Inquiry: Open Data
Today I submitted the following formal inquiry to city administration. It will likely come back to Council’s Executive Committee early next year. Mack Male and others connected to Change Camp and Bar/Demo Camp have been advocating for this and I’ve been reading about other Canadian projects, like Vancouver’s.
In local, national and sub-national governments around the world there is a trend toward making up-to-date government information freely available on-line in generically accessible data formats as so-called ‘Open Data’.
1) What level of awareness does the City Administration have regarding Open Data in municipal government?
2) What current initiatives are underway within City Administration that might qualify under the spirit of Open Data?
3) What further initiatives are under consideration within the city, and on what basis are they being evaluated?
4) Is Administration monitoring any successes and or challenges with this trend in other jurisdictions, especially large Canadian cities, and if so what can be shared with Council?
5) What would City Administration’s recommendation be on next steps regarding Open Data plans or strategies?
This inquiry process gets the issue on the agenda and we’ll go from there. Chris Moore with IT at the city has been very interested in this and I look forward to the report his group will provide.
[UPDATE Oct 19: Mack Male has posted further salient thoughts after a Change Camp session on this topic this past weekend.]
7 thoughts on “Inquiry: Open Data”
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Great work, Don! I’m looking forward to hearing what the City Admin reports back with early next year!
Well that would be a nice improvement over maps.edmonton.ca which I’ve never been able to look at – I’m not in the habit of installing 8-year old unsupported software. Especially when my web browser could view the thing itself, if it were allowed to.
Vancouver’s definitely a great model to follow. One of the nice things about their data offering is the many formats data is available in; end-user-friendly formats like Google Earth files, as well as traditional Shapefiles.
This is really exciting news, Don. I look forward to hearing what City Admin has to say.
Open Data could be a boon to helping citizens move through the city. As the ubiquity of cellphone use reaches its height, this becomes more and more a quality of life issue… and a quality of data issue as well. ;)
I’m very pleased to hear about the City moving forward with Open Data initiatives. Much of the information is location based and the City of Edmonton was one of the first major municipalities in the country to go “digital” with their mapping information. The City is in a good position to look at other municipalities and identify best practices that can be adopted here. I look forward to hearing more.