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 [...]
Entries from the “vancouver” category
Creating Open Data Apps: Lessons from Vantrash Creator Luke Closs
Apps for Climate Action Update – Lessons and some new sexy data
Okay, so I’ll be the first to say that the Apps4Climate Action data catalog has not always been the easiest to navigate and some of the data sets have not been machine readable, or even data at all. That however, is starting to change. Indeed, the good news is three fold. First, the data catalog [...]
Saving Millions: Why Cities should Fork the Kuali Foundation
For those interested in my writing on open source, municipal issues and technology, I want to be blunt: I consider this to be one of the most important posts I’ll write this year. A few months ago I wrote an article and blog post about “Muniforge,” an idea based on a speech I’d given at [...]
Open Data: An Example of the Long Tail of Public Policy at Work
As many readers know, Vancouver passed what has locally been termed the Open3 motion a year ago and has had a open data portal up and running for several months. Around the world much of the focus of open data initiatives have focused on the development of applications like Vancouver’s Vantrash, Washington DC’s Stumble Safely [...]
On Journalism & Crowdsourcing: the good, the bad, the ugly
Last week the Vancouver Sun (my local paper) launched a laudable experiment. They took all of the campaign finance data from the last round of municipal elections in the Lower Mainland (the Greater Vancouver area in Canada) and posted a significant amount of it on their website. This is exactly the type of thing I’ve [...]
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