Top 10 Datasets

[James McKinney-2]

We are talking about municipal datasets. Herb started the thread talking about "top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada”. I don’t know why you’re talking about federal electoral districts. For what it’s worth, federal electoral districts are only contiguous with provincial districts in Ontario. Each territory is a single federal district, so their territorial electoral districts obviously do not match. None of the other provinces match the federal districts. Wards are electoral districts; in municipalities with wards, representatives are elected per ward, residents of that ward must vote in that ward, etc. It’s just a different name. Other places in Canada call them “divisions.” In Québec, a few municipalities that did not switch to the new “districts” system maintain electoral “quartiers”. When I say 84 I mean 84 governments: Canada, 10 provinces, and 73 municipalities (and growing). We don’t have the territories yet, because they refuse to give us their electoral district boundary files.

James

On Mar 20, 2014, at 11:43 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey Herb;

This report (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/country/canada/progress-report/report) includes references to many of the datasets I was pointing out, it is the OGP independent report and some of the complaints are the fact that most portals do not have the data I was refering to in them.  Again, I think reflective of who we are and what our interstest are.  Perhaps let muni gov know that this list is a developers/open data enthusiast list and not a list from civil society at large and more outreach would be required to include them. 

They will not make a list unless they are asked Herb as open data is not something they are necessarily engaged in.  The FCM report I pointed to is all about cities, and that list of indicators was created by community grouns and city officials in canada's top 24  cities in terms of population.  If you go throught that list, you will quickly see that most open data portals do not contain these data, and this is also why many civil society folks don't care about portals.  They do not contain the data they need and use.  These are not tek specialist in any way, but they are big data users, so you will  most likely not come accross them at open data events as that is not a space they would gravitate to.

James,

You are discussing wards and so on, so a different scale than federal electoral districts which to my understanding are contiguous with provincial and territorial electoral districts. At lower tiers I did not think they were electoral districts files, but are wards and so on. So on that one I agree. When you say 84, you mean 84 what?

Officials are listed, not in the format you want, but the data are available.

Thx for the clarification on the Hansard and Tax rates.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 1:53 AM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with the "world view" and "comfort zone" assertions and I would guess that each of these groups would come up with a different list.  Maybe we need to encourage these groups to create a list for their purposes?

Ultimately I suppose we need to look at the value of creating a list in the first place.  For me, I just want to give muni's an idea of what at least SOME people are interested in.  It's true we can't speak for everyone.

The G8 list is great but my intention was to construct a list specifically for Canadian municipalities.  This list is specific to nations, though some of them could be addressed at the municipal level (crime for example).

H

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just recalled something!

I do not think the folks that submitted this list are not capable, but I do know that it is a group that reflects a world view that is not necessarily the same the civil society groups doing social and environmental justice work, or work on accessibility, or health.  And I worry that if we continuously only have us as open data folks involved in making lists and setting trajectories, then we are missing out on telling really important public policy issues, as they are just not on our horizon.

This is harder to step out of our comfort zones, but I think there is merit in doing so.  I was just going through the G8 resolution (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex) and if you scroll down to:

Action 2: Release of high value data, 

That list is pretty good.

Data Category* (alphabetical order)	Example datasets
Companies	Company/business register
Crime and Justice	Crime statistics, safety
Earth observation	Meteorological/weather, agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting
Education	List of schools; performance of schools, digital skills
Energy and Environment	Pollution levels, energy consumption
Finance and contracts	Transaction spend, contracts let, call for tender, future tenders, local budget, national budget (planned and spent)
Geospatial	Topography, postcodes, national maps, local maps
Global Development	Aid, food security, extractives, land
Government Accountability and Democracy	Government contact points, election results, legislation and statutes, salaries (pay scales), hospitality/gifts
Health	Prescription data, performance data
Science and Research	Genome data, research and educational activity, experiment results
Statistics	National Statistics, Census, infrastructure, wealth, skills
Social mobility and welfare	Housing, health insurance and unemployment benefits
Transport and Infrastructure	Public transport timetables, access points broadband penetration

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:18 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

HI Tracey,

The list was started on OpenDataBC and then moved here to get more input.  I have not taken it outside to other groups.

The idea is to generate a starting list of top 10 datasets.  Some of the datasets will already have been released by some municipalities.  Others may not have been made available by any municipalities.  The point is for publishers to be able to look at the list and see that people are interested.  I get asked over and over again "what do people want?" so I would like to be able to refer to a top ten list to give publishers and idea of what people are interested in.

For example, if it went out now I might choose:

• rezoning permit applications
  
lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

financial - actual expenditures

financial - grant and contribution awards

• crime information
  

I fully expect that the initial list will not be perfect but I think the people on the list have enough knowledge either on their own or with their networks to have a crack at it.

Also, I don't know of any group better than this one for getting things done so that's why I brought it here. :)

I am happy to help get this done however people think it should happen.  I like your categories suggestion - so maybe we should work that in somehow - but I was thinking more at the dataset level.

"Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!"

Thank you!  :)

Given this discussion I won't send anything out now so we can hear from a few more voices.

Cheers,

Herb

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Herb;

I think much more work needs to be done with these before you can do a survey is released and I think there is merit in grouping them.  Can you remind me how this list was made?  Looks like no social planners, community developers, health, environmentalists, or urban planners, housing experts, disability folks, were involved in the making of this list. What would they want?

Some of the data types are indicators and would require a number of datasets and research projects to get to these.  As I was sorting through them it reminded me of the Quality of life reporting systems of the federation of canadian municipalities, who collect these data from about 30 different institutions at all levels of jurisdiction (Grid of data - http://www.municipaldata-donneesmunicipales.ca/Site/Monitoring/grid.php?lang=en).  These data were decided upon as they told a story, overtime, and served a purpose to understand things in the city. Main headings of the report:

• Demographic Background Information (DBI)
• Affordable, Appropriate Housing (AAH)
• Civic Engagement (CE)
• Community and Social Infrastructure (CSI)
• Education (ED)
• Employment and Local Economy (ELE)
• Natural Environment (NE)
• Personal & Community Health (PCH)
• Personal Financial Security (PFS)
• Personal Safety (PS)

The issue of scale is also important here, is this for cities? if so do we want these data aggregated into neighbourhoods? Wards? electoral districts? dissemination areas? Postal Code areas?  GVRD/Metro van, or Van city? just to exemplify the difference.

I think we are maturing as a community, and maybe we can move beyond lists of datasets and start thinking about the best way for us to understand our cities/towns/etc.and think of the datasets that help us understand those things and then find the ways to communicate/discuss etc. these things. 

Also, some of the data on the list are already available.  Anyway, I have sorted the ones in your list.  I am super swamped for the next week, but I would be really happy to work with you and a few others (james?) to go through previous lists, and I would love to consult with some civil society groups and ask them what they want, environment? Community Health? Social Housing? Disability?  I don't know about you, but I find myself often circulating in the same circles and thus perpetuating ideals from a particular lens, this list I think reflects open data people but not necessarily, data users in the sense of actually using data to inform public policy in a real way, or a campaign, etc.  Open data folks like ourselves, got us here, and that is good, but now, I think we can do more, and communicate to people outside our 'open data circles', to those engaged in the day to day as non open data civil society groups and find out what their needs are.

Below is my first pass at classifying the list you shared, it is imperfect and not mutually exclusive, there are comments in brackets beside them.

Public Expenditures

·         financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)

·         Salaries of public officials

·         consultant fees (Maybe a better statement are gov subcontracting by type)

·         contracts

·         budget management (Not sure what is meant here? Which datasets?)

·         financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

·         financial - actual expenditures

·         financial - grant and contribution awards

·         financial - travel and hospitality expenses

Economic Development

·         business license

·         development applications (had twice)

·         approval results of development applications

·         DCC (development cost charges) rates

·         property assessments

·         tax rates (Do they mean property assessments?)

·         annual return data (not just pdf reports) is this taxfiler returns, is so then available at a fee? Which returns?

·         building citations (problems with structures etc...)

Business

·         tender opportunities

Land Use

·         park boundaries (which ones?  National park data are available)

·         land use changes (this too is an indicator, which datasets would be required, for instance parks, building footprints and year of construction, air photos, forests, farm land, etc. With those layers and others over time then land use change analysis is possible, but this is a research project or a geomatics project, not just one dataset)

Infrastructure

·         locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)

·         transit data

·         infrastructure deficits (which one? Roads? Power? Broadband?) also this is a measure, or an indicator, so there would need to be specificity in terms of a theme and then a way to measure that

·         road construction (511 data)

·         road maintenance and emergency work (I am guessing not ambulance emergencies but disruptions due to emergencies)

Demographics

·         vital stats

·         demographic data (these are available)

Framework Data

·         electoral districts (these are available)

·         transit data (Feeds? Routes? Schedules?)

Remote Sensing

·         orthophotos

·         lidar

User Fees

·         service fees (For what? Swimming pools? Rec Programs? School fees)

Democratic engagemet

·         hansards – Fed? Prov/ter? I think some are available, but not necessarily in a useful format.  Is the fed hansard now on open data licence?

·         council

·         petitions

·         elected officials contact information (is available at fed and provincial and I think all cities offer this too, was there something specific?)

·         satisfaction survey results (e.g. http://donnees.ville.montreal.qc.ca/dataset/sondage-satisfaction-citoyens)

Planning

·         traffic study data

·         rezoning permit applications

·         service requests (e.g. http://open311.org/)

Health

·         stream health assessments (i do not know what these are?  Wait times?  These data are available from CIHI but for a fee)

·         health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)

Well Being

·         food bank usage stats

·         homelessness stats

Citizen Engagement

·         public consultations

Freedom of Information

·         completed access to information requests (as is done at the federal level)

·         public documents released under access to information laws (as BC does, for most part)

·         transparency and access to information

Political Accountability

·         lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

·         political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

·         calendar of meetings

·         agendas of meetings

·         minutes of meetings

·         video of meetings

·         audio of meetings

·         transcripts of meetings

·         role call votes

·         attendance records

Safety

·         crime information

Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!

Cheers

Tracey

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:03 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just in case people are wondering what ever happened to this idea... I haven't forgotten.  The Summit was more of a priority for a while there.

I have compiled a list and plan to send out the survey in the near future.

Cheers,

Herb

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Over on the OpenDataBC google group we're developing a list of top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada.

The intention is to simply create a "first cut" at this to use as a starting point and I'm guessing it will evolve over time.  It won't be perfect, but it'll be a place to start.

We would like input from this group.  Please have a look at this list and let me know what, if anything is missing, or if any of these could use some fine tuning.

Once we have a list my intention is to compile this into a SurveyMonkey survey and send it back out to OpenDataBC and this group for voting and we'll see what people think are the top 10.

Here is the current list in no particular order:

• financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
  
• business license
  
• development applications
  
• property assessments
  
• park boundaries
  
• locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)
  
• tender opportunities
  
• electoral districts
  
• transit data
  
• vital stats / demographic data
  
• tax rates
  
• service fees
  
• infrastructure deficits
  
• hansards/council a/v
  
• petitions
  
• annual return data (not just pdf reports)
  
• stats relating to approval or non-approval of development applications
  
• DCC (development cost charges) rates
  
• salaries
  
• consultant fees
  
• traffic study data
  
• orthophotos
  
• lidar
  
• stream health assessments
  
• food bank usage stats
  
• homelessness stats
  
• transit data
  
• contracts
  
• road construction (511 data)
  
• building citations (problems with structures etc...)
  

The question I am thinking of sending is something like:

 "Which of the following datasets should municipalities make a priority and release them as open data?"

If there are any survey geeks out there that see a bias in this question and can suggest better wording please do so.

Also, if any of the bullets seems too ambiguous or vague to be a valid selection alternate suggestions for those would be appreciated.

Thanks,

H

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http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

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<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

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http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

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<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

_______________________________________________
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[hidden email]
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Tracey P. Lauriault

http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

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[Tracey P. Lauriault]

Great clarification!

- federal electoral districts (FEDs) are also used to know how certain cities voted in federal and provincial elections, and voter turnout is sometimes used as an indicator of democratic participation.
- the file name electoral district (ED) is normally not used for cities, they are called wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries but not EDs, that is how they are distinguished in portals and so on, but now I know that the open data community has renamed these.

- Good to know that only Ontario has contiguity between the federal and the provincial

- Good to know that the territories are a single FED, that was not obvious

- on the 84, I was asking as the number of FEDs are different, and because did not know that wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries nomenclature meant FEDs thought you might have been off somehow, and was curious to what you were refering to. 

Shesh! Should I not ask questions when I am unclear or what!

t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 4:26 AM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

We are talking about municipal datasets. Herb started the thread talking about "top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada”. I don’t know why you’re talking about federal electoral districts. For what it’s worth, federal electoral districts are only contiguous with provincial districts in Ontario. Each territory is a single federal district, so their territorial electoral districts obviously do not match. None of the other provinces match the federal districts. Wards are electoral districts; in municipalities with wards, representatives are elected per ward, residents of that ward must vote in that ward, etc. It’s just a different name. Other places in Canada call them “divisions.” In Québec, a few municipalities that did not switch to the new “districts” system maintain electoral “quartiers”. When I say 84 I mean 84 governments: Canada, 10 provinces, and 73 municipalities (and growing). We don’t have the territories yet, because they refuse to give us their electoral district boundary files.

James

On Mar 20, 2014, at 11:43 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey Herb;

This report (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/country/canada/progress-report/report) includes references to many of the datasets I was pointing out, it is the OGP independent report and some of the complaints are the fact that most portals do not have the data I was refering to in them.  Again, I think reflective of who we are and what our interstest are.  Perhaps let muni gov know that this list is a developers/open data enthusiast list and not a list from civil society at large and more outreach would be required to include them. 

They will not make a list unless they are asked Herb as open data is not something they are necessarily engaged in.  The FCM report I pointed to is all about cities, and that list of indicators was created by community grouns and city officials in canada's top 24  cities in terms of population.  If you go throught that list, you will quickly see that most open data portals do not contain these data, and this is also why many civil society folks don't care about portals.  They do not contain the data they need and use.  These are not tek specialist in any way, but they are big data users, so you will  most likely not come accross them at open data events as that is not a space they would gravitate to.

James,

You are discussing wards and so on, so a different scale than federal electoral districts which to my understanding are contiguous with provincial and territorial electoral districts. At lower tiers I did not think they were electoral districts files, but are wards and so on. So on that one I agree. When you say 84, you mean 84 what?

Officials are listed, not in the format you want, but the data are available.

Thx for the clarification on the Hansard and Tax rates.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 1:53 AM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with the "world view" and "comfort zone" assertions and I would guess that each of these groups would come up with a different list.  Maybe we need to encourage these groups to create a list for their purposes?

Ultimately I suppose we need to look at the value of creating a list in the first place.  For me, I just want to give muni's an idea of what at least SOME people are interested in.  It's true we can't speak for everyone.

The G8 list is great but my intention was to construct a list specifically for Canadian municipalities.  This list is specific to nations, though some of them could be addressed at the municipal level (crime for example).

H

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just recalled something!

I do not think the folks that submitted this list are not capable, but I do know that it is a group that reflects a world view that is not necessarily the same the civil society groups doing social and environmental justice work, or work on accessibility, or health.  And I worry that if we continuously only have us as open data folks involved in making lists and setting trajectories, then we are missing out on telling really important public policy issues, as they are just not on our horizon.

This is harder to step out of our comfort zones, but I think there is merit in doing so.  I was just going through the G8 resolution (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex) and if you scroll down to:

Action 2: Release of high value data, 

That list is pretty good.

Data Category* (alphabetical order)	Example datasets
Companies	Company/business register
Crime and Justice	Crime statistics, safety
Earth observation	Meteorological/weather, agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting
Education	List of schools; performance of schools, digital skills
Energy and Environment	Pollution levels, energy consumption
Finance and contracts	Transaction spend, contracts let, call for tender, future tenders, local budget, national budget (planned and spent)
Geospatial	Topography, postcodes, national maps, local maps
Global Development	Aid, food security, extractives, land
Government Accountability and Democracy	Government contact points, election results, legislation and statutes, salaries (pay scales), hospitality/gifts
Health	Prescription data, performance data
Science and Research	Genome data, research and educational activity, experiment results
Statistics	National Statistics, Census, infrastructure, wealth, skills
Social mobility and welfare	Housing, health insurance and unemployment benefits
Transport and Infrastructure	Public transport timetables, access points broadband penetration

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:18 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

HI Tracey,

The list was started on OpenDataBC and then moved here to get more input.  I have not taken it outside to other groups.

The idea is to generate a starting list of top 10 datasets.  Some of the datasets will already have been released by some municipalities.  Others may not have been made available by any municipalities.  The point is for publishers to be able to look at the list and see that people are interested.  I get asked over and over again "what do people want?" so I would like to be able to refer to a top ten list to give publishers and idea of what people are interested in.

For example, if it went out now I might choose:

• rezoning permit applications
  
lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

financial - actual expenditures

financial - grant and contribution awards

• crime information
  

I fully expect that the initial list will not be perfect but I think the people on the list have enough knowledge either on their own or with their networks to have a crack at it.

Also, I don't know of any group better than this one for getting things done so that's why I brought it here. :)

I am happy to help get this done however people think it should happen.  I like your categories suggestion - so maybe we should work that in somehow - but I was thinking more at the dataset level.

"Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!"

Thank you!  :)

Given this discussion I won't send anything out now so we can hear from a few more voices.

Cheers,

Herb

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Herb;

I think much more work needs to be done with these before you can do a survey is released and I think there is merit in grouping them.  Can you remind me how this list was made?  Looks like no social planners, community developers, health, environmentalists, or urban planners, housing experts, disability folks, were involved in the making of this list. What would they want?

Some of the data types are indicators and would require a number of datasets and research projects to get to these.  As I was sorting through them it reminded me of the Quality of life reporting systems of the federation of canadian municipalities, who collect these data from about 30 different institutions at all levels of jurisdiction (Grid of data - http://www.municipaldata-donneesmunicipales.ca/Site/Monitoring/grid.php?lang=en).  These data were decided upon as they told a story, overtime, and served a purpose to understand things in the city. Main headings of the report:

• Demographic Background Information (DBI)
• Affordable, Appropriate Housing (AAH)
• Civic Engagement (CE)
• Community and Social Infrastructure (CSI)
• Education (ED)
• Employment and Local Economy (ELE)
• Natural Environment (NE)
• Personal & Community Health (PCH)
• Personal Financial Security (PFS)
• Personal Safety (PS)

The issue of scale is also important here, is this for cities? if so do we want these data aggregated into neighbourhoods? Wards? electoral districts? dissemination areas? Postal Code areas?  GVRD/Metro van, or Van city? just to exemplify the difference.

