Alex Reid

Here’s a good web site that I’m suggesting to my West Coast friends:

http://72hours.org/

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.

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.