Edmonton Notes for 4/7/2013

Here are my weekly Edmonton notes:

Michael Walters Campaign Launch

Here are some upcoming events:

Pillow toss
Saturday was International Pillow Fight Day! Photo by Nelson Webb.

Potholes in Edmonton

Every year the City of Edmonton spends a few million dollars to fill a few hundred thousand potholes. Are potholes just a fact of life, or can we do something about them? I think the latter. It’s time for a more sophisticated and creative discussion about potholes in Edmonton!

Pothole
Pothole photo by More Bike Lanes Please

We hear the same thing every year. As spring approaches, dozens of stories are published about Edmonton’s pothole problem. We hear all about the freeze/thaw cycle of the winter and that’s why the potholes are bad. We hear that the City has crews out all the time fixing potholes, on average about 400,000 per year. We hear that a lot of money is being spent on the problem!

Here’s what Mayor Mandel said a few weeks ago:

“If you look at this winter — we’ve had freezing and thawing, freezing and thawing way more than any other year,” said Mandel, “and we have had a little more snow than normal. It creates havoc.”

“It’s not our intention to create a pothole … but it is a fact of life in our city,” said Mandel. “It will be there forever and we’ll never catch up.”

That sounds like a challenge!

I started digging into potholes, well figuratively anyway. I started with a series of questions, and then I just began researching. I went through old council minutes, I looked at City reports, I searched through old newspaper articles, etc. What was supposed to take a few hours turned into days! After a while I realized I had better stop and share what I had gathered, so that’s what you’ll find in this post.

Here’s a video for those of you in the TL;DR camp:

Here are some of the highlights of what I found:

  • Potholes form when water and traffic are present at the same time.
  • The City has filled more than 5.6 million potholes since 2000.
  • On average, the City fills about 433,000 potholes each year, with a budget of $3.5 million.
  • Annual pothole budgets have ranged from $1.5 million to $5.9 million since 1990, for a total of about $85 million (or $104 million adjusted for inflation).
  • Edmonton seems to fill twice as many potholes as any other large Canadian city.
  • The City maintains more than 4,600 kilometers of roads. The average quality of an arterial road is 6.1 out of 10, just below the industry standard. There is not enough funding in place to prevent this from falling.

There’s a lot more information in this PDF report that I’ve put together:

I put all of the data I gathered into an Excel document that you can download here. You’ll find some data in there that is incomplete – if you have the missing information, please let me know! If you use it to generate your own analysis, I’d love to learn from you so please share!

How can we solve the pothole problem in Edmonton? I don’t know. But doing the same thing over and over isn’t going to change anything either. Here are some ideas on how to make progress:

  1. Information is only useful if we can bring it together to turn it into knowledge. I’ve started to do some of that in the report above. In the absence of good data about weather patterns or traffic patterns, it’s easy to make assumptions. I feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface – there’s a lot more information that could be correlated to develop a better picture of the pothole problem.
  2. We need to make better use of the tools and expertise that we have in Edmonton. I’m thinking of tools like the Open Data Catalogue, for instance, and expertise like the transportation engineers and soil experts we have. Edmonton is one of the few cities that tracks the number of potholes filled, let alone makes that data available online, but we can do more! We also need to do a better job of harnessing the collective power of all Edmontonians for crowdsourcing ideas and data. Potholes don’t have to be just a transportation problem.
  3. There’s lots of interesting things happening elsewhere – Edmonton is not the only city that has to deal with potholes! What can we learn from others? There are self-heating roads, nanotechnology is being used to create crack-proof concrete, and all sorts of different polymers designed to make roads less brittle. How can we apply some of that knowledge?

What if we brought together engineers, scientists, designers, programmers, and other citizens for a one-day pothole unconference? What would they come up with? I think it’s an idea worth exploring.

Splash
Splash photo by Owen’s Law

I don’t think we’ll solve the pothole problem in Edmonton just by throwing more money at it, and we certainly won’t get anywhere with cheap gimmicks. Instead I think we need to get a bit more holistic and creative in our approach.

For now, I have two calls-to-action:

  1. If you’ve never reported a pothole using the City’s online form, give it a shot here. Don’t bother with forms or maps on other sites – use the official one.
  2. If you found anything in this post valuable, please share it with others.

Thanks for reading and happy pothole dodging!

