Highlights from the 2015 Growth Monitoring Report

The City of Edmonton released its annual Growth Monitoring Report recently, known as Our Growing City. At 90 pages it’s full of information. Here are some things I wanted to highlight!

Upward, Inward, Outward?

growth

The report (and associated infographic) likes to talk about how Edmonton is growing up, in, and out. But is it really?

Several key initiatives demonstrate how this vision guides Edmonton’s growth. The Quarters Downtown, West Rossdale, Blatchford, downtown redevelopment, and Transit Oriented Development are helping our central neighbourhoods and areas along Edmonton’s expanding LRT routes grow “upward.” Ongoing efforts to enable infill opportunities in our mature and established neighbourhoods help the city grow “inward,” and the construction of new neighbourhoods in developing areas enables our city to grow “outward.”

The truth is that developing neighbourhoods, the “outward” part of growth, account for the majority of residential development. The report states that as in 2013, “developing neighbourhoods accounted for 83% of all residential growth” last year. Our city continues to grow out much more quickly than up or in.

You can see the neighbourhood classifications on a map here.

Core neighbourhoods accounted for 8% of all growth in 2014 while mature neighbourhoods accounted for just 6%. “This is an increase of 18% from 2013 unit growth (704 units),” the report says. “It is, however, a relatively low proportion of city-wide growth due to strong increases in newer neighbourhoods.” Established neighourhoods accounted for 3% of all new units.

Nine of the top ten fastest growing neighbourhoods over the last five years are in the south.

The fastest growing are Summerside, The Hamptons, and Windermere.

The only potential bright spot here is that recent NSPs tend to plan more dense communities and “contain a more balanced range of dwelling types” than they have in the past. Here’s a look at the density map:

You can see that the new areas around the edge may actually be more dense than existing communities in mature and established neighbourhoods. If we don’t do anything to increase the density of those areas, that is.

Demographic Shifts

As of June 30, 2014 the Edmonton CMA had 1,328,290 residents, up 3.3% over the same time in 2013. We’re the second fastest growing CMA in the country after Calgary. And we’re comparatively young.

The Edmonton CMA is comparatively much younger than major Canadian city regions with a median age of 36 years.

Most other cities have a media age of 39-40 years. Our city’s largest cohort is 25-39 years of age, followed by the 49-65 age group.

You might think with all of those young people that we’d have more families. And maybe we do, but not in established parts of the city.

A demographic shift is occurring in mature and established areas of the city. The population is ageing and households are decreasing in size. There will be a significant increase in lone person and two person households.

It’s a complicated issue, but ageing in place means that young families are pushed to the developing areas (as shown in the above map), which means we have to build new schools, recreation facilities, etc. It means we continue to grow outward.

Regional Competition

In 2014, 71% of all housing starts in the Edmonton region occurred within the city, which is better than the 10 year average of 66% (our high was 94% in 1982 and our low was 53% in 1996). But remember, the bulk of our growth is happening in developing areas, and that often means single-detached homes.

Our share of regional single-detached housing starts over the last 10 years has averaged 59%. We don’t have much competition when it comes to folks wanting to live in condos or apartments. But for single family homes, there are lots of options just outside Edmonton’s boundaries. And this is a problem because surrounding communities don’t build communities that are as dense as the ones Edmonton is building.

Zoning & Annexation

boundary history

The report states that the Edmonton region is expected to grow to just under 2.2 million by 2044, with the city itself reaching 1.4 million people by that time. Looking further to 2064 our city’s population is expected to grow to 2.1 million. All those people are going to have to live somewhere, so “approximately 270,000 new housing units” are required to handle the anticipated growth.

This is why the City is pursuing annexation.

“The City of Edmonton is quickly running out of room to accommodate anticipated growth. This is especially true for industrial lands but is also true for residential developments.”

We’re only “quickly” running out of room because our growth pattern hasn’t changed much. There is room to grow inward:

Edmonton’s core, mature and established neighbourhoods share a total of 180 ha of vacant land, with the distribution of this land varying widely amongst them. In total, 1,343 vacant lots have been identified within the central core, mature and established neighbourhoods.

