Here’s a list of 25 festivals you can look forward to over the next three months, complete with iCal feeds, and social media information (see below for an iCal feed for all the festivals):

• International Children’s Festival – June 1 to 5
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
• Bikeology Festival – June 1 to 30
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • @bikeology
  • Facebook
• Dreamspeakers Film Festival – June 2 to 5
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • Facebook
• Nextfest – June 3 to 13
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • Facebook
• Heart of the City Festival – June 5 & 6
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • Facebook
• Creative Age Festival – June 8 to 16
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
• Sprouts New Play Festival for Kids – June 12 & 13
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
• Improvaganza – June 16 to 26
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • @theatresports
  • Facebook
  • Youtube
• Rock The Square – June 19
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
• Edmonton International Jazz Festival – June 25 to July 4
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • @edmontonjazz
  • Facebook
• The Works Art & Design Festival – June 25 to July 7
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • Facebook
• Freewill Shakespeare Festival – June 29 to July 25
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • Facebook
• Silly Summer Parade – July 1
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
• Edmonton & Northern Alberta Historic Festival – July 9 to 18
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
• Edmonton International Street Performers Festival – July 9 to 18
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • @EdmontonSPF
  • Facebook
• SOSFest – July 9 to 11
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • @SOSFEST
  • Facebook
• Capital EX Parade & Capital EX – July 22 to August 1
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • @CapitalExFun
  • Facebook
• A Taste of Edmonton – July 23 to August 1
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • @EventsEd
• Servus Heritage Festival – July 31 to August 2
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • @EdmHeritageFest
  • Facebook
• Edmonton Folk Music Festival – August 5 to 8
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
• Animethon – August 6 to 8
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • @Animethon
  • Facebook
• Cariwest – August 6 to 8
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • Facebook
• Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival – August 12 to 22
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • @edmontonfringe
  • Facebook
  • Youtube
• Edmonton Dragon Boat Festival – August 20 to 22
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal
  • @EDBRC
  • Facebook
• Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Festival – August 20 to 22
  • ShareEdmonton
  • iCal

You’ll note that each one has a link to ShareEdmonton, where I list the festival dates and locations as accurately as possible. Festivals like Creative Age and Improvaganza have really good detail, while others like the Fringe do not (they haven’t released the schedule yet). As I get more information I’ll update the listings. You can also see related tweets for each festival, and very soon, related photos and blog posts too!

Here’s the information for all festivals:

• ShareEdmonton
• iCal

You can subscribe to that iCal feed using Outlook or your favorite calendar application. In Google Calendar, you can “Add by URL” and just copy/paste the iCal link above.

I’m sure there are more festivals happening over the summer that I’ve missed. If your favorite isn’t on the list, let me know. If you subscribe to the iCal feed above, any new festival that gets added to the ShareEdmonton calendar will show up automatically!

I can’t remember how I was introduced to YEG Live – it might have been via Twitter, or it may have been because they use one of my photos for their header background. In any case, I was impressed. Founders Chris Martyniuk and Cameron Gertz have created an excellent online hub for local music in Edmonton. Most importantly, they really care about the accuracy of the data on the site. As a result, YEG Live has a superb collection of artist profiles, venue profiles, and of course, live music events. I contacted Chris to see if he’d be interested in working together, and fortunately, he was!

Now when you browse entertainment events at ShareEdmonton, you’ll see the ones that come from YEG Live highlighted with the icon to the left. When you click through to an event, such as tomorrow evening’s show featuring Sweet Thing at Haven Social Club, you’ll see all of the usual details you’d expect at a ShareEdmonton event page (start & end time, location details, related tweets, etc) as well as links and short bios for the artists performing (which link to YEG Live). There are also prominent links to the YEG Live event and ticket information pages.

Thanks to Chris for all the work he did to make this integration possible! There’s no sense in duplicating the tremendous effort he’s already putting into creating an accurate calendar of live music events in Edmonton, so I’m glad we were able to work together. It’s a win-win-win as I see it: ShareEdmonton is a little more complete, YEG Live gets a little more exposure, and Edmontonians are more likely to discover great live music events happening in the city!