Talking open data in Edmonton with Minister Tony Clement

Tony Clement, President of the Treasury Board of Canada, was in Edmonton today as part of a cross-country tour to gather feedback from the Open Data community. The federal government is preparing to launch a revamped Open Data Portal, and Minister Clement has been given the mandate to make it happen. After stops in the morning at Startup Edmonton and TEC Edmonton, Minister Clement was at City Hall for an Open Data Roundtable, hosted by the one and only David Eaves.

"Open Data is a global movement that is really gaining momentum across the country. Our Government wants to ensure we are making it as accessible as possible so that innovators and enthusiasts can harness this rich resource," said Minister Clement. "We are getting ready to unveil the next generation Open Data Portal and the input we received from Edmonton’s vibrant Open Data community will help us build a user-friendly site that will allow users to capitalize on this opportunity."

In addition to holding face-to-face meetings, Minister Clement also hosted a Google Hangout on Open Data last month. You can watch the whole thing here:

I was fortunate enough to be invited to the roundtable today, along with roughly two-dozen other Edmontonians interested in open data. We had a very limited amount of time to chat, but I think we still discussed a wide range of topics. I hope the information gathered was indeed valuable for the team in charge of the new portal.

As host, David organized our time around a series of questions. The first was to suggest ideas for what the next generation open data portal should be. We broke into small groups and then shared ideas back with the larger group.

The first thing I suggested was that it should not look like it was designed in 1995. I find all of the Government of Canada websites lacking in the aesthetics department! Certainly there’s something to be said for consistency, and I understand there’s an initiative underway to reimagine the entire GoC web presence. On the flip side of consistency though are the preconceptions that you may not want to be carried forward. If I look at the Open Data Portal today, it looks like every other government site, which makes me think it’ll be a mess of weird hierarchies and PDFs buried away. It’s not very welcoming or inviting!

Another theme was based around the idea that we can’t build a data portal that serves all possible audiences. But, we can do more than we are currently. So my group discussed the idea of intent-based profiles. The idea is you’d login, set some criteria like whether you’re a developer or not, and maybe your location, and the portal would then give you a personalized view. Of course, anonymous access should be preserved, so it shouldn’t be a requirement that you need to login.

Three other themes that emerged included: historical data and the realization that any data we create now will at some point become historical, articulated well by Heather and Maureen; the notion that the portal should facilitate the two-way movement of data, so that citizens can publish data into the catalogue as well as get data out of it; and the fact that documentation about data is important, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be created top-down.

The second question was related to datasets, both specific datasets that we’d like, but also criteria that make datasets valuable and/or interesting. The first thing that came to mind for me was geography. I’d love to be able to see all of the datasets related to Edmonton, or to municipalities, or to Alberta, or to provinces. Right now you have to really hunt to find datasets that compare cities, for instance.

I think Matt‘s two suggestions in response this question were spot on. The first was that the data he finds interesting is the data that makes the government uncomfortable. Minister Clement jumped in to assure us that there’s no conspiracy preventing certain datasets from being released. That would suggest a level of organization that most governments just don’t have, he joked. The second suggestion was that geographical data should be a key foundational dataset. Let’s see a base map of the country, zoomable to the neighbourhood level. Or to whatever smaller regions exist, whether it’s postal code, census district, garbage collection zone, or something else. I love this idea, and my only add-on suggestion was that geographical data doesn’t necessarily have to mean maps. Knowing the list of neighbourhoods or postal codes can be incredibly valuable outside of a map as well.

A few other themes that emerged about datasets were trends and historical data (I personally love the idea of a revision history for any datasets), some sort of metadata (the first dataset any portal should have is the list of datasets it contains, David suggested), and the notion of a data management plan.

We finished up the roundtable with a brief discussion on data standards, followed by a few minutes of open time. I spoke up on data standards along with Ben and Eugene, and suggested that data standards fall squarely under the "nice to have" category. It would be great if different datasets shared a common format, but we’d rather just have the data and worry about the differences with an abstraction layer.

Final thoughts mentioned by the group included dogfooding (the government should actively use its own data portal and datasets), the idea that everyone carries a phone and could be contributing data back into the catalogue, and the future world described by Devin that I think can be summarized as the Internet of Things. "The idea that we searched a catalogue of datasets will seem just as quaint as when we searched the web using Lycos," he said.

