ElectionLeaflets.org

The United Kingdom has an extremely valuable social resource in the form of the Postcode Address File that could — if handled properly — make this country the world class leader in geo-referencing innovation.

I call it a social resource, because the postcodes are something which everybody who lives in a flat or house anywhere in the country knows by heart. It’s part of our national heritage, like the national parks or the M25.

The fact that computers — with the right data — can convert from this code to a reasonably accurate Latitute-Longitude global position has major implications for what people with big ideas and very little budget can achieve.

Historically, that’s where inventions in IT come from. TheStraightChoice.org, for example, wasn’t invented by one of the political parties, or a newspaper, or one of the well-funded think tanks, or by a university professor with a research grant.

It was made by a couple of guys who don’t have £4000 to throw at the Royal Mail to satisfy their bean counters.

If there was culture of actually giving out enabling institutional grants to projects such as TheStraightChoice.org, or PublicWhip, or PlanningAlerts.com, or OpenStreetMap (and quite a few others), then maybe we wouldn’t feel so hard done by when faced with these otherwise prohibitive charges.

We don’t need a fraction of the money that is routinely given out for public works of art. And these web-projects, free and open as they are, are undeniably part of the public good.

But there are no available grants whatsoever for these types of projects. So there is no money to spend on buying back essential information from quasi public institutions that have been subject to substantial tax-payer bail-outs. They don’t even consider licensing the data for non-commercial use.

In light of this, the good people of earnestmarples.com provided system for enabling free access to the postcode -> latitude/longitude location numbers essential for the smooth running of TheStraightChoice.org and other worthy unfunded projects.

But today they got their very own threatening letter from the lawyers to take it down, which means that all the other services which depend on it have also effectively been taken down.

I am personally not party to the Plan B at the moment. (Maybe there isn’t one.) If anyone out there has £3,850 spare to buy a legitimate copy of the Royal Mail Postcode Address File, please get in contact as we have no way of raising this from the operation of the not-for-profit site.

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