Alex Reid

This may be a first; game developers using open government data.

A group of seven technical students from Vancouver’s Center for Digital Media have created a game using Vancouver’s Open Data. Built on Microsoft’s Silverlight development platform, Bing Maps and the City of Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue, the group of students have developed “TaxiCity” a Web-based driving game that allows the player to take on the role of a taxi driver, pick up passengers and deliver them to various locations around Vancouver.

The realism isn’t so much Grand Theft Auto, more pre-Google Street View, such as block outlines, building shapes, green spaces and the centre medians along main routes. The group also pulled their data from VanPark, a site that used Vancouver open data to help people find and track parking during the Olympics.

Open Government Data expert David Eaves was involved in the project, and he says the project is “pure R&D experiment.”

“It begins to show us some of the really complicated things that could become possible if cities shared their data,” he said. The game “also takes a step closer to being able to create games where you actually race around the City of Vancouver, which could be fun from a game perspective,” Eaves said.

You can play the game here.

Organizers of the Plastic Pollution Coalition (PPC) pulled off a stunt this morning in Vancouver, strangling sculptures of fish and birds with gigantic plastic six pack rings to highlight pollution from plastics.

The PPC want to eliminate single use plastics and its impact on marine and wild life, pointing to the horrendous Great Pacific Garbage Patch as an example.

Special kudos go to award-winning Vancouver ad agency Rethink (they went national with a Toronto office just recently) which worked up the smart idea with the PPC.

With the Winter Olympics about to hosted in Vancouver, I’m seeing more and more really great videos about Vancouver – heads up Tourism Vancouver!

Winnipegger Jon Schledewitz is holding his first show in Vancouver since 1999, featuring many of his hand printed photographs over the past decade from across the continent.

Paul Pritchard, who video recorded the scuffle between RCMP and Polish resident Robert Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver Airport two years ago, has won an award from the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

The award is the first-ever for citizen journalism [in Canada].

The video has handed over to RCMP at the time with the promise that the video would be returned within 48 hours; a promise that was later reneged. It wasn’t until Pritchard began legal proceedings and participated in a press conference when he feared “police cover up” that the RCMP returned the video.

Pritchard then sold the video to CBC, CTV and Global for several thousand dollars. The video contradicted what the RCMP initially said about the incident, and began a national outrage and later an inquiry into the incident.

“Without the tape we wouldn’t have had the journalistic investigation, the year-long inquiry into the incident, and we wouldn’t have seen the safer use of the taser by police departments across the country,” said Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) President Arnold Amber.

“The remarkable partnership between investigative journalists and the citizen who recorded the last minutes of Dziekanski’s life has led to all these revelations and impact.” Amber added “What he did probably will save many other lives down the road.”