Top 10 Municipal Datasets

[Jury Konga]

Hi Tracey

Great feedback as always - thank you. I'm already in discussions on some of the points you made. Would live to followup with you on your experiences to date. 

Cheers Jury

Jury Konga, Principal

eGovFutures Group

 

Open Knowledge Foundation - Canada Ambassador

Canadian Open Data Institute - Co-Founder

Ontario IPC "Access by Design" Ambassador

T.  905-640-7377

C. 647-393-8045

Skype.  jury.konga

Twitter @jkonga

www.slideshare.net/jurykonga

Sent from my iPhone

On May 20, 2014, at 3:31 AM, "Tracey P. Lauriault" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Jury,

A bilingual survey is absolutely necessary. Has France not translated it?  I also like the idea of independent reviewers and James' deeper relationship building approach, as well as your suggestion of enlisting the assistance of subject matter specialists.

I participated in the Irish Census with Denis Parfenov, and being able to consult with experts was key as it was when James and I did it.  The biggest issue however was the census was always changeable by just about anyone.

A truly canadian census would also include an examination of provinces and territories as they too hold very important datasets such as cadastres, health and education data, student loans, business registries, different environmental datasets and so on as they have different jurisdictional powers than the feds. In fact most of social and health spending is at that level, as it much infrastructure spending.

The UK is a unitary state, as are many countries in Europe, and the census was based on it, however, had the EU had to fill out the census, they too would encounter the complexities we have.

Cheers

T

On Tuesday, May 20, 2014, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Jury.

With the local census, I think there’s a greater opportunity to engage the municipalities themselves in filling in the census. By filling it in themselves, they’ll recognize what’s missing, and maybe add some datasets to improve their score in the index. This would also help us identify the open data leads in each municipality and build relationships.

However, it should not only be about municipalities with open data. Half of the 50 largest municipalities don’t have open data yet. This census should be used to motivate those cities to adopt open data. We should reach out to clerks in municipalities without open data to ask them to fill in the survey, and ideally use the opportunity to better understand whether they are considering open data, what the challenges are, etc.

Open North is starting a new project that will involve the more labor-intensive, talking-to-cities activities that I described, so it won’t be difficult to add in a request to participate in the census. We’ll be starting that project next month, at which point I’ll be able to give more details (not my choice, the funder’s).

I also really need to stress that it’s very important for the census to be bilingual.

What are the timelines / time-windows for the Canadian version? (e.g. timing of initial outreach to custodians, amount of time reserved for validation, ultimate deadline, etc.)

James

On May 19, 2014, at 1:43 PM, Jury Konga <<a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','[e-mail]');" target="_blank">jkonga@...> wrote:

Hi James

 

Catching up … there’s essentially three tasks that require assistance:

1.        Community/Custodian input to the census (series of questions to answer for each of the pre-defined data sets);

2.       Census “Editor” or “Validator” – this requires someone that can assess and confirm/edit the community input.  This task must be undertaken by a community member and not the data custodian.

3.       Census Administration – initial setup and updates to the website and census config and updating to new versions.  The census is a work-in-progress - see Github  https://github.com/okfn/opendatacensus

 

The initial input can be done by anyone – I’ll be reaching out to the local municipal open data custodians and encourage them to input the initial info.  This can also be done by the members of the local open data community.

 

The initial work was done by the OKF UK but this initiative is for Canada’s version of the Local Open Data Census.  I’m wide open to suggestions on the process as James you and Tracey had experience with the national census.  There are a number of ways to possible approach the editing/validation task – Herb had an excellent suggestion that looked to thematic SMEs to look at their speciality datasets across all the jurisdictions – example being Stephane for Transportation.  I’ll be having discussions with the census coordinators in other countries and would welcome everyone’s suggestions to make a Made in Canada solution for us.  Thanks.

 

Cheers  Jury

 

From: <a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','[e-mail]');" target="_blank">civicaccess-discuss-bounces@... [<a href="javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','[e-mail]');" target="_blank">mailto:civicaccess-discuss-bounces@...] On Behalf OfJames McKinney
Sent: May-16-14 2:49 PM
To: civicaccess discuss
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] Top 10 Municipal Datasets

 

Can you describe what tasks people can assist with?

 

James

 

On May 16, 2014, at 2:15 PM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello all,

 

Agreed this is a great start and something to build on over time.  Yesterday, at the GO Open Data Conference in Toronto #GOOD14,  I announced that the Open Knowledge Foundation – Canada will be ramping up to launch a Canadian Local Open Data Census this summer.  The OKF local version template began in February with a number of countries participating – here’s the U.S.  version  http://us-city.census.okfn.org/    Here’s the initial blog post by Rufus Pollock http://blog.okfn.org/2014/02/04/announcing-the-local-open-data-census/

 

I’ve talked to Herb and a few others about this project and looking for others that might be interested in assisting.  See some similarities in the Top 10 and the OKF list – there is some latitude in changing data sets used in the census although the idea with standardizing the data sets is to allow comparisons not only within our country but also with other countries local data.

 

Let me know if you’re interested.

 

Cheers  Jury Konga

 

OKF Canada Ambassador

 

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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]

I have finally posted the list of top 20 here!  Please forgive the delay.  Herb let me know if I got the story right!

http://datalibre.ca/2014/05/20/2014-open-data-summit-top-10-most-wanted-datasets/

Cheers
t

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 10:46 AM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey James

Great feedback - thank you! I particularly like the use of the census to encourage other cities to go open. I agree with the need for the census to be bilingual and looking for help in that area. 

Looking forward to hearing from others :-)

Cheers Jury

Jury Konga, Principal

eGovFutures Group

 

Open Knowledge Foundation - Canada Ambassador

Canadian Open Data Institute - Co-Founder

Ontario IPC "Access by Design" Ambassador

T.  <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">905-640-7377

C. <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">647-393-8045

Skype.  jury.konga

Twitter @jkonga

www.slideshare.net/jurykonga

Sent from my iPhone

On May 19, 2014, at 10:51 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Jury.

With the local census, I think there’s a greater opportunity to engage the municipalities themselves in filling in the census. By filling it in themselves, they’ll recognize what’s missing, and maybe add some datasets to improve their score in the index. This would also help us identify the open data leads in each municipality and build relationships.

