Exciting and fun news today… Google Maps blog announced that Vancouver has became the first Canadian city to add local experts to the Favorite Places on Google Maps. The site shares some of the favourite places of:
Bif Naked (map) – rock singer-songwriter, breast-cancer survivor
Gordon Campbell (map) – Premier of British Columbia
Kit Pearson (map) – children’s book writer, Governor General’s Award winner
Monte Clark (map) – owner of Monte Clark Gallery
Rebecca Bollwitt (map) – Vancouver’s Best Blogger & Top Twitter User for Miss604.com
Rob Feenie (map) – Food Concept Architect for Cactus Restaurants, Iron Chef champion
Ross Rebagliati (map) – Olympic Gold Medallist, snowboarding
Simon Whitfield (map) – Olympic Gold & Silver Medallist, triathlon
and… me! (My map can be found here).
The people at Google asked me for 10 locations and to have a mix of places I like to go as well as places that relate to my work and advocacy around public policy, technology and open government. Very excited to be included and want to thank the people at Google for thinking of including me.
Speaking of public policy and open government, yesterday I drove down to Seattle for a couple of hours to present to their City Council on open data and open government. You can see the presentation here, on the City of Seattle website. Seattle is definitely beginning to look more and more seriously at this issue, especially with the arrival of the new mayor and the leadership of some strong city council members. If you’re in Seattle and feeling passionate about this issue try linking up with following Jon Stahl (his blog) and Brett Horvath on twitter.
Finally, had a great time delivering my talk on The Future of the Public Service to a meeting of Middle Managers of Health Canada’s BC region. Lots of great feedback and conversations after the talk and in the hallways. Many of the ideas shared in this talk are also due to be published in a chapter in O’Reilly Media’s upcoming book on Open Government – very excited about this and will share more about it soon!
Anyway – this is all to say, sorry, no hard core policy or political blog post today…
eaves.ca 
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The Seattle City Council open gov committee meeting is now up at http://www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?….Thanks again for coming down!
Very excited to know that you are introducing open data to the health sector. There is a huge gap in the services that this initiative can fill. Thank you and god bless.
Very excited to know that you are introducing open data to the health sector. There is a huge gap in the services that this initiative can fill. Thank you and god bless.