Category Archives: technology

Great Hacks from the Open Data in Vancouver

12 Replies

Last weekend I helped host an Open Data Day in Vancouver. With the generous support of Domain7, who gave us a place to host talks and hack, over 30 Vancouverites braved the sleet and snow to spend the day sharing ideas and working on projects.

We had opening comments from Andy Yan – whose may be the most prolific user of Open Data in Vancouver, possibly Canada. I encourage you to check out his work here. We were also incredibly lucky to have Jeni Tennison – the Technical Director of the Open Data Institute – onsite to talk to participants about the ODI.

After the opening talks, people simply shared what they hoped to work on and people just found projects to contribute to. Minimal organization was involved… and here a taste of the awesome projects that got worked on! Lots of ideas here for other communities.

1. Open Data Licenses Resource: JSON + search + compatibility check = Awesome.

Kent Mewhort, who recently moved to Vancouver from Ottawa (via the Congo) updated his ongoing CLIPol project by adding some of the recently published licenses. If you’ve not seen CLIPol it is… awesome. It allows you to easily understand and compare the restrictions and rights of many open government licenses.

CLIPol Data

Better still CLIPol also lets you to see how compatible a license is (see example here). Possibly the best tool of all is one that allows you to determine what license you can apply to your re-mixed work in a way that is compliant with the original licenses (check out that tool here – screenshot below).

CLIPol compatibility

CLIPol is just such a fantastic tool – can’t recommend it enough and encourage people to add more licenses to it.

2. Vancouver in MineCraft

I have previously written about how Minecraft is being used to help in public consultations and urban planning – I love how the game becomes a simple tool that enables anyone to shape the environment.

So I was crazy excited I heard that Ryan Smith (aka Goldfish) had used the City of Vancouver’s open elevation data to recreate much of the city in Minecraft.

Below is a photo of Ryan presenting at the end of the day. The projection behind him shows Stanley park, near Siwash Rock. The flat feature at the bottom is the sea wall. Indeed Ryan notes that the sea wall makes for one of the clearest features since it creates almost perfectly flat structure along the city’s coast.

Mincraft Data

3. Vancouver’s Capital Budget Visualized in Where Does my Money Go

It is hard to imagine a project going better. I’m going to do a separate blog post on it.

This is a project I’ve always wanted to do – create a bubble tree visualization with Where Does my Money Go. Fortunately two developers – Alexandre Dufournet and Luc Lussier – who had never hacked on open data jumped on the idea. With help from City of Vancouver’s staff who were on site, I found a PDF of the capital budget which we then scraped.

WDMYG Data

The site is not actually live, but for developers who are interested in seeing this work (hint, hint City of Vancouver staff) you can grab their code from github here.

4. Monitoring Vancouver’s Bike Accident Data – Year 3

Eric Promislow has been coming to Open Data Hack-a-thons ever since Luke Closs and I started organizing them in 2009. During the first Open Data Day in 2011 you can read in my wrap up post about a bike accident monitoring website Eric created that day which Eric would eventual name Bent Frame. Well, Bent Frame has been live ever since and getting bigger. (Eric blogs about it here)

Each open data day, Eric updates Bent Frame with new data from ICBC – the province’s insurance monopoly. With over 6 years of data now in Eric is starting to be able to analyze trends – particularly around the decline of bike accidents along many roads with bike lanes, and an increase in accidents where the bike lanes end.


Bike Data

I initially had conversations with ICBC to persuade them to share their data with Eric and they’ve been in touch with him ever since, passing along the data on a regular basis. It is a real example of how an active citizen can change an organization’s policies around sharing important data that can help inform public policy debates.

5. ProactiveDisclosure.ca – Making government information easier to search

Kevin McArthur is the kind of security guy most governments dreads having around but should actually love (example his recent post on e-voting).  He continued to hack on one of his side projects: proactivedisclosure.ca. The site is a sort of front end for open data sets, making it easier to do searches based on people or companies. Thus, want to find all the open data about a specific minister… proactive disclosure organizes it for you.

Proactive Data

Kevin and a small team of players uploaded more data into their site and allowed it to consume unstructured data. Very cool stuff.

6. Better Open Data Search

Herb Lainchbury – another fantastic open data advocate – worked on a project in which he tried to rethink what an open data search engine would look like. This is a topic that I think matters A LOT. There is simply not a lot of good ways to find data that you are interested in.