I think we are maturing as a community, and maybe we can move beyond lists of datasets and start thinking about the best way for us to understand our cities/towns/etc.and think of the datasets that help us understand those things and then find the ways to communicate/discuss etc. these things. 

Also, some of the data on the list are already available.  Anyway, I have sorted the ones in your list.  I am super swamped for the next week, but I would be really happy to work with you and a few others (james?) to go through previous lists, and I would love to consult with some civil society groups and ask them what they want, environment? Community Health? Social Housing? Disability?  I don't know about you, but I find myself often circulating in the same circles and thus perpetuating ideals from a particular lens, this list I think reflects open data people but not necessarily, data users in the sense of actually using data to inform public policy in a real way, or a campaign, etc.  Open data folks like ourselves, got us here, and that is good, but now, I think we can do more, and communicate to people outside our 'open data circles', to those engaged in the day to day as non open data civil society groups and find out what their needs are.

Below is my first pass at classifying the list you shared, it is imperfect and not mutually exclusive, there are comments in brackets beside them.

Public Expenditures

·         financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)

·         Salaries of public officials

·         consultant fees (Maybe a better statement are gov subcontracting by type)

·         contracts

·         budget management (Not sure what is meant here? Which datasets?)

·         financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

·         financial - actual expenditures

·         financial - grant and contribution awards

·         financial - travel and hospitality expenses

Economic Development

·         business license

·         development applications (had twice)

·         approval results of development applications

·         DCC (development cost charges) rates

·         property assessments

·         tax rates (Do they mean property assessments?)

·         annual return data (not just pdf reports) is this taxfiler returns, is so then available at a fee? Which returns?

·         building citations (problems with structures etc...)

Business

·         tender opportunities

Land Use

·         park boundaries (which ones?  National park data are available)

·         land use changes (this too is an indicator, which datasets would be required, for instance parks, building footprints and year of construction, air photos, forests, farm land, etc. With those layers and others over time then land use change analysis is possible, but this is a research project or a geomatics project, not just one dataset)

Infrastructure

·         locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)

·         transit data

·         infrastructure deficits (which one? Roads? Power? Broadband?) also this is a measure, or an indicator, so there would need to be specificity in terms of a theme and then a way to measure that

·         road construction (511 data)

·         road maintenance and emergency work (I am guessing not ambulance emergencies but disruptions due to emergencies)

Demographics

·         vital stats

·         demographic data (these are available)

Framework Data

·         electoral districts (these are available)

·         transit data (Feeds? Routes? Schedules?)

Remote Sensing

·         orthophotos

·         lidar

User Fees

·         service fees (For what? Swimming pools? Rec Programs? School fees)

Democratic engagemet

·         hansards – Fed? Prov/ter? I think some are available, but not necessarily in a useful format.  Is the fed hansard now on open data licence?

·         council

·         petitions

·         elected officials contact information (is available at fed and provincial and I think all cities offer this too, was there something specific?)

·         satisfaction survey results (e.g. http://donnees.ville.montreal.qc.ca/dataset/sondage-satisfaction-citoyens)

Planning

·         traffic study data

·         rezoning permit applications

·         service requests (e.g. http://open311.org/)

Health

·         stream health assessments (i do not know what these are?  Wait times?  These data are available from CIHI but for a fee)

·         health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)

Well Being

·         food bank usage stats

·         homelessness stats

Citizen Engagement

·         public consultations

Freedom of Information

·         completed access to information requests (as is done at the federal level)

·         public documents released under access to information laws (as BC does, for most part)

·         transparency and access to information

Political Accountability

·         lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

·         political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

·         calendar of meetings

·         agendas of meetings

·         minutes of meetings

·         video of meetings

·         audio of meetings

·         transcripts of meetings

·         role call votes

·         attendance records

Safety

·         crime information

Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!

Cheers

Tracey

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:03 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just in case people are wondering what ever happened to this idea... I haven't forgotten.  The Summit was more of a priority for a while there.

I have compiled a list and plan to send out the survey in the near future.

Cheers,

Herb

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Over on the OpenDataBC google group we're developing a list of top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada.

The intention is to simply create a "first cut" at this to use as a starting point and I'm guessing it will evolve over time.  It won't be perfect, but it'll be a place to start.

We would like input from this group.  Please have a look at this list and let me know what, if anything is missing, or if any of these could use some fine tuning.

Once we have a list my intention is to compile this into a SurveyMonkey survey and send it back out to OpenDataBC and this group for voting and we'll see what people think are the top 10.

Here is the current list in no particular order:

• financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
  
• business license
  
• development applications
  
• property assessments
  
• park boundaries
  
• locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)
  
• tender opportunities
  
• electoral districts
  
• transit data
  
• vital stats / demographic data
  
• tax rates
  
• service fees
  
• infrastructure deficits
  
• hansards/council a/v
  
• petitions
  
• annual return data (not just pdf reports)
  
• stats relating to approval or non-approval of development applications
  
• DCC (development cost charges) rates
  
• salaries
  
• consultant fees
  
• traffic study data
  
• orthophotos
  
• lidar
  
• stream health assessments
  
• food bank usage stats
  
• homelessness stats
  
• transit data
  
• contracts
  
• road construction (511 data)
  
• building citations (problems with structures etc...)
  

The question I am thinking of sending is something like:

 "Which of the following datasets should municipalities make a priority and release them as open data?"

If there are any survey geeks out there that see a bias in this question and can suggest better wording please do so.

Also, if any of the bullets seems too ambiguous or vague to be a valid selection alternate suggestions for those would be appreciated.

Thanks,

H

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[James McKinney-2]

On Mar 21, 2014, at 10:55 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Great clarification!

- federal electoral districts (FEDs) are also used to know how certain cities voted in federal and provincial elections, and voter turnout is sometimes used as an indicator of democratic participation.

It’s curious that people analyze provincial elections with federal districts (outside Ontario)… Maybe because the provincial districts were previously not easily available? Or to make it easier to compare with federal elections?

- the file name electoral district (ED) is normally not used for cities, they are called wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries but not EDs, that is how they are distinguished in portals and so on, but now I know that the open data community has renamed these.

It’s not that the open data community has renamed the datasets. I personally just use the words “electoral districts” instead of each time having to write “electoral districts, wards, divisions, quartiers, etc.” whenever I want to refer to these functionally equivalent datasets, as it would be very repetitive and long to read. Functionally, Toronto’s wards and Canada’s electoral districts are the same kind of thing. The only difference is the related government. If you ask the City for Toronto for their “electoral districts” they may not understand, because everyone calls them wards in Toronto, but it’s just different names in different contexts for the same type of data.

- on the 84, I was asking as the number of FEDs are different, and because did not know that wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries nomenclature meant FEDs thought you might have been off somehow, and was curious to what you were refering to.  

Shesh! Should I not ask questions when I am unclear or what!

Sorry if my last message was terse - I just wanted to include as much information as possible and clear any confusions / misunderstandings.

t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 4:26 AM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

We are talking about municipal datasets. Herb started the thread talking about "top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada”. I don’t know why you’re talking about federal electoral districts. For what it’s worth, federal electoral districts are only contiguous with provincial districts in Ontario. Each territory is a single federal district, so their territorial electoral districts obviously do not match. None of the other provinces match the federal districts. Wards are electoral districts; in municipalities with wards, representatives are elected per ward, residents of that ward must vote in that ward, etc. It’s just a different name. Other places in Canada call them “divisions.” In Québec, a few municipalities that did not switch to the new “districts” system maintain electoral “quartiers”. When I say 84 I mean 84 governments: Canada, 10 provinces, and 73 municipalities (and growing). We don’t have the territories yet, because they refuse to give us their electoral district boundary files.

James

On Mar 20, 2014, at 11:43 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey Herb;

This report (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/country/canada/progress-report/report) includes references to many of the datasets I was pointing out, it is the OGP independent report and some of the complaints are the fact that most portals do not have the data I was refering to in them.  Again, I think reflective of who we are and what our interstest are.  Perhaps let muni gov know that this list is a developers/open data enthusiast list and not a list from civil society at large and more outreach would be required to include them. 

They will not make a list unless they are asked Herb as open data is not something they are necessarily engaged in.  The FCM report I pointed to is all about cities, and that list of indicators was created by community grouns and city officials in canada's top 24  cities in terms of population.  If you go throught that list, you will quickly see that most open data portals do not contain these data, and this is also why many civil society folks don't care about portals.  They do not contain the data they need and use.  These are not tek specialist in any way, but they are big data users, so you will  most likely not come accross them at open data events as that is not a space they would gravitate to.

James,

You are discussing wards and so on, so a different scale than federal electoral districts which to my understanding are contiguous with provincial and territorial electoral districts. At lower tiers I did not think they were electoral districts files, but are wards and so on. So on that one I agree. When you say 84, you mean 84 what?

Officials are listed, not in the format you want, but the data are available.

Thx for the clarification on the Hansard and Tax rates.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 1:53 AM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with the "world view" and "comfort zone" assertions and I would guess that each of these groups would come up with a different list.  Maybe we need to encourage these groups to create a list for their purposes?

Ultimately I suppose we need to look at the value of creating a list in the first place.  For me, I just want to give muni's an idea of what at least SOME people are interested in.  It's true we can't speak for everyone.

The G8 list is great but my intention was to construct a list specifically for Canadian municipalities.  This list is specific to nations, though some of them could be addressed at the municipal level (crime for example).

H

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just recalled something!

I do not think the folks that submitted this list are not capable, but I do know that it is a group that reflects a world view that is not necessarily the same the civil society groups doing social and environmental justice work, or work on accessibility, or health.  And I worry that if we continuously only have us as open data folks involved in making lists and setting trajectories, then we are missing out on telling really important public policy issues, as they are just not on our horizon.

This is harder to step out of our comfort zones, but I think there is merit in doing so.  I was just going through the G8 resolution (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex) and if you scroll down to:

Action 2: Release of high value data, 

That list is pretty good.

Data Category* (alphabetical order)	Example datasets
Companies	Company/business register
Crime and Justice	Crime statistics, safety
Earth observation	Meteorological/weather, agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting
Education	List of schools; performance of schools, digital skills
Energy and Environment	Pollution levels, energy consumption
Finance and contracts	Transaction spend, contracts let, call for tender, future tenders, local budget, national budget (planned and spent)
Geospatial	Topography, postcodes, national maps, local maps
Global Development	Aid, food security, extractives, land
Government Accountability and Democracy	Government contact points, election results, legislation and statutes, salaries (pay scales), hospitality/gifts
Health	Prescription data, performance data
Science and Research	Genome data, research and educational activity, experiment results
Statistics	National Statistics, Census, infrastructure, wealth, skills
Social mobility and welfare	Housing, health insurance and unemployment benefits
Transport and Infrastructure	Public transport timetables, access points broadband penetration

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:18 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

HI Tracey,

The list was started on OpenDataBC and then moved here to get more input.  I have not taken it outside to other groups.

The idea is to generate a starting list of top 10 datasets.  Some of the datasets will already have been released by some municipalities.  Others may not have been made available by any municipalities.  The point is for publishers to be able to look at the list and see that people are interested.  I get asked over and over again "what do people want?" so I would like to be able to refer to a top ten list to give publishers and idea of what people are interested in.

For example, if it went out now I might choose:

• rezoning permit applications
  
lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

financial - actual expenditures

financial - grant and contribution awards

• crime information
  

I fully expect that the initial list will not be perfect but I think the people on the list have enough knowledge either on their own or with their networks to have a crack at it.

Also, I don't know of any group better than this one for getting things done so that's why I brought it here. :)

I am happy to help get this done however people think it should happen.  I like your categories suggestion - so maybe we should work that in somehow - but I was thinking more at the dataset level.

"Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!"

Thank you!  :)

Given this discussion I won't send anything out now so we can hear from a few more voices.

Cheers,

Herb

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Herb;

I think much more work needs to be done with these before you can do a survey is released and I think there is merit in grouping them.  Can you remind me how this list was made?  Looks like no social planners, community developers, health, environmentalists, or urban planners, housing experts, disability folks, were involved in the making of this list. What would they want?

Some of the data types are indicators and would require a number of datasets and research projects to get to these.  As I was sorting through them it reminded me of the Quality of life reporting systems of the federation of canadian municipalities, who collect these data from about 30 different institutions at all levels of jurisdiction (Grid of data - http://www.municipaldata-donneesmunicipales.ca/Site/Monitoring/grid.php?lang=en).  These data were decided upon as they told a story, overtime, and served a purpose to understand things in the city. Main headings of the report:

• Demographic Background Information (DBI)
• Affordable, Appropriate Housing (AAH)
• Civic Engagement (CE)
• Community and Social Infrastructure (CSI)
• Education (ED)
• Employment and Local Economy (ELE)
• Natural Environment (NE)
• Personal & Community Health (PCH)
• Personal Financial Security (PFS)
• Personal Safety (PS)

The issue of scale is also important here, is this for cities? if so do we want these data aggregated into neighbourhoods? Wards? electoral districts? dissemination areas? Postal Code areas?  GVRD/Metro van, or Van city? just to exemplify the difference.

I think we are maturing as a community, and maybe we can move beyond lists of datasets and start thinking about the best way for us to understand our cities/towns/etc.and think of the datasets that help us understand those things and then find the ways to communicate/discuss etc. these things. 

Also, some of the data on the list are already available.  Anyway, I have sorted the ones in your list.  I am super swamped for the next week, but I would be really happy to work with you and a few others (james?) to go through previous lists, and I would love to consult with some civil society groups and ask them what they want, environment? Community Health? Social Housing? Disability?  I don't know about you, but I find myself often circulating in the same circles and thus perpetuating ideals from a particular lens, this list I think reflects open data people but not necessarily, data users in the sense of actually using data to inform public policy in a real way, or a campaign, etc.  Open data folks like ourselves, got us here, and that is good, but now, I think we can do more, and communicate to people outside our 'open data circles', to those engaged in the day to day as non open data civil society groups and find out what their needs are.

Below is my first pass at classifying the list you shared, it is imperfect and not mutually exclusive, there are comments in brackets beside them.

Public Expenditures

·         financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)

·         Salaries of public officials

·         consultant fees (Maybe a better statement are gov subcontracting by type)

·         contracts

·         budget management (Not sure what is meant here? Which datasets?)

·         financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

·         financial - actual expenditures

·         financial - grant and contribution awards

·         financial - travel and hospitality expenses

Economic Development

·         business license

·         development applications (had twice)

·         approval results of development applications

·         DCC (development cost charges) rates

·         property assessments

·         tax rates (Do they mean property assessments?)

·         annual return data (not just pdf reports) is this taxfiler returns, is so then available at a fee? Which returns?

·         building citations (problems with structures etc...)

Business

·         tender opportunities

Land Use

·         park boundaries (which ones?  National park data are available)

·         land use changes (this too is an indicator, which datasets would be required, for instance parks, building footprints and year of construction, air photos, forests, farm land, etc. With those layers and others over time then land use change analysis is possible, but this is a research project or a geomatics project, not just one dataset)

Infrastructure

·         locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)

·         transit data

·         infrastructure deficits (which one? Roads? Power? Broadband?) also this is a measure, or an indicator, so there would need to be specificity in terms of a theme and then a way to measure that

·         road construction (511 data)

·         road maintenance and emergency work (I am guessing not ambulance emergencies but disruptions due to emergencies)

Demographics

·         vital stats

·         demographic data (these are available)

Framework Data

·         electoral districts (these are available)

·         transit data (Feeds? Routes? Schedules?)

Remote Sensing

·         orthophotos

·         lidar

User Fees

·         service fees (For what? Swimming pools? Rec Programs? School fees)

Democratic engagemet

·         hansards – Fed? Prov/ter? I think some are available, but not necessarily in a useful format.  Is the fed hansard now on open data licence?

·         council

·         petitions

·         elected officials contact information (is available at fed and provincial and I think all cities offer this too, was there something specific?)

·         satisfaction survey results (e.g. http://donnees.ville.montreal.qc.ca/dataset/sondage-satisfaction-citoyens)

Planning

·         traffic study data

·         rezoning permit applications

·         service requests (e.g. http://open311.org/)

Health

·         stream health assessments (i do not know what these are?  Wait times?  These data are available from CIHI but for a fee)

·         health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)

Well Being

·         food bank usage stats

·         homelessness stats

Citizen Engagement

·         public consultations

Freedom of Information

·         completed access to information requests (as is done at the federal level)

·         public documents released under access to information laws (as BC does, for most part)

·         transparency and access to information

Political Accountability

·         lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

·         political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

·         calendar of meetings

·         agendas of meetings

·         minutes of meetings

·         video of meetings

·         audio of meetings

·         transcripts of meetings

·         role call votes

·         attendance records

Safety

·         crime information

Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!

Cheers

Tracey

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:03 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just in case people are wondering what ever happened to this idea... I haven't forgotten.  The Summit was more of a priority for a while there.

I have compiled a list and plan to send out the survey in the near future.

Cheers,

Herb

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Over on the OpenDataBC google group we're developing a list of top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada.

The intention is to simply create a "first cut" at this to use as a starting point and I'm guessing it will evolve over time.  It won't be perfect, but it'll be a place to start.

We would like input from this group.  Please have a look at this list and let me know what, if anything is missing, or if any of these could use some fine tuning.

Once we have a list my intention is to compile this into a SurveyMonkey survey and send it back out to OpenDataBC and this group for voting and we'll see what people think are the top 10.

