Year: 2009

Edmonton EXPO 2017 – Preparing a National Bid

Last night I attended an information session at City Hall on Edmonton’s bid for EXPO 2017. The purpose of the event was to provide information to potential volunteers, but they also covered quite a bit of background information on just what EXPO (or the World’s Fair) is all about (check out the Wikipedia article for more information). After the World Cup and the Olympics, EXPO is the world’s third largest event in terms of economic and cultural impact. There are two kinds of expositions – “registered” (larger) and “recognized” (smaller). Edmonton is pursuing a bid for a Recognized Exposition.

edmonton expo 2017

Last fall, a citizen committee of 40 “community and business leaders” completed a high-level assessment of a potential bid. A preliminary survey of 300 residents found that 85% support an Edmonton bid. On October 23rd, the committee submitted a report to Council which unanimously concluded that Edmonton should seriously consider making a bid for the event.

Of course, this idea has been in the works for far longer than just a few months. Councillor Jane Batty attended EXPO 2008 in Zaragoza, Spain over the summer and met with a number of key individuals and organizations. Zaragoza is similar to Edmonton in a lot of ways – both cities have roughly the same population (Edmonton is a bit larger), both have a river running through the city, and both have strong economies. There are differences, of course – Edmonton is just over 100 years old while Zaragoza is 2000 years old!

Why does Edmonton want to host EXPO 2017? There are a number of benefits, including:

  • Facilitating international trade and business opportunities
  • Encouraging urban renewal
  • Generating goodwill and community pride
  • Showcasing Edmonton on the world stage
  • Creating a lasting legacy of infrastructure, research, and scientific knowledge and education

And there are financial benefits too. Current estimates suggest a return of $1.12 to $1.15 for every $1.00 invested, and this excludes any legacy benefits. Here are a few more numbers:

  • Taking into account population estimates for 2017, roughly 4.7 million visits would be expected
  • That translates into about 52,000 people on the site each day (for comparison, the average daily attendance of CapitalEX is about 77,000)
  • The cost of similarly sized EXPOs ranges from $1.6 billion to $3 billion (in 2008 figures)
  • A rough guess at the cost for Edmonton EXPO 2017 is $2.3 billion

I think Edmonton has a fairly good chance of being successful with this bid. The last time EXPO was in North America was EXPO ‘86 in Vancouver, and the next few are all in Asia and Europe as well. The year 2017 happens to be the 150th anniversary of Canada, so that’s definitely going to help our chances too.

Here’s the rough timeline for Edmonton’s bid:

Phase 1 – Fall 2007 to Fall 2008: Approve conceptual study
Phase 2 – Fall 2008 to Fall 2009: Develop national bid and submit to Canadian Heritage
Phase 3 – Fall 2009 to Spring 2011: Edmonton selected as Canada’s candidate, develop international bid
Phase 4 – Spring 2011 to Fall 2012: Submit bid to BIE, Edmonton selected to host EXPO 2017
Phase 5 – Fall 2012 to Spring 2017: Prepare to host EXPO 2017

There’s a lot of work to be done before we get to that point, however.

Edmonton EXPO 2017Edmonton EXPO 2017

The next step is to prepare a national bid for consideration by the federal government. Volunteers are needed for four committees: theme development, site and infrastructure planning, community engagement, and sponsorship. Each committee will be comprised of up to 15 members who will meet six times throughout the year, so the time commitment is definitely reasonable.

Obviously I took the photo above before everyone arrived, but it didn’t really fill up. I’d guess there were about 20 people in attendance, much smaller than I expected. I hope they get the required number of volunteers to progress things! I’m going to apply to join the community engagement committee.

The deadline to apply is January 23rd at 4:30pm. You can download the application package in either PDF or Word formats. Enthusiasm is perhaps more important than relevant skills or experience, so if you’re interested in bringing EXPO to Edmonton, consider joining one of the committees!