Herb’s awesome insight was invert the traditional way of thinking about data search. He created a search engine that didn’t search for the data set keywords or titles, but rather searched the meta data exclusively.

One interesting side outcome of this approach is that it made related data sets easier and, made locating identical data sets but from different years a snap. As Herb notes the meta data becomes a sort of “finger print” that makes it easy to see when it has been duplicated. (Quick aside rant: I loath it when governments releases 20 data files of the same data set – say crime data – with each file representing a different year and then claiming that it is 20 unique data sets in their catalogue. No. It is one data set. You just have 20 years of it. Sigh).

7. School Performance Chart

Two local video game programers – Louie Dinh and Raymond Huang – with no experience in open data looked around the BC Government Open Data catalogue and noticed the data on test scores. Since they attended school here in British Columbia they thought it might be interesting to chart the test scores to see how their own schools had preformed over time.

They were able to set up a site which graphed how a number of elementary schools had performed over time by looking at the standardized test scores.

Test SCore Data

This is just a great example of data as a gateway to learning. Here a simple hackathon project become a bridge for two citizens to dive into a area of public policy and learn more about it. No one is claiming that there chart is definitive, rather it is the start of a learning process around what matters and what doesn’t and what can be measured and what can’t in education.

Congratulations to everyone who participated in the day – thank you for making it such an amazing success!

The dangerous mystique of the “open data” business

6 Replies

I’m frequently asked by people about how they can start an “open data business.” Let me first say that I love that the question gets asked. I love that people are interested in Open Data. I love that people want to learn more, they want to play, they want to think of ways of creating a company. These are, in part, signs of how far the open data discussion has come – people see it as a resource that they would like to leverage.

It is, also, the wrong question.

This is not to say there are not businesses that use open data. Indeed, a vast number of companies use open data (anyone company using census data for even a tiny part of their business qualifies). Nor am I denying there aren’t businesses built primarily with open data – the Open Data 500 list demonstrates there are. Plus I get introduced almost daily to businesses that are: both Ajah and OpenCorporates come to mind (I have donated advice, but have no financial connection, with either).

The Trap

But from a founder (or, I suppose, investor) perspective there are dangers to thinking about “open data” as a unique business space.

The danger is in failing to understand there is virtually nothing that distinguishes an open data business from any other business. Any business needs to solve a real (or sadly, at times imagined) problem, it needs to find clients (e.g. people willing to pay for that solution), and it needs to execute on a number of other things at least competently (HR, marketing, management, cashflow, etc…).

The danger with putting the words “open data” before the word “business” is that it risks making people think Open Data businesses are somehow unique. They are not. If there is a gapping chasm between the question of “what can I do with software” and “how can I create a viable software company” there is an equally large gap between “what can I do with open data” and “how can I create a viable company using open data.” And the questions you need to ask yourself to figure out that latter question (many of which are nicely laid out in this book) are independent of whether it is a software, hardware, crafts or open data business.

Indeed open source software space gives us a nice analogy. I suspect few people decide to create an open source software company – they decide to create a company and the software license is a reflection of their strategic options. I think it is the same with open data. You don’t start a company saying “let’s use open data.” You start a company to solve a problem, of which using or publishing open data may be the only, or the most strategic, way of doing this.

The Opportunity 

Some readers may be surprised to see me write this. I am, and continue to be an advocate of open data. But open data is not some magic pixie dust that causes normal business logic to disappear. And it is not that I think people are saying that per se, it is just that I want them to understand that the 99% of the problems that needs to be solved in an “open data business” lie in the third word of that string, and that while the first two do confer some unique advantages and disadvantages, these are relatively trivial.

The real opportunity of open data lies not in the way it creates a new unique type of business, but that it offers a new set of cheap building blocks by which to try to solve problems. In other words it increases the diversity and, lowers the cost of, inputs.

Here again the world of software is instructive. The Economist’s recent survey on Tech Start Ups talks of a Cambrian Explosion because of the availability of “Cheap and ubiquitous building blocks for digital products…” many of which are (and many of which are not) open source. The cheap availability of these building blocks is allowing for a range of experimentation that was previously not possible, or at least, prohibitively expensive.

Open data – whether as an input for software products and services, for analysis (journalistic or corporate) or for scientific research – is cheap (in theory free) and increasingly plentiful. It has the possibility of thus being the equivalent of the cheap code that is powering a great deal of experimentation in the world of software. As an open data advocate the possibility of this increased experimentation has me excited.

