Alex Reid

Canada Post is suing GeoCoder.ca for providing a free online database of Canadian postal codes, claiming that its postal code list is copyright.

Canada Post’s claim is based on financial reasoning, as the Crown Corporation charges companies approximately $5,500 a year for the same information. The statement of claim filed by Canada Post says it’s losing potential clients and revenue thanks to GeoCoder.ca.

As reported in the Toronto Sun, the Canada Post spokesperson also claims they create new addresses which is a strange comment. I’m not sure how any one can claim they own an address. I’m certain it is a town or city that requires a property to have an address.

“We deliver to 32 million Canadians every day. Each year, we create more than 200,000 new addresses, and countless others are changed or removed from the database. We also process 1.2 million change of address requests annually for Canadians who are moving from one residence to another

“As you can imagine, we invest a significant amount of time, effort and money to maintain our address data, and ensure that it is clean and accurate. Only Canada Post has the breadth of network required to collect and update this information on a daily basis.”

- Canada Post spokeswoman Anick Losier

Geolytica, the owner of the website GeoCoder.ca, says in its statement of defence that postal codes are public data and not subject to copyright law.

This is a court case to watch, especially for marketers and political campaigners who regularly use postal code databases.

I recommend you check out this wonderful personal art project produced by hint.fm (Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg) because it displays surface wind of the United States in real-time.

The data comes from the open weather data collected all over the United States by the National Digital Forecast Database, but what we see is art.

Watching this TED Talk by tech activist Jennifer Pahlka reminded me of my days working at City Hall over a decade ago. It was the turn of the century and the City of Winnipeg was just starting to use GIS and geo-mapping tools, and ten years later, they’re using a 311 system, but there still lacks a collaborative community system for neighbours to help neighbours.

The tools exist for cities to engage its citizens, and those tools are easy to use, low cost and offer a wealth of information, whether it be a Twitter feed, a wiki site, or a collaborative knowledgebase.

We’re not going to fix government until we fix citizenship.

~ Jennifer Pahlka

Last week, Jesper Andersen was talking at the Strata Data Conference about how to build a “data narrative” using social media and online information to tell a story about a neighbourhood.

He focused on San Francisco’s Haight Street and with the public information from government open data, mapping data, real estate, rental listings data with data from social services like Foursquare, Yelp and Instagram.

He looked at the safety element by finding the crime statistics from DataSF.org, and looked at an analysis of Tweets and found that, by distribution, people were more negative on the lower half of Haight. He was also able to see what people found interesting on Haight by mapping pictures from Instagram to the street as well to offer a creative Google Street View.

Story of Haight

It’s not the next Google Street View but it does offer hope inspiration to mobile application developers to use open data and social media data to tell a story.

Last July, New York City Mayor Bloomberg launched a new initiative called NYC Digital with the goal “to create a healthier civil society and stronger democracy through the use of technology that engages, serves, and connects New Yorkers.”

The first task of NYC Digital was to research and present a State of the Digital Union, per se, for the city. That report was released last week: “Roadmap for the Digital City: Achieving New York City’s Digital Future.”

The report pulls together everything the city wants to provide; from events calendar to a city license application process; how people found their web site; and how people can better engaged using services like Foursquare and Twitter. It’s all designed to be a super-311.

New York City is making a lot of headway here, hopefully cities like Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto and Ottawa are not far behind.