I really enjoyed the roundtable today, and I appreciate Minister Clement and David Eaves taking the time to listen to what we had to say. Thanks also to Chris and Ashley from the City for providing the venue and helping to facilitate.

Reflecting on it now, I think what I enjoyed most about the roundtable was the opportunity to chat with people in the local open data community. I haven’t given open data as much public attention lately as I should, and when you shift your gaze elsewhere it’s easy to miss all of the incredible people doing great things.

Recap: 2013 State of the City Address

Thousands of Edmontonians filled the Shaw Conference Centre during lunch today for the Chamber of Commerce’s annual State of the City event. Featuring Mayor Mandel, the event was an opportunity for our city’s business, community, and government leaders to reflect on the past year and to talk about the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Or at least, that’s what we were supposed to be talking about. Instead, the only thing on the minds of those in attendance was Mandel’s decision – would he be running again in October or not?

State of the City Address 2013

Many members of Mandel’s family joined him at the head table, including his adorable grandson, and that only fueled speculation that he would be announcing his retirement. As Mandel took the stage, he received a thunderous standing ovation. It was the kind of standing-O that said, “thanks for nine great years.” But it turned out to be premature.

“I know that there is expectation in this moment – one that I set myself – that I would answer a key question today about whether I would seek re-election this fall.

And as much as I pride myself on giving clear answers – I do not have an answer today.”

There was an audible gasp as he spoke the words. Most people were expecting a yes or no – the possibility of a maybe hadn’t even registered! I’ll admit that I was fairly certain he was going to announce that the current term would be his last, but it seems Mandel had more difficulty making a decision than anticipated. “Key issues affecting the state of our City are genuinely unsettled in my mind,” he said.

While Mandel touched on Make Something Edmonton and some of our city’s successes in his slightly-longer-than-normal speech, most of his comments were directed at the Province. And they weren’t positive. Specifically, Mandel focused on spending cuts to the post-secondary sector, and the imbalance of regional costs and funding.

State of the City Address 2013

First, he addressed the post-secondary sector and it’s very large impact on Edmonton, both to our economy now and to our future competitiveness.

“We should expect nothing less than passionate, relentless defense of this sector from our provincial representatives who should know better than to just stand by. We should expect that our Minister would actually engage this sector and challenge them to find solutions.”

Mandel stated that our post-secondary institutions have the potential to be “amongst the best in the world.” He went on to discuss his concerns with short-term thinking, and called for real leadership. “It means setting a course that people can believe in, and being clear about long-term intent.”

Next, Mandel addressed regional issues. While the Capital Region Board has at least started to address the issue of collaboration and planning together, the imbalance in provincial grant allocations “has not been touched,” he told us.

“The taxpayers of a city of 850,000 cannot continue to pay an unfair share of the costs of urban services for a region of 1.2 million. Making all municipalities responsible on both sides of the ledger is the only way to make growth fair – it is also the only way Edmonton can sustain itself.”

Here again, Mandel questioned decisions made by the provincial government in its most recent budget.

“If you really want to make a difference, not just for Edmonton – but for Alberta’s bottom line – this is a great opportunity for change. Because it will cost billions less to pay for a single coordinated regional plan – than for the wish lists of 25 municipalities.”

Mandel clearly had the element of surprise on his side today, and that helped to make the speech even more impactful. Advanced Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk reacted strongly to Mandel’s criticisms. “I don’t know who pissed into his corn flakes, and you can quote me on that,” he told the Journal.

State of the City Address 2013

Mandel very much positioned himself as the defender of Edmonton today, and his call-to-action was to speak up for the city. “You know, Edmonton is a funny city,” he said. “We are so fiercely proud of what we have, but too often scared to tell others that we have it.”

Though he acknowledged that his eventual decision about whether or not to run again will impact this year’s election, Mandel urged candidates who may want to run to make their intentions known on their own schedules, not his. That’s easier said than done, of course. No one on City Council seems willing to run against Mandel. If he were to run for an unprecedented fourth term, it’s widely expected that he would win.

Mandel’s non-announcement today has the speculation engines revving. Is there funding news about the downtown arena forthcoming? Is he considering a jump into provincial politics? Who knows, maybe he simply hasn’t made up his mind yet. My own sense is that Mandel must feel as though he can resolve a couple of those “key unsettled issues” over the next few months, otherwise, why not just announce that he’s running again?

