection box, and the map getting updated. I am proposing an ongoing multiyear data exchange program to speed corrections. As the number of USPS boxes dwindle, the visibility of the remaining boxes becomes an issue. I believe this will benefit the postal service: the less frustrating it is to use the postal service the better. I understand there have been a series of FOIA actions related to this same data. However this has led to an undesirable situation with multiple websites offering stale versions of the blue box data. At Open Street Map we have no such intent: we want an ongoing and automated exchange. Furthermore our intent is not to replace the USPS website, but rather to link a person to USPS to complete their transaction. * *Bryce Nesbitt Berkeley, CA USA * * Note 1: exchanging data with an "open" mapping effort requires an "open" compatible license agreement, a topic I can get into should our conversation progress. These licences have been per-developed and are well tested. Note 2: OSM is a worldwide collaboratively generated map, one that is used as a base in many ways including by large organizations such as Craigslist, Teleatlas and AOL patch. * Quite obviously the FOIA requests have not yet resulted in acceptable open data. The freshness issue is a real one: one organization that tackled that was BART. BART's main goal was to ensure their open data was never presented to users in stale form. In other words their one condition was : never show old data.* *
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