I was a bit concerned yesterday that the licencing terms for OS OpenData weren’t made clear in the consultation. But I needn’t have worried — as assured, it’s more or less a Creative Commons Attribution licence. There are a few extra bits, like not not implying that the Government endorses your product, but the licence [...]
Also filed in | |
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
The government have published their response to the Ordnance Survey Data consultation, for which we made a respond online tool. It looks good. It’s 60 pages long, and I haven’t read it properly, but the broad strokes are right. There were 441 responses overall, and our tool was used to send 128 — which means [...]
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Just a quick post to remind everyone that the Ordnance Survey consultation on making postcode and mapping data available for free reuse is going on right now. Number 10 don’t seem to have noticed, but we have — and it’s so important that every right-thinking person in the land responds. We’ve got to tell the [...]
Also filed in | |
Back when this all began, Stuart Harrison set up a petition on the Number 10 website: “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to encourage the Royal Mail to offer a free postcode database to non-profit and community websites.” Details of Petition: “Royal Mail today sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to Ernest Marples Ltd, [...]
Also filed in | |
Thursday, December 10, 2009
There have been some pretty exciting announcements during the last few weeks. Alongside those, we’ve also met with the Royal Mail to have a talk about finding a way forward. A couple of weeks ago, we had a great meeting with the Royal Mail. They explained in some detail the background to these datasets: how [...]
Curiouser and curiouser
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Things have been a bit quiet around here, but there’ve been two developments that I thought I’d share. First, we’ve now got a date for meeting the Royal Mail — we’ll be off to see them on Monday (2009-11-23). The meeting’s with one of their senior customer relationship managers, so I’m not sure quite what [...]
Also filed in | |
Interview with me about Ernest Marples
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Paul Canning very kindly interviewed me about the whole ErnestMarples saga after Government 2010 last week. We don’t have much news (hence the radio silence!) but if video’s your thing, you might want to have a watch. We talked about the site, what it did, how it worked, some of the policy background and what [...]
Also filed in | |
Write to your MP!
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
It’s certainly been an eventful week. Since we had to close, we’ve had numerous emails of support, several very detailed behind-the-scenes stories about how all this stuff works inside the Royal Mail, stories on websites far and wide, an article in the Guardian’s Technology Supplement… we even got an email from a relative of Mr [...]
Also filed in | |
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Well, it’s been quite a first-half-of-the-week. Since going offline, we have been overwhelmed by expressions of support. At one point on monday, my entire Twitter client was filled with people retweeting things about ErnestMarples, to the exclusion of everything else. Quite astonishing. There’s also been an amazing amount of media coverage — from the BBC, [...]
Also filed in | |
On Friday the 2nd October we received correspondence from the Royal Mail demanding that we close this site down (see below). One of the directors of Ernest Marples Postcodes Ltd has also been threatened personally. We are not in a position to mount an effective legal challenge against the Royal Mail’s demands and therefore have [...]
Also filed in | |