That vacant land could house an additional 3,287 dwelling units and potentially 7,725 people, based on existing zoning. If we re-zoned land and consolidated some lots the potential could be even higher. Not enough for all of the anticipated growth, but more than we’re on track to house centrally.

For the last decade or so, a 2:1 ratio of residential to industrial/commercial land area has continued in Edmonton.

“Without annexation, Edmonton will exhaust its industrial supply of land in 10 years and its residential in 12 to 17 years. The proposed annexation ensures that both industrial and residential land inventories meet the policy target of maintaining a minimum 30-year supply.”

The need for more industrial land is what’s really driving the two currently proposed annexations, in Leduc County and Sturgeon County.

In Edmonton the current proportion of zoned land uses is roughly 32% residential, 3% commercial, 12% industrial, 7% institutional and 9% parks and open space, special “direct control” zones account for 4% of land uses, Transportation Utility Corridor (TUC) 6% and 27% agriculture.

That’s a big drop in agricultural and reserve land, which was at 37% previously. “For the past decade Edmonton has been converting an average of 1,000 hectares of agriculture and reserve zoned land into urban zones.”

More Information

You can learn much more about Edmonton’s growth at the City’s website.

There are also some useful data sets in the open data catalogue. Here are a few that are relevant (but there are dozens):

What else did you find interesting in the report?

International Open Data Day in Edmonton

Today is Open Data Day around the world, and here in Edmonton we celebrated with a hackathon at the Edmonton Public Library’s new Makerspace. A few dozen people came out to learn more about open data, to hear ideas from others, and to start exploring and building.

The day started off with “speed data-ing”, where anyone who wanted to could pitch an idea to the room. Once the pitches were done, there were a lot of great conversations taking place as everyone figured out how they wanted to spend their time for the rest of the day. Teams slowly self-assembled, and then everyone got to work.

At the end of the day, teams had the opportunity to show off the progress they had made throughout the day. One team worked on visualizing open datasets so that they could be more easily accessed and used by educators. Another team looked at visualizing how many dogs there are and which breeds are most popular in different areas of the city. The winning idea was a visualization of tree data in Edmonton. Hackathons are typically longer than just a few hours, so it was impressive to see what everyone was able to come up with given the time constraints!

There has never been a better time to be an open data developer in Edmonton. The City of Edmonton’s open data catalogue now contains more than 400 datasets, and the Citizen Dashboard that sits atop the catalogue recently won a national public-sector leadership award. The Government of Alberta’s open data catalogue also has more than 400 datasets now, and it only launched last May. The Government of Canada recently expanded and updated its large open data catalogue. And just this week, Strathcona County launched its own data catalogue featuring more than 60 datasets.

Many other cities around the world hosted hackathons today too. Here’s what Open Data Day is about:

Open Data Day is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.

Open Data has come a long way over the last few years. It has been adopted by governments around the world both large and small, and even organizations like the G8 have adopted an Open Data Charter. Countless apps and services have been developed to take advantage of all that information, and I think the best is yet to come. If you’re looking for an open data primer, check out the Government of Canada’s Open Data 101 or check out the Apps Gallery.

Thanks to the City and EPL for hosting a fun and creative day at the Makerspace! You can see more photos from the day here.

My coffee consumption went up in 2013

In 2012 I started tracking how many lattes I was drinking (among other things). At the end of the year, I posted the results. As mentioned in that post, I drink at least a mug of black coffee every morning (usually more like two) so I don’t bother tracking that. I still don’t, but I have kept track of my latte consumption for 2013!

I drank 158 lattes in 2013, up from 120 in 2012. That’s an average of just over 3 lattes per week. I did my best to record diligently and while I’m sure I missed a few, that’s probably fairly accurate. For simplicity, I tracked iced lattes and frappuccino’s as lattes too.

