Year: 2010

Thoughts on Edmonton’s new City Manager

On Tuesday evening I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to meet Simon Farbrother, the City of Edmonton’s new City Manager. He started on Monday, just less than three months after his selection was announced. There were a lot of people there on Tuesday, so I only had a couple of minutes to introduce myself, but based on that quick interaction and Simon’s brief remarks to the crowd, I can say that he seems very genuine, personable, and intelligent.

Simon is no stranger to Edmonton. He earned his MA in Geography from the University of Alberta in 1985, started as a city planner at the City of Leduc in 1989, and after moving up there, left to become the City Manager of Spruce Grove in 1997, a position he held until 2005 when he became Chief Administrative Office for the City of Waterloo. You can read more about Simon’s background here and here.

I never really had the opportunity to interact with Al Maurer, Simon’s predecessor, but by most accounts he was a competent manager and all-around great guy. He joined the City of Edmonton back in 1970, as a traffic operations engineer. He became the department general manager in 1982, and went on to lead the Asset Management & Public Works department, and the Corporate Services department, before being appointed City Manager in 2000. During his tenure, quality of life remained constant (93% in 2000 vs. 91% in 2009) as did overall citizen satisfaction with City services (79% in 2000 vs. 72% in 2009 – all figures come from the Citizen Satisfaction Surveys of those years). It’s easy to find negatives too, such as the ballooning amount spent on consultants ($22 million in 1999 vs. $92 million in 2008). When Al joined the City, the population of Edmonton was about 430,000. When he became Manager 30 years later, Edmonton had grown to about 660,000. And today, as Simon takes over, Edmonton’s population sits at just over 780,000.

Obviously, Al Maurer and Simon Farbrother are quite different from one another. Al spent his entire career at the City of Edmonton, while Simon has moved around (and not just in Canada either, he earned his BA from the University of Portsmouth). Simon has never worked at a city with a population greater than 100,000 while Al has throughout his entire career. Al’s education was in engineering, Simon’s was in geography and economics. And of course, Simon is quite a bit younger at 49 than Al is. Here they are:

I was by far the youngest person in the room the other night, so maybe that’s why I took note of the age difference. I don’t want to make too big a deal of it, but I quite like the fact that Simon is a bit younger. My guess is that he’s younger than many of the other senior managers at the City, so I hope he uses that to his advantage. He said the right things in his letter to citizens, citing the need to “take advantage of new technologies and emerging opportunities” and generally exuding optimism and excitement for the challenges and opportunities ahead.

We’ve got a municipal election coming up on October 18, 2010 – maybe the average age of City Council will come down too?

Congratulations to Al Maurer on his retirement, and on the creation of the Al Maurer Awards Fund to recognize excellence in public service. And good luck to Simon Farbrother – I look forward to seeing Edmonton grow and prosper under his watch!

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – 2009 Year in Review

Welcome to the State of the Edmonton Twittersphere: 2009 Year in Review, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton in 2009!

I’ve done my best to ensure that everything is accurate, but take all the data you see here with a grain of salt. If I make any changes, I’ll update at the bottom of the post.

The source of the data is a combination of Twitter and Twitter Search. If a user has his or her location set to Edmonton, St. Albert, Sherwood Park, Leduc, Nisku, Stony Plain, Fort Saskatchewan, Beaumont, Spruce Grove, or matching lat/long coordinates, they are considered an Edmontonian.

If you compare the monthly statistics here to my monthly State of the Edmonton Twittersphere posts, you’ll notice they are slightly different. The monthly posts represent a snapshot – over the year I got better at identifying local users, retrieving missing updates, etc. This posts reflects the most up-to-date information I have been able to gather.

Summary

I identified just over 14,000 local users who posted at least one tweet in 2009. In December, I identified 5654 local users who posted at least one tweet throughout the month. Our peak for active users was in November, at 5989.

Here are the 2009 summarized statistics:

# of tweets by local users: 2,410,017
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 138,047 (5.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 868,722 (36.0%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 477,637 (19.8%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 112,463 (4.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 84,180 (3.5%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

And here’s a closer look at the total number of tweets posted by local users per month:

The 2.4 million tweets posted by local users in 2009 works out to about 4.6 tweets per minute. Just over half (52.2%) all of tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.