Here is the current list in no particular order:

• financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
  
• business license
  
• development applications
  
• property assessments
  
• park boundaries
  
• locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)
  
• tender opportunities
  
• electoral districts
  
• transit data
  
• vital stats / demographic data
  
• tax rates
  
• service fees
  
• infrastructure deficits
  
• hansards/council a/v
  
• petitions
  
• annual return data (not just pdf reports)
  
• stats relating to approval or non-approval of development applications
  
• DCC (development cost charges) rates
  
• salaries
  
• consultant fees
  
• traffic study data
  
• orthophotos
  
• lidar
  
• stream health assessments
  
• food bank usage stats
  
• homelessness stats
  
• transit data
  
• contracts
  
• road construction (511 data)
  
• building citations (problems with structures etc...)
  

The question I am thinking of sending is something like:

 "Which of the following datasets should municipalities make a priority and release them as open data?"

If there are any survey geeks out there that see a bias in this question and can suggest better wording please do so.

Also, if any of the bullets seems too ambiguous or vague to be a valid selection alternate suggestions for those would be appreciated.

Thanks,

H

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[Gerry Tychon-2]

I think this is a great discussion. And I think James has indicated that not all of the electoral/geo-administrative data is freely and openly available which it should be in our democracy.

Making this kind of data available could be a focused effort of the Canadian Geomatics Community Round Table.

http://cgcrt.ca/

The sooner the better.

... ggt

On 21/03/2014 10:10 AM, James McKinney wrote:

On Mar 21, 2014, at 10:55 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Great clarification!

- federal electoral districts (FEDs) are also used to know how certain cities voted in federal and provincial elections, and voter turnout is sometimes used as an indicator of democratic participation.

It’s curious that people analyze provincial elections with federal districts (outside Ontario)… Maybe because the provincial districts were previously not easily available? Or to make it easier to compare with federal elections?

- the file name electoral district (ED) is normally not used for cities, they are called wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries but not EDs, that is how they are distinguished in portals and so on, but now I know that the open data community has renamed these.

It’s not that the open data community has renamed the datasets. I personally just use the words “electoral districts” instead of each time having to write “electoral districts, wards, divisions, quartiers, etc.” whenever I want to refer to these functionally equivalent datasets, as it would be very repetitive and long to read. Functionally, Toronto’s wards and Canada’s electoral districts are the same kind of thing. The only difference is the related government. If you ask the City for Toronto for their “electoral districts” they may not understand, because everyone calls them wards in Toronto, but it’s just different names in different contexts for the same type of data.

- on the 84, I was asking as the number of FEDs are different, and because did not know that wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries nomenclature meant FEDs thought you might have been off somehow, and was curious to what you were refering to.  

Shesh! Should I not ask questions when I am unclear or what!

Sorry if my last message was terse - I just wanted to include as much information as possible and clear any confusions / misunderstandings.

t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 4:26 AM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

We are talking about municipal datasets. Herb started the thread talking about "top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada”. I don’t know why you’re talking about federal electoral districts. For what it’s worth, federal electoral districts are only contiguous with provincial districts in Ontario. Each territory is a single federal district, so their territorial electoral districts obviously do not match. None of the other provinces match the federal districts. Wards are electoral districts; in municipalities with wards, representatives are elected per ward, residents of that ward must vote in that ward, etc. It’s just a different name. Other places in Canada call them “divisions.” In Québec, a few municipalities that did not switch to the new “districts” system maintain electoral “quartiers”. When I say 84 I mean 84 governments: Canada, 10 provinces, and 73 municipalities (and growing). We don’t have the territories yet, because they refuse to give us their electoral district boundary files.

James

On Mar 20, 2014, at 11:43 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey Herb;

This report (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/country/canada/progress-report/report) includes references to many of the datasets I was pointing out, it is the OGP independent report and some of the complaints are the fact that most portals do not have the data I was refering to in them.  Again, I think reflective of who we are and what our interstest are.  Perhaps let muni gov know that this list is a developers/open data enthusiast list and not a list from civil society at large and more outreach would be required to include them. 

They will not make a list unless they are asked Herb as open data is not something they are necessarily engaged in.  The FCM report I pointed to is all about cities, and that list of indicators was created by community grouns and city officials in canada's top 24  cities in terms of population.  If you go throught that list, you will quickly see that most open data portals do not contain these data, and this is also why many civil society folks don't care about portals.  They do not contain the data they need and use.  These are not tek specialist in any way, but they are big data users, so you will  most likely not come accross them at open data events as that is not a space they would gravitate to.

James,

You are discussing wards and so on, so a different scale than federal electoral districts which to my understanding are contiguous with provincial and territorial electoral districts. At lower tiers I did not think they were electoral districts files, but are wards and so on. So on that one I agree. When you say 84, you mean 84 what?

Officials are listed, not in the format you want, but the data are available.

Thx for the clarification on the Hansard and Tax rates.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 1:53 AM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with the "world view" and "comfort zone" assertions and I would guess that each of these groups would come up with a different list.  Maybe we need to encourage these groups to create a list for their purposes?

Ultimately I suppose we need to look at the value of creating a list in the first place.  For me, I just want to give muni's an idea of what at least SOME people are interested in.  It's true we can't speak for everyone.

The G8 list is great but my intention was to construct a list specifically for Canadian municipalities.  This list is specific to nations, though some of them could be addressed at the municipal level (crime for example).

H

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just recalled something!

I do not think the folks that submitted this list are not capable, but I do know that it is a group that reflects a world view that is not necessarily the same the civil society groups doing social and environmental justice work, or work on accessibility, or health.  And I worry that if we continuously only have us as open data folks involved in making lists and setting trajectories, then we are missing out on telling really important public policy issues, as they are just not on our horizon.

This is harder to step out of our comfort zones, but I think there is merit in doing so.  I was just going through the G8 resolution (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex) and if you scroll down to:

Action 2: Release of high value data, 

That list is pretty good.

Data Category* (alphabetical order)	Example datasets
Companies	Company/business register
Crime and Justice	Crime statistics, safety
Earth observation	Meteorological/weather, agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting
Education	List of schools; performance of schools, digital skills
Energy and Environment	Pollution levels, energy consumption
Finance and contracts	Transaction spend, contracts let, call for tender, future tenders, local budget, national budget (planned and spent)
Geospatial	Topography, postcodes, national maps, local maps
Global Development	Aid, food security, extractives, land
Government Accountability and Democracy	Government contact points, election results, legislation and statutes, salaries (pay scales), hospitality/gifts
Health	Prescription data, performance data
Science and Research	Genome data, research and educational activity, experiment results
Statistics	National Statistics, Census, infrastructure, wealth, skills
Social mobility and welfare	Housing, health insurance and unemployment benefits
Transport and Infrastructure	Public transport timetables, access points broadband penetration

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:18 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

HI Tracey,

The list was started on OpenDataBC and then moved here to get more input.  I have not taken it outside to other groups.

The idea is to generate a starting list of top 10 datasets.  Some of the datasets will already have been released by some municipalities.  Others may not have been made available by any municipalities.  The point is for publishers to be able to look at the list and see that people are interested.  I get asked over and over again "what do people want?" so I would like to be able to refer to a top ten list to give publishers and idea of what people are interested in.

For example, if it went out now I might choose:

• rezoning permit applications
  
lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

financial - actual expenditures

financial - grant and contribution awards

• crime information
  

I fully expect that the initial list will not be perfect but I think the people on the list have enough knowledge either on their own or with their networks to have a crack at it.

Also, I don't know of any group better than this one for getting things done so that's why I brought it here. :)

I am happy to help get this done however people think it should happen.  I like your categories suggestion - so maybe we should work that in somehow - but I was thinking more at the dataset level.

"Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!"

Thank you!  :)

Given this discussion I won't send anything out now so we can hear from a few more voices.

Cheers,

Herb

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Herb;

I think much more work needs to be done with these before you can do a survey is released and I think there is merit in grouping them.  Can you remind me how this list was made?  Looks like no social planners, community developers, health, environmentalists, or urban planners, housing experts, disability folks, were involved in the making of this list. What would they want?

Some of the data types are indicators and would require a number of datasets and research projects to get to these.  As I was sorting through them it reminded me of the Quality of life reporting systems of the federation of canadian municipalities, who collect these data from about 30 different institutions at all levels of jurisdiction (Grid of data - http://www.municipaldata-donneesmunicipales.ca/Site/Monitoring/grid.php?lang=en).  These data were decided upon as they told a story, overtime, and served a purpose to understand things in the city. Main headings of the report:

• Demographic Background Information (DBI)
• Affordable, Appropriate Housing (AAH)
• Civic Engagement (CE)
• Community and Social Infrastructure (CSI)
• Education (ED)
• Employment and Local Economy (ELE)
• Natural Environment (NE)
• Personal & Community Health (PCH)
• Personal Financial Security (PFS)
• Personal Safety (PS)

The issue of scale is also important here, is this for cities? if so do we want these data aggregated into neighbourhoods? Wards? electoral districts? dissemination areas? Postal Code areas?  GVRD/Metro van, or Van city? just to exemplify the difference.

I think we are maturing as a community, and maybe we can move beyond lists of datasets and start thinking about the best way for us to understand our cities/towns/etc.and think of the datasets that help us understand those things and then find the ways to communicate/discuss etc. these things. 

Also, some of the data on the list are already available.  Anyway, I have sorted the ones in your list.  I am super swamped for the next week, but I would be really happy to work with you and a few others (james?) to go through previous lists, and I would love to consult with some civil society groups and ask them what they want, environment? Community Health? Social Housing? Disability?  I don't know about you, but I find myself often circulating in the same circles and thus perpetuating ideals from a particular lens, this list I think reflects open data people but not necessarily, data users in the sense of actually using data to inform public policy in a real way, or a campaign, etc.  Open data folks like ourselves, got us here, and that is good, but now, I think we can do more, and communicate to people outside our 'open data circles', to those engaged in the day to day as non open data civil society groups and find out what their needs are.

Below is my first pass at classifying the list you shared, it is imperfect and not mutually exclusive, there are comments in brackets beside them.

Public Expenditures

·         financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)

·         Salaries of public officials

·         consultant fees (Maybe a better statement are gov subcontracting by type)

·         contracts

·         budget management (Not sure what is meant here? Which datasets?)

·         financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

·         financial - actual expenditures

·         financial - grant and contribution awards

·         financial - travel and hospitality expenses

Economic Development

·         business license

·         development applications (had twice)

·         approval results of development applications

·         DCC (development cost charges) rates

·         property assessments

·         tax rates (Do they mean property assessments?)

·         annual return data (not just pdf reports) is this taxfiler returns, is so then available at a fee? Which returns?

·         building citations (problems with structures etc...)

Business

·         tender opportunities

Land Use

·         park boundaries (which ones?  National park data are available)

·         land use changes (this too is an indicator, which datasets would be required, for instance parks, building footprints and year of construction, air photos, forests, farm land, etc. With those layers and others over time then land use change analysis is possible, but this is a research project or a geomatics project, not just one dataset)

Infrastructure

·         locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)

·         transit data

·         infrastructure deficits (which one? Roads? Power? Broadband?) also this is a measure, or an indicator, so there would need to be specificity in terms of a theme and then a way to measure that

·         road construction (511 data)

·         road maintenance and emergency work (I am guessing not ambulance emergencies but disruptions due to emergencies)

Demographics

·         vital stats

·         demographic data (these are available)

Framework Data

·         electoral districts (these are available)

·         transit data (Feeds? Routes? Schedules?)

Remote Sensing

·         orthophotos

·         lidar

User Fees

·         service fees (For what? Swimming pools? Rec Programs? School fees)

Democratic engagemet

·         hansards – Fed? Prov/ter? I think some are available, but not necessarily in a useful format.  Is the fed hansard now on open data licence?

·         council

·         petitions

·         elected officials contact information (is available at fed and provincial and I think all cities offer this too, was there something specific?)

·         satisfaction survey results (e.g. http://donnees.ville.montreal.qc.ca/dataset/sondage-satisfaction-citoyens)

Planning

·         traffic study data

·         rezoning permit applications

·         service requests (e.g. http://open311.org/)

Health

·         stream health assessments (i do not know what these are?  Wait times?  These data are available from CIHI but for a fee)

·         health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)

Well Being

·         food bank usage stats

·         homelessness stats

Citizen Engagement

·         public consultations

Freedom of Information

·         completed access to information requests (as is done at the federal level)

·         public documents released under access to information laws (as BC does, for most part)

·         transparency and access to information

Political Accountability

·         lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

·         political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

·         calendar of meetings

·         agendas of meetings

·         minutes of meetings

·         video of meetings

·         audio of meetings

·         transcripts of meetings

·         role call votes

·         attendance records

Safety

·         crime information

Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!

Cheers

Tracey

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:03 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just in case people are wondering what ever happened to this idea... I haven't forgotten.  The Summit was more of a priority for a while there.

I have compiled a list and plan to send out the survey in the near future.

Cheers,

Herb

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Over on the OpenDataBC google group we're developing a list of top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada.

The intention is to simply create a "first cut" at this to use as a starting point and I'm guessing it will evolve over time.  It won't be perfect, but it'll be a place to start.

We would like input from this group.  Please have a look at this list and let me know what, if anything is missing, or if any of these could use some fine tuning.

Once we have a list my intention is to compile this into a SurveyMonkey survey and send it back out to OpenDataBC and this group for voting and we'll see what people think are the top 10.

Here is the current list in no particular order:

• financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
  
• business license
  
• development applications
  
• property assessments
  
• park boundaries
  
• locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)
  
• tender opportunities
  
• electoral districts
  
• transit data
  
• vital stats / demographic data
  
• tax rates
  
• service fees
  
• infrastructure deficits
  
• hansards/council a/v
  
• petitions
  
• annual return data (not just pdf reports)
  
• stats relating to approval or non-approval of development applications
  
• DCC (development cost charges) rates
  
• salaries
  
• consultant fees
  
• traffic study data
  
• orthophotos
  
• lidar
  
• stream health assessments
  
• food bank usage stats
  
• homelessness stats
  
• transit data
  
• contracts
  
• road construction (511 data)
  
• building citations (problems with structures etc...)
  

The question I am thinking of sending is something like:

 "Which of the following datasets should municipalities make a priority and release them as open data?"

If there are any survey geeks out there that see a bias in this question and can suggest better wording please do so.

Also, if any of the bullets seems too ambiguous or vague to be a valid selection alternate suggestions for those would be appreciated.

Thanks,

H

--

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

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http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

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<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

_______________________________________________
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http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
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--

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<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
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--

Tracey P. Lauriault

http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

_______________________________________________
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--

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http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

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[Tracey P. Lauriault]

That is for sure Gerry!  All local framework datasets need to be produced!

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:04 PM, Gerry Tychon <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think this is a great discussion. And I think James has indicated that not all of the electoral/geo-administrative data is freely and openly available which it should be in our democracy.

Making this kind of data available could be a focused effort of the Canadian Geomatics Community Round Table.

http://cgcrt.ca/

The sooner the better.

... ggt

On 21/03/2014 10:10 AM, James McKinney wrote:

On Mar 21, 2014, at 10:55 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Great clarification!

- federal electoral districts (FEDs) are also used to know how certain cities voted in federal and provincial elections, and voter turnout is sometimes used as an indicator of democratic participation.

It’s curious that people analyze provincial elections with federal districts (outside Ontario)… Maybe because the provincial districts were previously not easily available? Or to make it easier to compare with federal elections?

- the file name electoral district (ED) is normally not used for cities, they are called wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries but not EDs, that is how they are distinguished in portals and so on, but now I know that the open data community has renamed these.

It’s not that the open data community has renamed the datasets. I personally just use the words “electoral districts” instead of each time having to write “electoral districts, wards, divisions, quartiers, etc.” whenever I want to refer to these functionally equivalent datasets, as it would be very repetitive and long to read. Functionally, Toronto’s wards and Canada’s electoral districts are the same kind of thing. The only difference is the related government. If you ask the City for Toronto for their “electoral districts” they may not understand, because everyone calls them wards in Toronto, but it’s just different names in different contexts for the same type of data.

- on the 84, I was asking as the number of FEDs are different, and because did not know that wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries nomenclature meant FEDs thought you might have been off somehow, and was curious to what you were refering to.  

Shesh! Should I not ask questions when I am unclear or what!

Sorry if my last message was terse - I just wanted to include as much information as possible and clear any confusions / misunderstandings.

t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 4:26 AM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

We are talking about municipal datasets. Herb started the thread talking about "top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada”. I don’t know why you’re talking about federal electoral districts. For what it’s worth, federal electoral districts are only contiguous with provincial districts in Ontario. Each territory is a single federal district, so their territorial electoral districts obviously do not match. None of the other provinces match the federal districts. Wards are electoral districts; in municipalities with wards, representatives are elected per ward, residents of that ward must vote in that ward, etc. It’s just a different name. Other places in Canada call them “divisions.” In Québec, a few municipalities that did not switch to the new “districts” system maintain electoral “quartiers”. When I say 84 I mean 84 governments: Canada, 10 provinces, and 73 municipalities (and growing). We don’t have the territories yet, because they refuse to give us their electoral district boundary files.

James

On Mar 20, 2014, at 11:43 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey Herb;

This report (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/country/canada/progress-report/report) includes references to many of the datasets I was pointing out, it is the OGP independent report and some of the complaints are the fact that most portals do not have the data I was refering to in them.  Again, I think reflective of who we are and what our interstest are.  Perhaps let muni gov know that this list is a developers/open data enthusiast list and not a list from civil society at large and more outreach would be required to include them. 

They will not make a list unless they are asked Herb as open data is not something they are necessarily engaged in.  The FCM report I pointed to is all about cities, and that list of indicators was created by community grouns and city officials in canada's top 24  cities in terms of population.  If you go throught that list, you will quickly see that most open data portals do not contain these data, and this is also why many civil society folks don't care about portals.  They do not contain the data they need and use.  These are not tek specialist in any way, but they are big data users, so you will  most likely not come accross them at open data events as that is not a space they would gravitate to.

James,

You are discussing wards and so on, so a different scale than federal electoral districts which to my understanding are contiguous with provincial and territorial electoral districts. At lower tiers I did not think they were electoral districts files, but are wards and so on. So on that one I agree. When you say 84, you mean 84 what?

Officials are listed, not in the format you want, but the data are available.

Thx for the clarification on the Hansard and Tax rates.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 1:53 AM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with the "world view" and "comfort zone" assertions and I would guess that each of these groups would come up with a different list.  Maybe we need to encourage these groups to create a list for their purposes?

