This is a transcription-with-license from the a session I attended yesterday at ChangeCamp on entitled “Designing www.toronto.ca/opendata“. You can read more about ChangeCamp here; my primary reason for attending was interest in promoting and helping our governments share information which they are gathering, to make them more transparent, accountable and even potentially useful. This session I was attending was run by some folks from the City of Toronto and its 311 initiative (I think). These notes are based from memory and the photos I took, here on Flickr. Note that this is only one of several (3?) parallel discussions that were happening during this session, and this is only the “data” section of the session; I’m afraid I wandered off during the “tools” parts as I thought it might be a little premature.
Tags, Geocoding, Ontologies
A common theme of discussion was providing ways to organize the data. In particular:
- geocode,
- geocode by tag: e.g. “the annex”
- tagged by topic; i.e. that this is an orthogonal axis to geocoding
- metadata
- we should look to how other cities have organized data to find a common vocabulary
A common concept was that we could use tags / geocodes to:
- spontaneously form communities around ideas
- track related issues
- form feeds on related information
- use to query related information that would generally be spread widely
Information Dissemantion
- be able to track issues through the system; this is a very common theme
- have access to historical information
- feeds for everything
Crime and Public Safety
- Police reports (geocoded)
- Public health services
- Emergency information
- Info (like about SARS)
- Releases
- Public health
Scheduling
- Pools
- Skating rinks
- Ferries
- Public meetings
This is related to the concept discussed that any information that goes into a PDF should be available in raw form.
Politician Information
- Voting records
- Expenses
- Finances
Service Information
- Power grid disruptions
- Critical incident
- Zoning (i.e. what’s the zoning information for this location)
- Density / population / demographics
- Parking information (e.g. what’s the parking rules; how do I get a parking permit, etc.)
- Real-time polution:
- Water quality
- Air quality
- Tagged, available as feeds
- Historic information
- Traffic
- Roads
- street conditions
- Trains
- Utilization rates
- Roads
- Sewer / waterflow data; i.e. that apparently sensors are already in place for
Complaints
- be able to add data into the system
- be able to track that information
Tourism Information
- event dates, locations, price; e.g. Nuit Blanche
- standard information for tour operators
Budget Information
- spreadsheets
- all the raw data in PDFs should be available as XLS/CSV
- be able trace evolution of data from its source; follow back up the chain
Tendering Information
- What is up for tender
- What tenders have been awarded
- Make interaction with city more efficient and open
311 Information
- Track whether services were successful
- Raw feeds
- Ticketing system (i.e. issue tracking)
- Turnaround time
Community Group Information
Information to empower groups, enable spontaneous community formation…
- Mayor’s initiatives
- Bike lane’s
- Deal with language issues
- Schools
- What assets are available (pools, gyms)
- Parks & rec
- Open spaces
- Comunity centres
- Commity health centres
Hi David,
Thanks so much for posting the notes. I’ll incorporate them into the wiki when I post the summary. In reference to your intro above, the session was run by me from the Office of Mayor David Miller, with assistance from Suzanne Long and Denis Carr, who work in City I&T.
One of the exciting things about the tools discussion was that the ideas people came up with would require data sets that weren’t identified in the first half of the discussion.
Ryan Merkley
Senior Advisor, Office of Mayor David Miller
@ryanmerkley
Hi Ryan,
I had already put them in the Wiki. I think you guys had an independent discussion from our group, we had out own little thing happening there in Denis’ group to the right of the escalator.
I’ll be posting further thoughts about the data very soon, interested in hearing what you guys came up with tools, though it’s my personal belief that we can’t even imagine at this point what the best stuff will be once the data is available.
Hi David,
Thanks for all your help during the session, for capturing it in this blog, and for posting the photos. Our group came up with some interesting points and important considerations for the development of tools.
Denis Carr
Web Coordinator, User Experience Architect
City of Toronto I&T
@deniscarr