[CivicAccess-discuss] RE: CivicAccess-discuss Digest, Vol 14, Issue 5

[Joe Murray]

You can buy the Postal Code to Federal Electoral District file for a first
year fee of $2500, with the annual fee for quarterly updates thereafter
costing $500.

On the site the annual subscription fee is listed as $2900. Mike Gifford,
the principal person behind makethechange.ca along with Phillip Smith and
some others, was offering a fee of 10 cents per lookup earlier this week
when I said orphanvoters couldn't really afford that rate, and likely wasn't
that high volume a site. While there was an investment to making the data
available as a service, it's actually higher performance and easier to use
the data if it is placed on your own site.

It's true, Jennifer, that Mike hasn't locked down the data with security
keys yet, but I didn't want to take advantage of that and have it cut off
mid-campaign.

Alternate solutions are to scrape the data from a site which does not have a
fair use policy excluding that. 

Joe
> Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:22:48 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Jennifer Bell <jenniferlianne at yahoo.ca>
> Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] RE: CivicAccess-discuss Digest, Vol
> 	14,	Issue 4
> To: civicaccess discuss <civicaccess-discuss at civicaccess.ca>
> Message-ID: <248619.62179.qm at web51304.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> I was going to use this one to resolve new postal codes as they come in
> from users:
> 
> http://www.makethechange.ca/electoral-data-consortium-api
> 
> The lookup table itself seems to be pretty expensive.  I've read it's
> covered by crown copyright, but I've always understood that copyright
> doesn't apply to facts, so I'm confused.
> 
> Jennifer