However, it should not only be about municipalities with open data. Half of the 50 largest municipalities don’t have open data yet. This census should be used to motivate those cities to adopt open data. We should reach out to clerks in municipalities without open data to ask them to fill in the survey, and ideally use the opportunity to better understand whether they are considering open data, what the challenges are, etc.

Open North is starting a new project that will involve the more labor-intensive, talking-to-cities activities that I described, so it won’t be difficult to add in a request to participate in the census. We’ll be starting that project next month, at which point I’ll be able to give more details (not my choice, the funder’s).

I also really need to stress that it’s very important for the census to be bilingual.

What are the timelines / time-windows for the Canadian version? (e.g. timing of initial outreach to custodians, amount of time reserved for validation, ultimate deadline, etc.)

James

On May 19, 2014, at 1:43 PM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi James

 

Catching up … there’s essentially three tasks that require assistance:

1.        Community/Custodian input to the census (series of questions to answer for each of the pre-defined data sets);

2.       Census “Editor” or “Validator” – this requires someone that can assess and confirm/edit the community input.  This task must be undertaken by a community member and not the data custodian.

3.       Census Administration – initial setup and updates to the website and census config and updating to new versions.  The census is a work-in-progress - see Github  https://github.com/okfn/opendatacensus

 

The initial input can be done by anyone – I’ll be reaching out to the local municipal open data custodians and encourage them to input the initial info.  This can also be done by the members of the local open data community.

 

The initial work was done by the OKF UK but this initiative is for Canada’s version of the Local Open Data Census.  I’m wide open to suggestions on the process as James you and Tracey had experience with the national census.  There are a number of ways to possible approach the editing/validation task – Herb had an excellent suggestion that looked to thematic SMEs to look at their speciality datasets across all the jurisdictions – example being Stephane for Transportation.  I’ll be having discussions with the census coordinators in other countries and would welcome everyone’s suggestions to make a Made in Canada solution for us.  Thanks.

 

Cheers  Jury

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf OfJames McKinney
Sent: May-16-14 2:49 PM
To: civicaccess discuss
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] Top 10 Municipal Datasets

 

Can you describe what tasks people can assist with?

 

James

 

On May 16, 2014, at 2:15 PM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello all,

 

Agreed this is a great start and something to build on over time.  Yesterday, at the GO Open Data Conference in Toronto #GOOD14,  I announced that the Open Knowledge Foundation – Canada will be ramping up to launch a Canadian Local Open Data Census this summer.  The OKF local version template began in February with a number of countries participating – here’s the U.S.  version  http://us-city.census.okfn.org/    Here’s the initial blog post by Rufus Pollock http://blog.okfn.org/2014/02/04/announcing-the-local-open-data-census/

 

I’ve talked to Herb and a few others about this project and looking for others that might be interested in assisting.  See some similarities in the Top 10 and the OKF list – there is some latitude in changing data sets used in the census although the idea with standardizing the data sets is to allow comparisons not only within our country but also with other countries local data.

 

Let me know if you’re interested.

 

Cheers  Jury Konga

 

OKF Canada Ambassador

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf OfJames McKinney
Sent: May-16-14 1:26 PM
To: civicaccess discuss
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] Top 10 Municipal Datasets

 

Awesome! And now to share the list with open data municipalities, so that we get more datasets released from this list, and fewer datasets like helicopter landing sites. Nelson mentioned sharing with MISA, for instance.

 

I don’t know if the list will change every year, but I think it would be worthwhile to repeat next year, based on what we’ve learned. For example, as Linda wrote, we can work with open data municipalities to do better promotion. And as Heather wrote, we should think of ways to get the survey to people outside of open data. We can also make it bilingual. I’m sure we can continue to improve the list of survey options; my only comment at this point is to split up “locations of things” to be more specific.

 

Following up on another of Heather’s comments, if we can get municipalities to release "Top Searches on Government Websites” as a dataset, that would help inform the list of wanted datasets as well.

 

Thanks, Herb, and everyone who helped make this first top 10 list!

 

James

 

 

On May 14, 2014, at 11:13 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello All,

 

Thanks to everyone who helped out, voted, shared, discussed and otherwise furthered this project.  Much appreciated.  James, thanks for removing the duplicates.  I suggest we consider it complete at this point.

 

Canadian Open Data Community Top Ten Wanted Municipal Datasets - May 2014

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications
7. Crime information
8. Road construction (511 data)
9. Political financing
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns

With #1 being the most desired.

 

Tracey, could we please post this on datalibre so we can all refer to it there and let our various networks know about it?

 

Thank you!

Herb

 

ps: I also suggest we review it on a regular basis, perhaps yearly to start?

 

 

 

 

 

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think your edits are right on the mark James.   Thanks for doing that.

 

Does anyone else have any feedback or suggestions on this before we consider it done?

 

Keep in mind, this is our first attempt.  I expect we will do this once per year at a minimum - so we will have more opportunities to refine it.

 

Herb

 

 

On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 5:56 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

These are very useful results!

 

I knew from other studies that planning & development was of great interest, but this shows which datasets are prioritized within that theme: i.e. zoning data (1,2) is more in-demand than development applications (6,11). Sunlight has a series on zoning data:

 

https://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/municipal_zoning/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/05/23/the-landscape-of-municipal-zoning-data/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/06/05/the-impact-of-opening-up-zoning-data/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/06/07/recommendations-for-stronger-zoning-data/

 

They also dove into Asset Disclosure, Campaign Finance (12), Crime (8) and Lobbying:

 

https://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/local/

 

It’s interesting to see that health inspections (16) and building citations (19) are as low as they are. Health inspections are published by several cities in Canada, and both datasets have seen standardizations efforts by Code for America. However, this result is in keeping with the results of similar studies, like Monmouth which I had shared previously.

 

I’m not sure that there is a clear distinction between "development permit applications" and "development applications”. The wording of “Financial data (revenue, expenses…)” seems to overlap with “Financial - actual expenditures”. If we merge those and also “transit data”, we get:

 

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications

7. Crime information
8. Road construction (511 data)

9. Political financing
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns

Great work!