Northern Voice speakers are primarily from Vancouver and use Twitter

logo by basco5 If you visit the Twitter page for Northern Voice, the one line bio says “Canada’s social media and blogging conference” (isn’t the blogging bit redundant?). The website isn’t quite as direct, but the impression you’re left with is the same: it’s a Canada-wide event. A few days ago they announced the schedule for Saturday, the “conference” part. I took a look at it today and was struck by how many of the speakers are located in Vancouver! Here’s the list, with speaker names linked to their Twitter profiles where available:

Kris Krug – Vancouver
Lauren Wood – Vancouver
Nora Young – Toronto
Rob Cottingham – Vancouver
Stewart Butterfield – San Francisco
Steve Pratt – Vancouver
Nate Elliott – Vancouver
Tod Maffin – Vancouver
Isabella Mori – Vancouver
Airdrie Miller – Vancouver
Briana Tomkinson – Vancouver
Rebecca Bollwitt – Vancouver
Linda Bustos – Vancouver
Jenn Lowther – Vancouver
Nadia Nascimento – Vancouver
Monica Hamburg – Vancouver
Kim Adamson-Sharpe – ?
Hilary Genders – Vancouver
Tim Bray – Vancouver
Robert Scales – Vancouver
Susannah Gardner – Vancouver
Barbara Ganley – Vermont?
Laura Blankenship – Pennsylvania
Nancy White – Seattle
Darren Barefoot – Vancouver
Alfred Hermida – Vancouver
David Eaves – Vancouver
Alan Levine – Arizona
Dave Johnson – Vancouver
Kate Trgovac – Vancouver
Rosemary Rowe – Vancouver?
Dave Olson – Vancouver
Bev Davies – Vancouver
Irwin Oostindie – Vancouver

This list may be inaccurate or incomplete – the NV site lacks bios and abstracts, has one “TBA” slot, and doesn’t make it clear where everyone is from so I did the best I could to look it up. If you spot an error let me know and I’ll correct it.

Canada’s social media and blogging conference? More like Vancouver’s.

A few final remarks: I fully appreciate that this is a community event and that speakers’ expenses are not covered, so it makes sense to have more locals. I noted the Vancouver-specific nature of the conference last year. I submitted a speaking proposal and was turned down for Saturday, but will be leading a session on Friday (hopefully the schedule for that goes up soon).

Thoughts on Northern Voice’s popularity problem

image by bascoYesterday, Darren wrote about Northern Voice’s “popularity problem”. It’s a nice problem to have! This year’s conference sold out in just three days, leading Darren to speculate that individuals who aren’t “in the know” probably missed out on registering. I think he’s right. I also agree that part of the problem is that NV only happens once a year. I don’t think hosting Fall and Spring editions of the event is going to solve the problem though. The real issue is that NV has always tried to cater to two different audiences across an enormous country – techies and noobies from eastern and western Canada – and perhaps that just isn’t realistic anymore. If there are going to be multiple NV events in a year, I think they need to be distinguished by target audience and perhaps by location.

I wrote a post-mortem for last year’s event which was actually rather negative. I think the main thing that keeps me coming back despite the problems is that I fall into the techie audience, and NV is basically the one opportunity each year where techies from across the country (or at least the western part of it) can get together in person relatively easily and inexpensively to interact with one another (other events, such as Mesh, cost about $500 not including travel expenses). For me, that’s the real value of NV.

What would the two events I’m talking about look like? Perhaps Northern Voice for the noobies, and BarCampCanada for the techies. And recognizing that our country is massive, we probably need eastern and western versions of each of those events. An idea that was floated back when Northern Voice was getting started was that it could travel around the country from year-to-year, so we might have “Northern Voice: YVR” one year and “Northern Voice: YEG” another. Obviously that didn’t happen, because it’s just too difficult to manage. I think “Northern Voice: West” and “Northern Voice: East” would be sufficient. Same goes for BarCampCanada, which has had its date pushed back numerous times for precisely the same reason.

