A number of governments have begun to initiate open data and open government strategies. With more governments moving in this direction a growing number of public servants are beginning to understand the issues, obstacles, challenges and opportunities surrounding open data and open government. Indeed, these challenges are why many of these public servants frequent this [...]
Entries from the “technology” category
Are you a Public Servant? What are your Open Data Challenges?
The Web and the End of Forgetting: the upside of down
A reader recently pointed me to a fantastic article in the New York Times entitled The Web and the End of Forgetting which talks about the downside of a world where one’s history is permanently recorded on the web. It paints of the dangers of a world where one can never escape one’s past – [...]
Creating Open Data Apps: Lessons from Vantrash Creator Luke Closs
Last week, as part of the Apps for Climate Action competition (which is open to anyone in Canada), I interviewed the always awesome Luke Closs. Luke, along with Kevin Jones, created VanTrash, a garbage pick up reminder app that uses open data from the City of Vancouver. In it, Luke shares some of the lessons [...]
Some thoughts on improving Bugzilla
One of the keys to making an open source project work is getting feedback from users and developers about problems (bugs) in the code or system. Mozilla (the organization behind Firefox and Thunderbird) uses Bugzilla, but organizations have developed a variety of systems for dealing with this issue. For example, many cities use 311. I’m [...]
Awesome Interactions: More on my Mozilla Summit 2010 Ignite Talk
Last week I had the distinct pleasure of being at the Mozilla Summit. This is a gathering of about 650ish people from innumerable countries around the world to talk about Mozilla, the future of the open web, the various Mozilla products (such as Firefox and Thunderbird). As Mozilla is a distributed community of thousands of [...]


