Tag: technology

Transforming the City of Edmonton IT Branch

On Friday the City of Edmonton’s IT branch held its first ever IT Vendor Open House. The event was a big success, with dozens of local technology professionals stopping by throughout the day. Attendees had the opportunity to learn more about how the IT branch does business, and about some of the initiatives and projects that are coming down the pipe. The event also gave the IT branch a chance to share some of the work they’ve done recently to transform internally.

Chris Moore, the City’s Chief Information Officer, delivered two keynotes during the day, called “IT New Directions”. Chris isn’t your typical CIO – he doesn’t have a desk in his office, he avoids PowerPoint whenever possible, and he is always one step ahead of everyone else. For example, it wasn’t possible for anyone to run Macintosh computers at the City until recently. While everyone has been focusing on making that a reality (a few Councillors switched over earlier this year), Chris is looking at what’s next: bring your own technology. Chris imagines an environment in which employees can run whatever they like.

Edmonton CIO Chris Moore

He touched on a few main points:

  • There are around 1100 different applications and systems at the City. Only 132 of them are Access or Excel. That means there’s an incredible amount of overhead required for management and support, not to mention data in 1100 different places.
  • Throughout the spring, the IT branch held mini town halls, with about ten employees in each (there are 300 employees total).
  • Out of those discussions and other meetings, a new Agile Service Delivery Model emerged.

One of the few slides Chris showed during his keynote was a list of highlights from the past sixty years:

  • 1954: Univac 120 – First in Western Canada
  • 1960: IBM 1401 – First in Canada
  • 1966: IBM 360 – One of the first in Canada
  • 1978: Early adopter of GIS
  • 1980: City recruits IT staff from the U.K.
  • 1985: Sale of COINS to Orange County, CA
  • 1991: gov.edmonton.ab.ca, “early Internet adopter”
  • 1996: POSSE – Award winning system
  • 1999: One of the first cities to move to Enterprise GIS
  • 2009: First city in North America to use SAP CRM for 311

The slide was titled “Western Canada’s Municipal Information Technology Leader”. That’s perhaps a bit of a stretch for the last few years, but it’s certainly the goal for the future. Chris and his team want to get back to being the innovators.

On June 18th, the Information Technology Corporate Audit Report for 2008 was released and it talks a lot about the drivers behind the transformation that Chris touched on in his keynote. Here’s a Wordle of the report:

Among other things, there were two clear conclusions from the report (which you can download here in Word format):

  • That Corporate IT resources can be used in a more cost effective and efficient manner.
  • That the IT Governance Framework is not effective in prioritizing and allocating operating and capital resources for information technology.

In reality, there isn’t much of a Governance Framework at the moment, but the IT branch is already working to change that. They’ve created something they call COKESFORIT, or the “ten ways of being”:

  1. Collaborative
  2. Open
  3. Knowledgeable
  4. Empowered
  5. Supportive
  6. Flexible
  7. Organized
  8. Responsible
  9. Innovative
  10. Trusting

The idea is that everything the IT branch does should align with these concepts.

During ICLEI a couple weeks ago, visual facilitator Roy Blumenthal worked with the IT branch, and captured eighteen impressive visual notes. As a fan of open data, I like this one:

I’m excited about the changes taking place at the IT branch. I think the organization is heading down the right path: to become more efficient and more transparent. If you’ve got ideas or feedback, now seems like the right time to get in touch with them!

Recap: BarCampEdmonton2

Yesterday was the first really beautiful day of the summer here in Edmonton, with temperatures near 30 degrees and sun all day long. It was also the day we held BarCampEdmonton2, at the World Trade Centre downtown. The weather probably had an impact on the attendance, because we had less people than anticipated (around 80). Despite that however, I’d say the event was still a big success! It was another demonstration of the fantastic tech community we have in Edmonton.

Reg setting up the scheduleBarCampEdmonton2

We had three tracks each with 20 minute timeslots for sessions followed by 10 minute breaks. In true unconference-style, we started by having everyone who wanted to lead a discussion or deliver a presentation put their topic and name on a sticky note. Reg then arranged them all on the schedule.

I ended up with two timeslots. First thing in the morning, where I talked for a bit about Foundations for an Open Edmonton and led an interesting discussion about open cities, and second at 2pm, where I talked about Edmonton Transit’s recent Data for Developers announcement. Some of the other sessions included: The Perfect User Experience by Peter, New Interfaces in Visual Search Refinement by Reg, How To Not Raise VC $ by Shaun, VOIP+SIP: A Primer by Slepp, Chocolate Monkey Heads by Chris, and Licensing Tech from Universities by Brant. Of course, lunch time and the many breaks throughout the day provided lots of opportunities for ad hoc discussion, and that’s really what BarCamp is all about!