I don’t mean to suggest that we should completely segregate techies and noobies, because we’d lose out on the opportunity to learn from one another if we did that. All I’m suggesting is that Northern Voice could be targeted at noobies and BarCampCanada could be targeted at techies. That would help solve the problem of having everyone try to register for the same event immediately. Some techies would go for NV and some noobies would go for BarCampCanada, sure, but I think there would be less issues with this than with Spring and Fall events targeted at everyone.

In case you’re wondering why I’m calling it BarCampCanada, it’s because I’ve always thought that NV got it backwards when they applied the “unconference” style to the Friday meant for noobies (this year seems to be different thankfully). And since most major Canadian cities already have fairly well-established BarCamps (that tend to be more for the techies than for the noobies), why not get them to help organize larger east and west events?

Anyway, as I said, it’s a nice problem to have. Those are my armchair thoughts on the situation. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone at Northern Voice 2009 – both techies and noobies!

Putting my New Year’s energy to good use

tasks I’m not really a fan of New Year’s resolutions, though like many people I often feel re-energized at the start of a new year. Instead of putting that energy into a list of year-long tasks or goals that would inevitably be abandoned, I decided this year that I’d try to capitalize on that energy to accomplish a few things I often put off. I settled on three things: passwords, backups, and bills.

I feel pretty good about my strategy for passwords, with one exception – I don’t change my passwords often enough. Sometimes I get lazy and use an existing password when I sign up for a new site, but the important sites all have unique, randomly generated, strong passwords (well as strong as they can be…I still can’t believe that banks don’t allow special characters and long lengths). It’s good security practice to change passwords regularly, but that never seems to happen. Over the last week, I’ve changed all my passwords. I started with the list of sites and services that I use regularly, and changed everything else as it came up. I’m sure there are a few that I’ve missed, and I’ll change them the next time I need to login. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be actually!

The second thing I tackled was backups. Despite having pretty good systems in place to backup Paramagnus stuff, I don’t have a good process for my personal stuff. I still don’t, but I did manage to accomplish a few things. First, I bought a new hard drive and copied everything from my existing data drive onto it. I’ll store the old one somewhere safe now. Second, I backed up a bunch of stuff to Amazon S3. It’s inexpensive, fast, and easy. Lately I’ve been using CloudBerry Explorer, it’s a great app! I’m going to try to back up important data more regularly, but that’ll be an ongoing thing.

The final thing I did? I turned off paper bills. I logged into every site that I currently receive something in the mail for and found that almost all of them have a “go paperless” button buried somewhere in the interface (some call it “change notification options” or something similar). I typically shred bills as soon as they arrive anyway, so why receive them at all? I do everything online, and I have no need for the physical copies. Now it’ll really be a unique experience to receive something in the mail!

I’ve got a number of things on the go that require time and energy of course, but these were my “New Year’s tasks” if you want to call them that. Anyone else shun resolutions in favor of accomplishing something right away?

Notes for 1/11/2009

The first full week of January went pretty much as expected – very quickly! It was a busy week. Nice to be back to a normal schedule though.

Here are my weekly notes:

Edmonton Notes for 1/10/2009

Here are some Edmonton-related things I found interesting this week:

Registered for Northern Voice 2009

Early this morning I registered myself and Megan for Northern Voice 2009, taking place in Vancouver on February 20th and 21st. As you may recall, I submitted a speaking proposal back in December. Unfortunately, my submission wasn’t one of the 18 selected, but that’s okay. I’m glad to hear that the organizing committee received over 100 proposals as it suggests to me that the conference will once again have high quality content this year. Thanks to the committee for considering me and undertaking the nearly impossible task of narrowing that list down!

There are only 300 tickets available for the conference and as of earlier today, they were 75% sold out. If you haven’t already done so, you had better head on over to the registration site and book your spot! Keep an eye on their blog and Twitter account for updates. I suspect they’ll once again have a waiting list, but you don’t want to be on it.