Here are my top ten lattes by number consumed:

Credo Vanilla Latte (45)
Starbucks Caramel Macchiato (22)
Starbucks Cinnamon Dolce Latte (15)
Roast Vanilla Latte (11)
Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte (8)
Starbucks Caramel Frappuccino (7)
Second Cup Caramel Corretto (5)
Starbucks Eggnog Latte (5)
Credo Iced Vanilla Latte (4)
Transcend Vanilla Latte (3)

I spread things about a bit more in 2013 with 36 different drinks versus 29 in 2012. Here’s a look at my consumption over the year:

And here’s a look at which days of the week I was most likely to indulge on:

I also started tracking how much tea I drank in 2013 (though not by brand). If I drink tea, it’s almost always in the evening. In 2013, I did that about 126 times. Here’s the breakdown of type:

Last year I wrote that many of my lattes represented “an opportunity to sit down and chat with someone”. Based on my records, about half of those lattes were likely consumed in the company of someone else. Maybe one of my 2014 lattes will be with you?

I probably drank too much coffee in 2012

I drink a lot of coffee. I start my day with a mug or two of freshly ground and brewed coffee, usually black. A couple times a week and especially in the winter, I’ll also have a Starbucks Via in the evening, though I have been trying to drink more tea instead. On top of all that, I drink a lot of lattes. I generally don’t make new year’s resolutions, but I do like to try new things each year. For 2012, I decided I would dive further into the world of self-tracking. Using the free and wonderful DAYTUM, I tracked each latte I drank throughout the year. Here’s what that data looks like.

Credo Coffee on 4th Street Promenade

In total, I drank 120 lattes in 2012. I did my best to record diligently and while I’m sure I missed a few, that’s probably fairly accurate. That’s an average of 2.3 lattes per week. If I had purchased each one myself at an average of $5 (thankfully I didn’t, others often buy me coffee) that would be $600 over the year.

Here are my top ten lattes by number consumed:

Credo Vanilla Latte (46)
Starbucks Caramel Macchiato (12)
Starbucks Cinnamon Dolce Latte (10)
Starbucks Eggnog Latte (7)
Credo Iced Vanilla Latte (5)
Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte (5)
Roast Vanilla Latte (4)
Transcend Vanilla Latte (4)
Latte (3)
Second Cup Caramel Corretto (3)

Plot everything on a graph, and you get a long tail:

The other thing I can do with the data is look at my consumption over the year:

And I can see which days of the week I was most likely to indulge on:

I plan to keep tracking this data throughout 2013, so it’ll be interesting to compare at this time next year.

My first latte of 2013!

Though it seems like a lot of lattes, I’m not sure I necessarily want to cut back. Many of those lattes represent an opportunity to sit down and chat with someone, and that’s something I am not ready to give up!

The Edmonton Oilers look to gain an edge with analytics & hackathons

The Edmonton Oilers are mining for gold, and they want you to help them do it.

Last Thursday they launched the Oilers Hackathon 2.0, an analytics competition that hopes to harness the collective intelligence and passion of Oilers fans to surface valuable information that could ultimately help to improve the team.

The Oilers challenge for Oil Country in the newly launched Hackathon 2.0 is to conjure up the proper methodology to solve one of four questions the team’s analytics group has created. Naturally you’ll need the statistical information to back-up your formula and that’s why the Oilers are opening their information vault to anyone with an analytical mind and a love of hockey.

The hackathon is a great opportunity for math-geeks-slash-hockey-fans to engage with the team in a different way. But as Kevin Lowe told me when we discussed the competition, it’s also a recognition that having data is just part of the puzzle. “It’s all find and dandy to have the data, but it’s what you do with it that matters.” The Oilers no doubt have some ideas about what to do with it, but they know others do as well.

This idea of tapping into the “wisdom of the crowd” is hardly new, and one of my favorite stories on the topic comes from Don Tapscott’s book Wikinomics. In the first chapter, he tells the story of Goldcorp Inc. and the decision by its CEO Rob McEwan to tap into the expertise outside his organization. McEwan told his head geologist the idea: “I’d like to take all of our geology, all the data we have that goes back to 1948, and put it into a file and share it with the world. Then we’ll ask the world to tell us where we’re going to find the next six million ounces of gold.”