Perhaps the session I was most looking forward to was the one by Rob Davy and his colleagues from ENTS, the Edmonton New Technology Society. They’re working to create a “collaborative and social technology workspace” here in the city, akin to hackerspaces and collaborative workspaces in other cities. I wrote about Workspace in Vancouver last fall, and wondered why Edmonton didn’t have something similar. Now we will! I’m really excited about it. You can visit ENTS tonight from 6-7pm at 10575 114th Street for an open house.

Pizza time!BarCampEdmonton2

Maybe we’ll do the next BarCamp in the winter, when it’s cold outside and everyone will want to come inside! Before that however, is a new event called UX Camp, taking place on July 18th from 9am to 5pm at MacEwan.

Thanks again to sponsors TEC Edmonton, iNovia Capital, and Smibs, and to everyone who came out to BarCamp yesterday! You can see the rest of my photos here.

Foundations for an Open Edmonton

Today at BarCamp, I led a discussion around building an open Edmonton. Inspired by the great things happening in Vancouver, I wanted to stimulate the discussion here. I started with two fundamentals:

  1. The City of Edmonton must have the desire to be an open city.
  2. The primary audience is the Creative Class of Edmonton, the secondary audience is all citizens.

Next, I shared what I feel are the five basic foundations of an open city:

  1. Free – both financially and philosophically
  2. Permissive Licensing – things like Creative Commons, should be public domain
  3. Open Standards – formats that anyone can read and write
  4. Plentiful Data – make as much data available as possible
  5. Timely Access – eliminate delays and give everyone equal access

After my five slides (a photo for each of the above) we got into a great discussion about the idea. Here are some of the questions that came up:

  • Are citizens ready for so much data?
  • Why would City Council not want to be an open city?
  • What is the current state of progress on the idea in Edmonton?
  • How does privacy & security factor in?
  • What are some great examples of other cities doing this?

All things that we need to explore further. I’m not sure what the next step is, but eventually, I think it would be great to make a presentation on becoming an open city to Council.

In the meantime, Edmonton has already made some data available – a Google Transit data feed – and some other examples include London’s mySociety. Also, be sure to read Vancouver’s Open City Motion.

BarCampEdmonton2 – June 13th

Almost an entire year has passed since our first BarCamp in Edmonton! We’ve had no shortage of events during that time, but nothing is quite the same as BarCamp, which is why I’m really looking forward to BarCampEdmonton2 taking place later this month. Here are the details:

Date: Saturday, June 13, 2009
Time: 10am – 5pm
Location: 6th floor, World Trade Centre (map)
Cost: Free

We’ve only got room for 110 people, and over 70 have already signed up. Make sure to add your name to the list! This is one event you definitely don’t want to miss. If you’re new to the idea:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering of people in and interested in the Edmonton tech community. BarCamp is a series of loosely scheduled 20 minute presentations/discussions about whatever the community is interested in.

The unique things are that the attendees are also the presenters, and the agenda is created first thing in the morning. You don’t need to present anything though, so feel free to simply attend (though I think you’ll get more out of it by participating). Lunch and drinks will be provided, and you’re sure to learn something new. It’s a great opportunity to meet others in the Edmonton community!

Be sure to use the #BarCampYEG hashtag on Twitter.

See you there!

Recap: DemoCampEdmonton7

Another successful DemoCamp is in the books! Tonight was our seventh here in Edmonton. I didn’t actually count the attendance this time, but I’d say it was a bit less than DCE6. Still a strong turnout and some great demos. Tonight we did something new as well – a “hack” demo. The idea is to show one really rough project at each event. Reg and Sean started things off with TwitClipper, a bookmarklet service to tweet highlighted text via Twitter’s OAuth API. Impressively, it was built on the 3-hour drive down to Calgary for their last DemoCamp!

We had five demos tonight:

  • Chris Olsen showed us LeagueSmart, a recreational sports league management application. It’s unique in that it attempts to get team admins and players involved in addition to the league organizers.
  • James Matsuba showed us IdleTime, a service that aims to help you make money with your spare time. It’s like Monster.com for part-time and one-off jobs. You can both search for and post jobs.
  • Shawn Abbott showed us one of his portfolio companies, Tynt. They have demoed before, but now have a new direction and app called Tracer. It lets you see what people are copying and pasting from your site.
  • Andre Prefontaine showed us MapKat, a map-based service that lets you create a diary and slideshow of your trips and adventures.
  • Sean Healy and Joel Jackson showed us SnackPanda, or tried to. They had a bunch of technical issues, but essentially it’s an online ordering system for restaurants that do delivery.

The general feeling I got from talking to people afterward was that all the demos were fairly impressive. The favorite seemed to be Tynt, probably because of their slick “copy/paste heat map” which shows you the sections of text on your website that were copied the most. I thought IdleTime looked great too, a very polished UI.

