Last week, I met up with some folks who are building some amazing things with public data. After seeing their Postcode Paper project, I was left with the lasting impression that given the raw materials, there is very little hindrance to what can be built.

In the Postcode Paper, Tom Taylor, Gavin Bell, and Dan Catt brought together data from a whole bunch of online sources into a single resource which can be easily distributed to residents of a local neighbourhood. Also, because this proof-of-concept is a real newspaper (i.e. made from paper and everything), it bridges any digital divide and gives access to people who might not otherwise find such information online.

To me, the real brilliance behind the paper is the context it provides for your location. Through its simple newspaper metaphor of headings and sections, one can very quickly find something exactly, or absorb trivia by browsing the headings. So, for example, there is a section for “Healthcare” which provides a list of dentists, GPs, A&E services and the name of the Primary Care Trusts serving your area. Combining this kind of immediately useful information with some general facts about an area (crime rates and trends, green-space, recycling centres and even allotment information) gives a profoundly well-informed picture of a given neighbourhood.

In a stroke of genius, the lads have added travel times from that postcode to a series of important destinations along with travel times. So, from E5 0JA to Oxford Circus takes 4 minutes via bicycle and 42 on public transport; and it’s 3 hours to Paris or Bristol on the train.There’s even a route-map for local busses and Underground transport.

Part of the thinking behind it is that local authorities could print these every few months or so to send to newcomers. Imagine finding such a rich resource in your post after paying council tax for the first time! I’ve lived in my current town for 2 years now, and I don’t know about half the information this contains. It’s presented extremely clearly and in a very familiar format, so there is very little problem communicating across generational, cultural or potentially even linguistic divides. (Much of the information, such as journey times, doctors surgeries and crime rates would need little translation.) It also doesn’t take much imagination to see additional features or benefits spinning off of this kind of service.

Put the paper online, with live-updates of the information and widgets for transport. Add in some basic demographics (gender, age bracket, long-time resident or visitor), and you’ve got hugely-flexible possibilities for providing an extremely clear UI to your community’s site. Tailoring some specifics, such as age, might let you see more information about local schools, for example, then about old-age care. With print-on-demand kiosks in local libraries and post-offices, you could have an up-to-date snapshot of your neighbourhood whenever you need. This could be used by school children for local projects (and if they can tailor the paper themselves, how much more exciting!). It could be an aid to public transparency with clearly-presented statistics like crime and school standards rates. The list of ideas is endless, really.

That’s the vision, any way. In reality, there are still some huge hurdles to cross before this kind of service could even begin to become a reality. This project took only a few days to put together, but the supremely brainy folk behind it have years of data management skills behind them. They focused on a single postcode, and many of the data needed had to be hand-scraped from various sites and files. The work needed to launch an on-demand service would be daunting indeed, because no local authority would provide a unified point of access for this kind of information. Currently, if a council wanted to provide this kind of resource, researchers would have to go out and find the facts and figures from across the web (NHS sites, central and local government sites, education and reporting services, etc), compile them and produce an individual layout for each individual postcode. And, if you’re an organisation interested in this, you would potentially be required to pay £1000s to access the basic building-blocks: post code lookups and survey boundary data. Needless to say, local authorities and businesses would be hard-pressed to find the time to build such papers to such a fine level of localisation.

Any startup, application, or service wanting to offer localised information is up against some severe inclines. It takes little imagination to see this paper and similar applications taking off and providing huge benefit to where people spend most of their time—at home. However, I fear much of these innovations will remain in imaginations as long as so much of the material needed to build them remains locked away.

So, we’ve been banging on about opening up access to public data for a while. Talis has put its money where its mouth is and helped to fund the PDDL to give organisations a legal framework for dedicating their data to the public domain. (We’ll even host open data for free on the Platform under the Connected Commons.) We see the benefits of open data being shared innovation, and many projects exist which make use of this data for scientific, journalistic, entertaining and just plain useful purposes. We’ve been seeing a strong trend towards removing siloes and encouraging reuse of information resources to the point that we’ve begun to create our own jargon around open access. This is great, and even governments are beginning to see the benefit of this with projects like data.gov and Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s advisory appointment in the UK.

But there is an alternate side to this story of opening up and sharing our data. Where there is open, there is an implied “closed” too. Some closed data is absolutely necessary—you wouldn’t argue that your recent financial transactions are data I should have a right to pry into, for obvious example. There is a lot of hidden data necessary to run applications and to make a profit, and it is entirely right that this should be the case.

But a recent case here in the UK has illustrated the point that if open data encourages innovation, closing down data can quash it. The Royal Mail recently sent cease and desist letters to the directors of ernestmarples.com, who had been providing online services with a set of API’s to turn UK postcodes into location information. This provision had enabled the building of services which, for example, let people look for jobs in their area, and monitor and map political leaflet claims. The Royal Mail charges £4000 to make use of its official list of Postcodes, and wasn’t happy with ernestmarples.org providing postcode data for free. (ernestmarples.com did not license the data, but scraped it from other sites, apparently.) As soon as ernestmarples.com stopped providing the lookup, all the services built on the data were stopped too. So, in effect, the data was enclosed again behind a barrier of a steep paywall and legal action.

There is a lot of discussion about whether the UK postcode data should be free anyway. It was funded by public funds, for one thing, and it only generates around £11million annually for Royal Mail. The subscription rate is high for startups or non-profits, especially when compared with the Zip-code data in the United States, which I found out only costs $500/year to purchase. {1} It could also be argued that the steep pricing is an archaic throw-back to a time where such services cost a lot to provide, so needed to be high in order to recover costs. But this reverse peppercorn rent could no longer be valid, and £4000 must certainly be an order of magnitude (or two) higher than the cost of provision.

There is a lot to discuss about specific datasets like this, and they may need to be tried legally and publicly before all the details are sorted out, but this case is about as illustrative as possible of the principle of encouraging innovation. A single, simple and non-charging service provided a framework for thousands of users for mostly socially-beneficial aims. Imagine the impact if hundreds of source-services had access to postcode data? Perhaps tens of thousands of users could look for employment, or track their local governmental organisations’ progress. Who knows what else might have been developed? It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to envision services tailored to your very local locality, does it? Just as easily, though, the enclosure of a single database has cut off a huge network of potential innovation.

The Guardian has covered the story, if you want more details too.

Photo: “Open/Close” bymag3737 via flickr, Creative Commons License

{1} I’m not entirely sure about the licensing of the Zip-code data, but the representative I spoke with at USPS said you can purchase the 5-digit Zipcode product for $500/a.