 

James

 

On May 1, 2014, at 12:35 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Hey All,

 

The results from the top 10 datasets survey are in.   You can find them here: https://www.surveymonkey.net/results/SM-7Y5RDST/

 

I have to apologize, somehow Transit got in there twice.  It's clearly in the top ten in both cases so I think it's safe to say it's in the top ten.

 

We intentionally left the overlapping items and so we also see a few entries near the top around "Development Permits", "Land Use Changes", and "Rezoning Permits".  

 

Most of the entries are fairly distinct but there are a few that seem to me to be a bit overlapping.  So, we could either take the top 10 with the most votes (combining the two "Transit data" entries into one) - or we could attempt to eliminate any redundancy so we have 10 fairly distinct entries.  I am open to suggestions.

 

Here are the top 20 for your reference which should be enough to get us down to 10.  Please look at the link above for the actual numbers.

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications
7. Financial - actual expenditures
8. Crime information
9. Road construction (511 data)
10. Transit data
11. Development applications
12. Political financing
13. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns
14. Contracts
15. Property assessments
16. Health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)
17. Public consultations
18. Salaries
19. Building citations (problems with structures etc...)
20. Minutes of meetings

Cheers,

Herb

 

 

--

 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

<a href="tel:[phone]" style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

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--

 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

<a href="tel:[phone]" style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

 

--

 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

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

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

_______________________________________________
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[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

 

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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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[Herb Lainchbury]

Hi Tracy,

Thank you!

The list you used was the not-quite-finished one.  There should only be 10 entries and they are:

Canadian Open Data Community Top Ten Wanted Municipal Datasets - May 2014

1. Rezoning permit applications
   
2. Land use changes
   
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
   
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
   
5. Transit data
   
6. Development permit applications
   
7. Crime information
   
8. Road construction (511 data)
   
9. Political financing
   
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns
    

With #1 being the most desired.

Cheers,

Herb

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 9:22 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

I have finally posted the list of top 20 here!  Please forgive the delay.  Herb let me know if I got the story right!

http://datalibre.ca/2014/05/20/2014-open-data-summit-top-10-most-wanted-datasets/

Cheers
t

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 10:46 AM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey James

Great feedback - thank you! I particularly like the use of the census to encourage other cities to go open. I agree with the need for the census to be bilingual and looking for help in that area. 

Looking forward to hearing from others :-)

Cheers Jury

Jury Konga, Principal

eGovFutures Group

 

Open Knowledge Foundation - Canada Ambassador

Canadian Open Data Institute - Co-Founder

Ontario IPC "Access by Design" Ambassador

T.  <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">905-640-7377

C. <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">647-393-8045

Skype.  jury.konga

Twitter @jkonga

www.slideshare.net/jurykonga

Sent from my iPhone

On May 19, 2014, at 10:51 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Jury.

With the local census, I think there’s a greater opportunity to engage the municipalities themselves in filling in the census. By filling it in themselves, they’ll recognize what’s missing, and maybe add some datasets to improve their score in the index. This would also help us identify the open data leads in each municipality and build relationships.

However, it should not only be about municipalities with open data. Half of the 50 largest municipalities don’t have open data yet. This census should be used to motivate those cities to adopt open data. We should reach out to clerks in municipalities without open data to ask them to fill in the survey, and ideally use the opportunity to better understand whether they are considering open data, what the challenges are, etc.

Open North is starting a new project that will involve the more labor-intensive, talking-to-cities activities that I described, so it won’t be difficult to add in a request to participate in the census. We’ll be starting that project next month, at which point I’ll be able to give more details (not my choice, the funder’s).

I also really need to stress that it’s very important for the census to be bilingual.

What are the timelines / time-windows for the Canadian version? (e.g. timing of initial outreach to custodians, amount of time reserved for validation, ultimate deadline, etc.)

James

On May 19, 2014, at 1:43 PM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi James

 

Catching up … there’s essentially three tasks that require assistance:

1.        Community/Custodian input to the census (series of questions to answer for each of the pre-defined data sets);

2.       Census “Editor” or “Validator” – this requires someone that can assess and confirm/edit the community input.  This task must be undertaken by a community member and not the data custodian.

3.       Census Administration – initial setup and updates to the website and census config and updating to new versions.  The census is a work-in-progress - see Github  https://github.com/okfn/opendatacensus

 

The initial input can be done by anyone – I’ll be reaching out to the local municipal open data custodians and encourage them to input the initial info.  This can also be done by the members of the local open data community.

 

The initial work was done by the OKF UK but this initiative is for Canada’s version of the Local Open Data Census.  I’m wide open to suggestions on the process as James you and Tracey had experience with the national census.  There are a number of ways to possible approach the editing/validation task – Herb had an excellent suggestion that looked to thematic SMEs to look at their speciality datasets across all the jurisdictions – example being Stephane for Transportation.  I’ll be having discussions with the census coordinators in other countries and would welcome everyone’s suggestions to make a Made in Canada solution for us.  Thanks.

 

Cheers  Jury

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf OfJames McKinney
Sent: May-16-14 2:49 PM
To: civicaccess discuss
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] Top 10 Municipal Datasets

 

Can you describe what tasks people can assist with?

 

James

 

On May 16, 2014, at 2:15 PM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello all,

 

Agreed this is a great start and something to build on over time.  Yesterday, at the GO Open Data Conference in Toronto #GOOD14,  I announced that the Open Knowledge Foundation – Canada will be ramping up to launch a Canadian Local Open Data Census this summer.  The OKF local version template began in February with a number of countries participating – here’s the U.S.  version  http://us-city.census.okfn.org/    Here’s the initial blog post by Rufus Pollock http://blog.okfn.org/2014/02/04/announcing-the-local-open-data-census/

 

I’ve talked to Herb and a few others about this project and looking for others that might be interested in assisting.  See some similarities in the Top 10 and the OKF list – there is some latitude in changing data sets used in the census although the idea with standardizing the data sets is to allow comparisons not only within our country but also with other countries local data.

 

Let me know if you’re interested.