Download the Edmonton Public Schools Data in CSV

Back in early February I met Jeremy and Paul for lunch to chat about open data and the community here in Edmonton. One of the things we talked about was how Edmonton Public Schools could get involved. In addition to attending events like the Open City Workshop, Jeremy and his team also started working behind-the-scenes to pull together data that might be useful to share. I helped define the fields that should be included and did the geocoding work, but they did all the rest. The result is a great data set of public schools in Edmonton, containing the name, address, lat/long, grade levels, programming information, and contact details for each.

Edmonton Public Schools follows in the footsteps of the Edmonton Public Library in embracing open data. Both organizations should be applauded for being “early adopters” and for their enthusiastic participation in the open data movement here in Edmonton. They have set an example that others can follow. Specifically:

• Start small! EPL released branch locations, EPSB released school locations.
• Work with the community! In both cases, I was able to help with some of the work. There are many others in the community who are eager to help as well.
• Engage the City! In addition to getting the data in the catalogue, which is really important to have a central repository, the City has also offered some suggestions for improvements.

Thank you to Jeremy and the rest of the team at Edmonton Public Schools for making this happen!

No post about a new data set would be complete without mentioning that the data is now available at ShareEdmonton! You can now see a list of all public schools and on the details page for each one, you can see the relevant school ward, grade level, and programming information on the right side (for example, McNally, the high school I attended). More improvements coming soon!

Download the Edmonton Neighbourhood Census Data in CSV

I’ve also emailed this to the City’s open data team, so hopefully they can get it in the data catalogue soon.

Visualizing the Data

Why is having the census data in a format like CSV useful? Well for one thing, it enables creatives to do stuff with that data through code or other tools. For instance, I was able to generate a heat map for the City of Edmonton:

The darker sections are more heavily populated, the lighter yellow regions are less populated.

Not all neighbourhoods are reflected, as the City does not release details for neighbourhoods with a population between 1 and 49. Here are some other things we can learn from the data set:

• Total population in the data set is 777,811, which means there are 4628 individuals unaccounted for (total for 2009 was 782,439).
• The average neighbourhood population is 2424, or 3039 if you exclude neighbourhoods with a reported population of 0.
• The median neighbourhood population is 2216.
• Oliver and Downtown are the only two neighbourhoods with a population greater than 10,000.
• More dwellings are owned (192,171) than rented (121,953).

ShareEdmonton

Another reason having this data in CSV is useful is because app developers can more easily integrate it into the things they are building. For example, all the census data is now available at ShareEdmonton! So when you view a neighbourhood, you’ll see the census data on the right side (see Alberta Avenue for example). You can also browse neighbourhoods by population. I’ve also fixed the neighbourhood search, so it works better now.

This is just the first of a few neighbourhood-related updates this month, so stay tuned for more!

Apps4Edmonton

Yesterday the City released more information on the Apps4Edmonton competition. The first phase, from now until May, is “accepting community ideas”. Basically they want you to tell them what data you want. Aside from the obvious “we don’t know what we don’t know” problem, I think the community has done a pretty good job of defining desired data sets already.

They City had a great start in January with the launch of the data catalogue, but we need more data. Especially data like the census data, which myself and many others have been asking for since the day the PDFs were released. There are clearly some internal issues that need to be worked out if I was able to acquire this before the open data team was. I hope they get everything resolved for the competition, because it’ll be a pretty boring one if we still only have twelve data sets (New York and other cities had dozens, maybe even hundreds, before their competitions).

That said, I know there are passionate, smart people working on it. Email opendata@edmonton.ca if you have data set requests or want to get involved in Apps4Edmonton.

• There’s now a Featured Upcoming Events page where I can highlight specific events.
• Related events have been improved. For example, if you look at the page for this Saturday’s Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market, you’ll see other upcoming dates as well.
• That feature highlights something else – events on ShareEdmonton are as granular as possible. Instead of just having one event for The Citadel’s upcoming run of Sweeney Todd that starts on February 6 and ends on February 28, each individual show time gets its own page. That’s important in helping to answer the question, what’s happening in Edmonton at a given time and place? There are only a few exceptions to this, such as International Week.