Ultimately I suppose we need to look at the value of creating a list in the first place.  For me, I just want to give muni's an idea of what at least SOME people are interested in.  It's true we can't speak for everyone.

The G8 list is great but my intention was to construct a list specifically for Canadian municipalities.  This list is specific to nations, though some of them could be addressed at the municipal level (crime for example).

H

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just recalled something!

I do not think the folks that submitted this list are not capable, but I do know that it is a group that reflects a world view that is not necessarily the same the civil society groups doing social and environmental justice work, or work on accessibility, or health.  And I worry that if we continuously only have us as open data folks involved in making lists and setting trajectories, then we are missing out on telling really important public policy issues, as they are just not on our horizon.

This is harder to step out of our comfort zones, but I think there is merit in doing so.  I was just going through the G8 resolution (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex) and if you scroll down to:

Action 2: Release of high value data, 

That list is pretty good.

Data Category* (alphabetical order)	Example datasets
Companies	Company/business register
Crime and Justice	Crime statistics, safety
Earth observation	Meteorological/weather, agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting
Education	List of schools; performance of schools, digital skills
Energy and Environment	Pollution levels, energy consumption
Finance and contracts	Transaction spend, contracts let, call for tender, future tenders, local budget, national budget (planned and spent)
Geospatial	Topography, postcodes, national maps, local maps
Global Development	Aid, food security, extractives, land
Government Accountability and Democracy	Government contact points, election results, legislation and statutes, salaries (pay scales), hospitality/gifts
Health	Prescription data, performance data
Science and Research	Genome data, research and educational activity, experiment results
Statistics	National Statistics, Census, infrastructure, wealth, skills
Social mobility and welfare	Housing, health insurance and unemployment benefits
Transport and Infrastructure	Public transport timetables, access points broadband penetration

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:18 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

HI Tracey,

The list was started on OpenDataBC and then moved here to get more input.  I have not taken it outside to other groups.

The idea is to generate a starting list of top 10 datasets.  Some of the datasets will already have been released by some municipalities.  Others may not have been made available by any municipalities.  The point is for publishers to be able to look at the list and see that people are interested.  I get asked over and over again "what do people want?" so I would like to be able to refer to a top ten list to give publishers and idea of what people are interested in.

For example, if it went out now I might choose:

• rezoning permit applications
  
lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

financial - actual expenditures

financial - grant and contribution awards

• crime information
  

I fully expect that the initial list will not be perfect but I think the people on the list have enough knowledge either on their own or with their networks to have a crack at it.

Also, I don't know of any group better than this one for getting things done so that's why I brought it here. :)

I am happy to help get this done however people think it should happen.  I like your categories suggestion - so maybe we should work that in somehow - but I was thinking more at the dataset level.

"Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!"

Thank you!  :)

Given this discussion I won't send anything out now so we can hear from a few more voices.

Cheers,

Herb

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Herb;

I think much more work needs to be done with these before you can do a survey is released and I think there is merit in grouping them.  Can you remind me how this list was made?  Looks like no social planners, community developers, health, environmentalists, or urban planners, housing experts, disability folks, were involved in the making of this list. What would they want?

Some of the data types are indicators and would require a number of datasets and research projects to get to these.  As I was sorting through them it reminded me of the Quality of life reporting systems of the federation of canadian municipalities, who collect these data from about 30 different institutions at all levels of jurisdiction (Grid of data - http://www.municipaldata-donneesmunicipales.ca/Site/Monitoring/grid.php?lang=en).  These data were decided upon as they told a story, overtime, and served a purpose to understand things in the city. Main headings of the report:

• Demographic Background Information (DBI)
• Affordable, Appropriate Housing (AAH)
• Civic Engagement (CE)
• Community and Social Infrastructure (CSI)
• Education (ED)
• Employment and Local Economy (ELE)
• Natural Environment (NE)
• Personal & Community Health (PCH)
• Personal Financial Security (PFS)
• Personal Safety (PS)

The issue of scale is also important here, is this for cities? if so do we want these data aggregated into neighbourhoods? Wards? electoral districts? dissemination areas? Postal Code areas?  GVRD/Metro van, or Van city? just to exemplify the difference.

I think we are maturing as a community, and maybe we can move beyond lists of datasets and start thinking about the best way for us to understand our cities/towns/etc.and think of the datasets that help us understand those things and then find the ways to communicate/discuss etc. these things. 

Also, some of the data on the list are already available.  Anyway, I have sorted the ones in your list.  I am super swamped for the next week, but I would be really happy to work with you and a few others (james?) to go through previous lists, and I would love to consult with some civil society groups and ask them what they want, environment? Community Health? Social Housing? Disability?  I don't know about you, but I find myself often circulating in the same circles and thus perpetuating ideals from a particular lens, this list I think reflects open data people but not necessarily, data users in the sense of actually using data to inform public policy in a real way, or a campaign, etc.  Open data folks like ourselves, got us here, and that is good, but now, I think we can do more, and communicate to people outside our 'open data circles', to those engaged in the day to day as non open data civil society groups and find out what their needs are.

Below is my first pass at classifying the list you shared, it is imperfect and not mutually exclusive, there are comments in brackets beside them.

Public Expenditures

·         financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)

·         Salaries of public officials

·         consultant fees (Maybe a better statement are gov subcontracting by type)

·         contracts

·         budget management (Not sure what is meant here? Which datasets?)

·         financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

·         financial - actual expenditures

·         financial - grant and contribution awards

·         financial - travel and hospitality expenses

Economic Development

·         business license

·         development applications (had twice)

·         approval results of development applications

·         DCC (development cost charges) rates

·         property assessments

·         tax rates (Do they mean property assessments?)

·         annual return data (not just pdf reports) is this taxfiler returns, is so then available at a fee? Which returns?

·         building citations (problems with structures etc...)

Business

·         tender opportunities

Land Use

·         park boundaries (which ones?  National park data are available)

·         land use changes (this too is an indicator, which datasets would be required, for instance parks, building footprints and year of construction, air photos, forests, farm land, etc. With those layers and others over time then land use change analysis is possible, but this is a research project or a geomatics project, not just one dataset)

Infrastructure

·         locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)

·         transit data

·         infrastructure deficits (which one? Roads? Power? Broadband?) also this is a measure, or an indicator, so there would need to be specificity in terms of a theme and then a way to measure that

·         road construction (511 data)

·         road maintenance and emergency work (I am guessing not ambulance emergencies but disruptions due to emergencies)

Demographics

·         vital stats

·         demographic data (these are available)

Framework Data

·         electoral districts (these are available)

·         transit data (Feeds? Routes? Schedules?)

Remote Sensing

·         orthophotos

·         lidar

User Fees

·         service fees (For what? Swimming pools? Rec Programs? School fees)

Democratic engagemet

·         hansards – Fed? Prov/ter? I think some are available, but not necessarily in a useful format.  Is the fed hansard now on open data licence?

·         council

·         petitions

·         elected officials contact information (is available at fed and provincial and I think all cities offer this too, was there something specific?)

·         satisfaction survey results (e.g. http://donnees.ville.montreal.qc.ca/dataset/sondage-satisfaction-citoyens)

Planning

·         traffic study data

·         rezoning permit applications

·         service requests (e.g. http://open311.org/)

Health

·         stream health assessments (i do not know what these are?  Wait times?  These data are available from CIHI but for a fee)

·         health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)

Well Being

·         food bank usage stats

·         homelessness stats

Citizen Engagement

·         public consultations

Freedom of Information

·         completed access to information requests (as is done at the federal level)

·         public documents released under access to information laws (as BC does, for most part)

·         transparency and access to information

Political Accountability

·         lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

·         political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

·         calendar of meetings

·         agendas of meetings

·         minutes of meetings

·         video of meetings

·         audio of meetings

·         transcripts of meetings

·         role call votes

·         attendance records

Safety

·         crime information

Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!

Cheers

Tracey

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:03 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just in case people are wondering what ever happened to this idea... I haven't forgotten.  The Summit was more of a priority for a while there.

I have compiled a list and plan to send out the survey in the near future.

Cheers,

Herb

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Over on the OpenDataBC google group we're developing a list of top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada.

The intention is to simply create a "first cut" at this to use as a starting point and I'm guessing it will evolve over time.  It won't be perfect, but it'll be a place to start.

We would like input from this group.  Please have a look at this list and let me know what, if anything is missing, or if any of these could use some fine tuning.

Once we have a list my intention is to compile this into a SurveyMonkey survey and send it back out to OpenDataBC and this group for voting and we'll see what people think are the top 10.

Here is the current list in no particular order:

• financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
  
• business license
  
• development applications
  
• property assessments
  
• park boundaries
  
• locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)
  
• tender opportunities
  
• electoral districts
  
• transit data
  
• vital stats / demographic data
  
• tax rates
  
• service fees
  
• infrastructure deficits
  
• hansards/council a/v
  
• petitions
  
• annual return data (not just pdf reports)
  
• stats relating to approval or non-approval of development applications
  
• DCC (development cost charges) rates
  
• salaries
  
• consultant fees
  
• traffic study data
  
• orthophotos
  
• lidar
  
• stream health assessments
  
• food bank usage stats
  
• homelessness stats
  
• transit data
  
• contracts
  
• road construction (511 data)
  
• building citations (problems with structures etc...)
  

The question I am thinking of sending is something like:

 "Which of the following datasets should municipalities make a priority and release them as open data?"

If there are any survey geeks out there that see a bias in this question and can suggest better wording please do so.

Also, if any of the bullets seems too ambiguous or vague to be a valid selection alternate suggestions for those would be appreciated.

Thanks,

H

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http://datalibre.ca/

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http://datalibre.ca/

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https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

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[James McKinney-2]

I had previously tried to get this data on the agenda of the Canadian Council on Geomatics, GeoBase, and Centre for Topographic Information, but those conversations stalled. If anyone has an “in” with the Canadian Geomatics Community Round Table and knows someone who would be passionate about electoral/administrative geospatial data, it’d be great to collaborate with them or talk to them about how to make this data more broadly available.

James

On Mar 21, 2014, at 1:18 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

That is for sure Gerry!  All local framework datasets need to be produced!

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:04 PM, Gerry Tychon <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think this is a great discussion. And I think James has indicated that not all of the electoral/geo-administrative data is freely and openly available which it should be in our democracy.

Making this kind of data available could be a focused effort of the Canadian Geomatics Community Round Table.

http://cgcrt.ca/

The sooner the better.

... ggt

On 21/03/2014 10:10 AM, James McKinney wrote:

On Mar 21, 2014, at 10:55 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Great clarification!

- federal electoral districts (FEDs) are also used to know how certain cities voted in federal and provincial elections, and voter turnout is sometimes used as an indicator of democratic participation.

It’s curious that people analyze provincial elections with federal districts (outside Ontario)… Maybe because the provincial districts were previously not easily available? Or to make it easier to compare with federal elections?

- the file name electoral district (ED) is normally not used for cities, they are called wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries but not EDs, that is how they are distinguished in portals and so on, but now I know that the open data community has renamed these.

It’s not that the open data community has renamed the datasets. I personally just use the words “electoral districts” instead of each time having to write “electoral districts, wards, divisions, quartiers, etc.” whenever I want to refer to these functionally equivalent datasets, as it would be very repetitive and long to read. Functionally, Toronto’s wards and Canada’s electoral districts are the same kind of thing. The only difference is the related government. If you ask the City for Toronto for their “electoral districts” they may not understand, because everyone calls them wards in Toronto, but it’s just different names in different contexts for the same type of data.

- on the 84, I was asking as the number of FEDs are different, and because did not know that wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries nomenclature meant FEDs thought you might have been off somehow, and was curious to what you were refering to.  

Shesh! Should I not ask questions when I am unclear or what!

Sorry if my last message was terse - I just wanted to include as much information as possible and clear any confusions / misunderstandings.

t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 4:26 AM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

We are talking about municipal datasets. Herb started the thread talking about "top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada”. I don’t know why you’re talking about federal electoral districts. For what it’s worth, federal electoral districts are only contiguous with provincial districts in Ontario. Each territory is a single federal district, so their territorial electoral districts obviously do not match. None of the other provinces match the federal districts. Wards are electoral districts; in municipalities with wards, representatives are elected per ward, residents of that ward must vote in that ward, etc. It’s just a different name. Other places in Canada call them “divisions.” In Québec, a few municipalities that did not switch to the new “districts” system maintain electoral “quartiers”. When I say 84 I mean 84 governments: Canada, 10 provinces, and 73 municipalities (and growing). We don’t have the territories yet, because they refuse to give us their electoral district boundary files.

James

On Mar 20, 2014, at 11:43 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey Herb;

This report (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/country/canada/progress-report/report) includes references to many of the datasets I was pointing out, it is the OGP independent report and some of the complaints are the fact that most portals do not have the data I was refering to in them.  Again, I think reflective of who we are and what our interstest are.  Perhaps let muni gov know that this list is a developers/open data enthusiast list and not a list from civil society at large and more outreach would be required to include them. 

They will not make a list unless they are asked Herb as open data is not something they are necessarily engaged in.  The FCM report I pointed to is all about cities, and that list of indicators was created by community grouns and city officials in canada's top 24  cities in terms of population.  If you go throught that list, you will quickly see that most open data portals do not contain these data, and this is also why many civil society folks don't care about portals.  They do not contain the data they need and use.  These are not tek specialist in any way, but they are big data users, so you will  most likely not come accross them at open data events as that is not a space they would gravitate to.

James,

You are discussing wards and so on, so a different scale than federal electoral districts which to my understanding are contiguous with provincial and territorial electoral districts. At lower tiers I did not think they were electoral districts files, but are wards and so on. So on that one I agree. When you say 84, you mean 84 what?

Officials are listed, not in the format you want, but the data are available.

Thx for the clarification on the Hansard and Tax rates.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 1:53 AM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with the "world view" and "comfort zone" assertions and I would guess that each of these groups would come up with a different list.  Maybe we need to encourage these groups to create a list for their purposes?

Ultimately I suppose we need to look at the value of creating a list in the first place.  For me, I just want to give muni's an idea of what at least SOME people are interested in.  It's true we can't speak for everyone.

The G8 list is great but my intention was to construct a list specifically for Canadian municipalities.  This list is specific to nations, though some of them could be addressed at the municipal level (crime for example).

H

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just recalled something!

I do not think the folks that submitted this list are not capable, but I do know that it is a group that reflects a world view that is not necessarily the same the civil society groups doing social and environmental justice work, or work on accessibility, or health.  And I worry that if we continuously only have us as open data folks involved in making lists and setting trajectories, then we are missing out on telling really important public policy issues, as they are just not on our horizon.

This is harder to step out of our comfort zones, but I think there is merit in doing so.  I was just going through the G8 resolution (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex) and if you scroll down to:

Action 2: Release of high value data, 

That list is pretty good.

Data Category* (alphabetical order)	Example datasets
Companies	Company/business register
Crime and Justice	Crime statistics, safety
Earth observation	Meteorological/weather, agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting
Education	List of schools; performance of schools, digital skills
Energy and Environment	Pollution levels, energy consumption
Finance and contracts	Transaction spend, contracts let, call for tender, future tenders, local budget, national budget (planned and spent)
Geospatial	Topography, postcodes, national maps, local maps
Global Development	Aid, food security, extractives, land
Government Accountability and Democracy	Government contact points, election results, legislation and statutes, salaries (pay scales), hospitality/gifts
Health	Prescription data, performance data
Science and Research	Genome data, research and educational activity, experiment results
Statistics	National Statistics, Census, infrastructure, wealth, skills
Social mobility and welfare	Housing, health insurance and unemployment benefits
Transport and Infrastructure	Public transport timetables, access points broadband penetration

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:18 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

HI Tracey,

The list was started on OpenDataBC and then moved here to get more input.  I have not taken it outside to other groups.

The idea is to generate a starting list of top 10 datasets.  Some of the datasets will already have been released by some municipalities.  Others may not have been made available by any municipalities.  The point is for publishers to be able to look at the list and see that people are interested.  I get asked over and over again "what do people want?" so I would like to be able to refer to a top ten list to give publishers and idea of what people are interested in.

For example, if it went out now I might choose:

• rezoning permit applications
  
lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

financial - actual expenditures

financial - grant and contribution awards

• crime information
  

I fully expect that the initial list will not be perfect but I think the people on the list have enough knowledge either on their own or with their networks to have a crack at it.

Also, I don't know of any group better than this one for getting things done so that's why I brought it here. :)

I am happy to help get this done however people think it should happen.  I like your categories suggestion - so maybe we should work that in somehow - but I was thinking more at the dataset level.

"Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!"

Thank you!  :)

Given this discussion I won't send anything out now so we can hear from a few more voices.

Cheers,

Herb

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Herb;

I think much more work needs to be done with these before you can do a survey is released and I think there is merit in grouping them.  Can you remind me how this list was made?  Looks like no social planners, community developers, health, environmentalists, or urban planners, housing experts, disability folks, were involved in the making of this list. What would they want?

Some of the data types are indicators and would require a number of datasets and research projects to get to these.  As I was sorting through them it reminded me of the Quality of life reporting systems of the federation of canadian municipalities, who collect these data from about 30 different institutions at all levels of jurisdiction (Grid of data - http://www.municipaldata-donneesmunicipales.ca/Site/Monitoring/grid.php?lang=en).  These data were decided upon as they told a story, overtime, and served a purpose to understand things in the city. Main headings of the report:

• Demographic Background Information (DBI)
• Affordable, Appropriate Housing (AAH)
• Civic Engagement (CE)
• Community and Social Infrastructure (CSI)
• Education (ED)
• Employment and Local Economy (ELE)
• Natural Environment (NE)
• Personal & Community Health (PCH)
• Personal Financial Security (PFS)
• Personal Safety (PS)

The issue of scale is also important here, is this for cities? if so do we want these data aggregated into neighbourhoods? Wards? electoral districts? dissemination areas? Postal Code areas?  GVRD/Metro van, or Van city? just to exemplify the difference.

I think we are maturing as a community, and maybe we can move beyond lists of datasets and start thinking about the best way for us to understand our cities/towns/etc.and think of the datasets that help us understand those things and then find the ways to communicate/discuss etc. these things. 

Also, some of the data on the list are already available.  Anyway, I have sorted the ones in your list.  I am super swamped for the next week, but I would be really happy to work with you and a few others (james?) to go through previous lists, and I would love to consult with some civil society groups and ask them what they want, environment? Community Health? Social Housing? Disability?  I don't know about you, but I find myself often circulating in the same circles and thus perpetuating ideals from a particular lens, this list I think reflects open data people but not necessarily, data users in the sense of actually using data to inform public policy in a real way, or a campaign, etc.  Open data folks like ourselves, got us here, and that is good, but now, I think we can do more, and communicate to people outside our 'open data circles', to those engaged in the day to day as non open data civil society groups and find out what their needs are.

Below is my first pass at classifying the list you shared, it is imperfect and not mutually exclusive, there are comments in brackets beside them.

Public Expenditures

·         financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)

·         Salaries of public officials

·         consultant fees (Maybe a better statement are gov subcontracting by type)

·         contracts

·         budget management (Not sure what is meant here? Which datasets?)

·         financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

·         financial - actual expenditures

·         financial - grant and contribution awards

·         financial - travel and hospitality expenses

Economic Development

·         business license

·         development applications (had twice)

·         approval results of development applications

·         DCC (development cost charges) rates

·         property assessments

·         tax rates (Do they mean property assessments?)

·         annual return data (not just pdf reports) is this taxfiler returns, is so then available at a fee? Which returns?

·         building citations (problems with structures etc...)

Business

·         tender opportunities

Land Use

·         park boundaries (which ones?  National park data are available)

·         land use changes (this too is an indicator, which datasets would be required, for instance parks, building footprints and year of construction, air photos, forests, farm land, etc. With those layers and others over time then land use change analysis is possible, but this is a research project or a geomatics project, not just one dataset)

Infrastructure

·         locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)

·         transit data

·         infrastructure deficits (which one? Roads? Power? Broadband?) also this is a measure, or an indicator, so there would need to be specificity in terms of a theme and then a way to measure that

·         road construction (511 data)

·         road maintenance and emergency work (I am guessing not ambulance emergencies but disruptions due to emergencies)

Demographics

·         vital stats

·         demographic data (these are available)

Framework Data

·         electoral districts (these are available)

·         transit data (Feeds? Routes? Schedules?)

Remote Sensing

·         orthophotos

·         lidar

User Fees

·         service fees (For what? Swimming pools? Rec Programs? School fees)

Democratic engagemet

·         hansards – Fed? Prov/ter? I think some are available, but not necessarily in a useful format.  Is the fed hansard now on open data licence?

·         council

·         petitions

·         elected officials contact information (is available at fed and provincial and I think all cities offer this too, was there something specific?)

·         satisfaction survey results (e.g. http://donnees.ville.montreal.qc.ca/dataset/sondage-satisfaction-citoyens)

Planning

·         traffic study data

·         rezoning permit applications

·         service requests (e.g. http://open311.org/)

Health

·         stream health assessments (i do not know what these are?  Wait times?  These data are available from CIHI but for a fee)

·         health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)

Well Being

·         food bank usage stats

·         homelessness stats

Citizen Engagement

·         public consultations

Freedom of Information

·         completed access to information requests (as is done at the federal level)

·         public documents released under access to information laws (as BC does, for most part)

·         transparency and access to information

Political Accountability

·         lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

·         political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

·         calendar of meetings

·         agendas of meetings

·         minutes of meetings

·         video of meetings

·         audio of meetings

·         transcripts of meetings

·         role call votes

·         attendance records

Safety

·         crime information

Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!

Cheers

Tracey

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:03 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just in case people are wondering what ever happened to this idea... I haven't forgotten.  The Summit was more of a priority for a while there.

I have compiled a list and plan to send out the survey in the near future.

Cheers,

Herb

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Over on the OpenDataBC google group we're developing a list of top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada.

The intention is to simply create a "first cut" at this to use as a starting point and I'm guessing it will evolve over time.  It won't be perfect, but it'll be a place to start.

We would like input from this group.  Please have a look at this list and let me know what, if anything is missing, or if any of these could use some fine tuning.

Once we have a list my intention is to compile this into a SurveyMonkey survey and send it back out to OpenDataBC and this group for voting and we'll see what people think are the top 10.

Here is the current list in no particular order:

• financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
  
• business license
  
• development applications
  
• property assessments
  
• park boundaries
  
• locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)
  
• tender opportunities
  
• electoral districts
  
• transit data
  
• vital stats / demographic data
  
• tax rates
  
• service fees
  
• infrastructure deficits
  
• hansards/council a/v
  
• petitions
  
• annual return data (not just pdf reports)
  
• stats relating to approval or non-approval of development applications
  
• DCC (development cost charges) rates
  
• salaries
  
• consultant fees
  
• traffic study data
  
• orthophotos
  
• lidar
  
• stream health assessments
  
• food bank usage stats
  
• homelessness stats
  
• transit data
  
• contracts
  
• road construction (511 data)
  
• building citations (problems with structures etc...)
  

The question I am thinking of sending is something like:

 "Which of the following datasets should municipalities make a priority and release them as open data?"

If there are any survey geeks out there that see a bias in this question and can suggest better wording please do so.

Also, if any of the bullets seems too ambiguous or vague to be a valid selection alternate suggestions for those would be appreciated.

Thanks,

H

--

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

_______________________________________________
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http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

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http://datalibre.ca/

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[Tracey P. Lauriault]

Try and talk with Sylvain Latour at TBS and also Corina Vestner.  Look them up on geds.  They are great, and Corina wants this kind of input.  Also right now the Canadian Geomatics Round Table Discussion are underway and they are soliciting feedback on a draft strategy so you should add LOCAL in there.  I can be part of the geomatics accord process between provinces and territories.

I can talk to you more about that offline if you like.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:45 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

I had previously tried to get this data on the agenda of the Canadian Council on Geomatics, GeoBase, and Centre for Topographic Information, but those conversations stalled. If anyone has an “in” with the Canadian Geomatics Community Round Table and knows someone who would be passionate about electoral/administrative geospatial data, it’d be great to collaborate with them or talk to them about how to make this data more broadly available.

James

On Mar 21, 2014, at 1:18 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

That is for sure Gerry!  All local framework datasets need to be produced!

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:04 PM, Gerry Tychon <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think this is a great discussion. And I think James has indicated that not all of the electoral/geo-administrative data is freely and openly available which it should be in our democracy.

Making this kind of data available could be a focused effort of the Canadian Geomatics Community Round Table.

http://cgcrt.ca/

The sooner the better.

... ggt

On 21/03/2014 10:10 AM, James McKinney wrote:

On Mar 21, 2014, at 10:55 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Great clarification!

- federal electoral districts (FEDs) are also used to know how certain cities voted in federal and provincial elections, and voter turnout is sometimes used as an indicator of democratic participation.

It’s curious that people analyze provincial elections with federal districts (outside Ontario)… Maybe because the provincial districts were previously not easily available? Or to make it easier to compare with federal elections?

- the file name electoral district (ED) is normally not used for cities, they are called wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries but not EDs, that is how they are distinguished in portals and so on, but now I know that the open data community has renamed these.

It’s not that the open data community has renamed the datasets. I personally just use the words “electoral districts” instead of each time having to write “electoral districts, wards, divisions, quartiers, etc.” whenever I want to refer to these functionally equivalent datasets, as it would be very repetitive and long to read. Functionally, Toronto’s wards and Canada’s electoral districts are the same kind of thing. The only difference is the related government. If you ask the City for Toronto for their “electoral districts” they may not understand, because everyone calls them wards in Toronto, but it’s just different names in different contexts for the same type of data.

- on the 84, I was asking as the number of FEDs are different, and because did not know that wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries nomenclature meant FEDs thought you might have been off somehow, and was curious to what you were refering to.  

Shesh! Should I not ask questions when I am unclear or what!

Sorry if my last message was terse - I just wanted to include as much information as possible and clear any confusions / misunderstandings.

t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 4:26 AM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

We are talking about municipal datasets. Herb started the thread talking about "top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada”. I don’t know why you’re talking about federal electoral districts. For what it’s worth, federal electoral districts are only contiguous with provincial districts in Ontario. Each territory is a single federal district, so their territorial electoral districts obviously do not match. None of the other provinces match the federal districts. Wards are electoral districts; in municipalities with wards, representatives are elected per ward, residents of that ward must vote in that ward, etc. It’s just a different name. Other places in Canada call them “divisions.” In Québec, a few municipalities that did not switch to the new “districts” system maintain electoral “quartiers”. When I say 84 I mean 84 governments: Canada, 10 provinces, and 73 municipalities (and growing). We don’t have the territories yet, because they refuse to give us their electoral district boundary files.

James

On Mar 20, 2014, at 11:43 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey Herb;

This report (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/country/canada/progress-report/report) includes references to many of the datasets I was pointing out, it is the OGP independent report and some of the complaints are the fact that most portals do not have the data I was refering to in them.  Again, I think reflective of who we are and what our interstest are.  Perhaps let muni gov know that this list is a developers/open data enthusiast list and not a list from civil society at large and more outreach would be required to include them. 

They will not make a list unless they are asked Herb as open data is not something they are necessarily engaged in.  The FCM report I pointed to is all about cities, and that list of indicators was created by community grouns and city officials in canada's top 24  cities in terms of population.  If you go throught that list, you will quickly see that most open data portals do not contain these data, and this is also why many civil society folks don't care about portals.  They do not contain the data they need and use.  These are not tek specialist in any way, but they are big data users, so you will  most likely not come accross them at open data events as that is not a space they would gravitate to.

James,

You are discussing wards and so on, so a different scale than federal electoral districts which to my understanding are contiguous with provincial and territorial electoral districts. At lower tiers I did not think they were electoral districts files, but are wards and so on. So on that one I agree. When you say 84, you mean 84 what?

Officials are listed, not in the format you want, but the data are available.

Thx for the clarification on the Hansard and Tax rates.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 1:53 AM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with the "world view" and "comfort zone" assertions and I would guess that each of these groups would come up with a different list.  Maybe we need to encourage these groups to create a list for their purposes?

Ultimately I suppose we need to look at the value of creating a list in the first place.  For me, I just want to give muni's an idea of what at least SOME people are interested in.  It's true we can't speak for everyone.

The G8 list is great but my intention was to construct a list specifically for Canadian municipalities.  This list is specific to nations, though some of them could be addressed at the municipal level (crime for example).

H

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just recalled something!

I do not think the folks that submitted this list are not capable, but I do know that it is a group that reflects a world view that is not necessarily the same the civil society groups doing social and environmental justice work, or work on accessibility, or health.  And I worry that if we continuously only have us as open data folks involved in making lists and setting trajectories, then we are missing out on telling really important public policy issues, as they are just not on our horizon.

This is harder to step out of our comfort zones, but I think there is merit in doing so.  I was just going through the G8 resolution (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex) and if you scroll down to:

Action 2: Release of high value data, 

That list is pretty good.

Data Category* (alphabetical order)	Example datasets
Companies	Company/business register
Crime and Justice	Crime statistics, safety
Earth observation	Meteorological/weather, agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting
Education	List of schools; performance of schools, digital skills
Energy and Environment	Pollution levels, energy consumption
Finance and contracts	Transaction spend, contracts let, call for tender, future tenders, local budget, national budget (planned and spent)
Geospatial	Topography, postcodes, national maps, local maps
Global Development	Aid, food security, extractives, land
Government Accountability and Democracy	Government contact points, election results, legislation and statutes, salaries (pay scales), hospitality/gifts
Health	Prescription data, performance data
Science and Research	Genome data, research and educational activity, experiment results
Statistics	National Statistics, Census, infrastructure, wealth, skills
Social mobility and welfare	Housing, health insurance and unemployment benefits
Transport and Infrastructure	Public transport timetables, access points broadband penetration

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:18 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

HI Tracey,

The list was started on OpenDataBC and then moved here to get more input.  I have not taken it outside to other groups.

The idea is to generate a starting list of top 10 datasets.  Some of the datasets will already have been released by some municipalities.  Others may not have been made available by any municipalities.  The point is for publishers to be able to look at the list and see that people are interested.  I get asked over and over again "what do people want?" so I would like to be able to refer to a top ten list to give publishers and idea of what people are interested in.

For example, if it went out now I might choose:

• rezoning permit applications
  
lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

financial - actual expenditures

financial - grant and contribution awards

• crime information
  

I fully expect that the initial list will not be perfect but I think the people on the list have enough knowledge either on their own or with their networks to have a crack at it.

Also, I don't know of any group better than this one for getting things done so that's why I brought it here. :)

I am happy to help get this done however people think it should happen.  I like your categories suggestion - so maybe we should work that in somehow - but I was thinking more at the dataset level.

"Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!"

Thank you!  :)

Given this discussion I won't send anything out now so we can hear from a few more voices.

Cheers,

Herb

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Herb;

I think much more work needs to be done with these before you can do a survey is released and I think there is merit in grouping them.  Can you remind me how this list was made?  Looks like no social planners, community developers, health, environmentalists, or urban planners, housing experts, disability folks, were involved in the making of this list. What would they want?

Some of the data types are indicators and would require a number of datasets and research projects to get to these.  As I was sorting through them it reminded me of the Quality of life reporting systems of the federation of canadian municipalities, who collect these data from about 30 different institutions at all levels of jurisdiction (Grid of data - http://www.municipaldata-donneesmunicipales.ca/Site/Monitoring/grid.php?lang=en).  These data were decided upon as they told a story, overtime, and served a purpose to understand things in the city. Main headings of the report:

• Demographic Background Information (DBI)
• Affordable, Appropriate Housing (AAH)
• Civic Engagement (CE)
• Community and Social Infrastructure (CSI)
• Education (ED)
• Employment and Local Economy (ELE)
• Natural Environment (NE)
• Personal & Community Health (PCH)
• Personal Financial Security (PFS)
• Personal Safety (PS)

The issue of scale is also important here, is this for cities? if so do we want these data aggregated into neighbourhoods? Wards? electoral districts? dissemination areas? Postal Code areas?  GVRD/Metro van, or Van city? just to exemplify the difference.

I think we are maturing as a community, and maybe we can move beyond lists of datasets and start thinking about the best way for us to understand our cities/towns/etc.and think of the datasets that help us understand those things and then find the ways to communicate/discuss etc. these things. 

Also, some of the data on the list are already available.  Anyway, I have sorted the ones in your list.  I am super swamped for the next week, but I would be really happy to work with you and a few others (james?) to go through previous lists, and I would love to consult with some civil society groups and ask them what they want, environment? Community Health? Social Housing? Disability?  I don't know about you, but I find myself often circulating in the same circles and thus perpetuating ideals from a particular lens, this list I think reflects open data people but not necessarily, data users in the sense of actually using data to inform public policy in a real way, or a campaign, etc.  Open data folks like ourselves, got us here, and that is good, but now, I think we can do more, and communicate to people outside our 'open data circles', to those engaged in the day to day as non open data civil society groups and find out what their needs are.

Below is my first pass at classifying the list you shared, it is imperfect and not mutually exclusive, there are comments in brackets beside them.

Public Expenditures

·         financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)

·         Salaries of public officials

·         consultant fees (Maybe a better statement are gov subcontracting by type)

·         contracts

·         budget management (Not sure what is meant here? Which datasets?)

·         financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

·         financial - actual expenditures

·         financial - grant and contribution awards

·         financial - travel and hospitality expenses

Economic Development

·         business license

·         development applications (had twice)

·         approval results of development applications

·         DCC (development cost charges) rates

·         property assessments

·         tax rates (Do they mean property assessments?)

·         annual return data (not just pdf reports) is this taxfiler returns, is so then available at a fee? Which returns?

·         building citations (problems with structures etc...)

Business

·         tender opportunities

Land Use

·         park boundaries (which ones?  National park data are available)

·         land use changes (this too is an indicator, which datasets would be required, for instance parks, building footprints and year of construction, air photos, forests, farm land, etc. With those layers and others over time then land use change analysis is possible, but this is a research project or a geomatics project, not just one dataset)

Infrastructure

·         locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)

·         transit data

·         infrastructure deficits (which one? Roads? Power? Broadband?) also this is a measure, or an indicator, so there would need to be specificity in terms of a theme and then a way to measure that

·         road construction (511 data)

·         road maintenance and emergency work (I am guessing not ambulance emergencies but disruptions due to emergencies)

Demographics

·         vital stats

·         demographic data (these are available)

Framework Data

·         electoral districts (these are available)

·         transit data (Feeds? Routes? Schedules?)

Remote Sensing

·         orthophotos

·         lidar

User Fees

·         service fees (For what? Swimming pools? Rec Programs? School fees)

Democratic engagemet

·         hansards – Fed? Prov/ter? I think some are available, but not necessarily in a useful format.  Is the fed hansard now on open data licence?

·         council

·         petitions

·         elected officials contact information (is available at fed and provincial and I think all cities offer this too, was there something specific?)

·         satisfaction survey results (e.g. http://donnees.ville.montreal.qc.ca/dataset/sondage-satisfaction-citoyens)

Planning

·         traffic study data

·         rezoning permit applications

·         service requests (e.g. http://open311.org/)

Health

·         stream health assessments (i do not know what these are?  Wait times?  These data are available from CIHI but for a fee)

·         health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)

Well Being

·         food bank usage stats

·         homelessness stats

Citizen Engagement

·         public consultations

Freedom of Information

·         completed access to information requests (as is done at the federal level)

·         public documents released under access to information laws (as BC does, for most part)

·         transparency and access to information

Political Accountability

·         lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

·         political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

·         calendar of meetings

·         agendas of meetings

·         minutes of meetings

·         video of meetings

·         audio of meetings

·         transcripts of meetings

·         role call votes

·         attendance records

Safety

·         crime information

Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!

Cheers

Tracey

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:03 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just in case people are wondering what ever happened to this idea... I haven't forgotten.  The Summit was more of a priority for a while there.

I have compiled a list and plan to send out the survey in the near future.

Cheers,

Herb

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Over on the OpenDataBC google group we're developing a list of top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada.

The intention is to simply create a "first cut" at this to use as a starting point and I'm guessing it will evolve over time.  It won't be perfect, but it'll be a place to start.

We would like input from this group.  Please have a look at this list and let me know what, if anything is missing, or if any of these could use some fine tuning.

Once we have a list my intention is to compile this into a SurveyMonkey survey and send it back out to OpenDataBC and this group for voting and we'll see what people think are the top 10.

Here is the current list in no particular order:

• financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
  
• business license
  
• development applications
  
• property assessments
  
• park boundaries
  
• locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)
  
• tender opportunities
  
• electoral districts
  
• transit data
  
• vital stats / demographic data
  
• tax rates
  
• service fees
  
• infrastructure deficits
  
• hansards/council a/v
  
• petitions
  
• annual return data (not just pdf reports)
  
• stats relating to approval or non-approval of development applications
  
• DCC (development cost charges) rates
  
• salaries
  
• consultant fees
  
• traffic study data
  
• orthophotos
  
• lidar
  
• stream health assessments
  
• food bank usage stats
  
• homelessness stats
  
• transit data
  
• contracts
  
• road construction (511 data)
  
• building citations (problems with structures etc...)
  

The question I am thinking of sending is something like:

 "Which of the following datasets should municipalities make a priority and release them as open data?"

If there are any survey geeks out there that see a bias in this question and can suggest better wording please do so.

Also, if any of the bullets seems too ambiguous or vague to be a valid selection alternate suggestions for those would be appreciated.

Thanks,

H

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http://datalibre.ca/

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[James McKinney-2]

Thanks, Tracey - following up offline.

On Mar 21, 2014, at 1:49 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Try and talk with Sylvain Latour at TBS and also Corina Vestner.  Look them up on geds.  They are great, and Corina wants this kind of input.  Also right now the Canadian Geomatics Round Table Discussion are underway and they are soliciting feedback on a draft strategy so you should add LOCAL in there.  I can be part of the geomatics accord process between provinces and territories.

I can talk to you more about that offline if you like.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:45 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

I had previously tried to get this data on the agenda of the Canadian Council on Geomatics, GeoBase, and Centre for Topographic Information, but those conversations stalled. If anyone has an “in” with the Canadian Geomatics Community Round Table and knows someone who would be passionate about electoral/administrative geospatial data, it’d be great to collaborate with them or talk to them about how to make this data more broadly available.

James

On Mar 21, 2014, at 1:18 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

That is for sure Gerry!  All local framework datasets need to be produced!

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:04 PM, Gerry Tychon <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think this is a great discussion. And I think James has indicated that not all of the electoral/geo-administrative data is freely and openly available which it should be in our democracy.

Making this kind of data available could be a focused effort of the Canadian Geomatics Community Round Table.

http://cgcrt.ca/

The sooner the better.

... ggt

On 21/03/2014 10:10 AM, James McKinney wrote:

On Mar 21, 2014, at 10:55 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Great clarification!

- federal electoral districts (FEDs) are also used to know how certain cities voted in federal and provincial elections, and voter turnout is sometimes used as an indicator of democratic participation.

It’s curious that people analyze provincial elections with federal districts (outside Ontario)… Maybe because the provincial districts were previously not easily available? Or to make it easier to compare with federal elections?

- the file name electoral district (ED) is normally not used for cities, they are called wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries but not EDs, that is how they are distinguished in portals and so on, but now I know that the open data community has renamed these.

It’s not that the open data community has renamed the datasets. I personally just use the words “electoral districts” instead of each time having to write “electoral districts, wards, divisions, quartiers, etc.” whenever I want to refer to these functionally equivalent datasets, as it would be very repetitive and long to read. Functionally, Toronto’s wards and Canada’s electoral districts are the same kind of thing. The only difference is the related government. If you ask the City for Toronto for their “electoral districts” they may not understand, because everyone calls them wards in Toronto, but it’s just different names in different contexts for the same type of data.

- on the 84, I was asking as the number of FEDs are different, and because did not know that wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries nomenclature meant FEDs thought you might have been off somehow, and was curious to what you were refering to.  

Shesh! Should I not ask questions when I am unclear or what!

Sorry if my last message was terse - I just wanted to include as much information as possible and clear any confusions / misunderstandings.

t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 4:26 AM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

We are talking about municipal datasets. Herb started the thread talking about "top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada”. I don’t know why you’re talking about federal electoral districts. For what it’s worth, federal electoral districts are only contiguous with provincial districts in Ontario. Each territory is a single federal district, so their territorial electoral districts obviously do not match. None of the other provinces match the federal districts. Wards are electoral districts; in municipalities with wards, representatives are elected per ward, residents of that ward must vote in that ward, etc. It’s just a different name. Other places in Canada call them “divisions.” In Québec, a few municipalities that did not switch to the new “districts” system maintain electoral “quartiers”. When I say 84 I mean 84 governments: Canada, 10 provinces, and 73 municipalities (and growing). We don’t have the territories yet, because they refuse to give us their electoral district boundary files.

James

On Mar 20, 2014, at 11:43 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey Herb;

This report (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/country/canada/progress-report/report) includes references to many of the datasets I was pointing out, it is the OGP independent report and some of the complaints are the fact that most portals do not have the data I was refering to in them.  Again, I think reflective of who we are and what our interstest are.  Perhaps let muni gov know that this list is a developers/open data enthusiast list and not a list from civil society at large and more outreach would be required to include them. 

They will not make a list unless they are asked Herb as open data is not something they are necessarily engaged in.  The FCM report I pointed to is all about cities, and that list of indicators was created by community grouns and city officials in canada's top 24  cities in terms of population.  If you go throught that list, you will quickly see that most open data portals do not contain these data, and this is also why many civil society folks don't care about portals.  They do not contain the data they need and use.  These are not tek specialist in any way, but they are big data users, so you will  most likely not come accross them at open data events as that is not a space they would gravitate to.

James,

You are discussing wards and so on, so a different scale than federal electoral districts which to my understanding are contiguous with provincial and territorial electoral districts. At lower tiers I did not think they were electoral districts files, but are wards and so on. So on that one I agree. When you say 84, you mean 84 what?

Officials are listed, not in the format you want, but the data are available.

Thx for the clarification on the Hansard and Tax rates.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 1:53 AM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with the "world view" and "comfort zone" assertions and I would guess that each of these groups would come up with a different list.  Maybe we need to encourage these groups to create a list for their purposes?

Ultimately I suppose we need to look at the value of creating a list in the first place.  For me, I just want to give muni's an idea of what at least SOME people are interested in.  It's true we can't speak for everyone.

The G8 list is great but my intention was to construct a list specifically for Canadian municipalities.  This list is specific to nations, though some of them could be addressed at the municipal level (crime for example).

H

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just recalled something!

I do not think the folks that submitted this list are not capable, but I do know that it is a group that reflects a world view that is not necessarily the same the civil society groups doing social and environmental justice work, or work on accessibility, or health.  And I worry that if we continuously only have us as open data folks involved in making lists and setting trajectories, then we are missing out on telling really important public policy issues, as they are just not on our horizon.

This is harder to step out of our comfort zones, but I think there is merit in doing so.  I was just going through the G8 resolution (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex) and if you scroll down to:

Action 2: Release of high value data, 

That list is pretty good.

Data Category* (alphabetical order)	Example datasets
Companies	Company/business register
Crime and Justice	Crime statistics, safety
Earth observation	Meteorological/weather, agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting
Education	List of schools; performance of schools, digital skills
Energy and Environment	Pollution levels, energy consumption
Finance and contracts	Transaction spend, contracts let, call for tender, future tenders, local budget, national budget (planned and spent)
Geospatial	Topography, postcodes, national maps, local maps
Global Development	Aid, food security, extractives, land
Government Accountability and Democracy	Government contact points, election results, legislation and statutes, salaries (pay scales), hospitality/gifts
Health	Prescription data, performance data
Science and Research	Genome data, research and educational activity, experiment results
Statistics	National Statistics, Census, infrastructure, wealth, skills
Social mobility and welfare	Housing, health insurance and unemployment benefits
Transport and Infrastructure	Public transport timetables, access points broadband penetration

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:18 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

HI Tracey,

The list was started on OpenDataBC and then moved here to get more input.  I have not taken it outside to other groups.

The idea is to generate a starting list of top 10 datasets.  Some of the datasets will already have been released by some municipalities.  Others may not have been made available by any municipalities.  The point is for publishers to be able to look at the list and see that people are interested.  I get asked over and over again "what do people want?" so I would like to be able to refer to a top ten list to give publishers and idea of what people are interested in.

For example, if it went out now I might choose:

• rezoning permit applications
  
lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

financial - actual expenditures

financial - grant and contribution awards

• crime information
  

I fully expect that the initial list will not be perfect but I think the people on the list have enough knowledge either on their own or with their networks to have a crack at it.

Also, I don't know of any group better than this one for getting things done so that's why I brought it here. :)

I am happy to help get this done however people think it should happen.  I like your categories suggestion - so maybe we should work that in somehow - but I was thinking more at the dataset level.

"Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!"

Thank you!  :)

Given this discussion I won't send anything out now so we can hear from a few more voices.

Cheers,

Herb

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Herb;

I think much more work needs to be done with these before you can do a survey is released and I think there is merit in grouping them.  Can you remind me how this list was made?  Looks like no social planners, community developers, health, environmentalists, or urban planners, housing experts, disability folks, were involved in the making of this list. What would they want?

Some of the data types are indicators and would require a number of datasets and research projects to get to these.  As I was sorting through them it reminded me of the Quality of life reporting systems of the federation of canadian municipalities, who collect these data from about 30 different institutions at all levels of jurisdiction (Grid of data - http://www.municipaldata-donneesmunicipales.ca/Site/Monitoring/grid.php?lang=en).  These data were decided upon as they told a story, overtime, and served a purpose to understand things in the city. Main headings of the report:

• Demographic Background Information (DBI)
• Affordable, Appropriate Housing (AAH)
• Civic Engagement (CE)
• Community and Social Infrastructure (CSI)
• Education (ED)
• Employment and Local Economy (ELE)
• Natural Environment (NE)
• Personal & Community Health (PCH)
• Personal Financial Security (PFS)
• Personal Safety (PS)

The issue of scale is also important here, is this for cities? if so do we want these data aggregated into neighbourhoods? Wards? electoral districts? dissemination areas? Postal Code areas?  GVRD/Metro van, or Van city? just to exemplify the difference.

I think we are maturing as a community, and maybe we can move beyond lists of datasets and start thinking about the best way for us to understand our cities/towns/etc.and think of the datasets that help us understand those things and then find the ways to communicate/discuss etc. these things. 

Also, some of the data on the list are already available.  Anyway, I have sorted the ones in your list.  I am super swamped for the next week, but I would be really happy to work with you and a few others (james?) to go through previous lists, and I would love to consult with some civil society groups and ask them what they want, environment? Community Health? Social Housing? Disability?  I don't know about you, but I find myself often circulating in the same circles and thus perpetuating ideals from a particular lens, this list I think reflects open data people but not necessarily, data users in the sense of actually using data to inform public policy in a real way, or a campaign, etc.  Open data folks like ourselves, got us here, and that is good, but now, I think we can do more, and communicate to people outside our 'open data circles', to those engaged in the day to day as non open data civil society groups and find out what their needs are.

Below is my first pass at classifying the list you shared, it is imperfect and not mutually exclusive, there are comments in brackets beside them.

Public Expenditures

·         financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)

·         Salaries of public officials

·         consultant fees (Maybe a better statement are gov subcontracting by type)

·         contracts

·         budget management (Not sure what is meant here? Which datasets?)

·         financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

·         financial - actual expenditures

·         financial - grant and contribution awards

·         financial - travel and hospitality expenses

Economic Development

·         business license

·         development applications (had twice)

·         approval results of development applications

·         DCC (development cost charges) rates

·         property assessments

·         tax rates (Do they mean property assessments?)

·         annual return data (not just pdf reports) is this taxfiler returns, is so then available at a fee? Which returns?

·         building citations (problems with structures etc...)

Business

·         tender opportunities

Land Use

·         park boundaries (which ones?  National park data are available)

·         land use changes (this too is an indicator, which datasets would be required, for instance parks, building footprints and year of construction, air photos, forests, farm land, etc. With those layers and others over time then land use change analysis is possible, but this is a research project or a geomatics project, not just one dataset)

Infrastructure

·         locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)

·         transit data

·         infrastructure deficits (which one? Roads? Power? Broadband?) also this is a measure, or an indicator, so there would need to be specificity in terms of a theme and then a way to measure that

·         road construction (511 data)

·         road maintenance and emergency work (I am guessing not ambulance emergencies but disruptions due to emergencies)

Demographics

·         vital stats

·         demographic data (these are available)

Framework Data

·         electoral districts (these are available)

·         transit data (Feeds? Routes? Schedules?)

Remote Sensing

·         orthophotos

·         lidar

User Fees

·         service fees (For what? Swimming pools? Rec Programs? School fees)

Democratic engagemet

·         hansards – Fed? Prov/ter? I think some are available, but not necessarily in a useful format.  Is the fed hansard now on open data licence?

·         council

·         petitions

·         elected officials contact information (is available at fed and provincial and I think all cities offer this too, was there something specific?)

·         satisfaction survey results (e.g. http://donnees.ville.montreal.qc.ca/dataset/sondage-satisfaction-citoyens)

Planning

·         traffic study data

·         rezoning permit applications

·         service requests (e.g. http://open311.org/)

Health

·         stream health assessments (i do not know what these are?  Wait times?  These data are available from CIHI but for a fee)

·         health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)

Well Being

·         food bank usage stats

·         homelessness stats

Citizen Engagement

·         public consultations

Freedom of Information

·         completed access to information requests (as is done at the federal level)

·         public documents released under access to information laws (as BC does, for most part)

·         transparency and access to information

Political Accountability

·         lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

·         political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

·         calendar of meetings

·         agendas of meetings

·         minutes of meetings

·         video of meetings

·         audio of meetings

·         transcripts of meetings

·         role call votes

·         attendance records

Safety

·         crime information

Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!

Cheers

Tracey

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:03 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just in case people are wondering what ever happened to this idea... I haven't forgotten.  The Summit was more of a priority for a while there.

I have compiled a list and plan to send out the survey in the near future.

Cheers,

Herb

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Over on the OpenDataBC google group we're developing a list of top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada.

The intention is to simply create a "first cut" at this to use as a starting point and I'm guessing it will evolve over time.  It won't be perfect, but it'll be a place to start.

We would like input from this group.  Please have a look at this list and let me know what, if anything is missing, or if any of these could use some fine tuning.

Once we have a list my intention is to compile this into a SurveyMonkey survey and send it back out to OpenDataBC and this group for voting and we'll see what people think are the top 10.

Here is the current list in no particular order:

• financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
  
• business license
  
• development applications
  
• property assessments
  
• park boundaries
  
• locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)
  
• tender opportunities
  
• electoral districts
  
• transit data
  
• vital stats / demographic data
  
• tax rates
  
• service fees
  
• infrastructure deficits
  
• hansards/council a/v
  
• petitions
  
• annual return data (not just pdf reports)
  
• stats relating to approval or non-approval of development applications
  
• DCC (development cost charges) rates
  
• salaries
  
• consultant fees
  
• traffic study data
  
• orthophotos
  
• lidar
  
• stream health assessments
  
• food bank usage stats
  
• homelessness stats
  
• transit data
  
• contracts
  
• road construction (511 data)
  
• building citations (problems with structures etc...)
  

The question I am thinking of sending is something like:

 "Which of the following datasets should municipalities make a priority and release them as open data?"

If there are any survey geeks out there that see a bias in this question and can suggest better wording please do so.

Also, if any of the bullets seems too ambiguous or vague to be a valid selection alternate suggestions for those would be appreciated.

Thanks,

H

--

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<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

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http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

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<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

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http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

_______________________________________________
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--

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<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
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http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

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http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

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http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

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https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

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[James McKinney-2]

Hi Herb,

I’d like for us to go forward with the SurveyMonkey poll even if the process is not perfect, because that way we’ll at least have something to work with.

If particular communities disagree with the “top 10 open datasets” I would consider that a great outcome, because then those communities will be engaging with open data and its priorities, whereas now they aren’t.

We can of course continue to refine the list over time (i.e. the list is never “final”) but I feel that if we keep adding more steps we’ll never get to the end of the staircase, so to speak.

James

On Mar 20, 2014, at 9:53 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with the "world view" and "comfort zone" assertions and I would guess that each of these groups would come up with a different list.  Maybe we need to encourage these groups to create a list for their purposes?

Ultimately I suppose we need to look at the value of creating a list in the first place.  For me, I just want to give muni's an idea of what at least SOME people are interested in.  It's true we can't speak for everyone.

The G8 list is great but my intention was to construct a list specifically for Canadian municipalities.  This list is specific to nations, though some of them could be addressed at the municipal level (crime for example).

H

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just recalled something!

I do not think the folks that submitted this list are not capable, but I do know that it is a group that reflects a world view that is not necessarily the same the civil society groups doing social and environmental justice work, or work on accessibility, or health.  And I worry that if we continuously only have us as open data folks involved in making lists and setting trajectories, then we are missing out on telling really important public policy issues, as they are just not on our horizon.

This is harder to step out of our comfort zones, but I think there is merit in doing so.  I was just going through the G8 resolution (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex) and if you scroll down to:

Action 2: Release of high value data, 

That list is pretty good.

Data Category* (alphabetical order)	Example datasets
Companies	Company/business register
Crime and Justice	Crime statistics, safety
Earth observation	Meteorological/weather, agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting
Education	List of schools; performance of schools, digital skills
Energy and Environment	Pollution levels, energy consumption
Finance and contracts	Transaction spend, contracts let, call for tender, future tenders, local budget, national budget (planned and spent)
Geospatial	Topography, postcodes, national maps, local maps
Global Development	Aid, food security, extractives, land
Government Accountability and Democracy	Government contact points, election results, legislation and statutes, salaries (pay scales), hospitality/gifts
Health	Prescription data, performance data
Science and Research	Genome data, research and educational activity, experiment results
Statistics	National Statistics, Census, infrastructure, wealth, skills
Social mobility and welfare	Housing, health insurance and unemployment benefits
Transport and Infrastructure	Public transport timetables, access points broadband penetration

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:18 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

HI Tracey,

The list was started on OpenDataBC and then moved here to get more input.  I have not taken it outside to other groups.

The idea is to generate a starting list of top 10 datasets.  Some of the datasets will already have been released by some municipalities.  Others may not have been made available by any municipalities.  The point is for publishers to be able to look at the list and see that people are interested.  I get asked over and over again "what do people want?" so I would like to be able to refer to a top ten list to give publishers and idea of what people are interested in.

For example, if it went out now I might choose:

• rezoning permit applications
  
lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

financial - actual expenditures

financial - grant and contribution awards

• crime information
  

I fully expect that the initial list will not be perfect but I think the people on the list have enough knowledge either on their own or with their networks to have a crack at it.

Also, I don't know of any group better than this one for getting things done so that's why I brought it here. :)

I am happy to help get this done however people think it should happen.  I like your categories suggestion - so maybe we should work that in somehow - but I was thinking more at the dataset level.

"Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!"

Thank you!  :)

Given this discussion I won't send anything out now so we can hear from a few more voices.

Cheers,

Herb

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Herb;

I think much more work needs to be done with these before you can do a survey is released and I think there is merit in grouping them.  Can you remind me how this list was made?  Looks like no social planners, community developers, health, environmentalists, or urban planners, housing experts, disability folks, were involved in the making of this list. What would they want?

Some of the data types are indicators and would require a number of datasets and research projects to get to these.  As I was sorting through them it reminded me of the Quality of life reporting systems of the federation of canadian municipalities, who collect these data from about 30 different institutions at all levels of jurisdiction (Grid of data - http://www.municipaldata-donneesmunicipales.ca/Site/Monitoring/grid.php?lang=en).  These data were decided upon as they told a story, overtime, and served a purpose to understand things in the city. Main headings of the report:

• Demographic Background Information (DBI)
• Affordable, Appropriate Housing (AAH)
• Civic Engagement (CE)
• Community and Social Infrastructure (CSI)
• Education (ED)
• Employment and Local Economy (ELE)
• Natural Environment (NE)
• Personal & Community Health (PCH)
• Personal Financial Security (PFS)
• Personal Safety (PS)

The issue of scale is also important here, is this for cities? if so do we want these data aggregated into neighbourhoods? Wards? electoral districts? dissemination areas? Postal Code areas?  GVRD/Metro van, or Van city? just to exemplify the difference.

I think we are maturing as a community, and maybe we can move beyond lists of datasets and start thinking about the best way for us to understand our cities/towns/etc.and think of the datasets that help us understand those things and then find the ways to communicate/discuss etc. these things. 

Also, some of the data on the list are already available.  Anyway, I have sorted the ones in your list.  I am super swamped for the next week, but I would be really happy to work with you and a few others (james?) to go through previous lists, and I would love to consult with some civil society groups and ask them what they want, environment? Community Health? Social Housing? Disability?  I don't know about you, but I find myself often circulating in the same circles and thus perpetuating ideals from a particular lens, this list I think reflects open data people but not necessarily, data users in the sense of actually using data to inform public policy in a real way, or a campaign, etc.  Open data folks like ourselves, got us here, and that is good, but now, I think we can do more, and communicate to people outside our 'open data circles', to those engaged in the day to day as non open data civil society groups and find out what their needs are.

Below is my first pass at classifying the list you shared, it is imperfect and not mutually exclusive, there are comments in brackets beside them.

Public Expenditures

·         financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)

·         Salaries of public officials

·         consultant fees (Maybe a better statement are gov subcontracting by type)

·         contracts

·         budget management (Not sure what is meant here? Which datasets?)

·         financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

·         financial - actual expenditures

·         financial - grant and contribution awards

·         financial - travel and hospitality expenses

Economic Development

·         business license

·         development applications (had twice)

·         approval results of development applications

·         DCC (development cost charges) rates

·         property assessments

·         tax rates (Do they mean property assessments?)

·         annual return data (not just pdf reports) is this taxfiler returns, is so then available at a fee? Which returns?

·         building citations (problems with structures etc...)

Business

·         tender opportunities

Land Use

·         park boundaries (which ones?  National park data are available)

·         land use changes (this too is an indicator, which datasets would be required, for instance parks, building footprints and year of construction, air photos, forests, farm land, etc. With those layers and others over time then land use change analysis is possible, but this is a research project or a geomatics project, not just one dataset)

Infrastructure

·         locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)

·         transit data

·         infrastructure deficits (which one? Roads? Power? Broadband?) also this is a measure, or an indicator, so there would need to be specificity in terms of a theme and then a way to measure that

·         road construction (511 data)

·         road maintenance and emergency work (I am guessing not ambulance emergencies but disruptions due to emergencies)

Demographics

·         vital stats

·         demographic data (these are available)

Framework Data

·         electoral districts (these are available)

·         transit data (Feeds? Routes? Schedules?)

Remote Sensing

·         orthophotos

·         lidar

User Fees

·         service fees (For what? Swimming pools? Rec Programs? School fees)

Democratic engagemet

·         hansards – Fed? Prov/ter? I think some are available, but not necessarily in a useful format.  Is the fed hansard now on open data licence?

·         council

·         petitions

·         elected officials contact information (is available at fed and provincial and I think all cities offer this too, was there something specific?)

·         satisfaction survey results (e.g. http://donnees.ville.montreal.qc.ca/dataset/sondage-satisfaction-citoyens)

Planning

·         traffic study data

·         rezoning permit applications

·         service requests (e.g. http://open311.org/)

Health

·         stream health assessments (i do not know what these are?  Wait times?  These data are available from CIHI but for a fee)

·         health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)

Well Being

·         food bank usage stats

·         homelessness stats

Citizen Engagement

·         public consultations

Freedom of Information

·         completed access to information requests (as is done at the federal level)

·         public documents released under access to information laws (as BC does, for most part)

·         transparency and access to information

Political Accountability

·         lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

·         political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

·         calendar of meetings

·         agendas of meetings

·         minutes of meetings

·         video of meetings

·         audio of meetings

·         transcripts of meetings

·         role call votes

·         attendance records

Safety

·         crime information

Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!

Cheers

Tracey

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:03 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just in case people are wondering what ever happened to this idea... I haven't forgotten.  The Summit was more of a priority for a while there.

I have compiled a list and plan to send out the survey in the near future.

Cheers,

Herb

On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Over on the OpenDataBC google group we're developing a list of top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada.

The intention is to simply create a "first cut" at this to use as a starting point and I'm guessing it will evolve over time.  It won't be perfect, but it'll be a place to start.

We would like input from this group.  Please have a look at this list and let me know what, if anything is missing, or if any of these could use some fine tuning.

Once we have a list my intention is to compile this into a SurveyMonkey survey and send it back out to OpenDataBC and this group for voting and we'll see what people think are the top 10.

Here is the current list in no particular order:

• financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
  
• business license
  
• development applications
  
• property assessments
  
• park boundaries
  
• locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)
  
• tender opportunities
  
• electoral districts
  
• transit data
  
• vital stats / demographic data
  
• tax rates
  
• service fees
  
• infrastructure deficits
  
• hansards/council a/v
  
• petitions
  
• annual return data (not just pdf reports)
  
• stats relating to approval or non-approval of development applications
  
• DCC (development cost charges) rates
  
• salaries
  
• consultant fees
  
• traffic study data
  
• orthophotos
  
• lidar
  
• stream health assessments
  
• food bank usage stats
  
• homelessness stats
  
• transit data
  
• contracts
  
• road construction (511 data)
  
• building citations (problems with structures etc...)
  

The question I am thinking of sending is something like:

 "Which of the following datasets should municipalities make a priority and release them as open data?"

If there are any survey geeks out there that see a bias in this question and can suggest better wording please do so.

Also, if any of the bullets seems too ambiguous or vague to be a valid selection alternate suggestions for those would be appreciated.

Thanks,

H

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http://datalibre.ca/

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[Herb Lainchbury]

(sorry - wrote this a few days ago, didn't notice it got bounced back until now.  resending)

I don't know where we landed on this.

Tracey, I think your main point is that we're not including "civil society at large" so any list we come up with here would be inadequate to represent such groups.  I'm fine with that inadequacy.  I couldn't begin to imagine who should be included, especially since as you say, they're not interested in [open data] portals.  As "they are big data users" they are satisfying some of their needs for data in other ways.  Ways that to them seem preferable to getting involved in open data.  Maybe if we get significant traction with municipalities by gathering low hanging fruit, we'll convince them through our actions to get involved, even if it's only to tell us that we've liberated the wrong data.

At this point, with so little data being liberated I am primarily interested in getting traction with some obvious areas - finance, taxation, property, transit, whatever....  I could make up my own list but I thought it would be better to try to do that as an open data community - even though we're not very representative of "civic society at large".  It's not my intention to represent what others want, I just want to know what those of us who care about open data want.

I think of it as "What's the simplest thing we can do that would move this forward?".  Will it be perfect?  Not at all.  Will it get people talking about what's important?  I think so.

I hope that makes sense.

Perhaps a title change is needed so we don't over represent ourselves?

From "list of top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada" to "Canadian open data community list of top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada"?

Comments welcome.

H

On Mar 21, 2014 11:32 AM, "James McKinney" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Tracey - following up offline.

On Mar 21, 2014, at 1:49 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Try and talk with Sylvain Latour at TBS and also Corina Vestner.  Look them up on geds.  They are great, and Corina wants this kind of input.  Also right now the Canadian Geomatics Round Table Discussion are underway and they are soliciting feedback on a draft strategy so you should add LOCAL in there.  I can be part of the geomatics accord process between provinces and territories.

I can talk to you more about that offline if you like.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:45 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

I had previously tried to get this data on the agenda of the Canadian Council on Geomatics, GeoBase, and Centre for Topographic Information, but those conversations stalled. If anyone has an “in” with the Canadian Geomatics Community Round Table and knows someone who would be passionate about electoral/administrative geospatial data, it’d be great to collaborate with them or talk to them about how to make this data more broadly available.

James

On Mar 21, 2014, at 1:18 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

That is for sure Gerry!  All local framework datasets need to be produced!

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:04 PM, Gerry Tychon <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think this is a great discussion. And I think James has indicated that not all of the electoral/geo-administrative data is freely and openly available which it should be in our democracy.

Making this kind of data available could be a focused effort of the Canadian Geomatics Community Round Table.

http://cgcrt.ca/

The sooner the better.

... ggt

On 21/03/2014 10:10 AM, James McKinney wrote:

On Mar 21, 2014, at 10:55 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Great clarification!

- federal electoral districts (FEDs) are also used to know how certain cities voted in federal and provincial elections, and voter turnout is sometimes used as an indicator of democratic participation.

It’s curious that people analyze provincial elections with federal districts (outside Ontario)… Maybe because the provincial districts were previously not easily available? Or to make it easier to compare with federal elections?

- the file name electoral district (ED) is normally not used for cities, they are called wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries but not EDs, that is how they are distinguished in portals and so on, but now I know that the open data community has renamed these.

It’s not that the open data community has renamed the datasets. I personally just use the words “electoral districts” instead of each time having to write “electoral districts, wards, divisions, quartiers, etc.” whenever I want to refer to these functionally equivalent datasets, as it would be very repetitive and long to read. Functionally, Toronto’s wards and Canada’s electoral districts are the same kind of thing. The only difference is the related government. If you ask the City for Toronto for their “electoral districts” they may not understand, because everyone calls them wards in Toronto, but it’s just different names in different contexts for the same type of data.

- on the 84, I was asking as the number of FEDs are different, and because did not know that wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries nomenclature meant FEDs thought you might have been off somehow, and was curious to what you were refering to.  

Shesh! Should I not ask questions when I am unclear or what!

Sorry if my last message was terse - I just wanted to include as much information as possible and clear any confusions / misunderstandings.

t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 4:26 AM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

We are talking about municipal datasets. Herb started the thread talking about "top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada”. I don’t know why you’re talking about federal electoral districts. For what it’s worth, federal electoral districts are only contiguous with provincial districts in Ontario. Each territory is a single federal district, so their territorial electoral districts obviously do not match. None of the other provinces match the federal districts. Wards are electoral districts; in municipalities with wards, representatives are elected per ward, residents of that ward must vote in that ward, etc. It’s just a different name. Other places in Canada call them “divisions.” In Québec, a few municipalities that did not switch to the new “districts” system maintain electoral “quartiers”. When I say 84 I mean 84 governments: Canada, 10 provinces, and 73 municipalities (and growing). We don’t have the territories yet, because they refuse to give us their electoral district boundary files.

James

On Mar 20, 2014, at 11:43 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey Herb;

This report (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/country/canada/progress-report/report) includes references to many of the datasets I was pointing out, it is the OGP independent report and some of the complaints are the fact that most portals do not have the data I was refering to in them.  Again, I think reflective of who we are and what our interstest are.  Perhaps let muni gov know that this list is a developers/open data enthusiast list and not a list from civil society at large and more outreach would be required to include them. 

They will not make a list unless they are asked Herb as open data is not something they are necessarily engaged in.  The FCM report I pointed to is all about cities, and that list of indicators was created by community grouns and city officials in canada's top 24  cities in terms of population.  If you go throught that list, you will quickly see that most open data portals do not contain these data, and this is also why many civil society folks don't care about portals.  They do not contain the data they need and use.  These are not tek specialist in any way, but they are big data users, so you will  most likely not come accross them at open data events as that is not a space they would gravitate to.

James,

You are discussing wards and so on, so a different scale than federal electoral districts which to my understanding are contiguous with provincial and territorial electoral districts. At lower tiers I did not think they were electoral districts files, but are wards and so on. So on that one I agree. When you say 84, you mean 84 what?

Officials are listed, not in the format you want, but the data are available.

Thx for the clarification on the Hansard and Tax rates.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 1:53 AM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with the "world view" and "comfort zone" assertions and I would guess that each of these groups would come up with a different list.  Maybe we need to encourage these groups to create a list for their purposes?

Ultimately I suppose we need to look at the value of creating a list in the first place.  For me, I just want to give muni's an idea of what at least SOME people are interested in.  It's true we can't speak for everyone.

The G8 list is great but my intention was to construct a list specifically for Canadian municipalities.  This list is specific to nations, though some of them could be addressed at the municipal level (crime for example).

H

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just recalled something!

I do not think the folks that submitted this list are not capable, but I do know that it is a group that reflects a world view that is not necessarily the same the civil society groups doing social and environmental justice work, or work on accessibility, or health.  And I worry that if we continuously only have us as open data folks involved in making lists and setting trajectories, then we are missing out on telling really important public policy issues, as they are just not on our horizon.

This is harder to step out of our comfort zones, but I think there is merit in doing so.  I was just going through the G8 resolution (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex) and if you scroll down to:

Action 2: Release of high value data, 

That list is pretty good.

Data Category* (alphabetical order)	Example datasets
Companies	Company/business register
Crime and Justice	Crime statistics, safety
Earth observation	Meteorological/weather, agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting
Education	List of schools; performance of schools, digital skills
Energy and Environment	Pollution levels, energy consumption
Finance and contracts	Transaction spend, contracts let, call for tender, future tenders, local budget, national budget (planned and spent)
Geospatial	Topography, postcodes, national maps, local maps
Global Development	Aid, food security, extractives, land
Government Accountability and Democracy	Government contact points, election results, legislation and statutes, salaries (pay scales), hospitality/gifts
Health	Prescription data, performance data
Science and Research	Genome data, research and educational activity, experiment results
Statistics	National Statistics, Census, infrastructure, wealth, skills
Social mobility and welfare	Housing, health insurance and unemployment benefits
Transport and Infrastructure	Public transport timetables, access points broadband penetration

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:18 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

HI Tracey,

The list was started on OpenDataBC and then moved here to get more input.  I have not taken it outside to other groups.

The idea is to generate a starting list of top 10 datasets.  Some of the datasets will already have been released by some municipalities.  Others may not have been made available by any municipalities.  The point is for publishers to be able to look at the list and see that people are interested.  I get asked over and over again "what do people want?" so I would like to be able to refer to a top ten list to give publishers and idea of what people are interested in.

For example, if it went out now I might choose:

• rezoning permit applications
  
lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

financial - actual expenditures

financial - grant and contribution awards

• crime information
  

I fully expect that the initial list will not be perfect but I think the people on the list have enough knowledge either on their own or with their networks to have a crack at it.

Also, I don't know of any group better than this one for getting things done so that's why I brought it here. :)

I am happy to help get this done however people think it should happen.  I like your categories suggestion - so maybe we should work that in somehow - but I was thinking more at the dataset level.

"Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!"

Thank you!  :)

Given this discussion I won't send anything out now so we can hear from a few more voices.

Cheers,

Herb

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Herb;

I think much more work needs to be done with these before you can do a survey is released and I think there is merit in grouping them.  Can you remind me how this list was made?  Looks like no social planners, community developers, health, environmentalists, or urban planners, housing experts, disability folks, were involved in the making of this list. What would they want?

Some of the data types are indicators and would require a number of datasets and research projects to get to these.  As I was sorting through them it reminded me of the Quality of life reporting systems of the federation of canadian municipalities, who collect these data from about 30 different institutions at all levels of jurisdiction (Grid of data - http://www.municipaldata-donneesmunicipales.ca/Site/Monitoring/grid.php?lang=en).  These data were decided upon as they told a story, overtime, and served a purpose to understand things in the city. Main headings of the report:

• Demographic Background Information (DBI)
• Affordable, Appropriate Housing (AAH)
• Civic Engagement (CE)
• Community and Social Infrastructure (CSI)
• Education (ED)
• Employment and Local Economy (ELE)
• Natural Environment (NE)
• Personal & Community Health (PCH)
• Personal Financial Security (PFS)
• Personal Safety (PS)

The issue of scale is also important here, is this for cities? if so do we want these data aggregated into neighbourhoods? Wards? electoral districts? dissemination areas? Postal Code areas?  GVRD/Metro van, or Van city? just to exemplify the difference.

I think we are maturing as a community, and maybe we can move beyond lists of datasets and start thinking about the best way for us to understand our cities/towns/etc.and think of the datasets that help us understand those things and then find the ways to communicate/discuss etc. these things. 