It was a gamble, but with the company struggling McEwan was determined to try something different. The “Goldcorp Challenge” was launched in March 2000 with $575,000 in prize money available. The contest was a big success, as Tapscott explained. “Not only did the contest yield copious quantities of gold, it catapulted his underperforming $100 million company into a $9 billion juggernaut while transforming a backward mining site in Northern Ontario into one of the most innovative and profitable properties in the industry,” he wrote.

The use of statistical analysis in sports is not new either, and thanks to Moneyball many people have at least heard about analytics being applied to baseball. Though he is most often associated with politics these days, New York Times writer Nate Silver actually got his start with baseball. “I have been a fan of baseball – and baseball statistics – for as long as I can remember,” he wrote in his book The Signal and the Noise. He started creating statistics for the game when he was just twelve, and while working at KPMG he created PECOTA, a forecasting system for baseball player performance. There are good reasons that baseball has been at the forefront of analytics, as Silver explains:

“Baseball offers perhaps the world’s richest data set: pretty much everything that has happened on a major-league playing field in the past 140 years has been dutifully and accurately recorded, and hundreds of players play in the big leads every year.”

While baseball is a team sport, it is unlike hockey or basketball or most other team sports in that it proceeds in a linear fashion. You could argue that a batter or pitcher in baseball is more responsible for his or her own performance than a forward is in hockey. It’s therefore a little easier to test empirically a hypothesis in baseball than it is in hockey.

Still, that hasn’t deterred NHL teams from delving into the world of analytics (though there have certainly been ups and downs over the years). David Staples, a guest of the Oilers Analytics Working Group (AWG), wrote about its creation back in March:

Some pro hockey bosses have little time for “Moneypuck,” the notion that NHL teams can use advanced statistics to gain an advantage. Others are more open to this cutting edge work. But there’s no doubt that interest in the field is exploding.

The Oilers formed the AWG a little over a year ago as a result of an advisory group on analytics coordinated by the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Extension. Members of the AWG include Kevin Lowe, Nick Wilson, and a number of other members of the Oilers operations team, Cult of Hockey blogger Bruce McCurdy, University of Alberta professors Corey Wentzell and Bruce Matichuk, AICML’s Randy Goebel, and Daniel Haight of Darkhorse Analytics. The group meets monthly, though someone is looking at the data almost every day. The Oilers have purchased reports and other sources of data in the past, but with the AWG, they’re considering data and analytics more aggressively. They see hackathons as a key way to extract value from all of the data.

The Hackathon 2.0 offers anyone who is interested the chance to delve into more than 1 GB of CSV data going all the way back to 1918. That’s 1 GB of pure text, roughly equivalent to 1000 thick books, and much more than was available during the first hackathon. For a data geek like myself, it’s pretty exciting. Hardcore hockey fans also seem to like the idea. “This is entirely fascinating. I cannot believe it’s really happening,” wrote Justin Bourne on theScore’s blog. Some have even started analyzing the data. Not everyone is as optimistic, however. Well-known Oilers blogger Tyler Dellow wrote, “while I applaud the effort, I’m not really sure that I think they’re going to get a whole lot that’s useful out of it.”

My sense after talking to Kevin Lowe and Nick Wilson about the hackathon is that they are realistic about the potential for data analytics. “It’s about knowing where to spend your time and resources,” Kevin said. “The findings are not earth shattering, but it’s a little bit of knowledge that you can hand over to the coach that at the right moment he can use, or so that he has more confidence in his decisions.” Nick agreed. “It’s a two or three percent contribution, like everything else.”

That said, there is some optimism that a fan will come up with something the Oilers just haven’t thought of, with some nugget of gold. “What’s unique about math applied to sports is the undiscovered, the lingering moneyball,” Nick said. “There’s incredible fans, incredible intelligence in this city,” Kevin agreed.

A total of 400 entrants had registered for the hackathon as of this morning. If you want to participate, you’d better move quickly – the deadline to register is tomorrow. After filling out the form, you’ll receive an email with a link to download the data. From there you’ll have until February 15 to submit your methodology for answering four challenges set forth by the Oilers AWG. You can see the full contest details here.