 

Cheers  Jury Konga

 

OKF Canada Ambassador

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf OfJames McKinney
Sent: May-16-14 1:26 PM
To: civicaccess discuss
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] Top 10 Municipal Datasets

 

Awesome! And now to share the list with open data municipalities, so that we get more datasets released from this list, and fewer datasets like helicopter landing sites. Nelson mentioned sharing with MISA, for instance.

 

I don’t know if the list will change every year, but I think it would be worthwhile to repeat next year, based on what we’ve learned. For example, as Linda wrote, we can work with open data municipalities to do better promotion. And as Heather wrote, we should think of ways to get the survey to people outside of open data. We can also make it bilingual. I’m sure we can continue to improve the list of survey options; my only comment at this point is to split up “locations of things” to be more specific.

 

Following up on another of Heather’s comments, if we can get municipalities to release "Top Searches on Government Websites” as a dataset, that would help inform the list of wanted datasets as well.

 

Thanks, Herb, and everyone who helped make this first top 10 list!

 

James

 

 

On May 14, 2014, at 11:13 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello All,

 

Thanks to everyone who helped out, voted, shared, discussed and otherwise furthered this project.  Much appreciated.  James, thanks for removing the duplicates.  I suggest we consider it complete at this point.

 

Canadian Open Data Community Top Ten Wanted Municipal Datasets - May 2014

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications
7. Crime information
8. Road construction (511 data)
9. Political financing
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns

With #1 being the most desired.

 

Tracey, could we please post this on datalibre so we can all refer to it there and let our various networks know about it?

 

Thank you!

Herb

 

ps: I also suggest we review it on a regular basis, perhaps yearly to start?

 

 

 

 

 

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think your edits are right on the mark James.   Thanks for doing that.

 

Does anyone else have any feedback or suggestions on this before we consider it done?

 

Keep in mind, this is our first attempt.  I expect we will do this once per year at a minimum - so we will have more opportunities to refine it.

 

Herb

 

 

On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 5:56 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

These are very useful results!

 

I knew from other studies that planning & development was of great interest, but this shows which datasets are prioritized within that theme: i.e. zoning data (1,2) is more in-demand than development applications (6,11). Sunlight has a series on zoning data:

 

https://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/municipal_zoning/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/05/23/the-landscape-of-municipal-zoning-data/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/06/05/the-impact-of-opening-up-zoning-data/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/06/07/recommendations-for-stronger-zoning-data/

 

They also dove into Asset Disclosure, Campaign Finance (12), Crime (8) and Lobbying:

 

https://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/local/

 

It’s interesting to see that health inspections (16) and building citations (19) are as low as they are. Health inspections are published by several cities in Canada, and both datasets have seen standardizations efforts by Code for America. However, this result is in keeping with the results of similar studies, like Monmouth which I had shared previously.

 

I’m not sure that there is a clear distinction between "development permit applications" and "development applications”. The wording of “Financial data (revenue, expenses…)” seems to overlap with “Financial - actual expenditures”. If we merge those and also “transit data”, we get:

 

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications

7. Crime information
8. Road construction (511 data)

9. Political financing
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns

Great work!

 

James

 

On May 1, 2014, at 12:35 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Hey All,

 

The results from the top 10 datasets survey are in.   You can find them here: https://www.surveymonkey.net/results/SM-7Y5RDST/

 

I have to apologize, somehow Transit got in there twice.  It's clearly in the top ten in both cases so I think it's safe to say it's in the top ten.

 

We intentionally left the overlapping items and so we also see a few entries near the top around "Development Permits", "Land Use Changes", and "Rezoning Permits".  

 

Most of the entries are fairly distinct but there are a few that seem to me to be a bit overlapping.  So, we could either take the top 10 with the most votes (combining the two "Transit data" entries into one) - or we could attempt to eliminate any redundancy so we have 10 fairly distinct entries.  I am open to suggestions.

 

Here are the top 20 for your reference which should be enough to get us down to 10.  Please look at the link above for the actual numbers.

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications
7. Financial - actual expenditures
8. Crime information
9. Road construction (511 data)
10. Transit data
11. Development applications
12. Political financing
13. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns
14. Contracts
15. Property assessments
16. Health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)
17. Public consultations
18. Salaries
19. Building citations (problems with structures etc...)
20. Minutes of meetings

Cheers,

Herb

 

 

--

 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

<a href="tel:[phone]" style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

 

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

 

--

 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

<a href="tel:[phone]" style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

 

--

 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

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

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

 

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

 

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

--

Tracey P. Lauriault

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
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

--

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

[Tracey P. Lauriault]

adjusted!

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 5:54 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Tracy,

Thank you!

The list you used was the not-quite-finished one.  There should only be 10 entries and they are:

Canadian Open Data Community Top Ten Wanted Municipal Datasets - May 2014

1. Rezoning permit applications
   
2. Land use changes
   
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
   
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
   
5. Transit data
   
6. Development permit applications
   
7. Crime information
   
8. Road construction (511 data)
   
9. Political financing
   
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns
    

With #1 being the most desired.

Cheers,

Herb

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 9:22 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

I have finally posted the list of top 20 here!  Please forgive the delay.  Herb let me know if I got the story right!

http://datalibre.ca/2014/05/20/2014-open-data-summit-top-10-most-wanted-datasets/

Cheers
t

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 10:46 AM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey James

Great feedback - thank you! I particularly like the use of the census to encourage other cities to go open. I agree with the need for the census to be bilingual and looking for help in that area. 

Looking forward to hearing from others :-)

Cheers Jury

Jury Konga, Principal

eGovFutures Group

 

Open Knowledge Foundation - Canada Ambassador

Canadian Open Data Institute - Co-Founder

Ontario IPC "Access by Design" Ambassador

T.  <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">905-640-7377

C. <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">647-393-8045

Skype.  jury.konga

Twitter @jkonga

www.slideshare.net/jurykonga

Sent from my iPhone

On May 19, 2014, at 10:51 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Jury.

With the local census, I think there’s a greater opportunity to engage the municipalities themselves in filling in the census. By filling it in themselves, they’ll recognize what’s missing, and maybe add some datasets to improve their score in the index. This would also help us identify the open data leads in each municipality and build relationships.