I’m going to continue to make it easier to find and browse events, especially by tag, like valentine’s day or family day. I have made good progress on making the calendar more complete too. Currently, there are more than 200 unique events in ShareEdmonton for February, with more than 600 different instances (a unique event would be “Sweeny Todd”, and each showtime would be a different instance). There are probably hundreds more that I don’t yet have in the calendar. It’s a tricky problem, but I’m working on it!

Another thing I’ve been working on is improving Places in ShareEdmonton, which includes adding more places! Most recently, I started adding places that have been made available as part of the City’s open data catalogue, such as Police Stations. That’s a handy page to see all the police station locations in Edmonton. I’ve got some more neat stuff coming with this, so stay tuned.

If you have feedback, let me know!

• A list and map of all EPL branches
• A list of all events taking place at EPL branches (which you can subscribe to using RSS or iCal)
• The Stanley A. Milner Library, as an example of an EPL branch page that shows you its location on a map, upcoming events (which you can subscribe to using RSS or iCal), recent related tweets, and recent @EPLdotCA tweets

The EPL has had event listings on its website for a long time now, and while they are quite detailed, they aren’t necessarily the easiest to find or browse. The ability to subscribe to events is also somewhat limited – you can choose the next 2 weeks of all EPL events via RSS, or events at your branch via email. Still, the EPL is ahead of most organizations in that they’ve been able to aggregate all events into a single place.

Shortly after ShareEdmonton launched, Peter Schoenberg, Director of eServices at EPL, got in touch with me to see if we could work together. I explained the idea behind ShareEdmonton, and he outlined some of the digital initiatives the EPL is undertaking. We identified a couple of actions. The first was for EPL to get started with Open Data, by releasing a data file of library locations. The second was for ShareEdmonton to import those locations and all the events taking place at them.

Importing events required a little bit of custom work on both ends – thanks to Peter and his team for working so efficiently and for their patience! Having the EPL events in ShareEdmonton helps us both. For the EPL, it helps users find out about their local libraries, and exposes EPL events to a different and potentially wider audience. It also makes it possible for users to subscribe to events in Outlook, Google Calendar, or any other calendar application supporting iCal. For ShareEdmonton, it’s another important step toward becoming Edmonton’s de facto calendar.

Check out the EPL branches and events on ShareEdmonton!

You can think of ShareEdmonton as an events calendar, at least right now. It certainly has that functionality, and I want it to become the de facto events calendar for Edmonton. I’ve taken the opposite approach of most online calendaring sites, such as Upcoming or Eventful. Instead of starting at the global level and working down, I’ve started at the local level. This is a simple, but important distinction.

I believe that place is more important than ever. That’s why place is at the heart of ShareEdmonton. Unlike other sites, each place exists once and only once in ShareEdmonton. If you want to find out what’s going on at the Shaw Conference Centre, you can be confident there’s only one in the system. In addition to individual places, ShareEdmonton currently supports neighbourhoods, such as Downtown. This is a powerful way to roll up data about a collection of places.

What kind of data? Events, obviously, but also tweets. For any event, place, or neighbourhood you can see recent related tweets written by people in the Edmonton area, in real-time. Or you can see all tweets written by local users. Over time, I’ll be adding other kinds of data alongside tweets, including blog posts, photos, and more.

ShareEdmonton is all about aggregating the immense amounts of data available online and helping you find the bits that are important, relevant or interesting to you, through place, topic, or some other filter. Here’s an example – George W. Bush is in town tonight, at the Shaw Conference Centre. Here’s the event page on ShareEdmonton (and here’s the page for the rally against him). On it, you find information about the event, the location, and recent related tweets – people talking about the event. Two more examples, using topic as a filter: weather and traffic. That’s pretty powerful, I think, and has the potential to become even more powerful over time.

What’s available today is just a small part of what I hope the site will become. Today is step one, and there’s a long way to go until the vision is realized. I have grand ambitions for ShareEdmonton!

