Alex Reid

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.

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.”

A US consulting company has announced their top Canadian cities for young professionals (like me). The company’s founder, Rebecca Ryan says:

“The next generation is very savvy about choosing where they’ll live. They look carefully at quality of life factors like how much time they’re going to spend in traffic commuting, if they can live near a park or hike-and-bike trail, and whether a city’s downtown stays awake after five.”

Victoria, Ottawa and Vancouver got the top three positions:

1. Victoria, British Columbia
2. Ottawa, Ontario
3. Vancouver, British Columbia
4. Kingston, Ontario
5. Halifax, Nova Scotia
6. Toronto, Ontario
7. Calgary, Alberta
8. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
9. London, Ontario
10. Edmonton, Alberta

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.]“