Conclusion

So if you are thinking about starting an open data business – that is great! I’m excited to hear that and I am keen to help and be supportive. But focus on that third word – business. That’s the one that really matters.

From a data perspective you should be asking yourself – what real tangible pain does doing something with this data set help me solve that was previously only possible with a more expensive input (e.g. proprietary data) or not possible at all. The second is to think of the impact of using open data on your strategy. Where does it leave you more vulnerable (too copy cats or the whims of the data publisher) and where does it leave you stronger (if the data is commoditized then the axis of competition will lie in other parts of the business).

I hope this is a helpful nuance to the issue of open data businesses, and some helpful input for those looking at open data and thinking about to find business opportunities in it.

Open Data Advice for Librarian Coders

2 Replies

For the purposes of this post we will ignore how remarkably badass sounding the word librarian becomes when “coder” is added to the end of it.

I recently had a librarian who had just picked up some coding skills email me and ask how they could get into Open Data (if, by the way, you were interested in someone with those skills, I’d be happy to connect you to them). Here is an edited version of my response:

I actually think that librarians are exactly what the open data space needs. It is interesting to think about the consulting services and organizational problems that exist in a world of almost infinite data – and particularly in a world with large amounts of open data.

Open Data portals are are getting more and more data sets – but I’m not sure anyone has meaningfully figured out how you organize that data in meaningful way? Or at least make them searchable in a way that is meaningful to a cross section of people as opposed to a narrow highly specialized specific type of user (e.g. an academic or domain expert)? Nor has anyone – as far as I can tell – cracked the problem (or developed the human hacks necessary) around acquiring and organizing meta data (e.g. actually getting it, and then making it understandable to a range of audiences without losing its nuance).

Certainly when I facilitated consultations on open data in a range of cities across Canada the issue of searchability and finding data came up over and over again. It was a very strong theme.

These are serious problems. And they are probably going to get much much worse as more data becomes available.

Open Data Day Google+ Hang Out

Leave a reply

With just about a month to go until Open Data Day things are going well. There are quite a few cities that have been added to the open data day wiki.

This year we thought we would try something new. On January 21st we are going to host a  Get Ready For Open Data Day 2014! Google hangout.

The goal of the hangout is to help people thinking about organizing an event in their city get a sense of what others doing, ask questions about what has worked in the past, and just learn more about what is possible on the day. 

We’ll be hosting a 30-60 minute event on Tuesday, January 21 (at 11:00 am EST/ 8:00 PST/ 16:00 GMT /17:00 CEST) with myself, Heather Leson and Beatrice Martini focused on:

  1. What is Open Day Day – History
  2. Planning tips
  3. Open Q&A

There is likely a limit to how many people we can host on the hangout so please let us know if you’d like to participate.

And if you are interested in connecting with others – especially those who have run open data day events before – please consider joining the mailing list!

Open Data Day 2014 is Coming Feb 22 – Time to Join the Fun!

4 Replies

So, with much help from various community members (who reminded me that we need to get this rolling – looking at you Heather Leson), I pleased to say we are starting to gear up for Open Data Day 2014 on February 22nd, 2014.

From its humble beginnings of a conversation between a few friends who were interested in promoting and playing with open data, last year Open Data Day had locally organized events take place in over 100 cities around the world. Check out this video of open data day in Kathmandu last year.

Why makes Open Data Day work? Mostly you. It is a global excuse for people in communities like yours to come together and organize an event that meets their needs. Whether that is a hackathon, a showcase and fair, lectures, workshops for local NGOs and businesses, training on data, or meetings with local politicians – people are free to organize around whatever they think their community needs. You can read more about how Open Data Day works on our website.

Want to join in on the fun? I thought you’d never ask. Listed below are some different ways you can help make Open Data Day 2014 a success in your community!

A) How can I let EVERYONE know about open data day

I love the enthusiasm. Here’s a tweet you can send:

#OpenData Day is community powered in a timezone near you.  http://opendataday.org/ #ODD2014

Yes, our hashtag is #ODD2014. Cause we are odd. And cause we love open data.

B) I’d like to participate!

Great! If you are interested in participating in check out the Open Data Day wiki. We’ve just unlocked the pages so cities haven’t been added yet but feel free to add your city to the list, and put down your name as interested in participating. You can even check to see who organized the event last year to see if they are interested in doing it again.

C) Forget about participating, I want to coordinate an Open Data Day event in my city.