Hashtags

Starting in mid-July, I improved the way my systems track hashtags. Looking at the data now, I’m struck by the sheer number of hashtags that have been used by local users! From mid-July through December of 2009, I identified 29,469 unique hashtags. Here are the top ten:

  1. #yeg
  2. #Oilers
  3. #ff
  4. #ableg
  5. #followfriday
  6. #yegtraffic
  7. #fb
  8. #fun140
  9. #edmonton
  10. #yyc

Of course, #yeg is far and away the most popular. To put it into perspective:

Here’s what the tag cloud looks like without the top ten hashtags:

Another interesting stat related to hashtags: there were 437 unique tags used that started with #yeg. Here are the top ten:

  1. #yegtraffic
  2. #yegfood
  3. #yegtransit
  4. #yegfringe
  5. #yegchange
  6. #yegcc
  7. #yegphoto
  8. #yegfoodbank
  9. #yegsafetymtg
  10. #yegtweetup

The average length of a hashtag (excluding the #) was 11.25 characters, while the most common hashtag length was 9 characters. Hashtags four characters or less in length were used 2.25 times more than hashtags ten characters or more in length.

Clients

Twitter started reporting the client used to post updates in mid-February, so the data below is for almost the entire year. In total, I identified 754 different clients that were used by local users to post updates. Here are the top ten:

  1. web
  2. TweetDeck
  3. UberTwitter
  4. TwitterFon/EchoFon
  5. Tweetie
  6. txt
  7. Twitterrific
  8. twitterfeed
  9. TwitterBerry
  10. mobile web

Here they are in graphic form:

In total, the Twitter website accounted for 39.2% of all updates. The top ten clients together accounted for 82.2% of all updates.

Users

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

  1. revtrev
  2. Pat_Lorna
  3. wearestereos
  4. DrBarryLycka
  5. subunit1
  6. LesM
  7. DarleneV
  8. dragonage
  9. dancinginlife
  10. redneckmommy

There are 181 users with 1000 followers or more, and 1449 users with 100 followers or more.

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

  1. DaBaby
  2. revtrev
  3. dragonage
  4. redneckmommy
  5. dancinginlife
  6. paradepro
  7. Pat_Lorna
  8. lealea
  9. gsiemens
  10. wearestereos

There are 2799 users who appear on at least one list. Among those, the average user appears on ten lists.

Here are the top ten most active local users:

  1. bevurlee
  2. britl
  3. angelzilla
  4. AndyGroenink
  5. TrinaMLee
  6. Gen22
  7. GeneralTekno
  8. stygldpnyby
  9. FWEE4U
  10. akomuzikera

The top one hundred active local users posted 27.2% of all tweets.

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

  1. britl
  2. bevurlee
  3. angelzilla
  4. bingofuel
  5. ZoomJer
  6. akomuzikera
  7. mastermaq
  8. stygldpnyby
  9. Sirthinks
  10. frostedbetty

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yeg:

  1. iNews880
  2. edmontonjournal
  3. Sirthinks
  4. mastermaq
  5. ZoomJer
  6. ctvedmonton
  7. cbcedmonton
  8. BrentWelch
  9. DebraWard
  10. livingsanctuary & britl

Twitter Posts

Here are some of the interesting Twitter-related posts I wrote in 2009:

Final Thoughts

I’m continually amazed by the local Twitter community here in Edmonton! Local users have used Twitter to meet one another, to do business, to effect change, and to support the less fortunate, among other things. The community is not led by anyone, instead it self-organizes, and because of that it has accomplished some amazing things. I can’t wait to see what 2010 brings!

Something to watch for in 2010: geotagged tweets (sending your latitude and longitude along with your tweet, usually via your mobile phone). By default, geotagging is disabled on Twitter, you must enable it in your settings. Thus far, just 270 local users have done so.

Thanks for reading my State of the Edmonton Twittersphere posts over the last year!

Edmonton in 2009

Last year I did a recap post called Edmonton in 2008. You can’t recap something as large as an entire city, but I did find the post useful to refer back to. I thought I’d do the same kind of post again this year, for the same reason. Over the last few weeks I’ve been gathering links to articles, statistics, and more related to Edmonton in 2009. I’ll update this post as I find more.

News Articles for 2009

Other Recaps for 2009

Facts & Figures for 2009

  • Population of Edmonton: 782,439 (source)
  • Number of calls to EPS reporting suspected impaired drivers: 9,201 (source)
  • Home sales: 19,139 (source)
  • Average single-family house price: $364,032 (source)
  • Average condo price: $240,322 (source)
  • YTD Passengers at EIA as of November 2009: 5,561,131 (source)
  • 2009 CFR Attendance: 83,904 (source)
  • 2009 Capital EX Attendance: 717,966 (source)
  • 2009 Edmonton Fringe Ticket Sales: 92,279 (source)

Leave a comment if you’ve got something else I should add to the list – thanks!

Notes for 1/17/2010

Here are my weekly notes:

Edmonton Notes for 1/16/2010

What a week! Here are my weekly Edmonton notes:

I’ll leave you today with a common sight around the City right now. I hope the ice sculptures at Ice on Whyte are ok!

Melting in Edmonton

Olympic Torch Relay in Spruce Grove with GM’s Art & Serge

The Olympic Torch rolled through Stony Plain and Spruce Grove this morning, and I got to tag along with GM’s Art and Serge! General Motors is one of the major sponsors of the torch relay, so they have a team that travels with the convoy to ensure all the vehicles are kept in top shape. Like all sponsors, GM is using its role in the relay as the foundation for some marketing, so Art & Serge have been documenting their adventures on their blog and on Twitter and occasionally have invited bloggers to join them.

Olympic Torch in Spruce Grove

I met Art and his technician Dan at around 7:10 AM in Spruce Grove (I learned that Art & Serge switch off every 15 days, so that’s why he wasn’t there). They had come from a service call earlier in the morning, where they had to fix a gas leak of some kind. I jumped in their Chevy Silverado (loaded with everything a vehicle tech could want, including enough juice to boost a Mack truck) and we set out to join the torch convoy. Art had a minute-by-minute schedule of the route, and explained that everything is very accurately mapped out in advance. Unfortunately we couldn’t get as close as we had hoped, so we followed from a distance until the convoy turned.

Olympic Torch in Spruce Grove

It was pretty cool to see all the people lining the streets with their glowsticks in hand and Canadian gear on. There were a ridiculous number of flashing lights too, thanks to all of the police and fire vehicles helping to clear a path for the convoy, so I’m sure Art and Dan see flashing lights in their sleep!

We eventually stopped and got out to take some pictures as the torch went by on its last leg in Spruce Grove. I didn’t get a chance to see the torch on the street the other day in Edmonton, so it was neat to have that experience.

Olympic Torch in Spruce Grove

Throughout the morning I asked Art dozens of questions and learned a lot about his team’s role in the relay. Here are some of the things I found quite interesting:

  • I had no idea the relay was so large. Art mentioned about 100 vehicles and over 200 people are involved! Amazingly, they can service all of those vehicles in about five hours.
  • Roughly 30% of the GM fleet are hybrid vehicles. They often get comments about how quiet the vehicles are when they stop.
  • One challenge has been finding parts at local dealerships to fix the vehicles when something goes wrong, because most of them are 2010 models!
  • Every night Art’s team is responsible for washing all of the vehicles. How else do you think they’d stay clean and shiny for all the photographers?
  • There are two terms for the torch relay: convoy mode, when they are travelling to another location, and torchbearer mode, when the torchbearers are doing their thing.
  • Some of the vehicles involved include the Pilot (lead vehicle), Media One (where all the media/cameras are), a van to carry the torchbearers, and two Olympias (they are the Zamboni-like vehicles that give stuff away).
  • Both Art & Dan said they prefer the early morning or evening routes, because everything (especially the flame) looks so much better when it’s dark out.

I had fun this morning learning about the torch relay and getting to see it from a different perspective. Like Chris Wheeler who I met earlier this week, Art and his team have a pretty tiring schedule. Despite that, both Art and Dan said that seeing the torch and all of the excited, smiling people along the way never gets old. They were upbeat and proud to be playing a role in the torch relay, mentioning that going back to their normal jobs would be difficult!

Thanks again to GM Canada for the opportunity!

Art Gallery of Alberta sneak peek for Edmonton’s social media community

As I’ve mentioned here a few times before, I’m very excited for the new Art Gallery of Alberta, opening to the public on January 31 (on ShareEdmonton). The AGA has done a really solid job of keeping everything a secret so far for the big reveal, but at the same time they want to stir up interest in the community. I had the opportunity to suggest a sneak peek of the new building for Edmonton’s social media community, and was thrilled when Sarah Hoyles, the AGA’s Media Relations & Communications Coordinator, said it was going to happen!

Here are the details:

The Art Gallery of Alberta will host a private tour for local bloggers later this month. The by-invitation-only event will be led by AGA Executive Director, Gilles Hebert, who will provide Edmonton’s social media community with a sneak peek of Alberta’s newest gallery, opening on January 31, 2010.

If you’re an active blogger or Twitter or other social media user in Edmonton, you should be receiving an invitation soon! The invite will contain all of the other relevant details.

For more information on the new building, check out Randall Stout on the new Art Gallery of Alberta. For updates about the AGA, follow yourAGA on Twitter!

See you there!

Olympic Torch Relay in Edmonton

I have never seen Churchill Square as packed full of people as it was tonight for the Olympic Torch Relay celebration! Olympian Doreen Ryan ran the final leg of the relay, and lit the “celebration cauldron” shortly after 7pm. You could just feel the energy moving through the crowd, despite the relative cold!

Olympic Torch in Edmonton

Getting setup in Churchill Square

Olympic Torch in Edmonton

City Hall was nicely colored for the festivities

Olympic Torch in Edmonton

The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra performed the Olympic music by John Williams

Olympic Torch in Edmonton

The Square starting to fill up

Olympic Torch in Edmonton

Lots of entertainment

The most energetic of the performances

Olympic Torch in Edmonton

Clear path for Doreen Ryan

Olympic Torch in Edmonton

Churchill Square full of people

Olympic Torch in Edmonton

The Olympic Torch appears!

The final leg of the Edmonton relay

Olympic Torch in Edmonton

Celebration Cauldron and dignitaries

The Journal has a nice recap of the event here. You can see the rest of my photos here. For more excellent photos from the event, check out Bruce Clarke’s blog. This was potentially the most photographed moment in Edmonton’s history though, so I’m sure there are thousands more photos that will appear soon!

Go Canada Go!

Open Data comes to Edmonton

Today I’m excited to share the news that Open Data has arrived in Edmonton! In a presentation to City Council this afternoon, Edmonton CIO Chris Moore will describe what the City has accomplished thus far and will outline some of the things we can look forward to over the next six months (I’ll update here after the presentation with any new information). This morning, he announced the initial release of data.edmonton.ca, the City of Edmonton’s open data catalogue. Starting immediately, developers can access 12 different data sets, including the locations of City parks, locations of historical buildings, and a list of planned road closures.

PDF You can download the report to Executive Committee here in PDF.

The report was created in an open fashion – the information inside was provided by 39 contributors who had access to a shared document on Google Docs.

Data Catalogue

The data catalogue is currently in the “community preview” phase, which basically means that the City of Edmonton may make breaking changes. Critically, the data available in the catalogue is licensed under very friendly terms:

“The City of Edmonton (the City) now grants you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use, modify, and distribute the datasets in all current and future media and formats for any lawful purpose.”

Developers access the data in the catalogue using the APIs. This might seem a little cumbersome at first, but it actually means you can programmatically traverse and download the entire catalogue! Developers can also run simple queries and view preview data on each data set page.

The catalogue features a prominent “feedback” link on every page, so check it out and let the City know how to make it better.

OGDI

The City of Edmonton’s data catalogue is built on Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) platform. OGDI is an open source project that makes it easy for governments to publish data on the web. The City of Edmonton, which is the first major government agency in Canada North America to use OGDI, will be contributing enhancements back to the project. OGDI is built atop the Windows Azure platform, and exposes a REST interface for developers. By default it supports the OData, JSON, and KML formats. Developers can access ODGI using their technology of choice, and C#, Java, and PHP developers can make use of the toolkits provided by Microsoft.

History of Open Data in Edmonton

We have been talking about open data for roughly a year now (and probably even longer). On February 18, 2009, Edmonton Transit officially launched Google Transit trip planning, which made use of a GTFS feed provided by ETS. 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 formal inquiry on open data to City administration on October 14, 2009. A few days later, the community talked again about open data at ChangeCamp Edmonton on October 17, 2009, focusing on Councillor Iveson’s inquiry. That event led to the creation of the #yegdata hashtag, a UserVoice site to identify potential data sets, and a number of smaller follow-up events. It also prompted Chris Moore to open up access to the creation of his report. On November 23, 2009 the City of Edmonton hosted an Open Data Workshop at City Hall that was attended by about 45 people.

What’s next?

First and foremost, developers need to start using the data! There will also be opportunities to provide feedback on the catalogue, to help prioritize new data sets, and to get involved with crafting the City strategy. Here’s the Program Plan for the City’s Open Data Initiative:

  • January 13, 2010: Initial release of City of Edmonton data catalogue
  • January 2010: Sessions with utility & organizational partners to obtain more data
  • February 2010: Public Involvement Plan
  • February – April 2010: Official data catalogue release, application competition!
  • March – April 2010: Development & approval of open data strategy for the City of Edmonton
  • May 2010: Open Data Administrative Directive, approved by City Manager
  • May – June 2010: Open Data Road Show, to communicate the strategy

In Vancouver, the policy came first and the data catalogue came second. In Edmonton we’re doing the reverse. We end up with the same result though: by the spring we’ll have a data catalogue in use by developers, and an official policy and strategy for open data in the future. This is fantastic news for all Edmontonians!

Congratulations & Thanks

Congrats and thanks to: Chris Moore for providing the leadership necessary at the City of Edmonton for all of this to become a reality; James Rugge-Price and Devin Serink, for organizing the workshop in November, for doing most of the behind-the-scenes work, and for always keeping the discussion alive and interesting; Jacob Modayil, Stephen Gordon, Jason Darrah, and Gordon Martin for supporting this initiative from the beginning, and for bringing valuable experience and leadership to the table; Don Iveson, for recognizing the positive role that open data will play in building a better a Edmonton; all of the members of the community who have contributed ideas and helped to spread the word about open data; all of the other City of Edmonton employees who have supported open data in Edmonton. And finally, thanks to Vancouver, Toronto, and everyone else who came before us for leading the charge.

Enough reading – go build something amazing!

Torch Relay Reporter Chris Wheeler comes to Edmonton

Today I had the pleasure of hosting Chris Wheeler, a video journalist capturing the Olympic Flame as it makes its way throughout the country. I was asked by EEDC a few weeks ago if I’d be interested in the opportunity, and I said absolutely. I love Edmonton and I love meeting new people, so it was good fit for me! EEDC regularly hosts travel media from around the world, something that most Edmontonians probably don’t know, but which absolutely makes sense to do.

DISCLOSURE: I got paid for my time today, but I am not getting paid for this blog post.

Chris is the iCoke Torch Relay Reporter, a project of Coca-Cola, the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC), and Tourism BC. This is the seventh time that Coca-Cola has sponsored the Olympic Torch Relay! So far the videos have been getting lots of views and Chris says that as he works his way west, the excitement is definitely building.

I started today by meeting Chris at the airport. He was in Saskatoon until very early this morning, and I quickly learned that the last 75 or so days of his life have consisted of “wake up, shoot footage all day, then edit/upload/sleep/travel”. It’s a grueling schedule, but one that Chris is passionate about!

Welcome to Edmonton

We first made our way to the new Art Gallery of Alberta, where we got a very brief tour amongst all the construction that is still going on. Chris interviewed AGA Board Chair Allan Scott, and I think was really amazed at how long he has been working to make the new AGA a reality for Edmonton. I’m very excited for the new AGA building, which officially opens on January 31, and I can’t wait to see it all finished!

Torch Reporter in Edmonton!

Next we walked to Blue Plate Diner for a quick lunch – tasty as always! It was really interesting to hear from Chris about the places he’s been on the trip, and some of the challenges he has faced along the way. One of the biggest, of course, is bandwidth. Chris shoots all his videos in high-definition, so even after editing and finalizing a video the files are still quite large, and hotels typically don’t have the fastest Internet. It’s pretty amazing that Chris has managed to continue posting new videos every few days!

Lunch at Blue Plate Diner

Our next stop was West Edmonton Mall, and more specifically, Sea Lions’ Rock. We didn’t know what to expect, but it turned out that Chris was able to get up close and personal with Pablo, the largest of the sea lions. Chris got to hug Pablo, and even got a big kiss! We also stayed for the scheduled show, something I haven’t seen in quite a while. It’s very entertaining, and is definitely something to check out at least once! Right after we left, Rick Mercer and Danielle Smith showed up for a shoot. Both Chris and I are RMR fans, but resisted the temptation to interrupt them.

Torch Reporter in Edmonton!

Torch Reporter in Edmonton!

Chris is in Edmonton all day tomorrow as well, filming the Torch Relay and related festivities (on ShareEdmonton). After that he’ll be on his way to other locations in Alberta and eventually, back to Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Best of luck with the remainder of your trip Chris!

Thanks again to EEDC for the opportunity. You can see the rest of my photos from today here. Keep an eye on Chris’ YouTube channel for the Edmonton video, which should be up in a few days.