YOUR DATA. OUR DATA.Nik GarkushaOpenHalton | Microsoft Canada
By Day – run Open Source strategy & Open Gov initiatives at Microsoft CanadaBy Night – I run a community organization OpenHalton, helping to bringOpen Data to the Halton RegionBeing in both of these worlds makes me…
…a Professional GeekI am an Open Data “hacktivist”And I work with many Open Data communities across CanadaSo Today -- I’d like to share some insights into our communitiesAnd some suggestions on how you can harness the incredible passion & innovation that Open Data communities offer
After all, what motivates people to give up their personal time on weekends to attend Hackathons & CodeFestsTo spend evenings and nights building Open Gov applications?
BUILD STUFFto make the Data easier to understand by an Average Joeto find insights, to learn, and to better our society the processSo, I’ve divided the STUFF we like to do into 3 categories:
Like WhereDidItGo project by OpenDataBC that helps to visualize how BC’s taxes are being spent, orOpenHamilton project to visualize the Map of 2011 Federal Election results in Hamilton East Stoney Creek. (Color-coded by victor of polls)
Or visualizeCrime in San Farncisco as Streetlights and make AWESOME 3D projections of crime data:Prostitution NarcoticsVandalism –Or the way I like to call it:Sex, Drugs and RockNRoll data in 3DDoug McCune / http://dougmccune.com/blog
Or London’s eatsure that mashes up Restaurant & Food Inspection information
I was part of the cross-Canada team of open data hackers that pulled together EMITTERA way to visualize industrial polluters & using Environment Canada data via Windows Azure APIs to pull information about MPs for that area
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Like the LED heads-up display at JP Licks ice cream in Boston –Shows bus arrival / departure times to help customers time their purchases – and for the business to time their next batch of treatsThese are things that are possible, and Here are some ideas on how you can help:
The infamous VanTrash project that transformed into ReCollect – a service to remind you of your garbage & recycling days – across multiple devicesSends you SMS, email and even calls your phone
Revisit your city website Terms of Use and Disclaimers Do you really need to issue a written permission before someone can link to your site?Why wouldn’t you want us to help make your site more popular, your data more useful?
Many municipalities have passionate love affairs with PDFWe know it supposed to preserve fidelity and integrity of documentsBut it really makes it difficult to extract useful dataSo please resist the temptation to print / scan / post documentshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebaird/4264611133/
Organic crowdsourcingExtends to gov20City of nanaimo, opendatabc, nanaimo IT workers - part of Relying on citizen communities requires knowing how to:Empowering the culture of these communities (foster communities)Hosting hackathons, F&B and venue --Socially – specific thingsSense – making
And finally, give us some data to work with We’re buried under a pile of unnecessary steps to scrape and scrub the dataStart with low hanging fruit like simple reporting & GIS data: ward boundaries, geocoded bus stops, etcHelp us Help You….
