OpenOttawa.org is a volunteer organization with that builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community areas of their lives. Want to volunteer?
It’s been a while since my last post, so i thought I would provide an update at where we are with some of our projects.
Fixit Ottawa
After FixitOttawa was open-sourced under the Affero GPL last fall , VisibleGovernment.ca ran with the project and ported things from PHP to Django which is now running on the official FixMyStreet.ca site.
New Cities on Board
In the past several months, we’ve seen prince Edward Island, Montreal come on board at FixMyStreet.ca. Hamilton is in the works and I have heard some rumblings of a Halifax-specific release. If you’re interested in getting your municipality involved, get in touch and we can share what has worked for others getting their own cities on board. See here for more details.
iPhone App
I’ve been doing some work on an iPhone App that should be ready to go this fall. The app will allow you to take a geo-tagged photo, select a category, subject, and description, and send your report directly to the appropriate supported city via FixMyStreet.ca. If you’re a seasoned iPhone developer, we could always do with some help. Get in touch if you’re interested.
Calls for Open Data in Ottawa We’ve seen some exciting progress in Canadian cities this year with Toronto, Vancouver, Nanaimo, among others, either start providing raw data to their citizens, or having committed to doing so by the end of the year. If anyone is aware of anyone working on a draft a motion for the City of Ottawa in the regard, I’d love to get in touch and help get the motion the attention it deserves, and if not, I’d be happy to help lead the charge. Also, please help us compile a ranked list of datasets you’d like to see the City provide by posting and voting up your suggestions here.
*As a side note, some interesting data is now available via the Interactive Traffic map site, including NCC bike trail polygons, parking lots, traffic cameras and signs, and incident data.
What: “Geeks and policy wonks from across Canada are meeting for ChangeCamp
in Toronto on January 24th. They hope to build on the success of events
like Toronto TransitCamp by bringing together stakeholders to imagine
how the Canadian government can engage with citizens in an age of mass
participation.”
When:
Saturday, January 24, 2009 from 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM (ET)
Where: MaRS Centre
101 College Street
Toronto, Ontario M5G 1L7
Canada
I’ll be there, and hope to see you (and hopefully some more Ottawans) at the event! If you’re heading down, ping @openottawaorg on Twitter – maybe we can organize some carpooling if needed.
The online consultation component regarding Ottawa’s Transit Plan has been posted on the City’s website. This is in addition to the open houses that have been taking place across the City this week. If you haven’t been able to make it out to any of the open houses, take some time to register and head over there to express your opinions on how best to move the Transit plan forward.
I was reading today Michael Geist’s post on how the CRTC’s online Public Policy consultations failed to attract a large audience. Over the span of a month, the site generated just over 2,500 unique visitors with an average 84 visitors/day. Only 284 Canadians registered with the site, posting a total of 278 comments.Not a fantastic response by any means.
I know the City used the same Nanos Research software to pilot online consultations for the Transit Plan as well as the Design Lansdowne consultations. It would be interesting to see the kind of responses that it experienced for those projects.
I’m quite pleased at how well FixItOttawa is coming along. A few more nagging issues to deal with and I think we’ll be ready to go.
I know I promised a screenshot earlier, but given that the work done to that point was mostly basic functionality, there wasn’t much to look at. I’ve finally had a chance to sit down and tweak some of the css, so I thought I’d post a couple screenshots after the jump.
Suggestions or comments? Send’em our way.
Show Us a Better Way.
The UK Government’s Power of Information Taskforce are running a mashup
competition (a.k.a. “ideas for new products that could improve the way
public information is communicated”) with a £20,000 prize fund and
gigabytes of brand new data and APIs. Maybe we’ll see something similar come out of the City? It would be a great follow-up action to the eGovernment Taskforce report. Provincial data would be equally encouraging. What do you think?
When I was at Mesh ‘08, I had the chance to catch Mark Kuznicki and Sean Howard’s presentation detailing the progress they had made in developing a new way to do public consultations with Metrolinks utilizing a series of unconferences called “Transit Camps” with associated website and branding. I’ve written about the session previously on my blog, but wanted to capture it here as well. You can see the slidedeck below. We’ll be following the progress of the Metronauts closely. It’s something that I think would really work well in tandem with the current online public consultation process (can’t find a link at the moment) for Ottawa’s new Transit plan.
