Spaced Out ::

The Guardian reports on something useful to come out of the “Show Us a Better Way” competition run by that Cabinet Office and that is a website to find your nearest postbox and its collection times. A genuinely useful application that, not surprisingly, fell foul of the Post Office saying “that’s our data.” Anyway, I’ll leave it up to more avid readers to skim through The Guardian’s article. The site itself is useful and is using crowd sourcing to get over the problem of recording the exact location of boxes; they know the postcode and the collection times, but not the 10 figure grid reference. So, through the power of people, about 25,000 of the ~100,000 boxes have been located. Just visit the site, enter the first 3-digits of your postcode and tie the list on the right to locations (or add a location) on the map on the left. Its all done inside OSM data to make life simpler.

It’s great to see genuinely useful services kick off so well, but isn’t it just insane that users are not allowed access to: base maps, electoral boundaries, postcodes, postboxes, weather data, hydrography etc etc. The list goes on and on and so mad is this that users are having to generate the content from scratch again. Doesn’t say much for “joined up government.”