Tweet of the night definitely goes to Graham Batty, who said:

Why does everyone always want to show us their signup page? They’re all the same. #democampyeg

So true. Perhaps we’ll have to incorporate that into the unofficial DemoCamp rules!

Two event announcements tonight: TransitCampEdmonton, taking place on May 30th, and BarCampEdmonton2, taking place on June 13th. Stay tuned for details on both of those!

Thanks to everyone who came out tonight. See you at the next event!

UPDATE: Rob Davy posted some videos of the evening here. Thanks Rob!

DemoCampEdmonton7

Are you ready for another DemoCamp? Our next event here in Edmonton is coming up fast, on May 13th! Join us at the University of Alberta to see what local tech entrepreneurs are up to. As usual, we’ll head over to RATT after the demos for Edmonton’s best networking opportunity for tech professionals. If you’re new to DemoCamp, check out my recap of our last event. Here are the details for #7:

Date: Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Time: 6:30pm (and drinks/networking afterward)
Location: E1 017, ETLC, University of Alberta (map)
Cost: Free

The rules for DemoCamp are simple: ten minutes to demo real, working software, followed by a few minutes for questions. No slides allowed.

This time we’ve got a fantastic new sign up page for both attendees and anyone interested in demoing at this event or in the future. No more wiki craziness – just enter your name and click Register!

Help us spread the word – check out the BarCamp Edmonton blog and our Facebook group. Be sure to tag your tweets, posts, photos, and other content with democampyeg.

Hope to see you there!

Tech stuff I’ve been learning about lately

I haven’t done one of these lists in quite a while, so I figured it was time for an update. Here are some of the geeky tech things I’m currently playing with/learning more about:

Facebook Connect
I’ve added support for Facebook Connect to ShareEdmonton, and was surprised at how straightforward it was. Little bit of a learning curve initially, but nothing major. I’m impressed with the way it works.

OAuth
Looking into this one for use with Twitter and Brightkite. I’m not very far along yet, but it also seems fairly straightforward. Check out this ReadWriteWeb article on how a recent OAuth security flaw was addressed by the community.

MSMQ
I’ve been using this since January, actually. It works great, and I wouldn’t hesitate to use it again. I want to explore some of the more advanced uses now.

OpenCalais
You might consider it a semantic web service, because Calais is all about giving meaning to data. I came across it via bit.ly, which uses Calais to automatically extract names, places, and other metadata from the links you shorten.

Google Maps API
Again, this one is fairly straightforward. Lately I’ve been looking into the non-visual services it provides. For example, geocoding and reverse-geocoding in the background, without necessarily having a map on the page.

Public Data Sets on AWS
This one I’ve looked into the least so far, but I’m keen to check it out. In particular, I’d like to explore working with the Freebase data dump. It’s still amazing to me that you can tap into such a vast amount of data with relative ease.

As you can probably guess, almost all of these are related to work I’m doing with ShareEdmonton. I should have an update on that soon.

My Dell Inspiron Mini 9

On January 1st, I decided to order a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook. I had been reading a lot about netbooks, and was in the market for something smaller to carry around. My aging Toshiba M200 Tablet PC is fairly small and light, but it’s still quite big compared to a netbook. I went on the Dell site, customized my order, and waited for my new netbook to arrive.

And waited, and waited.

After my original ship date of January 21st was delayed, I tried to be patient. When I called for an update mid-February, I learned that my order was going to be cancelled and re-entered because of a software conflict with Adobe. I told Dell to forget it, and I cancelled my order completely. I then hopped on the Future Shop site, and ordered the same computer (minus the integrated Bluetooth) for about $100 less. It arrived a week later.

My Mini 9 has the integrated webcam, is black, and runs Windows XP. I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB, and the hard drive to 32 GB (the Mini 9 uses an SSD). Even with the extra components and shipping, the total price was only about $500.

I’ve been using it for a little over a month now, and I really like it. In no particular order, these are my favorite things about it:

  • Small and light. The main reasons for getting a netbook, obviously!
  • Clean, solid design. So many netbooks have a big gap between the screen and keyboard, and that just drives me nuts. The Mini 9 is solid with smooth, rounded edges.
  • Quiet and cool. Partly because of the SSD, the Mini 9 doesn’t have a fan. It runs extremely cool, and never makes any noise.
  • It’s fast! Resume from standby, boot up, shutdown, etc. are all fairly quick. The only slowness is from some applications that don’t work well with SSDs, such as Outlook.