However, it should not only be about municipalities with open data. Half of the 50 largest municipalities don’t have open data yet. This census should be used to motivate those cities to adopt open data. We should reach out to clerks in municipalities without open data to ask them to fill in the survey, and ideally use the opportunity to better understand whether they are considering open data, what the challenges are, etc.

Open North is starting a new project that will involve the more labor-intensive, talking-to-cities activities that I described, so it won’t be difficult to add in a request to participate in the census. We’ll be starting that project next month, at which point I’ll be able to give more details (not my choice, the funder’s).

I also really need to stress that it’s very important for the census to be bilingual.

What are the timelines / time-windows for the Canadian version? (e.g. timing of initial outreach to custodians, amount of time reserved for validation, ultimate deadline, etc.)

James

On May 19, 2014, at 1:43 PM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi James

 

Catching up … there’s essentially three tasks that require assistance:

1.        Community/Custodian input to the census (series of questions to answer for each of the pre-defined data sets);

2.       Census “Editor” or “Validator” – this requires someone that can assess and confirm/edit the community input.  This task must be undertaken by a community member and not the data custodian.

3.       Census Administration – initial setup and updates to the website and census config and updating to new versions.  The census is a work-in-progress - see Github  https://github.com/okfn/opendatacensus

 

The initial input can be done by anyone – I’ll be reaching out to the local municipal open data custodians and encourage them to input the initial info.  This can also be done by the members of the local open data community.

 

The initial work was done by the OKF UK but this initiative is for Canada’s version of the Local Open Data Census.  I’m wide open to suggestions on the process as James you and Tracey had experience with the national census.  There are a number of ways to possible approach the editing/validation task – Herb had an excellent suggestion that looked to thematic SMEs to look at their speciality datasets across all the jurisdictions – example being Stephane for Transportation.  I’ll be having discussions with the census coordinators in other countries and would welcome everyone’s suggestions to make a Made in Canada solution for us.  Thanks.

 

Cheers  Jury

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf OfJames McKinney
Sent: May-16-14 2:49 PM
To: civicaccess discuss
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] Top 10 Municipal Datasets

 

Can you describe what tasks people can assist with?

 

James

 

On May 16, 2014, at 2:15 PM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello all,

 

Agreed this is a great start and something to build on over time.  Yesterday, at the GO Open Data Conference in Toronto #GOOD14,  I announced that the Open Knowledge Foundation – Canada will be ramping up to launch a Canadian Local Open Data Census this summer.  The OKF local version template began in February with a number of countries participating – here’s the U.S.  version  http://us-city.census.okfn.org/    Here’s the initial blog post by Rufus Pollock http://blog.okfn.org/2014/02/04/announcing-the-local-open-data-census/

 

I’ve talked to Herb and a few others about this project and looking for others that might be interested in assisting.  See some similarities in the Top 10 and the OKF list – there is some latitude in changing data sets used in the census although the idea with standardizing the data sets is to allow comparisons not only within our country but also with other countries local data.

 

Let me know if you’re interested.

 

Cheers  Jury Konga

 

OKF Canada Ambassador

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf OfJames McKinney
Sent: May-16-14 1:26 PM
To: civicaccess discuss
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] Top 10 Municipal Datasets

 

Awesome! And now to share the list with open data municipalities, so that we get more datasets released from this list, and fewer datasets like helicopter landing sites. Nelson mentioned sharing with MISA, for instance.

 

I don’t know if the list will change every year, but I think it would be worthwhile to repeat next year, based on what we’ve learned. For example, as Linda wrote, we can work with open data municipalities to do better promotion. And as Heather wrote, we should think of ways to get the survey to people outside of open data. We can also make it bilingual. I’m sure we can continue to improve the list of survey options; my only comment at this point is to split up “locations of things” to be more specific.

 

Following up on another of Heather’s comments, if we can get municipalities to release "Top Searches on Government Websites” as a dataset, that would help inform the list of wanted datasets as well.

 

Thanks, Herb, and everyone who helped make this first top 10 list!

 

James

 

 

On May 14, 2014, at 11:13 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello All,

 

Thanks to everyone who helped out, voted, shared, discussed and otherwise furthered this project.  Much appreciated.  James, thanks for removing the duplicates.  I suggest we consider it complete at this point.

 

Canadian Open Data Community Top Ten Wanted Municipal Datasets - May 2014

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications
7. Crime information
8. Road construction (511 data)
9. Political financing
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns

With #1 being the most desired.

 

Tracey, could we please post this on datalibre so we can all refer to it there and let our various networks know about it?

 

Thank you!

Herb

 

ps: I also suggest we review it on a regular basis, perhaps yearly to start?

 

 

 

 

 

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think your edits are right on the mark James.   Thanks for doing that.

 

Does anyone else have any feedback or suggestions on this before we consider it done?

 

Keep in mind, this is our first attempt.  I expect we will do this once per year at a minimum - so we will have more opportunities to refine it.

 

Herb

 

 

On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 5:56 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

These are very useful results!

 

I knew from other studies that planning & development was of great interest, but this shows which datasets are prioritized within that theme: i.e. zoning data (1,2) is more in-demand than development applications (6,11). Sunlight has a series on zoning data:

 

https://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/municipal_zoning/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/05/23/the-landscape-of-municipal-zoning-data/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/06/05/the-impact-of-opening-up-zoning-data/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/06/07/recommendations-for-stronger-zoning-data/

 

They also dove into Asset Disclosure, Campaign Finance (12), Crime (8) and Lobbying:

 

https://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/local/

 

It’s interesting to see that health inspections (16) and building citations (19) are as low as they are. Health inspections are published by several cities in Canada, and both datasets have seen standardizations efforts by Code for America. However, this result is in keeping with the results of similar studies, like Monmouth which I had shared previously.

 

I’m not sure that there is a clear distinction between "development permit applications" and "development applications”. The wording of “Financial data (revenue, expenses…)” seems to overlap with “Financial - actual expenditures”. If we merge those and also “transit data”, we get:

 

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications

7. Crime information
8. Road construction (511 data)

9. Political financing
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns

Great work!

 

James

 

On May 1, 2014, at 12:35 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Hey All,

 

The results from the top 10 datasets survey are in.   You can find them here: https://www.surveymonkey.net/results/SM-7Y5RDST/

 

I have to apologize, somehow Transit got in there twice.  It's clearly in the top ten in both cases so I think it's safe to say it's in the top ten.

 

We intentionally left the overlapping items and so we also see a few entries near the top around "Development Permits", "Land Use Changes", and "Rezoning Permits".  

 

Most of the entries are fairly distinct but there are a few that seem to me to be a bit overlapping.  So, we could either take the top 10 with the most votes (combining the two "Transit data" entries into one) - or we could attempt to eliminate any redundancy so we have 10 fairly distinct entries.  I am open to suggestions.

 

Here are the top 20 for your reference which should be enough to get us down to 10.  Please look at the link above for the actual numbers.

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications
7. Financial - actual expenditures
8. Crime information
9. Road construction (511 data)
10. Transit data
11. Development applications
12. Political financing
13. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns
14. Contracts
15. Property assessments
16. Health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)
17. Public consultations
18. Salaries
19. Building citations (problems with structures etc...)
20. Minutes of meetings

Cheers,

Herb

 

 

--

 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

<a href="tel:[phone]" style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

 

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

 

--

 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

<a href="tel:[phone]" style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

 

--

 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

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

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

 

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

 

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

--

Tracey P. Lauriault

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
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

--

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

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

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

--

Tracey P. Lauriault

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
[hidden email]
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

[Nick Skytland]

Is anyone interested in writing up a blog post, or cross-posting the article, on the hackforchange.org website as part of National Day of Civic Hacking?  We have a number of Canadian locations this year and with about 120 events taking place around the world, it might help draw some attention to this!  

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 12:10 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

adjusted!

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 5:54 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Tracy,

Thank you!

The list you used was the not-quite-finished one.  There should only be 10 entries and they are:

Canadian Open Data Community Top Ten Wanted Municipal Datasets - May 2014

1. Rezoning permit applications
   
2. Land use changes
   
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
   
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
   
5. Transit data
   
6. Development permit applications
   
7. Crime information
   
8. Road construction (511 data)
   
9. Political financing
   
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns
    

With #1 being the most desired.

Cheers,

Herb

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 9:22 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

I have finally posted the list of top 20 here!  Please forgive the delay.  Herb let me know if I got the story right!

http://datalibre.ca/2014/05/20/2014-open-data-summit-top-10-most-wanted-datasets/

Cheers
t

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 10:46 AM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey James

Great feedback - thank you! I particularly like the use of the census to encourage other cities to go open. I agree with the need for the census to be bilingual and looking for help in that area. 

Looking forward to hearing from others :-)

Cheers Jury

Jury Konga, Principal

eGovFutures Group

 

Open Knowledge Foundation - Canada Ambassador

Canadian Open Data Institute - Co-Founder

Ontario IPC "Access by Design" Ambassador

T.  <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">905-640-7377

C. <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">647-393-8045

Skype.  jury.konga

Twitter @jkonga

www.slideshare.net/jurykonga

Sent from my iPhone

On May 19, 2014, at 10:51 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Jury.

With the local census, I think there’s a greater opportunity to engage the municipalities themselves in filling in the census. By filling it in themselves, they’ll recognize what’s missing, and maybe add some datasets to improve their score in the index. This would also help us identify the open data leads in each municipality and build relationships.

However, it should not only be about municipalities with open data. Half of the 50 largest municipalities don’t have open data yet. This census should be used to motivate those cities to adopt open data. We should reach out to clerks in municipalities without open data to ask them to fill in the survey, and ideally use the opportunity to better understand whether they are considering open data, what the challenges are, etc.

Open North is starting a new project that will involve the more labor-intensive, talking-to-cities activities that I described, so it won’t be difficult to add in a request to participate in the census. We’ll be starting that project next month, at which point I’ll be able to give more details (not my choice, the funder’s).

I also really need to stress that it’s very important for the census to be bilingual.

What are the timelines / time-windows for the Canadian version? (e.g. timing of initial outreach to custodians, amount of time reserved for validation, ultimate deadline, etc.)

James

On May 19, 2014, at 1:43 PM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi James

 

Catching up … there’s essentially three tasks that require assistance:

1.        Community/Custodian input to the census (series of questions to answer for each of the pre-defined data sets);

2.       Census “Editor” or “Validator” – this requires someone that can assess and confirm/edit the community input.  This task must be undertaken by a community member and not the data custodian.

3.       Census Administration – initial setup and updates to the website and census config and updating to new versions.  The census is a work-in-progress - see Github  https://github.com/okfn/opendatacensus

 

The initial input can be done by anyone – I’ll be reaching out to the local municipal open data custodians and encourage them to input the initial info.  This can also be done by the members of the local open data community.

 

The initial work was done by the OKF UK but this initiative is for Canada’s version of the Local Open Data Census.  I’m wide open to suggestions on the process as James you and Tracey had experience with the national census.  There are a number of ways to possible approach the editing/validation task – Herb had an excellent suggestion that looked to thematic SMEs to look at their speciality datasets across all the jurisdictions – example being Stephane for Transportation.  I’ll be having discussions with the census coordinators in other countries and would welcome everyone’s suggestions to make a Made in Canada solution for us.  Thanks.

 

Cheers  Jury

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf OfJames McKinney
Sent: May-16-14 2:49 PM
To: civicaccess discuss
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] Top 10 Municipal Datasets

 

Can you describe what tasks people can assist with?

 

James

 

On May 16, 2014, at 2:15 PM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello all,

 

Agreed this is a great start and something to build on over time.  Yesterday, at the GO Open Data Conference in Toronto #GOOD14,  I announced that the Open Knowledge Foundation – Canada will be ramping up to launch a Canadian Local Open Data Census this summer.  The OKF local version template began in February with a number of countries participating – here’s the U.S.  version  http://us-city.census.okfn.org/    Here’s the initial blog post by Rufus Pollock http://blog.okfn.org/2014/02/04/announcing-the-local-open-data-census/

 

I’ve talked to Herb and a few others about this project and looking for others that might be interested in assisting.  See some similarities in the Top 10 and the OKF list – there is some latitude in changing data sets used in the census although the idea with standardizing the data sets is to allow comparisons not only within our country but also with other countries local data.

 

Let me know if you’re interested.

 

Cheers  Jury Konga

 

OKF Canada Ambassador

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf OfJames McKinney
Sent: May-16-14 1:26 PM
To: civicaccess discuss
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] Top 10 Municipal Datasets

 

Awesome! And now to share the list with open data municipalities, so that we get more datasets released from this list, and fewer datasets like helicopter landing sites. Nelson mentioned sharing with MISA, for instance.

 

I don’t know if the list will change every year, but I think it would be worthwhile to repeat next year, based on what we’ve learned. For example, as Linda wrote, we can work with open data municipalities to do better promotion. And as Heather wrote, we should think of ways to get the survey to people outside of open data. We can also make it bilingual. I’m sure we can continue to improve the list of survey options; my only comment at this point is to split up “locations of things” to be more specific.

 

Following up on another of Heather’s comments, if we can get municipalities to release "Top Searches on Government Websites” as a dataset, that would help inform the list of wanted datasets as well.

 

Thanks, Herb, and everyone who helped make this first top 10 list!

 

James

 

 

On May 14, 2014, at 11:13 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello All,

 

Thanks to everyone who helped out, voted, shared, discussed and otherwise furthered this project.  Much appreciated.  James, thanks for removing the duplicates.  I suggest we consider it complete at this point.

 

Canadian Open Data Community Top Ten Wanted Municipal Datasets - May 2014

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications
7. Crime information
8. Road construction (511 data)
9. Political financing
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns

With #1 being the most desired.

 

Tracey, could we please post this on datalibre so we can all refer to it there and let our various networks know about it?

 

Thank you!

Herb

 

ps: I also suggest we review it on a regular basis, perhaps yearly to start?

 

 

 

 

 

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think your edits are right on the mark James.   Thanks for doing that.

 

Does anyone else have any feedback or suggestions on this before we consider it done?

 

Keep in mind, this is our first attempt.  I expect we will do this once per year at a minimum - so we will have more opportunities to refine it.

 

Herb

 

 

On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 5:56 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

These are very useful results!

 

I knew from other studies that planning & development was of great interest, but this shows which datasets are prioritized within that theme: i.e. zoning data (1,2) is more in-demand than development applications (6,11). Sunlight has a series on zoning data:

 

https://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/municipal_zoning/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/05/23/the-landscape-of-municipal-zoning-data/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/06/05/the-impact-of-opening-up-zoning-data/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/06/07/recommendations-for-stronger-zoning-data/

 

They also dove into Asset Disclosure, Campaign Finance (12), Crime (8) and Lobbying:

 

https://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/local/

 

It’s interesting to see that health inspections (16) and building citations (19) are as low as they are. Health inspections are published by several cities in Canada, and both datasets have seen standardizations efforts by Code for America. However, this result is in keeping with the results of similar studies, like Monmouth which I had shared previously.

 

I’m not sure that there is a clear distinction between "development permit applications" and "development applications”. The wording of “Financial data (revenue, expenses…)” seems to overlap with “Financial - actual expenditures”. If we merge those and also “transit data”, we get:

 

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications

7. Crime information
8. Road construction (511 data)

9. Political financing
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns

Great work!

 

James

 

On May 1, 2014, at 12:35 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Hey All,

 

The results from the top 10 datasets survey are in.   You can find them here: https://www.surveymonkey.net/results/SM-7Y5RDST/

 

I have to apologize, somehow Transit got in there twice.  It's clearly in the top ten in both cases so I think it's safe to say it's in the top ten.

 

We intentionally left the overlapping items and so we also see a few entries near the top around "Development Permits", "Land Use Changes", and "Rezoning Permits".  

 

Most of the entries are fairly distinct but there are a few that seem to me to be a bit overlapping.  So, we could either take the top 10 with the most votes (combining the two "Transit data" entries into one) - or we could attempt to eliminate any redundancy so we have 10 fairly distinct entries.  I am open to suggestions.

 

Here are the top 20 for your reference which should be enough to get us down to 10.  Please look at the link above for the actual numbers.

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications
7. Financial - actual expenditures
8. Crime information
9. Road construction (511 data)
10. Transit data
11. Development applications
12. Political financing
13. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns
14. Contracts
15. Property assessments
16. Health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)
17. Public consultations
18. Salaries
19. Building citations (problems with structures etc...)
20. Minutes of meetings

Cheers,

Herb

 

 

--

 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

<a href="tel:[phone]" style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

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CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
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--

 

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<a href="tel:[phone]" style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

 

--

 

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

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

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

http://datalibre.ca/

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http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

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[hidden email]
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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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[James McKinney-2]

Hi Nick,

Sorry to change the topic, but which Canadian locations are participating? I can only find Edmonton.

Thanks,

James

On May 20, 2014, at 1:56 PM, Nick Skytland <[hidden email]> wrote:

Is anyone interested in writing up a blog post, or cross-posting the article, on the hackforchange.org website as part of National Day of Civic Hacking?  We have a number of Canadian locations this year and with about 120 events taking place around the world, it might help draw some attention to this!  

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 12:10 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

adjusted!

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 5:54 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Tracy,

Thank you!

The list you used was the not-quite-finished one.  There should only be 10 entries and they are:

Canadian Open Data Community Top Ten Wanted Municipal Datasets - May 2014

1. Rezoning permit applications
   
2. Land use changes
   
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
   
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
   
5. Transit data
   
6. Development permit applications
   
7. Crime information
   
8. Road construction (511 data)
   
9. Political financing
   
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns
    

With #1 being the most desired.

Cheers,

Herb

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 9:22 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

I have finally posted the list of top 20 here!  Please forgive the delay.  Herb let me know if I got the story right!

http://datalibre.ca/2014/05/20/2014-open-data-summit-top-10-most-wanted-datasets/

Cheers
t

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 10:46 AM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey James

Great feedback - thank you! I particularly like the use of the census to encourage other cities to go open. I agree with the need for the census to be bilingual and looking for help in that area. 

Looking forward to hearing from others :-)

Cheers Jury

Jury Konga, Principal

eGovFutures Group

 

Open Knowledge Foundation - Canada Ambassador

Canadian Open Data Institute - Co-Founder

Ontario IPC "Access by Design" Ambassador

T.  <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">905-640-7377

C. <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">647-393-8045

Skype.  jury.konga

Twitter @jkonga

www.slideshare.net/jurykonga

Sent from my iPhone

On May 19, 2014, at 10:51 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Jury.

