Very interesting. Haiti, for instance, has no addresses for anything except by name in its larger cities. I’ll pass this along to my contacts in Port au Prince. We’ve been looking for a way to send mail to the country.

Haiti, in the meantime has bridged the snail mail gap with digital everything, money, news, etc. But getting medicine is still a hand carry operation.

Ted

This is pretty interesting concept I recently read about.  A company called what3words has developed an alternative to lat/long.  They split up the word into a 3m grid and assign 3 random words to each square.  The premise is that since the majority of the world doesn’t use alpha-numeric addressing this system is a viable alternative for geolocating and addressing.

Their website says:

·         Poor addressing costs businesses billions of dollars and hampers the growth and development of entire nations.

·         Around 75% of the world (135+ countries), suffers from inadequate addressing.

·         4 billion people are invisible, unable to get deliveries or receive aid, and unable to exercise their rights as citizens

So for example I work at deals.cycles.faster and my favorite place to go on vacation is shining.carpentry.instants

I thought it was a pretty clever, and very ambitious, idea.

Meg McGaffin

GIS Analyst

City of Milford, CT

203-783-3232

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