Here are a few other quick points:

• Though I’m not calling this a beta, it is a work-in-progress.
• The entire site features clean, hackable URLs.
• The site also features Microformats. If you’re running Firefox, install Operator and you’ll see your browser “light up” with events, locations, tagspaces, and more.
• All tweets pages have RSS feeds, and most event listing pages have both RSS and iCal feeds.
• ShareEdmonton is not, and will not be, open source. I am and will be embracing the concepts of open data, however, so stay tuned for more on that.
• The engine is generic, so you could in theory turn on ShareCalgary or an aggregator for another city.
• As I was quoted on Saturday – I’m really not concerned with the business model at the moment. I want to build something that is valuable first.

I want to say a big thank you to everyone who has provided feedback, done testing, and otherwise helped me out with this, especially Chris, Cam, Reg, Eric, Rob, Dickson, Jas, and Adam. Also, though she probably would rather me not say it, Sharon played a big behind-the-scenes role in this – thanks!

Please check out ShareEdmonton, and let me know what you think. Tweet it, blog it, leave a comment below, email me, or post something on the Uservoice forum I’ve setup. You can also follow ShareEdmonton on Twitter, which is where I’ll announce new features. Thanks!

Facebook Connect
I’ve added support for Facebook Connect to ShareEdmonton, and was surprised at how straightforward it was. Little bit of a learning curve initially, but nothing major. I’m impressed with the way it works.

OAuth
Looking into this one for use with Twitter and Brightkite. I’m not very far along yet, but it also seems fairly straightforward. Check out this ReadWriteWeb article on how a recent OAuth security flaw was addressed by the community.

MSMQ
I’ve been using this since January, actually. It works great, and I wouldn’t hesitate to use it again. I want to explore some of the more advanced uses now.

OpenCalais
You might consider it a semantic web service, because Calais is all about giving meaning to data. I came across it via bit.ly, which uses Calais to automatically extract names, places, and other metadata from the links you shorten.

Google Maps API
Again, this one is fairly straightforward. Lately I’ve been looking into the non-visual services it provides. For example, geocoding and reverse-geocoding in the background, without necessarily having a map on the page.

Public Data Sets on AWS
This one I’ve looked into the least so far, but I’m keen to check it out. In particular, I’d like to explore working with the Freebase data dump. It’s still amazing to me that you can tap into such a vast amount of data with relative ease.

As you can probably guess, almost all of these are related to work I’m doing with ShareEdmonton. I should have an update on that soon.

We had five demos:

• I showed the first little bit of ShareEdmonton, and EdmontonTechScene. It wasn’t the best demo in the world, but it wasn’t bad for having just two days
• Graham Batty showed us bittablog, an interesting microblogging service that he recently cooked up.
• Ryan Leland showed his unique take on social networking – you-vs-me. It was a definite crowd pleaser thanks to the humorous topics like Cougar-vs-Bear. You can use the democamp invite code to check it out.
• Mark Matichuk showed us Clinitrust, a secure messaging platform for medical professionals.
• Our final demo was Peter Urban and Paul Bellows, who showed us their new joint venture (between Smibs and Yellow Pencil). It’s a tool to help move content from one CMS to another.

The general consensus afterward was that Peter & Paul’s was the demo of the night. Though they did a little too much talking in my opinion, the product is definitely intriguing. It’s not hard to see that there’s a big market for what they are doing. It’ll be a time saver, indeed. Hopefully we’ll get to see more of it soon.

See what I mean about the tripods and cameras? After the demos almost everyone wandered over to RATT (Room At The Top) in the Students’ Union Building. A little too much drinking and karaoke ensued, but it was a fun time!

Twitter featured more prominently this time at DemoCamp. We had TwitterFall up on the big screen before we got started, and that encouraged lots of people to start tweeting. Soon after the demos started, we broke into the top ten trending topics at Twitter Search, and eventually rose as high as #7. Very cool!

Don’t miss Walter & Alain’s great list, 10 things I liked about DemoCamp Edmonton 6. Brittney also has a funny post of fun facts about DemoCamp Edmonton 6. Also, Cam and I did an interview with The Gateway, who wrote about DemoCamp and IDEAfest today.

I can’t wait until DCE7! Thanks to everyone who came out last night. If you’d like to be notified about future DemoCamp and BarCamp events in Edmonton, sign up for the mailing list here.