I’d like to draw your attention to MaMairie.ca, one of the projects completed during the recent Hackathon organized by Montreal Ouvert and hosted by the City of Montreal.
To give some context (i.e. "why did I build this site?"): Municipal politics receives comparatively little attention compared to federal and provincial politics. If a newspaper doesn't write about something happening in council, I'll never hear about it. Yet, municipal government has a much more direct effect on my quality of life, as it's responsible for most of the services I use every day.
MaMairie.ca's mission is to fill that gap by allowing citizens to track and interact with their municipal elected officials. The municipal level is a good place to start because that’s where representatives are most likely to take notice. Each MP in the House of Commons represents on average 100,000 Canadians. A City of Montreal councillor represents 15,000. I think there's a huge opportunity for cities to be more participatory, consultative and responsive with the smart, creative use of online tools.
MaMairie could not have got this far without the efforts of about a dozen volunteers over two hack days (who will be acknowledged once the about page is up :). Going forward, MaMairie will be a project of Open North (
http://opennorth.ca/).
The site is not complete and over the coming days and weeks we will be adding major features such as mini-budget consultations and new data such as attendance records. The code running the site is fairly flexible and we are hoping that once we're satisfied with the feature set we can work with people in other cities to get it running for their citizens, too. If anyone knows that they'd already like to work with us, please contact me!
All comments and suggestions are welcome. Feel free to reply off-list.
Thanks,
James
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