Hopefully they announce the schedule soon – I’m keen to see who’s speaking!

You can read my previous posts related to Northern Voice here. You can also look at my photos from 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008.

Are you going to NV2009? Let me know!

Edmonton Winter Light 2009

winter light 2009 Today marks the start of Winter Light 2009, a new festival designed to “usher in the winter season” and “enjoy Edmonton’s winter spirit.” The opening ceremonies were held tonight in Churchill Square and City Hall. It couldn’t have happened on a day more representative of winter than today – temperatures were around –22 C (and –32 C with the wind chill) and we received a fresh dump of snow during the day!

Sharon and I made our way to Churchill Square at about 7:45pm and found it mostly empty except for the volunteers. Despite having a number of warming tents and fire/heat displays, most people were inside City Hall enjoying the free food (provided by NAIT) and the entertainment of Le Fuzz and others.

Winter Light 2009Winter Light 2009 - Inside City Hall

We wandered around the square for a bit and eventually found the information tent where they were offering free hot chocolate to anyone who brought their own cup. Great way to be a little more environmentally responsible! The hot chocolate tasted great and allowed us to stay outside a little more before heading indoors.

Sharon was excited to see what culinary delights NAIT was offering so we headed straight for the tables of food. Unfortunately the good feeling we had by bringing our own mug for hot chocolate disappeared when we found the disposable plates and spoons being used for the food! Ah well – everything was very tasty!

We spent some time enjoying the performances, and managed to catch the official “welcome” to Winter Light with one of the organizers and Councillor Ben Henderson (Councillor Kim Krushell was also in attendance):

Next up for Winter Light is Deep Freeze on 118th Avenue, which takes place this weekend on January 10th and 11th. Activities include outdoor curling, free hay rides, snowshoeing, snow sculpting workshops, and of course, free food! On January 15th the sixth annual Ice on Whyte festival gets underway.

Although there were far more people out for the much colder New Year’s Eve than there were tonight, I wouldn’t call the festival’s success into question just yet. The main events are what will really draw people in, and tonight was basically just free marketing for those events.

I’m excited to see how the next 10 weeks unfold – I’d say Winter Light 2009 is off to a fairly good start. You can see my photos from this evening at Flickr, and some video at YouTube.

UPDATE: Sharon posted her thoughts and a bit more about the food at her blog.

Recap: DemoCampEdmonton5

Tonight we held our first DemoCamp of 2009, once again in ETLC at the University of Alberta. Despite some cold weather, slick roads, and an Oilers game (featuring the return of Mats Sundin) we still had at least 75 people in attendance tonight at DemoCampEdmonton5. A great way to start the new year!

We had five demos tonight:

  • Randy Troppmann showed us RunningMap.com, an online tool for running enthusiasts to track and share routes. Users can map a route, view elevation, add photos and other points of interest, and more.
  • Mark Donovan from Titan Gaming Inc. showed us Titan Strike, a social networking platform for games. It features team and guild management, a built-in awards system, and tournaments. The idea is to have game publishers use Titan to build an online community around their games.
  • Timo Ewalds of Nexopia fame showed us one of his side projects – artificial intelligence for the game Pentago. It was without a doubt the most technical demo we’ve ever had, but it was fascinating to hear Timo describe everything he had to do to get it working well.
  • Victor Rubba from CrazedCoders showed us the UI they designed for the new Linksys MediaHub, just announced today at CES. It’s a Flash interface unlike anything you’ve ever seen before on a Linksys device.
  • Matt Skopyk showed us his Seizure Violin. It’s hard to describe in text, but essentially he’s using instruments and computers together to manipulate electronic music. Very cool stuff.

Just like last time, all of the demos went very well and looked very slick.