Also, some of the data on the list are already available.  Anyway, I have sorted the ones in your list.  I am super swamped for the next week, but I would be really happy to work with you and a few others (james?) to go through previous lists, and I would love to consult with some civil society groups and ask them what they want, environment? Community Health? Social Housing? Disability?  I don't know about you, but I find myself often circulating in the same circles and thus perpetuating ideals from a particular lens, this list I think reflects open data people but not necessarily, data users in the sense of actually using data to inform public policy in a real way, or a campaign, etc.  Open data folks like ourselves, got us here, and that is good, but now, I think we can do more, and communicate to people outside our 'open data circles', to those engaged in the day to day as non open data civil society groups and find out what their needs are.

Below is my first pass at classifying the list you shared, it is imperfect and not mutually exclusive, there are comments in brackets beside them.

Public Expenditures

·         financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)

·         Salaries of public officials

·         consultant fees (Maybe a better statement are gov subcontracting by type)

·         contracts

·         budget management (Not sure what is meant here? Which datasets?)

·         financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

·         financial - actual expenditures

·         financial - grant and contribution awards

·         financial - travel and hospitality expenses

Economic Development

·         business license

·         development applications (had twice)

·         approval results of development applications

·         DCC (development cost charges) rates

·         property assessments

·         tax rates (Do they mean property assessments?)

·         annual return data (not just pdf reports) is this taxfiler returns, is so then available at a fee? Which returns?

·         building citations (problems with structures etc...)

Business

·         tender opportunities

Land Use

·         park boundaries (which ones?  National park data are available)

·         land use changes (this too is an indicator, which datasets would be required, for instance parks, building footprints and year of construction, air photos, forests, farm land, etc. With those layers and others over time then land use change analysis is possible, but this is a research project or a geomatics project, not just one dataset)

Infrastructure

·         locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)

·         transit data

·         infrastructure deficits (which one? Roads? Power? Broadband?) also this is a measure, or an indicator, so there would need to be specificity in terms of a theme and then a way to measure that

·         road construction (511 data)

·         road maintenance and emergency work (I am guessing not ambulance emergencies but disruptions due to emergencies)

Demographics

·         vital stats

·         demographic data (these are available)

Framework Data

·         electoral districts (these are available)

·         transit data (Feeds? Routes? Schedules?)

Remote Sensing

·         orthophotos

·         lidar

User Fees

·         service fees (For what? Swimming pools? Rec Programs? School fees)

Democratic engagemet

·         hansards – Fed? Prov/ter? I think some are available, but not necessarily in a useful format.  Is the fed hansard now on open data licence?

·         council

·         petitions

·         elected officials contact information (is available at fed and provincial and I think all cities offer this too, was there something specific?)

·         satisfaction survey results (e.g. http://donnees.ville.montreal.qc.ca/dataset/sondage-satisfaction-citoyens)

Planning

·         traffic study data

·         rezoning permit applications

·         service requests (e.g. http://open311.org/)

Health

·         stream health assessments (i do not know what these are?  Wait times?  These data are available from CIHI but for a fee)

·         health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)

Well Being

·         food bank usage stats

·         homelessness stats

Citizen Engagement

·         public consultations

Freedom of Information

·         completed access to information requests (as is done at the federal level)

·         public documents released under access to information laws (as BC does, for most part)

·         transparency and access to information

Political Accountability

·         lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

·         political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

·         calendar of meetings

·         agendas of meetings

·         minutes of meetings

·         video of meetings

·         audio of meetings

·         transcripts of meetings

·         role call votes

·         attendance records

Safety

·         crime information

Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!

Cheers

Tracey

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:03 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just in case people are wondering what ever happened to this i

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[James McKinney-2]

This all makes sense to me.

As far as the name goes, I figure that if I use the list of datasets in my communications with a government, I’ll probably describe it using whatever words I think they will understand and that will have the best chance of making them move towards open data.

As far as what’s shared with open data lists, we can call it "Canadian open data community list of top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada”, but I assume individuals will come up with their own way of describing the list in their personal communications with governments - whether or not we come up with a “recommended” description - so no need to overthink it in my opinion.

James

On Mar 27, 2014, at 3:13 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

(sorry - wrote this a few days ago, didn't notice it got bounced back until now.  resending)

I don't know where we landed on this.

Tracey, I think your main point is that we're not including "civil society at large" so any list we come up with here would be inadequate to represent such groups.  I'm fine with that inadequacy.  I couldn't begin to imagine who should be included, especially since as you say, they're not interested in [open data] portals.  As "they are big data users" they are satisfying some of their needs for data in other ways.  Ways that to them seem preferable to getting involved in open data.  Maybe if we get significant traction with municipalities by gathering low hanging fruit, we'll convince them through our actions to get involved, even if it's only to tell us that we've liberated the wrong data.

At this point, with so little data being liberated I am primarily interested in getting traction with some obvious areas - finance, taxation, property, transit, whatever....  I could make up my own list but I thought it would be better to try to do that as an open data community - even though we're not very representative of "civic society at large".  It's not my intention to represent what others want, I just want to know what those of us who care about open data want.

I think of it as "What's the simplest thing we can do that would move this forward?".  Will it be perfect?  Not at all.  Will it get people talking about what's important?  I think so.

I hope that makes sense.

Perhaps a title change is needed so we don't over represent ourselves?

From "list of top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada" to "Canadian open data community list of top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada"?

Comments welcome.

H

On Mar 21, 2014 11:32 AM, "James McKinney" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Tracey - following up offline.

On Mar 21, 2014, at 1:49 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Try and talk with Sylvain Latour at TBS and also Corina Vestner.  Look them up on geds.  They are great, and Corina wants this kind of input.  Also right now the Canadian Geomatics Round Table Discussion are underway and they are soliciting feedback on a draft strategy so you should add LOCAL in there.  I can be part of the geomatics accord process between provinces and territories.

I can talk to you more about that offline if you like.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:45 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

I had previously tried to get this data on the agenda of the Canadian Council on Geomatics, GeoBase, and Centre for Topographic Information, but those conversations stalled. If anyone has an “in” with the Canadian Geomatics Community Round Table and knows someone who would be passionate about electoral/administrative geospatial data, it’d be great to collaborate with them or talk to them about how to make this data more broadly available.

James

On Mar 21, 2014, at 1:18 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

That is for sure Gerry!  All local framework datasets need to be produced!

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:04 PM, Gerry Tychon <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think this is a great discussion. And I think James has indicated that not all of the electoral/geo-administrative data is freely and openly available which it should be in our democracy.

Making this kind of data available could be a focused effort of the Canadian Geomatics Community Round Table.

http://cgcrt.ca/

The sooner the better.

... ggt

On 21/03/2014 10:10 AM, James McKinney wrote:

On Mar 21, 2014, at 10:55 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Great clarification!

- federal electoral districts (FEDs) are also used to know how certain cities voted in federal and provincial elections, and voter turnout is sometimes used as an indicator of democratic participation.

It’s curious that people analyze provincial elections with federal districts (outside Ontario)… Maybe because the provincial districts were previously not easily available? Or to make it easier to compare with federal elections?

- the file name electoral district (ED) is normally not used for cities, they are called wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries but not EDs, that is how they are distinguished in portals and so on, but now I know that the open data community has renamed these.

It’s not that the open data community has renamed the datasets. I personally just use the words “electoral districts” instead of each time having to write “electoral districts, wards, divisions, quartiers, etc.” whenever I want to refer to these functionally equivalent datasets, as it would be very repetitive and long to read. Functionally, Toronto’s wards and Canada’s electoral districts are the same kind of thing. The only difference is the related government. If you ask the City for Toronto for their “electoral districts” they may not understand, because everyone calls them wards in Toronto, but it’s just different names in different contexts for the same type of data.

- on the 84, I was asking as the number of FEDs are different, and because did not know that wards, quartiers, regions, districts or electoral boundaries nomenclature meant FEDs thought you might have been off somehow, and was curious to what you were refering to.  

Shesh! Should I not ask questions when I am unclear or what!

Sorry if my last message was terse - I just wanted to include as much information as possible and clear any confusions / misunderstandings.

t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 4:26 AM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

We are talking about municipal datasets. Herb started the thread talking about "top 10 wanted datasets for municipal governments in Canada”. I don’t know why you’re talking about federal electoral districts. For what it’s worth, federal electoral districts are only contiguous with provincial districts in Ontario. Each territory is a single federal district, so their territorial electoral districts obviously do not match. None of the other provinces match the federal districts. Wards are electoral districts; in municipalities with wards, representatives are elected per ward, residents of that ward must vote in that ward, etc. It’s just a different name. Other places in Canada call them “divisions.” In Québec, a few municipalities that did not switch to the new “districts” system maintain electoral “quartiers”. When I say 84 I mean 84 governments: Canada, 10 provinces, and 73 municipalities (and growing). We don’t have the territories yet, because they refuse to give us their electoral district boundary files.

James

On Mar 20, 2014, at 11:43 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey Herb;

This report (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/country/canada/progress-report/report) includes references to many of the datasets I was pointing out, it is the OGP independent report and some of the complaints are the fact that most portals do not have the data I was refering to in them.  Again, I think reflective of who we are and what our interstest are.  Perhaps let muni gov know that this list is a developers/open data enthusiast list and not a list from civil society at large and more outreach would be required to include them. 

They will not make a list unless they are asked Herb as open data is not something they are necessarily engaged in.  The FCM report I pointed to is all about cities, and that list of indicators was created by community grouns and city officials in canada's top 24  cities in terms of population.  If you go throught that list, you will quickly see that most open data portals do not contain these data, and this is also why many civil society folks don't care about portals.  They do not contain the data they need and use.  These are not tek specialist in any way, but they are big data users, so you will  most likely not come accross them at open data events as that is not a space they would gravitate to.

James,

You are discussing wards and so on, so a different scale than federal electoral districts which to my understanding are contiguous with provincial and territorial electoral districts. At lower tiers I did not think they were electoral districts files, but are wards and so on. So on that one I agree. When you say 84, you mean 84 what?

Officials are listed, not in the format you want, but the data are available.

Thx for the clarification on the Hansard and Tax rates.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 1:53 AM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with the "world view" and "comfort zone" assertions and I would guess that each of these groups would come up with a different list.  Maybe we need to encourage these groups to create a list for their purposes?

Ultimately I suppose we need to look at the value of creating a list in the first place.  For me, I just want to give muni's an idea of what at least SOME people are interested in.  It's true we can't speak for everyone.

The G8 list is great but my intention was to construct a list specifically for Canadian municipalities.  This list is specific to nations, though some of them could be addressed at the municipal level (crime for example).

H

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just recalled something!

I do not think the folks that submitted this list are not capable, but I do know that it is a group that reflects a world view that is not necessarily the same the civil society groups doing social and environmental justice work, or work on accessibility, or health.  And I worry that if we continuously only have us as open data folks involved in making lists and setting trajectories, then we are missing out on telling really important public policy issues, as they are just not on our horizon.

This is harder to step out of our comfort zones, but I think there is merit in doing so.  I was just going through the G8 resolution (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex) and if you scroll down to:

Action 2: Release of high value data, 

That list is pretty good.

Data Category* (alphabetical order)	Example datasets
Companies	Company/business register
Crime and Justice	Crime statistics, safety
Earth observation	Meteorological/weather, agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting
Education	List of schools; performance of schools, digital skills
Energy and Environment	Pollution levels, energy consumption
Finance and contracts	Transaction spend, contracts let, call for tender, future tenders, local budget, national budget (planned and spent)
Geospatial	Topography, postcodes, national maps, local maps
Global Development	Aid, food security, extractives, land
Government Accountability and Democracy	Government contact points, election results, legislation and statutes, salaries (pay scales), hospitality/gifts
Health	Prescription data, performance data
Science and Research	Genome data, research and educational activity, experiment results
Statistics	National Statistics, Census, infrastructure, wealth, skills
Social mobility and welfare	Housing, health insurance and unemployment benefits
Transport and Infrastructure	Public transport timetables, access points broadband penetration

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:18 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

HI Tracey,

The list was started on OpenDataBC and then moved here to get more input.  I have not taken it outside to other groups.

The idea is to generate a starting list of top 10 datasets.  Some of the datasets will already have been released by some municipalities.  Others may not have been made available by any municipalities.  The point is for publishers to be able to look at the list and see that people are interested.  I get asked over and over again "what do people want?" so I would like to be able to refer to a top ten list to give publishers and idea of what people are interested in.

For example, if it went out now I might choose:

• rezoning permit applications
  
lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

financial - actual expenditures

financial - grant and contribution awards

• crime information
  

I fully expect that the initial list will not be perfect but I think the people on the list have enough knowledge either on their own or with their networks to have a crack at it.

Also, I don't know of any group better than this one for getting things done so that's why I brought it here. :)

I am happy to help get this done however people think it should happen.  I like your categories suggestion - so maybe we should work that in somehow - but I was thinking more at the dataset level.

"Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!"

Thank you!  :)

Given this discussion I won't send anything out now so we can hear from a few more voices.

Cheers,

Herb

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 2:36 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Herb;

I think much more work needs to be done with these before you can do a survey is released and I think there is merit in grouping them.  Can you remind me how this list was made?  Looks like no social planners, community developers, health, environmentalists, or urban planners, housing experts, disability folks, were involved in the making of this list. What would they want?

Some of the data types are indicators and would require a number of datasets and research projects to get to these.  As I was sorting through them it reminded me of the Quality of life reporting systems of the federation of canadian municipalities, who collect these data from about 30 different institutions at all levels of jurisdiction (Grid of data - http://www.municipaldata-donneesmunicipales.ca/Site/Monitoring/grid.php?lang=en).  These data were decided upon as they told a story, overtime, and served a purpose to understand things in the city. Main headings of the report:

• Demographic Background Information (DBI)
• Affordable, Appropriate Housing (AAH)
• Civic Engagement (CE)
• Community and Social Infrastructure (CSI)
• Education (ED)
• Employment and Local Economy (ELE)
• Natural Environment (NE)
• Personal & Community Health (PCH)
• Personal Financial Security (PFS)
• Personal Safety (PS)

The issue of scale is also important here, is this for cities? if so do we want these data aggregated into neighbourhoods? Wards? electoral districts? dissemination areas? Postal Code areas?  GVRD/Metro van, or Van city? just to exemplify the difference.

I think we are maturing as a community, and maybe we can move beyond lists of datasets and start thinking about the best way for us to understand our cities/towns/etc.and think of the datasets that help us understand those things and then find the ways to communicate/discuss etc. these things. 

Also, some of the data on the list are already available.  Anyway, I have sorted the ones in your list.  I am super swamped for the next week, but I would be really happy to work with you and a few others (james?) to go through previous lists, and I would love to consult with some civil society groups and ask them what they want, environment? Community Health? Social Housing? Disability?  I don't know about you, but I find myself often circulating in the same circles and thus perpetuating ideals from a particular lens, this list I think reflects open data people but not necessarily, data users in the sense of actually using data to inform public policy in a real way, or a campaign, etc.  Open data folks like ourselves, got us here, and that is good, but now, I think we can do more, and communicate to people outside our 'open data circles', to those engaged in the day to day as non open data civil society groups and find out what their needs are.

Below is my first pass at classifying the list you shared, it is imperfect and not mutually exclusive, there are comments in brackets beside them.

Public Expenditures

·         financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)

·         Salaries of public officials

·         consultant fees (Maybe a better statement are gov subcontracting by type)

·         contracts

·         budget management (Not sure what is meant here? Which datasets?)

·         financial - planned expenditures (a.k.a. estimates, appropriations, supply)

·         financial - actual expenditures

·         financial - grant and contribution awards

·         financial - travel and hospitality expenses

Economic Development

·         business license

·         development applications (had twice)

·         approval results of development applications

·         DCC (development cost charges) rates

·         property assessments

·         tax rates (Do they mean property assessments?)

·         annual return data (not just pdf reports) is this taxfiler returns, is so then available at a fee? Which returns?

·         building citations (problems with structures etc...)

Business

·         tender opportunities

Land Use

·         park boundaries (which ones?  National park data are available)

·         land use changes (this too is an indicator, which datasets would be required, for instance parks, building footprints and year of construction, air photos, forests, farm land, etc. With those layers and others over time then land use change analysis is possible, but this is a research project or a geomatics project, not just one dataset)

Infrastructure

·         locations of things (fire hydrants, bike parking, ...)

·         transit data

·         infrastructure deficits (which one? Roads? Power? Broadband?) also this is a measure, or an indicator, so there would need to be specificity in terms of a theme and then a way to measure that

·         road construction (511 data)

·         road maintenance and emergency work (I am guessing not ambulance emergencies but disruptions due to emergencies)

Demographics

·         vital stats

·         demographic data (these are available)

Framework Data

·         electoral districts (these are available)

·         transit data (Feeds? Routes? Schedules?)

Remote Sensing

·         orthophotos

·         lidar

User Fees

·         service fees (For what? Swimming pools? Rec Programs? School fees)

Democratic engagemet

·         hansards – Fed? Prov/ter? I think some are available, but not necessarily in a useful format.  Is the fed hansard now on open data licence?

·         council

·         petitions

·         elected officials contact information (is available at fed and provincial and I think all cities offer this too, was there something specific?)

·         satisfaction survey results (e.g. http://donnees.ville.montreal.qc.ca/dataset/sondage-satisfaction-citoyens)

Planning

·         traffic study data

·         rezoning permit applications

·         service requests (e.g. http://open311.org/)

Health

·         stream health assessments (i do not know what these are?  Wait times?  These data are available from CIHI but for a fee)

·         health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)

Well Being

·         food bank usage stats

·         homelessness stats

Citizen Engagement

·         public consultations

Freedom of Information

·         completed access to information requests (as is done at the federal level)

·         public documents released under access to information laws (as BC does, for most part)

·         transparency and access to information

Political Accountability

·         lobbying disclosures (see http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/guidelines/)

·         political financing (contribution and expenses e.g. http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&lang=e)

·         calendar of meetings

·         agendas of meetings

·         minutes of meetings

·         video of meetings

·         audio of meetings

·         transcripts of meetings

·         role call votes

·         attendance records

Safety

·         crime information

Herb, you are super great at persistently keeping us going!

Cheers

Tracey

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 11:03 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just in case people are wondering what ever happened to this i

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