Whoa! Very exciting! Here’s a short checklist of what to do:

  • If you didn’t organize one last year, check to see if anyone in your city did. It would be good to connect with them first.
  • Read the Open Data Day website. Basically, pick up on our vibe: we want Open Data Day to work for everyone, from novices who know little about data to experts like Kaggle participants and uber geeks like Bruce Schneier. These events have always been welcoming and encouraging – it is part of the design challenge.
  • Okay, now add your city to the list, let people know where it will be taking place (or that you are working on securing space), let them know a rough agenda, what to expect, and how they can contribute.
  • Add yourself to the 2014 Open Data Day map. (Hint: Wikipedia lists Lat/Long in the information side bar for each cities wiki page: “Coordinates: 43°42′N 79°24′W”)
  • Join the Open Data Day mailing list. Organizers tend to share best practices and tips here. It’s not serious, really just a help and support group.
  • Check out resources like this and this about how to organize a successful event.
  • Start spreading the news!

D) I want to help more! How can Open Data Day work more smoothly everywhere?

Okay, for the truly hardcore you right, we need help. Open Data day has grown. This means we’ve outgrown a whole bunch of our infrastructure… like our webpage! Everyone involved in this is a volunteer so… we have some extra heavy lifting we need help with. This includes:

a. Website template update: The current Open Data Day template was generously donated by Mark Dunkley (thank you!!!). We’d love to have it scale a little better and refresh the content. You can see the code on github here. Email me if you are interested. Skills required: css, design

b. Translation: Can you help translate the ODD site into your language? You can submit the requests on github or send a document to heather.leson at okfn dot org with the content. She’ll do the github stuff if that’s beyond you.

c. Map: Leaflet and layers helpers wanted! We’d like a map geek to help correct geolocation and keep the 2014 map fresh with accurate geo for all the locations. Github repo is here and the event list is here.

What’s next?

I’m really looking forward to this year… I’ve lots more thoughts I’ll be sharing shortly.

Plus, I can’t wait to hear from you!

Mozillians: Announcing Community Metrics DashboardCon – January 21, 2014

Leave a reply

Please read background below for more info. Here’s the skinny.

What

A one day mini-conference, held (tentatively) in Vancouver on January 14th  San Francisco on January 21st and 22nd, 2014 (remote participating possible) for Mozillians about community metrics and dashboards.

Update: Apologies for the change of date and location, this event has sparked a lot of interest and so we had to change it so we could manage the number of people.

Why?

It turns out that in the past 2-3 years a number of people across Mozilla have been tinkering with dashboards and metrics in order to assess community contributions, effectiveness, bottlenecks, performance, etc… For some people this is their job (looking at you Mike Hoye) for others this is something they arrived at by necessity (looking at you SUMO group) and for others it was just a fun hobby or experiment.

Certainly I (and I believe co-collaborators Liz Henry and Mike Hoye) think metrics in general and dashboards in particular can be powerful tools, not just to understand what is going in the Mozilla Community, but as a way to empower contributors and reduce the friction to participating at Mozilla.

And yet as a community of practice, I’m not sure those interested in converting community metrics into some form of measurable output have ever gathered together. We’ve not exchanged best practices, aligned around a common nomenclature or discussed the impact these dashboards could have on the community, management and other aspects of Mozilla.

Such an exercise, we think, could be productive.

Who

Who should come? Great question. Pretty much anyone who is playing around with metrics around community, participation, or something parallel at Mozilla. If you are interested in participating please contact sign up here.

Who is behind this? I’ve outlined more in the background below, but this event is being hosted by myself, Mike Hoye (engineering community manager) and Liz Henry (bugmaster)

Goal

As you’ve probably gathered the goals are to:

  • Get a better understanding of what community metrics and dashboards exist across Mozilla
  • Learn about how such dashboards and metrics are being used to engage, manage or organize communities and/or influence operations
  • Exchange best around both the development of and use/application of dashboards and metrics
  • Stretch goal – begin to define some common definitions for metrics that exists across mozilla to enable portability of metrics across dashboards.

Hope this sounds compelling. Please feel free to email or ping me if you have questions.

—–

Background

I know that my cocollaborators – Mike Hoye and Liz Henry have their own reasons for ending up here. I, as many readers know, am deeply interested in understanding how open source communities can combine data and analytics with negotiation and management theory to better serve their members. This was the focus on my keynote at OSCON in 2012 (posted below).

