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:

1. The City of Edmonton must have the desire to be an open city.
2. 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:

1. Free – both financially and philosophically
2. Permissive Licensing – things like Creative Commons, should be public domain
3. Open Standards – formats that anyone can read and write
4. Plentiful Data – make as much data available as possible
5. 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.