What does HackerNews think of open-location-code?
Open Location Code is a library to generate short codes, called "plus codes", that can be used as digital addresses where street addresses don't exist.
https://www.addressingtheunaddressed.org/ . If you want to use this tech + operations expertise in other geographies...just reach out to them. They intend to share their knowhow and expertise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd3gGspgVGs
Also from what i understand, after the success in Kolkata, this was then used in Native American communities.
P.S. Plus Codes are open source - https://github.com/google/open-location-code And they are well researched.
>The character set for Open Location Code was selected out of over eight billion possibilities, using a word list of 10,000 words from 30 languages. All possible sets were scored on whether they could spell the test words, and the most promising sets evaluated by hand.
>Plus codes can be encoded and decoded offline.
>Plus codes do not depend on any infrastructure, and so are not dependent on any organisation or company for their continued existence or usage.
Having a field that takes lat and lon has all sorts of ways to enter data either incorrectly, or in an unexpected format - if someone has coordinates from some other source they might be typing it in, rather than copy/pasting.
Also, as others have mentioned - plus codes (or Open Location Codes) are an open standard that can be implemented by anyone under an Apache 2.0 license with a whole bunch of example implementations on github[1]
You appear to be conflating other proprietary systems with this open one.
[1] https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/master/doc...
[1] https://plus.codes/developers - Plus codes are based on Open Location Code (OLC, for short), an open-source project initiated by a group of Google engineers.
[2] https://github.com/google/open-location-code/blob/master/doc... - Definition document - Open Location Code: An Open Source Standard for Addresses, Independent of Building Numbers And Street Names
[3] https://github.com/google/open-location-code - Github repo
[4] https://plus.codes/howitworks - How it works