DemoCampEdmonton5DemoCampEdmonton5

I think my “demo of the night” goes to CrazedCoders, with Matt Skopyk very close behind. I’m very impressed that a local company designed the new interface for a mainstream Linksys device (photo here and here), and will be revamping the interface for their line of routers as well. Engadget said in their post about the device, “we’ll see how that interface runs in person later this week.” How cool is it that we got to see the interface directly from the developers tonight here in Edmonton?! More than that, the interface looks amazing. They’ve really done an amazing job. As for Matt’s demo – it was just plain cool. I love seeing the interesting things that people are up to, and the music and lights was definitely a crowd pleaser. You can watch it here (audio is pretty quiet, sorry):

For more on the demos, check out Twitter where I posted live updates from the event. Afterward we again converged at The Windsor Pub to continue chatting, meeting one another, and occasionally watch the hockey game. It was absolutely packed!

Thanks to everyone who came out tonight! If you’d like to be notified about future DemoCamp and BarCamp events in Edmonton, sign up for the mailing list here.

I want an API for Edmonton Transit (ETS)

edmonton transit When the new edmonton.ca website launched back in the fall, I was hopeful that the Edmonton Transit portion of the site would receive more than just a facelift. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Though I’m disappointed, I can understand why. Edmonton Transit is not in the business of developing websites or software, it’s in the business of transportation. They’ve got to make sure buses and trains run efficiently and effectively first, and then they can focus on everything else.

That’s not to say that the website, or BusLink (over the phone), or the other services they offer aren’t important, just that ETS has limited resources and must deploy them accordingly. That’s why I think an Edmonton Transit API makes a lot of sense.

To build an application for looking up transit information, you need both an interface and data (I’m simplifying things a bit). ETS has all of the data of course – they know all of the route numbers, bus stops, and schedule information. What they lack are great interfaces. If ETS exposed their data through an API, third party developers could build great interfaces on top with relative ease.

Here’s the kind of information I’d like to see exposed through an ETS API:

  • Route Information – return name, start and end point, and other details for a given route
  • Stop Information – return coordinates, address, photo, and other information for a given stop
  • Route Stops with Stop Times – return a list of all stops along a given route with stop times
  • Routes at Stop with Times – return a list of routes for a given stop with stop times for each one
  • Search for Stop by Location – return the closest stops for a given address or set of coordinates

That list is similar to the information exposed by the unofficial TransLink API. A good starting point would be to simply clone what they’ve done! More advanced API features could include:

  • Route Interruptions – return a list of routes currently affected by construction or other interruptions
  • Stop Interruptions – return a list of stops currently affected by construction or other interruptions
  • Search for Stop by Landmark – return the closest stops for a given landmark
  • Trip Planner – return a list of route and transfer options for a given location of origin and destination
  • Information for St. Albert Transit and Strathcona County Transit

In the future, the sky is the limit. I know ETS is testing GPS technology on buses, so why not expose “distance from stop” information for a given route? That would be wicked, and incredibly useful when the weather dips below –25 C.

It’s not feasible for ETS to develop interfaces for each new platform that emerges. They have a website, but what about an iPhone application? Or a BlackBerry application? Or a Twitter bot? If they focused their limited software development energies on building an API, I’m confident that local entrepreneurs and software developers would build a plethora of interfaces on top of it. I would definitely build a Twitter bot!

There don’t seem to be many transit systems with APIs available, but that won’t be true for long. Here are a few others I’ve found: TransLink (unofficial), Bay Area Rapid Transit (official), Portland’s TriMet (official), Chicago Transit Authority (unofficial), Charlottetown Transit (unofficial). And here are a couple other resources I’ve come across: the Public Transit Openness Index, and a list of publicly available official GTFS (Google Transit Feed Specification) schedule data feeds.

I’d love to see Edmonton Transit take the lead and offer a completely free, fully functional transit API, and I’d be willing to help make it happen. In the meantime, don’t forget that you can now use Google Maps to find ETS trip plans.