Location: Space address vs postal address

[dbrgn]

The location.address field is described as "The postal address of your space (street, block, housenumber, zip code, city, whatever you usually need in your country, and the country itself).".

This could be interpreted as "the address of your space". But it could also mean "the address where you can receive mail". For example, for Coredump these two are different.

I would suggest the following to clarify this:

• Adjust the description of location.address from "The postal address of your space" to "The address of your space" to avoid confusion
• Add contact.postal_address string field with the following description: "The postal address of your space (street, block, housenumber, zip code, city, whatever you usually need in your country, and the country itself). May also be a post office box. This is where you can receive mail."

Opinions, @SpaceApi/core?

[the-metalgamer]

• Adjust the description of location.address from "The postal address of your space" to "The address of your space" to avoid confusion

I'm in favor of this change.

• Add contact.postal_address string field with the following description: "The postal address of your space (street, block, housenumber, zip code, city, whatever you usually need in your country, and the country itself). May also be a post office box. This is where you can receive mail."

Personnally, I think that this is a great addition to the SpaceAPI, but I see one small problem. Some spaces might want that letters should be sent to the address of the space, as they could have a letterbox, but not for parcels and bigger items. This is for example the case in our space. Letters can be sent directly to our space (even though we do not encourage it) and parcels and packages should be sent to our P.O. box.

I don't know, how we can handle this in the SpaceAPI and do we want to represent this in the SpaceAPI.

[rnestler]

Some spaces might want that letters should be sent to the address of the space, as they could have a letterbox, but not for parcels and bigger items. This is for example the case in our space. Letters can be sent directly to our space (even though we do not encourage it) and parcels and packages should be sent to our P.O. box.

I think this is really quite an edge case. Maybe we could have some comment field for such things?

I don't know, how we can handle this in the SpaceAPI and do we want to represent this in the SpaceAPI.

I don't think we can represent this in the SpaceAPI for every edge case.

[dbrgn]

One way to solve this would be to make the postal address an object with an optional description field:

{
  "address": "Eichwiesstrasse 4, 8645 Jona, Switzerland",
  "postal_address": {
    "address": "Postfach 387, 8640 Rapperswil, Switzerland",
    "description": "Only send letters, no large parcels"
  },
}

(The key could also be named "snail_mail" instead.)

I'm just not a big fan of the asymmetry between address and postal address, and would currently tend towards keeping things simple.

Opinions?