2024|14: Geocoding and safety trainings
Creating a geocoding tool
We had a call with a colleague this week who was interested in using Excel’s ArcGIS plugin to create some maps of addresses. When people are working with postcode data and need a quick way to batch geocode a list of postcodes and get back lat/long coordinates, we’ve usually recommended using the batch geocoding tool on Doogal.co.uk. On the call we did a demo and as I always use an adblocker, I was surprised to see how full of ads the page is without one.
This was a prompt to create our own version of the tool that could still provide the same processing but free from ads, cookie pop-ups and other bloat. I’d played around with making a postcode lookup tool with Streamlit in December, so I adapted that and added some code I wrote last year to geocode postcodes from the UK crown dependencies. The result is a simple postcode geocoding tool hosted for free on Streamlit.io: UK postcode geocoder.
The GitHub repo is here, any feedback welcome. Since postcodes are a bit of a pain for people trying to map data, I’ll likely use this as a starting point to build a few other tools that could be useful, like being able to find which of our operating regions a postcode is in.
Safety & security training
I had to take some online security trainings as a precursor to a longer training I’m taking soon. For online trainings, they were surprisingly painless and didn’t take nearly as long as I thought they would.
Aside from some Red Cross-specific content around the use of logos, it’s pretty widely applicable for anyone working in the humanitarian sector and I don’t think it’s restricted to RC staff. The trainings and materials are online at: https://ifrcstaysafe.org/.