Edmonton is a better place because Mandel has been our mayor for the last nine years. He’s given so much to this city and it must be taking a toll, but clearly Mandel feels he has more to give. “My focus remains on the job at hand, on what I owe to Edmonton, and what Edmonton needs.”

Thanks to the Chamber of Commerce for inviting me today. You can read my recap of previous State of the City events here: 2011, 2012. You can read the full transcript of Mayor Mandel’s speech here (PDF), and the rest of his speeches here.

Media Monday Edmonton: Update #72

Hope you didn’t get duped too badly today! Here is my latest update on local media stuff:

  • Prepare yourselves for a media blitz tomorrow as Mayor Mandel announces whether or not he’ll run in October’s election! Keep an eye on the #yegvote hashtag for updates.

You can follow Edmonton media news on Twitter using the hashtag #yegmedia. For a great overview of the global media landscape, check out Mediagazer.

So, what have I missed? What’s new and interesting in the world of Edmonton media? Let me know!

You can see past Media Monday Edmonton entries here.

Edmonton Notes for 3/31/2013

Happy Easter! Here are my weekly Edmonton notes:

Here are some upcoming events:

Muttart Conservatory, Edmonton
Great shot of the Muttart Conservatory by Cezary Kucharski.

Transforming Edmonton: Shifting our focus from plans to implementation

Toward the end of 2006, the City of Edmonton started to look at refreshing its visioning and planning efforts. A number of major City plans were about to be renewed, including the Municipal Development Plan, the Capital City Downtown Plan, and the Transportation Master Plan. Administration explained the importance of these reports in an update to Council:

Major plans are plans of city-wide or corporate-wide significance.  Major plans act as foundation blocks for Administration decisions and recommendations to City Council.  They are also a fundamental building block for future Council decisions.  These plans are meant to be in place for multiple years, and the review of these plans takes significant time and resources by both Administration and Council.

A report published in early 2007 provided a more detailed update and proposed a method for developing a “Vision for the City of Edmonton” that would kick off a full planning cycle. The report also included a Strategic Planning Brief. Here’s a look at the proposed strategic development cycle:

And here’s a look at the proposed framework process:

Writing in the Edmonton Journal about public information sessions held by the City in October 2008, Todd Babiak noted:

This process, which also includes the City Vision for 2040, the 10-year strategic plan, the Ecovision, and the plan for downtown, is broadly called "Transforming Edmonton." We’re admitting, as a people, that we have made expensive and dangerous mistakes for a generation or so.

Mary Ann McConnell-Boehm, who managed the Municipal Development Plan at the time, said:

"This is what we heard from our stakeholders in 2006, about the direction they wanted our city to take. A different approach, more integrated, a little braver."

That more integrated process ultimately led to the creation of the City Vision, the City’s Strategic Plan for 2009-2018 known as The Way Ahead, and the associated “Ways” plans:

Many Edmontonians have noted that the last plan to be approved, The Way We Finance, is the one that’s supposed to help us pay for the rest! Still, when its approval finally happens later this year, it’ll bring the most ambitious planning cycle in the City of Edmonton’s history to a close.

There were previous efforts at establishing a city-wide vision of course, such as the “Smart City” initiative of the late 90s, but none stuck. Why did Transforming Edmonton succeed at getting off the ground when other initiatives had failed? I think a big reason was Mayor Mandel. After winning re-election in October 2007, Mayor Mandel told the Edmonton Journal:

“The vision we have is of Edmonton being a city of the world. A city that is vibrant, environmentally sensitive and attractive. And a city that cares about people and opens its arms to them, wherever they came from.”

The importance of Mandel’s victory did not go unnoticed by the Edmonton Journal’s Scott McKeen, who wrote:

Mandel’s win, though hardly a surprise, was much more than a ho- hum victory over the fringers, fanatics and languid Koziaks who ran against him.

His approval rating on Monday narrates a turning point in Edmonton’s history. If Mandel’s first term stood for anything, it was a shift away from historic nickel-and-dime civic politics.

Edmontonians, it seems, embrace Mandel’s big-city vision.

The success or failure of an effort as broad and ambitious as Transforming Edmonton cannot be attributed to one person of course, but under Mayor Mandel’s watch, the City became a bit more integrated and much more strategic.