If you don’t get the opportunity to participate this time, don’t worry, the Oilers are keen to do additional hackathons in the future. “It’s not a one-off, and we definitely want to do more,” Nick told me. That’s probably a good strategy, given that new data is available all the time. As technology improves, you can imagine all sorts of new statistics being tracked. For example, cameras could help to track the number of strides a player takes per shift, or the number of times he pivots on the ice.

I’m planning to participate in the hackathon, though for me it’ll be more for fun than anything. I have already enlisted the help of my Dad who is a much bigger hockey fan than I am, based on some advice from Nate Silver: “Statistical inferences are much stronger when backed up by theory or at least some deeper thinking about their root causes.” In other words, it helps to know a thing or two about hockey!

City Council data now available in Edmonton’s open data catalogue

Yesterday Edmonton became the first city in Canada to release “a fully robust set” of City Council datasets to its open data catalogue. A total of five datasets were released, including meeting details, agenda items, motions, attendance, and voting records. There are now more than 100 datasets available in the catalogue, with more on the way.

Here’s the video recording of the news conference:

The City also produced a video about the new datasets:

The Office of the City Clerk is responsible for managing Council & Committee meetings, boards, elections, and more. The release of this data (referred to as “Clerk’s data” by some City employees) is another example of the way that office has embraced technology over the years. Kudos to Alayne Sinclair and her team, as well as Chris Moore, Ashley Casovan, and the rest of the IT team for making this data available!

I’m really excited about the potential for this data. The information has long been available on the City’s website, it was just locked away in meeting minutes as “unstructured” data – possible for humans to read relatively easily, but not for software. Now that it is available as “structured” data in the open data catalogue, applications can be written that take advantage of the data. You can find the data under the City Administration tab of the catalogue. Unfortunately the datasets only go back to June 1, 2011 instead of the start of Council’s term in October 2010. Currently, the datasets are updated daily.

I’ve now had a chance to look through the data, and while it looks good, it is unfortunately incomplete at the moment. There’s quite a bit of data missing. I would love to do some statistical analysis on the data, but with so many missing records there’s a good chance that my conclusions would be incorrect. I have already summarized my findings and passed them along to the team, so hopefully they can resolve the issues quickly!

I have already added functionality to ShareEdmonton for this data, and as soon as the datasets are fixed, I’ll release it. I hate to say “stay tuned” but there’s not much choice right now!

1.2 zettabytes of data created in 2010

For the last five years or so, IDC has released an EMC-sponsored study on “The Digital Universe” that looks at how much data is created and replicated around the world. When I last blogged about it back in 2008, the number stood at 281 exabytes per year. Now the latest report is out, and for the first time the amount of data created has surpassed 1 zettabyte! About 1.2 zettabytes were created and replicated in 2010 (that’s 1.2 trillion gigabytes), and IDC predicts that number will grow to 1.8 zettabytes this year. The amount of data is more than doubling every two years!

Here’s what the growth looks like:

How much data is that? Wikipedia has some good answers: exabyte, zettabyte. EMC has also provided some examples to help make sense of the number. 1.8 zettabytes is equivalent in sheer volume to:

Every person in Canada tweeting three tweets per minute for 242,976 years nonstop
Every person in the world having over 215 million high-resolution MRI scans per day
Over 200 billion HD movies (each two hours in length) – would take one person 47 million years to watch every movie 24/7
The amount of information needed to fill 57.5 billion 32GB Apple iPads. With that many iPads we could:
- Create a wall of iPads, 4,005 miles long and 61 feet high extending from Anchorage, Alaska to Miami, Florida
- Build the Great iPad Wall of China – at twice the average height of the original
- Build a 20-foot high wall around South America
- Cover 86 per cent of Mexico City
- Build a mountain 25 times higher than Mt. Fuji

That’s a lot of data!

