Okay, super psyched about this. Back at the Strata Conference in Feb (in San Diego) I introduced my long time uber-quant friend and now Wikimedia Foundation data scientist Diederik Van Liere to fellow Gov2.0 thinker Nicholas Gruen (Chairman) and Anthony Goldbloom (Founder and CEO) of an awesome new company called Kaggle. As usually happens when [...]
Entries from June 2011
Mind. Prepare to be blown away. Big Data, Wikipedia and Government.
CIDA announces Open Data portal: What it means to Canadians
For those who missed it, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has announced it is launching an open data portal. This is exciting news. On Monday I was interviewed about the initiative by Embassy Magazine which published the resulting article (behind their paywall) here. As (I hope) the interview conveys, I’m cautiously optimistic about the [...]
Links on Social Media & Politics: Notes from “We Want Your Thoughts #4″
Last night I had a great time taking the stage with Alexandra Samuel in Vancouver for “We Want Your Thoughts” at the Khafka coffee house on Main St. The night’s discussion was focused on Social Media – from chit chat to election winner – what next?” (with a little on the social media driven response [...]
The next Open Data battle: Advancing Policy & Innovation through Standards
With the possible exception of weather data, the most successful open data set out there at the moment is transit data. It remains the data with which developers have experimented and innovated the most. Why is this? Because it’s been standardized. Ever since Google and the City of Portland creating the General Transit Feed Specification [...]
Open Data Job Posting at MaRS in Toronto
The following job posting can be found on the MaRS website here. So here’s a job for an open data advocate living in, or willing to move to, Toronto. For the right person with the right vision, this could be about getting a group of organizations to open up their data to drive innovation and [...]


