I was on the judging panel for the Golden Spiders for this year. It was very interesting. The judging process is pretty thorough, but it’s certainly not perfect. Anyway, you too can be a Golden Spiders judge by participating in the public voting for the Social Networking and Community Website.
The organizers are pretty open to ideas about how to get the community more involved next year. Any thoughts or views?
So, my solicitors and I spent a day in Court with Swords Express, the public transport company I started to provide decent, fast transport to the people of Ireland’s biggest town last year. You only go to Court when there is something really big at stake, and you only go to Court with the government if you think you are very likely to get a favorable outcome. The costs involved are tremendous. The government has limitless resources and is not afraid to bring them to bear. Even for our one-day event and even though no evidence was heard in Court and the State decided to settle on the day, the costs will be into six figures, money which the taxpayer will end up having to pay.
This is a great video about why youtube and the whole Internet makes a big difference to the way we live.
Someone (Mr P. Stewkesbury) wrote a nice review of my book on Amazon. (Scroll down to the bottom.) It is very kind.
There is an interesting (though slightly hard-to-believe) case study in the Irish Times today, with some interesting observations from experts. It’s strange, some of the observations seemed quite good in the print edition, but seem quite lame on the Internet. Part of the reason for that is that the full details of the contributors aren’t given on-line and these are really an integral part of the article.
Anyway, the important lesson from the article is that service is something that can be designed and improved, and many problems can be solved or at least reduced without always needing more resources.
This article in the Irish Times (now free) is an important description of the problems with the National Consumer Agency and other bodies by Michael Casey, a former assistant director of the Central Bank of Ireland.
UPDATE: Ann FitzGerald of the National Consumer Agency responds.
Read this plan for an intercity coach system based on Motorways, conceived for the UK, but very applicable to Ireland.
I’ve written loads about postcodes before. GPS Ireland have published a concept for a postcode system, and Garmin have implemented it in a limited way on their devices. Good for them for publishing their idea.
However, there are a number of big issues with implementing such a system.
– The problem is that it is not much help in and of itself to actually deliver anything, except maybe by helicopter. You need to cross-reference the code against a map database to have any idea of how to effect the delivery or to estimate how long the delivery might take. This means that you are in a proprietary situation right away. There is no free road map database of Ireland.
– Packets and parcels with the code (and packets and parcels will represent 80 percent of delivery items within 20 years) would be practically impossible to sort by hand. You have to key ’em or scan ’em to have any idea which bag to put them in. Manual sorting of letters by unskilled workers is still a reality of the Irish postal system at the busiest times. Many other items (like registered letters and packages) are also manually sorted.
– You can have very ambiguous codes. For example, if you have a short back garden, you could end up with a code the same as the guy in the house backing on to you. In some cases, it could be a one-mile drive to the other property.
– The resolution of the system is just not that high for central areas. It’s only 5m. A significant number of houses in Ireland are smaller than 5m on one or other dimension.
– You really need a centralized database of addresses to do most useful tasks with the code (for example, verifying an address as valid). Sorting out this national address database is the big challenge for any postcode implementation. To do the surveys required from scratch for this system would cost at least EUR 15m, and maybe more.
– Google maps is just not an accurate way of determining longitude and lattitude. It is often many inaccurate by tens or even hundreds of metres, because of the way the projections work.
– letters in codes are not a good idea. They make it more likely that the code will be misremembered, misheard or misread. Letters that look alike, or like numbers, such as ‘S’, ‘Z’ and letters that sound alike, such as ‘N’ and ‘M’ in particular are going to cause confusion and errors.
My own suggestion, which I have worked on with Michael Everson, is to use an all-numbers 5+4 code and base the code on existing administrative divisions, subdividing to road/street and individual delivery point level as necessary, and to number the codes geographically, i.e, the district in the top left of a county is numbered 101 and the district in the bottom right is number 909.
This has the following advantages:
– keeps the implementation costs to a minimum at the outset
– allows items to be be easily sorted manually or by machine
– can be implemented in a basic way without any proprietary databases (although it can conveniently link to proprietary databases)
– integrates well with existing databases (like census, rates office, electoral register and geodirectory)
– does not absolutely require a single address database at the outset (although one may have to be constructed over time on the basis of existing databases)
– allows the system to be extended where necessary (subdivision to provide a unique address for each home is not a big issue in Dublin City for example, but it is a big issue in some rural areas and is more likely to be cost-effective there).
– can cope with certain areas of the country becoming much higher density over time
– makes it obvious for a non-specialist withough special equipment as to where in the country a particular address is located.
This scheme isn’t perfect either of course, but after talking to a lot of people and considering a lot of options, it seems like the best way to do it. We also have a plan for giving the postcode legal backing, without requiring an Act of the Oireachtas.
No free wi-fi in Dublin. No surprise there really – using state money to undercut commercial operators is just not a great way to spend money, even if you have it, which Dublin City Council simply does not.
There is still no reason why Dublin City Council could not help with deploying FON. Plenty of other local authorities have in important European cities, and there are others in progress.
