Submitted by johnh on October 31, 2006 - 17:06.

For those of you who are as frustrated as I am at the relatively slow pace of progress at Vovo, an update of sorts.

Last week I unilaterally decided to postpone the collection of more indices to electoral registers until after the site is launched -- which sounds remarkably counterintuitive since that was supposed to be how I'm resolving addresses to constituencies.

Simon McGarr and I spoke at some length at BarCamp Ireland last month about a different approach: perhaps, we thought, the famed map hack plus the OSI's DigiBoundary would get us very close very quickly?

Sadly not without dropping at least seven thousand euro. Because obviously it's a frickin' state secret which places are in which constituencies. So that idea died about two weeks back.

Anyway. I've since had another idea, and it's working. I spent some of Friday night writing code which will take another couple of weeks to finish doing its thing. So far, this new process has added another half a million people to my home-served private prototype.

If (as herself says), God willing and the creek don't rise, and nothing else goes wrong, there's a good chance I'll have a full national address-to-TD lookup working in four weeks.

That'll be the hard bit done, and we can get to sorting the writing to them part and launch the bugger -- and all in under a year from the first promise. Barely under a year, I grant you, but still.

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