Edmonton’s efforts at improving the visioning and planning process are not unique. Vancouver’s CityPlan was adopted in 1995 and is slated to come to a close in 2015 (to be replaced with Green Vancouver, I think). Toronto’s Strategic Plan was approved in three stages from 1999-2001. Ottawa adopted its Official Plan in 2003 to guide the city through 2021. Montreal’s Master Plan was adopted in 2004. Calgary adopted imagineCALGARY in 2006, which sets out a 100 year vision with targets every 30 years. Winnipeg replaced its previous Plan Winnipeg 2020 initiative with OurWinnipeg in 2011, presenting a 25-year vision for the city. Long-term planning seems to be the norm for Canada’s major cities.

Today nearly every aspect of the City of Edmonton’s operations have been affected by Transforming Edmonton. For example, every budget item references one of “The Ways” and/or the strategic goals, and internal structures have changed to match the new approach. We’ve also seen efforts to describe progress, such as the new Citizen Dashboard.

While some implementation has occurred, the focus of the last five years has unquestionably been on the creation of Transforming Edmonton’s plans and associated documents. The approval of the final major plan, not to mention the expected retirement of Mayor Mandel next week and April’s unofficial kickoff of campaigning for the October municipal election, should signal a shift toward more concerted implementation efforts.

A shift in focus from planning to implementation won’t just happen, however. Edmontonians need to demand it. We as citizens need to do a better job of asking how things are going, not just how things are going to be.

Media Monday Edmonton: Update #71

Here is my latest update on local media stuff:

https://twitter.com/CapitalIdeasYEG/status/314806813696589827

And now that you’re thinking of food…

Chris Cosentino
Here’s Top Chef Master Chris Cosentino doing his thing at NAIT where he’s the latest Chef in Residence! Check out the Twitter Chat NAIT did here.

You can follow Edmonton media news on Twitter using the hashtag #yegmedia. For a great overview of the global media landscape, check out Mediagazer.

So, what have I missed? What’s new and interesting in the world of Edmonton media? Let me know!

You can see past Media Monday Edmonton entries here.

Edmonton Notes for 3/24/2013

Here are my weekly Edmonton notes:

Earth Hour Before/After
Awesome before & after shot of Earth Hour in Edmonton by Darren!

Earth Hour-Edmonton 2013
Another great Earth Hour shot, this one by Hugh.

Here are some upcoming events:

Jewels of the West
Mark shows us that all that snow can be beautiful too.

Recap: Make Something Edmonton Launch Party

Tonight a few hundred Edmontonians gathered at the Avenue Theatre on 118 Avenue to celebrate the launch of Make Something Edmonton. With lots of buzz about the initiative but few details on the launch event itself, attendees arrived both excited and curious. Something was happening, but what? How would the evening unfold?

Make Something Edmonton Launch Party

Sharon and I caught the specially chartered ETS shuttle from City Hall which dropped us off right in front of the theatre. It turns out our driver, who was just 19 years old, had only moved to Edmonton a couple of months ago. He’d always wanted to be a bus driver, he told us, and he came here to make it happen! While enjoying the ride we chatted with The Local Good’s Tad Hargrave, catching up on one another’s projects and blueskying Make Something Edmonton. That sort of set the tone for the evening.

Make Something Edmonton Launch Party

We found the Avenue Theatre already buzzing with activity when we got there just after 5:30pm. Volunteers scanned tickets, checked coats, and welcomed us. We entered the theatre and found it completely transformed. The seating was gone, and the space had been converted into a two-level open room, with tables around the edges and the stage at the front. There were lights, cameras, food, and the pleasant sounds of connections being made and ideas being spread.

We split up and said hi to as many people as we could. It was a veritable who’s-who of the hyper-engaged in attendance, and I felt like every direction I looked there were familiar faces to greet. People continued to pour in and after a few brief delays to ensure the shuttles could all make it through the snow, the formal program got underway.

Make Something Edmonton Launch Party

Mayor Mandel took the stage first to welcome everyone and to say a few things about the project. I had managed to snag a few minutes with him just before the program began, and he seemed totally pumped about Make Something Edmonton. Who cares what people outside the city think, he told us. What matters is getting Edmontonians on board with the idea that Edmonton is a great place to make something. If we can do that, the rest will come. Mayor Mandel then brought Randy Boissonnault, a local entrepreneur, literacy advocate, and public speaker, to the stage. As our MC for the evening, Randy shared a few introductory thoughts and then welcomed Todd Babiak to the stage to provide some history.