Nothing is perfect – here are the things I don’t like about it:

  • The battery life is pretty good at about four hours, but I wish it were much longer.
  • The keyboard is small and hard to get used to. I still have to hunt for the quote key, located at the very bottom. I often close windows by accident when I try to type an exclamation point and hit the Esc key instead. There are no F11 or F12 keys or functions. If I could redesign the keyboard, I’d get rid of CAPS Lock and the context-menu button, would move the quote key to it’s proper place, and would give the right Shift key more space.
  • There are two LEDs on the front, one with the power icon and one with a battery with a lightning bolt in it. The battery light only comes on when the device is dangerously low on power…I’d rather it lit up when the battery was recharging too.
  • It has an external display port, but the resolution it outputs is pretty weak.

Overall, I’m quite happy with my Mini 9. It was relatively inexpensive, comes with me almost everywhere, and works perfectly for surfing, checking email, blogging, and Twittering.

Recap: DemoCampEdmonton6

Last night was our sixth DemoCamp here in Edmonton, and I think it was probably our best yet. We had around 140 people in attendance, which isn’t much different than DCE4 but it somehow seemed bigger. Maybe it was all the cameras and video cameras? We had Peter Urban and the Smibs TV team record all the demos – watch for the video there soon. I was also really surprised that so many people had never been to DemoCamp before. We’re definitely reaching new people, and I think that’s great!

We had five demos:

  • I showed the first little bit of ShareEdmonton, and EdmontonTechScene. It wasn’t the best demo in the world, but it wasn’t bad for having just two days 🙂
  • Graham Batty showed us bittablog, an interesting microblogging service that he recently cooked up.
  • Ryan Leland showed his unique take on social networking – you-vs-me. It was a definite crowd pleaser thanks to the humorous topics like Cougar-vs-Bear. You can use the democamp invite code to check it out.
  • Mark Matichuk showed us Clinitrust, a secure messaging platform for medical professionals.
  • Our final demo was Peter Urban and Paul Bellows, who showed us their new joint venture (between Smibs and Yellow Pencil). It’s a tool to help move content from one CMS to another.

The general consensus afterward was that Peter & Paul’s was the demo of the night. Though they did a little too much talking in my opinion, the product is definitely intriguing. It’s not hard to see that there’s a big market for what they are doing. It’ll be a time saver, indeed. Hopefully we’ll get to see more of it soon.

DemoCamp Edmonton 6DemoCamp Edmonton 6

See what I mean about the tripods and cameras? After the demos almost everyone wandered over to RATT (Room At The Top) in the Students’ Union Building. A little too much drinking and karaoke ensued, but it was a fun time!

Twitter featured more prominently this time at DemoCamp. We had TwitterFall up on the big screen before we got started, and that encouraged lots of people to start tweeting. Soon after the demos started, we broke into the top ten trending topics at Twitter Search, and eventually rose as high as #7. Very cool!

Don’t miss Walter & Alain’s great list, 10 things I liked about DemoCamp Edmonton 6. Brittney also has a funny post of fun facts about DemoCamp Edmonton 6. Also, Cam and I did an interview with The Gateway, who wrote about DemoCamp and IDEAfest today.

I can’t wait until DCE7! Thanks to everyone who came out last night. If you’d like to be notified about future DemoCamp and BarCamp events in Edmonton, sign up for the mailing list here.

Can Facebook become the new default?

I find Facebook incredibly useful, if not particularly exciting. My usage reflects that – I like to add people on Facebook in order to maintain connections, and I like to keep my profile looking fresh, but I rarely surf Facebook like I used to. Yet there’s no escaping Facebook. The numbers tell the story. Check out these statistics compiled for a recent Fortune article:

  • 175 million members
  • 3 billion total daily minutes of use
  • 850 million photos uploaded each month
  • 15 million who update their status daily
  • 24 million pieces of content shared each month

Very impressive. Also in the sidebar, Fortune looks at the race to 150 million users. That feat took Facebook 5 years, versus 7 years for the iPod, 14 years for the cell phone, 38 years for the television, and 89 years for the telephone. Obviously it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but you get the idea (and notice how other technologies such as Google or Windows are left out).

With numbers like that, it’s not hard to listen to Mark Zuckerberg and actually think he’s got a shot at achieving his new goal:

"We think that if you can build one worldwide platform where you can just type in anyone’s name, find the person you’re looking for, and communicate with them," he told a German audience in January, "that’s a really valuable system to be building."

In the article, author Jessi Hempel positions Facebook as the new phone system, but I think the new email system is perhaps a more reasonable comparison. I think the “default” right now when you make a connection is to get an email address. You collect business cards at events and they all have phone numbers and email addresses but how many people actually pick up the phone? Email is the default.

What if Facebook could become the new default? Clearly, that’d be a big deal.

Already I think Facebook is the default platform for events, and most people seem to think it’s the default for photos. Can it become the default for communication in general? As I’ve said before, I think Facebook Connect is a step in that direction.