Alex Reid

Vancouver City Councillor Andrea Reimer introduced a motion this week (PDF) endorsed by Mayor Gregor Robertson that will have the city develop open standards for city documents, maps and other data, to be released online.

It’s a big step for civic transparency.

It’s also a vert smart move for Vancouver because they know that “software companies” will aggregate that data for public usage just like Google Transit did when Vancouver made their bus schedules available in open standard in late 2007. By making the information that already exists (and paid for) available to the public for free, the City is allowing open source developers to connect the dots; effectively crowd sourcing the bulk of the programming work, for free.

EveryBlock is a perfect example of what could come of this. Using data from eleven major American cities, volunteers gather whatever city data is available (definitely not open format) and relate that information (crime incidents, bike rack installations, building permits, restaurant inspections, graffiti clean-ups, etc.) to maps of those cities.

For example, the San Francisco Police Department releases daily information about its daily calls and EveryBlock lists that information “whether they’re made by citizens or police officers and whether they involve criminal or non-criminal activity. Each report says where the incident was reported, when police were called and when the report was entered into the system. Also included is the incident’s type (homicide, noise nuisance, fight without weapons, etc.).

Finally, each report includes the incident’s result, which essentially tells you what responding officers found or did in response to the call. This might be an arrest, the issuance of a citation or a report’s cancellation while the officer was en route.”

But what Vancouver is doing will really expand what EveryBlock has already illustrated with limited and sparse information. Vancouver’s City Manager has already been charged with digitizing archival records, indexing, publishing and syndicating all data using “prevailing open standards, interfaces and formats” – all to be unlicensed.

Reimer suggested that City Council meeting videos will be on YouTube within months.

“They’re tiny little things, but they have so much ripple effect in the community,” she said. “There’s probably a few more thousand people that we could be talking to out there if we could send them videos [instead of written material.]“

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A new documentary We Live in Public which screens today at the Sundance Film Festival follows Josh Harris, a dot com entrepreneur turned artist as he explored media, technology and social interaction at the turn of the century.

The UK government has leaked their plans for a £12 billion program to tap every phone call and email originating or received in the UK under the guise of anti-terrorism measures.

GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project.

Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country’s biggest internet and mobile phone providers – thought to be BT and Vodafone. BT has nearly 5m internet customers.

Essentially the security services want a “live tap” into every phone call and email message.

So far not much is being said except that the opposition Conservative Party’s only qualm with the program is the integrity of keeping the information safe from leaking. I find it shocking that the security services are having such a difficult time knowing who is bad and who is good that everyone is suspect.

The BBC reports that a city in Israel (population 180,000) is setting up a DNA database to match dog poop left in their streets to their owners in order to fine them. In the UK, some towns have resorted to using surveillance cameras and undercover patrols to identify offenders in particular trouble spots.

Tika Bar-On, the city’s chief veterinarian who came up with the idea for the DNA experiment, told Reuters the DNA database could also help veterinarians research genetic diseases in dogs, investigate canine pedigree and identify stray animals, replacing the need for electronic chip identification.

“The sky is the limit on how far we can take this,” she said.

BBC reports that when a Lloyds bank customer chose “Lloyds is pants” (as in rubbish) as his password, he found it had been changed to “no it’s not” by a Lloyds bank employee.

“I thought it was actually quite a funny response,” [Lloyds customer Steve Jetley] said.

But what really incensed me was when I was told I could not change it back to ‘Lloyds is pants’ because they said it was not appropriate.

“I asked if it was ‘pants’ they didn’t like, and would ‘Lloyds is rubbish’ do? But they didn’t think so.

“So I tried ‘Barclays is better’ and that didn’t go down too well either.

“The rules seemed to change, and they told me it had to be one word, so I tried ‘censorship’, but they didn’t like that, and then said it had to be no more than six letters long.”

While the employee who changed the password has been let go and the bank has insisted they rarely look at passwords in a press release, the bank continues to be able to review his new passwords.