For several years I tried with minimal success to create some dashboards that might provide an overview of the community’s health as well as diagnose problems that were harming growth. Despite my own limited success, it has been fascinating to see how more and more individuals across Mozilla – some developers, some managers, others just curious observers – have been scrapping data they control of can access to create dashboards to better understand what is going on in their part of the community. The fact is, there are probably at least 15 different people running community oriented dashboards across Mozilla – and almost none of us are talking to one another about it.

At the Mozilla Summit in Toronto after speaking with Mike Hoye (engineering community manager) and Liz Henry (bugmaster) I proposed that we do a low key mini conference to bring together the various Mozilla stakeholders in this space. Each of us would love to know what others at Mozilla are doing with dashboards and to understand how they are being used. We figured if we wanted to learn from others who were creating and using dashboards and community metrics data – they probably do to. So here we are!

In addition to Mozillians, I’d also love to invite an old colleague, Diederik van Liere, who looks at community metrics for the Wikimedia foundation, as his insights might also be valuable to us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvteDoRSRr8

The promise and challenges of open government – Toronto Star OpEd

Leave a reply

As some readers many know it was recently announced that I’ve been asked by Ontario Premier Wynn and Government Services Minister John Milloy to be part of the Government of Ontario’s task force on Open Government.

The task force will look at best practices around the world as well as engage a number of stakeholders and conduct a series of public consultations across Ontario to make a number of recommendations around opening up the Ontario government.

I have an opinion piece in the Toronto Star today titled The Promise and Challenges of Open Government where I try (in a few words) to outline some of the challenges the task force faces as well as some of the opportunities I hope it can capitalize on.

The promise and challenges of open government

Last week, Premier Kathleen Wynne announced the launch of Ontario’s Open Government initiative, including an engagement task force (upon which I sit).

The premier’s announcement comes on the heels of a number of “open government” initiatives launched in recent years. President Barack Obama’s first act in 2009 was to sign the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government. Since then numerous city, state and provincial governments across North America are finding new ways to share information. Internationally, 60 countries belong to the Open Government Partnership, a coalition of states and non-profits that seeks to improve accountability, transparency, technology and innovation and citizen participation.

Some of this is, to be blunt, mere fad. But there is a real sense among many politicians and the public that governments need to find new ways to be more responsive to a growing and more diverse set of citizen needs, while improving accountability.

Technology has a certainly been – in part – a driver, if only because it shifts expectations. Today a Google search takes about 30 milliseconds, with many users searching for mere minutes before locating what they are looking for. In contrast, access to information requests can take weeks, or months to complete. In an age of computers, government processes often seem more informed by the photocopier – clinging to complex systems for sorting, copying and sharing information – than using computer systems that make it easy to share information by design.

There is also growing recognition that government data and information can empower people both inside and outside government. In British Columbia, the province’s open data portal is widely used by students – many of whom previously used U.S. data as it was the only free source. Now the province benefits from an emerging workforce that uses local data while studying everything from the environment to demography to education. Meanwhile the largest user of B.C.’s open data portal are public servants, who are able to research and create policy while drawing on better information, all without endless meetings to ask for permission to use other departments’ data. The savings from fewer meetings alone is likely significant.

The benefits of better leveraging government data can affect us all. Take the relatively mundane but important issue of transit. Every day hundreds of thousands of Ontarians check Google Maps or locally developed applications for transit information. The accumulated minutes not spent waiting for transit has likely saved citizens millions of hours. Few probably realize however that it is because local governments “opened” transit data that it has become so accessible on our computers and phones.

Finally, there are a number of new ways to think about how to “talk” to Ontarians. It is possible that traditional public consultations could be improved. But there is also an opportunity to think more broadly about how the government interacts with citizens. Projects like Wikipedia demonstrate how many small contributions can create powerful resources and public assets. Could such a model apply to government?

All of these opportunities are exciting – and the province is right to explore them. But important policy questions remain. For example: how do we safeguard the data government collects to minimize political interference? The country lost a critical resource when the federal government destroyed the reliability of the long form census by making it voluntary. If crowdsourcing and other new forms of public engagement can be adopted for government, how do we manage privacy concerns and preserve equality of opportunity? And how will such changes affect public representation? Canada’s political system has been marked by increasing centralization of power over the past several decades – will new technologies and approaches further this trend? Or could they be shaped to arrest it? These are not simple questions.

It is also easy to dismiss these efforts. This will neither be the first nor the last time people talk about open government. Indeed, there is a wonderfully cynical episode of Yes, Minister from 1980 titled “Open Government.” More recently, various revelations about surveillance and national governments’ desire to snoop in on our every email and phone call reveals much about what is both opaque and to be feared about our governments. Such cynicism is both healthy and necessary. It is also a reason why we should demand more.

Open government is not something we will ever fully achieve. But I do hope that it can serve as an objective and a constantly critical lens for thinking about what we should demand. I can’t speak for the other panelists of the task force, but that will be how I approach my work.

David Eaves is a public policy entrepreneur, open government activist and negotiation expert. He is a member of the Ontario government’s new Engagement Task Force.

Government Procurement Reform – It matters

1 Reply

Earlier this week I posted a slidecast on my talk to Canada’s Access to Information Commissioners about how, as they do their work, they need to look deeper into the government “stack.”

My core argument was how decisions about what information gets made accessible is no longer best managed at the end of a policy development or program delivery process but rather should be embedded in it. This means monkeying around and ensuring there is capacity to export government information and data from the tools (e.g. software) government uses every day. Logically, this means monkeying around in procurement policy (see slide below) since that is where the specs for the tools public servants use get set. Trying to bake “access” into processes after the software has been chosen is, well, often an expensive nightmare.

Gov stack

Privately, one participant from a police force, came up to me afterward and said that I was simply guiding people to another problem – procurement. He is right. I am. Almost everyone I talk to in government feels like procurement is broken. I’ve said as much myself in the past. Clay Johnson is someone who has thought about this more than others, here he is below at the Code for America Summit with a great slide (and talk) about how the current government procurement regime rewards all the wrong behaviours and often, all the wrong players.

Clay Risk profile

So yes, I’m pushing the RTI and open data community to think about procurement on purpose. Procurement is borked. Badly. Not just from a wasting tax dollars money perspective, or even just from a service delivery perspective, but also because it doesn’t serve the goals of transparency well. Quite the opposite. More importantly, it isn’t going to get fixed until more people start pointing out that it is broken and start contributing to solving this major bottle neck of a problem.

I highly, highly recommend reading Clay Johnson’s and Harper Reed’s opinion piece in today’s New York Times about procurement titled Why the Government Never Gets Tech Right.

All of this becomes more important if the White House’s (and other governments’ at all levels) have any hope of executing on their digital strategies (image below).  There is going to be a giant effort to digitize much of what governments do and a huge number of opportunities for finding efficiencies and improving services is going to come from this. However, if all of this depends on multi-million (or worse 10 or 100 million) dollar systems and websites we are, to put it frankly, screwed. The future of government isn’t to be (continue to be?) taken over by some massive SAP implementation that is so rigid and controlled it gives governments almost no opportunity to innovate. And this is the future our procurement policies steer us toward. A future with only a tiny handful of possible vendors, a high risk of project failure and highly rigid and frail systems that are expensive to adapt.

Worse there is no easy path here. I don’t see anyone doing procurement right. So we are going to have to dive into a thorny, tough problem. However, the more governments that try to tackle it in radical ways, the faster we can learn some new and interesting lessons.

Open Data WH

Access to Information, Technology and Open Data – Keynote for the Commissioners

Leave a reply

On October 11th I was invited by Elizabeth Denham, the Access to Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia to give a keynote at the Privacy and Access 20/20 Conference in Vancouver to an audience that included the various provincial and federal Information Commissioners.

Below is my keynote, I’ve tried to sync the slides up as well as possible. For those who want to skip to juicier parts:

  • 7:08 – thoughts about the technology dependence of RTI legislation
  • 12:16 –  the problematic approach to RTI implementation that results from these unsaid assumptions
  • 28:25 – the need and opportunity to bring open data and RTI advocates together

Some acronyms used:

StreetMix for testing bike lanes – Burrard St. Bridge Example

Leave a reply

I’m MCing the Code for America Summit at the moment, so short on time to write a post, but I’m just LOVING StreetMix so much I had to give it a shout out. If you are a councillor, urban planner or community activist, StreetMix is a site you HAVE to check out.

What does it do? I basically allows you to create or edit and street you want. It is so simple to use it takes about 1 minute to master. At that point, you can build, copy and redesign any street in the world.

Here, for example I’ve recreated the Burrard St. Bridge in Vancouver as it exists today, with bike lanes and below, as it existed before the addition bike lane.

Burrard Bridge new

Burrard Bridge old