EMC/IDC has produced a great infographic that explains more about the explosion of data – see it here in PDF. One of the things that has always been fuzzy for me is the difference between data we’ve created intentionally (like a document) and data we’ve created unintentionally (sharing that document with others). According to IDC, one gigabyte of stored data can generate one petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of transient data!

Cost is one of the biggest factors behind this growth, of course. The cost of creating, capturing, managing, and storing information is now just 1/6th of what it was in 2005. Another big factor is the fact that most of us now carry the tools of creation at all times, everywhere we go. Digital cameras, mobile phones, etc.

You can learn more about all of this and see a live information growth ticker at EMC’s website.

This seems as good a time as any to remind you to backup your important data! It may be easy to create photos and documents, but it’s even easier to lose them. I use a variety of tools to backup data, including Amazon S3, Dropbox, and Windows Live Mesh. The easiest by far though is Backblaze – unlimited storage for $5 per month per computer, and it all happens automagically in the background.

Exploring Apps4Edmonton using Microsoft Live Labs Pivot

You’re going to hear a lot more about apps over the next few weeks! The deadline for submissions for the City of Edmonton’s Apps4Edmonton competition was Friday evening. Local developers came up with more than 30 really interesting and useful local apps, which will now compete for your votes and for the attention of the judges. You can learn more about the prizes and the competition here.

I started looking at some of the apps, and decided I wanted a better interface to browse them. I thought it would be nice to be able to sort the apps, to see a screenshot of each one, and to see which datasets each of the apps made use of. I also didn’t want to spend too much time on it, so with all of that in mind, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to experiment with Pivot.

Here’s what I came up with! Click on the image below to load the Apps4Edmonton Apps Directory in Pivot. You’ll need Silverlight 4 installed for it to work. Alternatively, if you have downloaded Pivot and have it installed on your computer, you can browse to this URL inside Pivot.

Click here to launch the Pivot!

Might take a minute or two to load. If it doesn’t, just refresh it. What you see are all the apps from the contest page, with a screenshot, description, contest URL, and list of datasets for each one. If you want to see just the apps that use the “Police Stations” dataset for example, you can select it in the navigation pane on the left and the view will update.

Ever since TechEd, I’ve been really interested in Microsoft Live Labs Pivot, an interactive data visualization technology. It’s great for exploring large datasets, identifying relationships, visualizing patterns, etc. The Apps4Edmonton dataset isn’t very large of course, but the tool still does a great job.

How It Works

I started out by building a Pivot Collection using Microsoft Excel. Pivot has a pretty handy tool for turning spreadsheets into collections, so that’s what I used initially. Quickly though I realized that I wanted to host this on the web somewhere, and that I wanted others to help me refine the dataset.

I uploaded the spreadsheet to Google Docs, and then downloaded the Just In Time Pivot Collection sample. After a little bit of experimentation with the Google Docs API (which I have never used before) I had the code working to create my collection on the fly. It loads the spreadsheet from Google Docs, creates the collection, and then serves up the XML and Deep Zoom images.

The spreadsheet is mostly complete, but a few apps are missing datasets. This is because either it wasn’t immediately obvious which they were using, or they simply don’t use any that are part of the data catalogue. You can update the spreadsheet here.

If you’d like to experiment with creating your own just-in-time Pivot Collection, you can download the sample code here and the code for the collection I wrote here. I also made use of CutyCapt to generate screenshots. You’ll also want to check the XML schema.

Apps4Edmonton

There are some really great apps in the Apps4Edmonton competition, so check them out. You’ve got until September 10 to vote for your favorite ideas and apps!

And for full disclosure, I submitted ShareEdmonton to the competition. If you like it, vote for it!

UPDATE: Thanks to John for helping me get the Pivot Collection right!

Edmonton Neighbourhood Census Data

For a long time I’ve wanted to get the City of Edmonton’s neighbourhood census data in CSV format (or really any usable format other than PDF). Recently, with the help of Laura (and Sandra) at the City’s Election & Census Services department, who I met at the Open City Workshop, I finally got it. And now you can have it too!

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.

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!

Upward, Inward, Outward?

Demographic Shifts

Regional Competition

Zoning & Annexation

More Information

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: