Tag: edmonton

Edmonton IT Community: What are your top 5 needs?

Along with a few other usual suspects I’ve been invited to take part in an informal IT Circle later this week. The goal is to come to some consensus about what the top 5 or 10 needs of local startups and growing IT companies are, so that we can start trying to address them. I feel very strongly that we need to be doing more for the tech community in Edmonton, particularly the part of the community that is often overlooked – web & software. I’ve written about this in the past, most notably here.

The meeting is being hosted by EEDC, who I openly criticized in that post. I’m encouraged by the progress I’ve seen them make over the last six months – I think they’re really making an effort to listen, to learn, and slowly to participate in the community. I hope to see that trend continue, through this meeting and other initiatives.

So now I need your help. If you’re a member of the local IT community, whether it’s biotech, public sector, startups, or something else, what are your top needs? What’s on your wishlist? How can we make the tech community in Edmonton better? Let me know, and I’ll bring that to the table this week. Thanks!

FWIW, here are a few on my list:

  • Micro/seed funding. Small amounts of money to enable entrepreneurs to try things out.
  • Exposure to external experience. How can we connect with people who in other places that could teach us a lot?
  • Storytelling. I talk about this a lot…how can we do a better job of telling local success stories to others?

Live Music in Edmonton now at ShareEdmonton with YEG Live

It’s difficult but not impossible to discover all of the events that happen in Edmonton, and I’m continually working to improve the listings at ShareEdmonton. One of the ways I’m doing that is by working with others who already have large, accurate collections of events. The latest such example is YEG Live, Edmonton’s source for local live music, artist, venue, and event listings. You can now see all YEG Live events at ShareEdmonton!

I can’t remember how I was introduced to YEG Live – it might have been via Twitter, or it may have been because they use one of my photos for their header background. In any case, I was impressed. Founders Chris Martyniuk and Cameron Gertz have created an excellent online hub for local music in Edmonton. Most importantly, they really care about the accuracy of the data on the site. As a result, YEG Live has a superb collection of artist profiles, venue profiles, and of course, live music events. I contacted Chris to see if he’d be interested in working together, and fortunately, he was!

Now when you browse entertainment events at ShareEdmonton, you’ll see the ones that come from YEG Live highlighted with the icon to the left. When you click through to an event, such as tomorrow evening’s show featuring Sweet Thing at Haven Social Club, you’ll see all of the usual details you’d expect at a ShareEdmonton event page (start & end time, location details, related tweets, etc) as well as links and short bios for the artists performing (which link to YEG Live). There are also prominent links to the YEG Live event and ticket information pages.

Thanks to Chris for all the work he did to make this integration possible! There’s no sense in duplicating the tremendous effort he’s already putting into creating an accurate calendar of live music events in Edmonton, so I’m glad we were able to work together. It’s a win-win-win as I see it: ShareEdmonton is a little more complete, YEG Live gets a little more exposure, and Edmontonians are more likely to discover great live music events happening in the city!

Edmonton Notes for 5/29/2010

Here are my weekly Edmonton notes:

It has been another very wet weekend in Edmonton. Here are a couple of photos of today’s City Market Downtown and the Highlands Street Festival:

City Market Downtown - May 29

City Market Downtown - May 29City Market Downtown - May 29

Highlands Street FestivalHighlands Street Festival

Highlands Street FestivalHighlands Street Festival

You can see more photos here.

Celebrate Your Neighbourhood Spirit: Edmonton Community Challenge

Last July I attended an event called the Community Challenge, co-hosted by Edmonton Next Gen and the Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues. Its purpose was to bring next-geners together to discuss how to improve and work with community leagues. That event was the first collaboration between the two organizations, and it was pretty successful!

Now NextGen and EFCL have teamed up again, this time for the Edmonton Community Challenge:

The Edmonton Community Challenge is a volunteer-driven event that aims to promote community spirit through friendly competition. By registering to join teams that represent community leagues throughout the city, individuals can support local charities, get to know others in their community, and win some great prizes! The event challenges will take place throughout the month of June, and teams will be rewarded based on a pre-determined point system for their energy, creativity, and commitment to sustainability.

I think it’s a neat idea. The big prize is a $15,000 fund for the winning community league which will be spent on a capital project in the neighbourhood. There are also smaller individual prizes to be won along the way.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Register, by June 1.
  2. Get a passport from your team captain.
  3. Bring your passport when you participate in the events and get it stamped! The key events are the Pancake Breakfast (on ShareEdmonton), the Neighbourhood Cleanup (on ShareEdmonton), the 24 Hour Bike Repair-a-Thon (on ShareEdmonton), and the “Can It” Challenge (on ShareEdmonton).
  4. Check the rankings. The team with the most points at the end of June wins.

If you need a little nudge to register, how about this: one of the prizes will be an Apple iPad! Remember, you have less than a week to register!

Stay tuned to the ECC website for news & updates, as well as Edmonton Next Gen on Twitter.

Mapping where Edmonton’s kids live and learn

On Friday evening, an interactive map I worked on with Edmonton Journal education reporter Sarah O’Donnell went live. Sarah’s first story based on the data was published in the paper today. Here’s our introduction to the project:

With five schools closing in Edmonton’s core and nine new suburban schools opening in September, education reporter Sarah O’Donnell wondered, “Just where do children live?” Local programmer Mack Male worked with The Journal to create an interactive map showing at a glance where children live and where they learn.

Here’s the map we created:

You can also see the map on ShareEdmonton here.

We showed a little of this at MediaCamp a few weeks ago, citing it as an example of traditional media and new media working together to tell a story. Newspapers like the New York Times often publish interactive story elements of course, but this is fairly new for the Journal. And I think it’s just the beginning!

I wanted to share a few notes on how the map was built:

It was an interesting experience for me! We had to double-check the data many times, and had to make decisions about how much/little to show. In that way, it was more like writing words than building a map. Thanks to Sarah for working with me on this!

Here’s what Sarah wrote in her story:

Nine new suburban schools will open next September; like Sister Annata Brockman, some will be close to capacity from the moment they open their doors. One look at a map of where children live shows why.

Most neighbourhoods with the highest number of children are on the city’s fringes. Those are the communities where the new schools are opening.

I was hoping the map would result in some discussion, and it has. Beth Sanders blogged about it this afternoon. She tackles the issue, highlighting as others have that city planning doesn’t “just happen”, rather its the result of many decisions made over time. We need to align our decisions – City Council and EPSB need to be on the same page! Beth finishes with some thoughts on open data:

The City of Edmonton, in creating and providing open source data, is providing a critical feedback loop for Edmontonians to understand how the city we are creating works. There are exciting conversations ahead in Edmonton’s future.

I agree completely. Kudos to the City of Edmonton, Edmonton Public Schools, and Edmonton Catholic Schools for making the data available for this mapping project. I’m positive it is just the first of many tools to come that will help Edmontonians better understand the data and contribute to the future of the city.

If you have any feedback on the map, let me know!

Edmonton Notes for 5/22/2010

Hope you’re enjoying the long weekend so far, despite the cooler, wet weather we’re having! Here are my weekly Edmonton notes:

With a little sunshine after all this rain, flowers are going to grow like crazy! Here’s one I got from the launch of The Way We Green:

The Way We Green

Recap: Public Meeting on Proposed Arena & Entertainment District in Downtown Edmonton

Last night at MacEwan’s City Centre Campus the City of Edmonton held a Public Meeting on the proposed Arena & Entertainment District (on ShareEdmonton). I don’t know what the final attendance numbers were, but my rough guess is that about 100 people were in the room. There were a number of City representatives on hand, led by Scott Mackie from the Planning & Development department. Councillors Batty and Henderson also attended. From the Katz Group, Jim Low, Bob Black, and Steve Hogle were all there, along with Simon O’Byrne from Stantec, and Ray Davis from Bunt & Associates.

Public Meeting on AED RezoningPublic Meeting on AED Rezoning

The purpose of the meeting was to provide information on and to gather feedback about a proposed rezoning from DC2.500 to a new AED zoning. Such a change would require an amendment to either the existing Capital City Downtown Plan or the new one that Council is expected to approve this summer.

The night started with a brief presentation from Scott Mackie, as well as introductions of all the representatives:

Next Jim Low gave an overview:

The final (and very long) presentation was from Simon O’Byrne (only about the last two minutes are missing):

That was followed up by questions and comments from the audience, which I unfortunately had to miss (but it was live-tweeted, see below). I’m not sure why the Katz Group and its representatives got to talk for 45 minutes; I thought that’s why they held their own open house a couple weeks ago? Maybe that’s just how these things go.

Here’s a map of the area that the Katz Group would like rezoned:

Here are the tweets tagged #yegarena that were posted two hours before, during, and two hours after the public meeting (in reverse chronological order):

You can get the full version here. Here’s a quick Wordle I made with that data (removing usernames and the hashtag):

Both @journalistjeff and @bingofuel did an awesome job live-tweeting the meeting!

If you’d like to learn more about the rezoning process, you can do so here. I was pleased to see the City actively promoting its Planning Academy at the meeting. The proposed rezoning is tentatively scheduled to go to a public hearing on June 28, but that date could change – stay tuned to #yegarena for updates.

Public Meeting on AED RezoningPublic Meeting on AED Rezoning

You can see the rest of my photos from the event here.

UPDATE: Check out Jeff’s excellent recap here.

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – April 2010

Welcome to the fourth State of the Edmonton Twittersphere of 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton, AB. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For April 2010:

# of local users: 7673 (a decrease of 422 from March)
# of tweets by local users: 404756
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 27352 (6.8%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 143618 (35.5%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 97891 (24.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 20058 (5.0%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 14270 (3.5%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates – looks like Twitter for BlackBerry is rising quickly:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

  • Just under 51% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
  • Local users posted roughly 9.4 tweets per minute in April (compared to 9.3 tweets per minute in March).
  • The day with the most local tweets posted was April 13 at 16015. On average, 13492 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 13449 in March).
  • Of the 143618 replies posted by local users this month, 49910 or 34.8% were to other local users.
  • A total of 1572 users posted 50 times or more in March. In comparison, 1075 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

  1. Pat_Lorna
  2. revtrev
  3. randyfritz
  4. dancinginlife
  5. LesM
  6. dragonage
  7. DrBarryLycka
  8. NHL_Oilers
  9. patkSTEREOS
  10. redneckmommy

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

  1. randyfritz
  2. revtrev
  3. dragonage
  4. paradepro
  5. redneckmommy
  6. DaBaby
  7. dancinginlife
  8. NHL_Oilers
  9. Pat_Lorna
  10. edmontonjournal

Here are the top ten most active local users:

  1. EdmontonBizcaf
  2. Lekordable
  3. rootnl2k
  4. etownmelly
  5. DWsBITCH
  6. Gen22
  7. frostedbetty
  8. CommonSenseSoc
  9. PsychicJay
  10. EdmontonCP

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

  1. edmontonjournal
  2. WeatherEdmonton
  3. EdmCa
  4. DebraWard
  5. oilersff
  6. iNews880
  7. cbcedmonton
  8. livingsanctuary
  9. ctvedmonton
  10. Tamara_Stecyk

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

  1. frostedbetty
  2. ZoomJer
  3. britl
  4. CommonSenseSoc
  5. angelzilla
  6. Jenaseegalet
  7. GuitarKat
  8. bingofuel
  9. adampatterson
  10. Wildsau

Here are the top ten most retweeted local users (by other local users):

  1. edmontonjournal
  2. mastermaq
  3. ctvedmonton
  4. cbcedmonton
  5. CityofEdmonton
  6. BrentWelch
  7. dantencer
  8. bingofuel
  9. sonic1029
  10. iNews880

Final Thoughts

I did some additional work on my algorithm for identifying local users, which accounts for the drop in users from last month. I think it’s more accurate now. I think the “most retweeted” list is useful for measuring influence, though it alone doesn’t tell the whole story.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, the most retweeted list only accounts for standard-style retweets (those using Twitter’s retweet feature or those starting with RT @) made by other local users. I hope to improve this over time.

Civic Smart Card coming to Edmonton?

At today’s Executive Committee meeting Councillors will discuss a report on Smart Card Solutions, the result of an inquiry Mayor Mandel made back in February. You might remember that the Transportation & Public Works Committee had approved a recommendation that ETS implement a smart card solution. But why should ETS be the only ones to benefit? That’s the thought that prompted the mayor to ask for more information.

 

A civic smart card would be something like the cards pictured above, presumably more like a modern credit card with a little chip embedded inside. It could serve two primary purposes: payment, like a gift card you’d get at Starbucks, but also identity, like a digital driver’s license.

The new report sidesteps the question about what it would take to implement a civic smart card that would work for all City services, including the Edmonton Public Library, essentially saying that a business case would need to be made, and that more research needs to be done to find similar solutions implemented elsewhere. I suppose that’s prudent, but I would think based on the TPW report that they’d have some idea (the estimate for an ETS solution was close to $23 million, which would pay for itself within 15 years).

Some highlights from the report:

  • Administration would contact the provincial and federal governments “to investigate possible synergies in respect to pilot projects around identity management.” Apparently both have already started exploring similar ideas.
  • ETS, Community Services, EPL, EFCL, and the University of Alberta are just a few of the potential partner organizations mentioned.
  • In response to the mayor’s question about engaging the public: “For a civic smart card to be successful and fully adopted by Edmontonians, Edmontonians must be engaged in the design and implementation planning process as well as the actual implementation of a solution.” Administration would leverage “every channel from town hall meetings to social media.”
  • For the IT folks reading this: “Administration should also engage the IT community by creating a project advisory group made up of Edmonton’s best and brightest technology minds…”

By improving Edmonton’s livability, the civic smart card supports the City’s strategic plan. What are the next steps?

The Information Technology Branch will take the lead, working with city departments and external stakeholders to develop the value assessment to determine if this initiative should be considered in the 2012-2014 capital budget. This project will provide a test case for the new IT governance framework which is being designed to allow the city to make the right technology investment decisions.

I really love the idea of a civic smart card for Edmonton. A quick Google search reveals lots of examples of transit cards, and even some parking cards, but not much for city-wide cards. As Councillor Iveson pointed out back in October, when writing about a smart card for ETS, “this isn’t leading edge stuff anymore. This is now an established practice.” I agree – ETS absolutely needs this. Something city-wide is quite intriguing, however, and I think Edmonton would be one of the innovators there.

Let’s get it done!

If you want to follow along with today’s meeting, you can do so here.

Putting incidents at the Stanley Milner library into perspective

The Stanley Milner Library was in the news a lot last week thanks to a few violent incidents that happened outside the main entrance. Mayor Mandel suggested moving the entrance to the back, away from Churchill Square, an idea that EPL CEO Linda Cook doesn’t agree with (more on this from Colby). I don’t either. I’d much rather see the sidewalk widened, and perhaps the bus stop moved.

Then I got to thinking – maybe we’re making a big deal out of nothing.

This is based on data from the Edmonton Sun (and I used IBM’s Many Eyes to get the proportions right). There were 1.4 million visits and just 728 incidents in 2009. Incidents here include everything from “noisy patrons to public intoxication”. How many violent crimes are there? I’m guessing a lot less.

I’m not trying to downplay the violent crimes that have occurred, but if so many people use the library without incident maybe the entrance isn’t the issue.