Make Something Edmonton Launch Party

I really feel like tonight was Todd’s night. He would probably tell you that Edmontonians are the ones who came up with Make Something Edmonton, but he’s the one who listened to what we had to say and helped us put our thoughts into words. Todd spoke of Edmonton’s history of collaborating and building, and of our struggles with civic identity. He framed Make Something Edmonton as our city’s story, and noted that “a story is about choice.” Some in the room had made the choice to come to Edmonton, others had made the choice to stay.

Here’s the video he showed to help tell the Make Something Edmonton story:

Next we heard from four makers. Lewis Cardinal kicked things off by discussing the importance of our city’s history. He introduced words like Pehonan and Monto. Our pehonan (“gathering place”) is where Edmonton was born, the area we now call the Rossdale Flats. Monto, which is found in our city’s name – Edmonton – refers to our spirit. You can learn more in the Spirit of Edmonton presentation.

Make Something Edmonton Launch Party

The second speaker was Dave Mowat, who shared his idea for lighting up the High Level Bridge. It would take 45,360 LED bulbs to light the bridge, he told us, and the money for the project will come not from the government, but from Edmontonians themselves. His presentation was a lot like the one he delivered at Pecha Kucha 14, but with some new visuals to help illustrate the idea.

Make Something Edmonton Launch Party

Third was Christy Morin of Arts on the Ave. She welcomed everyone to Alberta Avenue and gave some background and context to the ongoing revitalization of the area. The initiative got underway over eight years ago because she was sick of the crime and knew the community could be different. “The beauty that hides behind the crime and grime,” is what she wanted to help expose.

Make Something Edmonton Launch Party

The final presentation was from Rob and Kirk who are looking to launch the Edmonton Keg Roll. They got the idea from the annual Cheese Rolling event that takes place near Gloucester in England. So why a keg roll? “Edmonton isn’t known for its cheese making,” they told us, “but we do make fine beer.” The winner will get, appropriately, a keg of beer. Their presentation was my favorite, both for its whimsy and for its seductive simplicity.

Make Something Edmonton Launch Party

Make Something Edmonton co-chair Chris LaBossiere brought the formal program to close by thanking all of the volunteers and attendees, and by introducing the rest of the makers who were in the room. In addition to the featured makers, attendees could check out the Edmonton Bicycle Commuters, Make Jen’s Day, The Found Art Project, Gillian’s Just Right, Little Warriors, Edmonton’s Next Gen, and The Startup City Project. Chris highlighted the fact that Make Something Edmonton needs to “change the culture of our whole city,” to make it easier for projects to move forward. “Welcome to Edmonton, what are you making, how can I help?” is how he described the new approach.

Make Something Edmonton Launch Party

The new Make Something Edmonton website went live this afternoon, and it features the ability for you to add your own project and to discover other projects that Edmontonians are working on:

Explore how your neighbours are making the city more fun, more beautiful, more caring, more profitable, sillier and sassier and stupider and smarter. Join them, help them, launch your own project.

There are already a couple of dozen projects up on the site, and I’m sure we’ll see many more added over the next few days.

I left the launch party feeling energized (it didn’t take long for Sharon and I to start plotting a future project). I think Make Something Edmonton has really tapped into the core of what makes Edmonton the city it is, and I’m glad that so many people are supporting the initiative already. We’re going to need all the help we can get – moving beyond the hyper-engaged and connecting with the average Edmontonian is going to be a much bigger challenge than we’ve faced thus far. As the launch day blog post states:

A city is not like a new soap or a box of cookies or a chain of restaurants. How can you sum up the spirit of a million people in a few words, a pretty logo, a big sign at the corporate limits?

You can’t. But:

This city does have a story. It does have an identity. It does have a spirit. Make Something Edmonton is an evocation of that spirit.

I want to say a big congratulations to Toscha Turner, Thomas Scott, and the entire event subcommittee who worked really hard to make tonight happen. The “YEG Heads” were great, the livestreaming via the Edmonton Journal seemed to work well, and there were lots of volunteers on hand to ensure everything went smoothly. It feels great to have Make Something Edmonton out in the open, and tonight’s event was a great way to kick that off!

Make Something Edmonton Launch Party

Stay tuned to Make Something Edmonton on Twitter at @makeitYEG and on Facebook. You can check out more of my photos from the evening here, and you can re-watch the video here.

What are you making? How can I help?