Alex Reid

Last July, New York City Mayor Bloomberg launched a new initiative called NYC Digital with the goal “to create a healthier civil society and stronger democracy through the use of technology that engages, serves, and connects New Yorkers.”

The first task of NYC Digital was to research and present a State of the Digital Union, per se, for the city. That report was released last week: “Roadmap for the Digital City: Achieving New York City’s Digital Future.”

The report pulls together everything the city wants to provide; from events calendar to a city license application process; how people found their web site; and how people can better engaged using services like Foursquare and Twitter. It’s all designed to be a super-311.

New York City is making a lot of headway here, hopefully cities like Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto and Ottawa are not far behind.

Montreal web developer and blogger Cedric Sam put together a brilliant Google Map mashup displaying election results of each of the 308 federal ridings – poll by poll!

He “used cartographic data from the Geogratis.gc.ca website. I imported the Shapefiles to a PostgreSQL database with Postgis. Then, I processed results by polling divisions from the 2008 election, data available on the Elections Canada website. It was put in a separate table on the same database. A custom program in Python using the very handy libkml (a code library developed and supported by Google) took the data and outputted pretty KML code. It was packed as a KMZ and uploaded to my webspace. [E-mail me, if you want to exchange ideas on the code]

The webpage itself is rich in JavaScript and the code can be seen here. I use hashes to make the webpage bookmarkable and loadable with a given riding pre-loaded.”

Sam has a lot of cool things going on, check out his blog here: http://smurfmatic.net/blog/

New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been pushing for more public information to be handed over to geeks to achieve three goals; more civic transparency, offering more services for less money and promoting the city as the next tech mecca.

For the second year in a row, the City of New York has embarked on a call to arms to geeks with its own annual data competition, releasing over 350 public data sets and asking tech companies to make apps that are not only useful but may be the basis of the next Google or Facebook.

This year’s $10,000 grand prize went to Roadify, an app that sends alerts to mobile phones about subway, bus, and driving conditions, allowing users to add comments and real-time updates as they commute.

It isn’t just about the money though, it’s about the pride and attention. Some of the competition judges included Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai.

Some of the finalists included DontEat.at, an app that sends a text message when you check in to a restaurant that has a risk of being closed for health code violations; Sportaneous, a geo-map app that helps users find and join pick-up games close to them with other users that match their skill level; and Parking Finder, an app that locates nearby parking garages and their parking rates.

Here is a great article differentiating between the terms “Open Data” and “Publicly available data” which should be addressed in the coming discussions about transparency.

(A)n increasing number of people are using the term open data to mean publicly available data … this “open data” initiative focuses on what data is made available, when open data is really about how data is made available.

The concept of “Open Data” is about format and protocol, and not the limits of any content. In light of the latest WikiLeaks drama, this part should be repeated:

Whether data should be made publicly available is where privacy concerns come into play. Once it has been determined that government data should be made public, then it should be done so in an open format.

To launch their new Twitter account, the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) decided to ‘tweet’ the details of regular calls for 24 hours to show the public what they do in an average day.

This follows what the Greater Manchester Police Department similarly did two months ago in the UK, however VPD’s plan didn’t go exactly as promised. The VPD promised to tweet each and every call for 24 hours, adding they usually get an average of 500 calls per day.

In reality, 103 tweets were posted in a 14-hour stretch from 8am to 10pm by a lone “social media officer”, and perhaps a third of them were tips or Twitter replies, smartly reminding the public that Twitter won’t replace the 911 telephone function.

I hate to rain on their parade, because this is really a good thing!

More Police departments should be conversing with people and disclosing this kind of information (granted, leave out the names and numbers). Great idea, but it could have been executed better. They should have had two or three people in there, for this ‘special’ day.

If you’re going to say you’re going to do something for 24 hours, have the staff available to do so, and if you say you’re going to tweet each and every call, posting only 70 such calls in a 14 hour period does not look impressive for a 1700-strong organization.

I complain about this only because if the number of reports were closer to what a real day is like in a city like Vancouver, open data geeks would have something to play with. Otherwise, an average day in Vancouver appears pretty tame.