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Foundations for an Open Edmonton
Today at BarCamp, I led a discussion around building an open Edmonton. Inspired by the great things happening in Vancouver, I wanted to stimulate the discussion here. I started with two fundamentals:
- The City of Edmonton must have the desire to be an open city.
- The primary audience is the Creative Class of Edmonton, the secondary audience is all citizens.
Next, I shared what I feel are the five basic foundations of an open city:
- Free – both financially and philosophically
- Permissive Licensing – things like Creative Commons, should be public domain
- Open Standards – formats that anyone can read and write
- Plentiful Data – make as much data available as possible
- Timely Access – eliminate delays and give everyone equal access
After my five slides (a photo for each of the above) we got into a great discussion about the idea. Here are some of the questions that came up:
- Are citizens ready for so much data?
- Why would City Council not want to be an open city?
- What is the current state of progress on the idea in Edmonton?
- How does privacy & security factor in?
- What are some great examples of other cities doing this?
All things that we need to explore further. I’m not sure what the next step is, but eventually, I think it would be great to make a presentation on becoming an open city to Council.
In the meantime, Edmonton has already made some data available – a Google Transit data feed – and some other examples include London’s mySociety. Also, be sure to read Vancouver’s Open City Motion.
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Tags: barcamp, barcampyeg, city, data, edmonton, events, municipalities, mysociety, open city, politics, technology, vancouver
Categories: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
June 14th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
[...] ended up with two timeslots. First thing in the morning, where I talked for a bit about Foundations for an Open Edmonton and led an interesting discussion about open cities, and second at 2pm, where I talked about [...]
June 26th, 2009 at 10:01 am
[...] Idea Zone is the City of Edmonton’s new system for open innovation. It’s one of their first attempts at leveraging a crowdsourcing model, and it represents a shift in the way the City tackles large problems. Perhaps more importantly, I think Idea Zone is another small step toward becoming an Open City. [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 10:32 am
[...] At TransitCamp Edmonton on May 30, 2009, that data was made available to local developers. I led a discussion about open data a couple of weeks later at BarCampEdmonton2, on June 13, 2009. Councillor Don Iveson submitted a [...]