With the local census, I think there’s a greater opportunity to engage the municipalities themselves in filling in the census. By filling it in themselves, they’ll recognize what’s missing, and maybe add some datasets to improve their score in the index. This would also help us identify the open data leads in each municipality and build relationships.

However, it should not only be about municipalities with open data. Half of the 50 largest municipalities don’t have open data yet. This census should be used to motivate those cities to adopt open data. We should reach out to clerks in municipalities without open data to ask them to fill in the survey, and ideally use the opportunity to better understand whether they are considering open data, what the challenges are, etc.

Open North is starting a new project that will involve the more labor-intensive, talking-to-cities activities that I described, so it won’t be difficult to add in a request to participate in the census. We’ll be starting that project next month, at which point I’ll be able to give more details (not my choice, the funder’s).

I also really need to stress that it’s very important for the census to be bilingual.

What are the timelines / time-windows for the Canadian version? (e.g. timing of initial outreach to custodians, amount of time reserved for validation, ultimate deadline, etc.)

James

On May 19, 2014, at 1:43 PM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi James

 

Catching up … there’s essentially three tasks that require assistance:

1.        Community/Custodian input to the census (series of questions to answer for each of the pre-defined data sets);

2.       Census “Editor” or “Validator” – this requires someone that can assess and confirm/edit the community input.  This task must be undertaken by a community member and not the data custodian.

3.       Census Administration – initial setup and updates to the website and census config and updating to new versions.  The census is a work-in-progress - see Github  https://github.com/okfn/opendatacensus

 

The initial input can be done by anyone – I’ll be reaching out to the local municipal open data custodians and encourage them to input the initial info.  This can also be done by the members of the local open data community.

 

The initial work was done by the OKF UK but this initiative is for Canada’s version of the Local Open Data Census.  I’m wide open to suggestions on the process as James you and Tracey had experience with the national census.  There are a number of ways to possible approach the editing/validation task – Herb had an excellent suggestion that looked to thematic SMEs to look at their speciality datasets across all the jurisdictions – example being Stephane for Transportation.  I’ll be having discussions with the census coordinators in other countries and would welcome everyone’s suggestions to make a Made in Canada solution for us.  Thanks.

 

Cheers  Jury

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf OfJames McKinney
Sent: May-16-14 2:49 PM
To: civicaccess discuss
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] Top 10 Municipal Datasets

 

Can you describe what tasks people can assist with?

 

James

 

On May 16, 2014, at 2:15 PM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello all,

 

Agreed this is a great start and something to build on over time.  Yesterday, at the GO Open Data Conference in Toronto #GOOD14,  I announced that the Open Knowledge Foundation – Canada will be ramping up to launch a Canadian Local Open Data Census this summer.  The OKF local version template began in February with a number of countries participating – here’s the U.S.  version  http://us-city.census.okfn.org/    Here’s the initial blog post by Rufus Pollock http://blog.okfn.org/2014/02/04/announcing-the-local-open-data-census/

 

I’ve talked to Herb and a few others about this project and looking for others that might be interested in assisting.  See some similarities in the Top 10 and the OKF list – there is some latitude in changing data sets used in the census although the idea with standardizing the data sets is to allow comparisons not only within our country but also with other countries local data.

 

Let me know if you’re interested.

 

Cheers  Jury Konga

 

OKF Canada Ambassador

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf OfJames McKinney
Sent: May-16-14 1:26 PM
To: civicaccess discuss
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] Top 10 Municipal Datasets

 

Awesome! And now to share the list with open data municipalities, so that we get more datasets released from this list, and fewer datasets like helicopter landing sites. Nelson mentioned sharing with MISA, for instance.

 

I don’t know if the list will change every year, but I think it would be worthwhile to repeat next year, based on what we’ve learned. For example, as Linda wrote, we can work with open data municipalities to do better promotion. And as Heather wrote, we should think of ways to get the survey to people outside of open data. We can also make it bilingual. I’m sure we can continue to improve the list of survey options; my only comment at this point is to split up “locations of things” to be more specific.

 

Following up on another of Heather’s comments, if we can get municipalities to release "Top Searches on Government Websites” as a dataset, that would help inform the list of wanted datasets as well.

 

Thanks, Herb, and everyone who helped make this first top 10 list!

 

James

 

 

On May 14, 2014, at 11:13 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello All,

 

Thanks to everyone who helped out, voted, shared, discussed and otherwise furthered this project.  Much appreciated.  James, thanks for removing the duplicates.  I suggest we consider it complete at this point.

 

Canadian Open Data Community Top Ten Wanted Municipal Datasets - May 2014

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications
7. Crime information
8. Road construction (511 data)
9. Political financing
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns

With #1 being the most desired.

 

Tracey, could we please post this on datalibre so we can all refer to it there and let our various networks know about it?

 

Thank you!

Herb

 

ps: I also suggest we review it on a regular basis, perhaps yearly to start?

 

 

 

 

 

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think your edits are right on the mark James.   Thanks for doing that.

 

Does anyone else have any feedback or suggestions on this before we consider it done?

 

Keep in mind, this is our first attempt.  I expect we will do this once per year at a minimum - so we will have more opportunities to refine it.

 

Herb

 

 

On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 5:56 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

These are very useful results!

 

I knew from other studies that planning & development was of great interest, but this shows which datasets are prioritized within that theme: i.e. zoning data (1,2) is more in-demand than development applications (6,11). Sunlight has a series on zoning data:

 

https://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/municipal_zoning/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/05/23/the-landscape-of-municipal-zoning-data/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/06/05/the-impact-of-opening-up-zoning-data/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/06/07/recommendations-for-stronger-zoning-data/

 

They also dove into Asset Disclosure, Campaign Finance (12), Crime (8) and Lobbying:

 

https://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/local/

 

It’s interesting to see that health inspections (16) and building citations (19) are as low as they are. Health inspections are published by several cities in Canada, and both datasets have seen standardizations efforts by Code for America. However, this result is in keeping with the results of similar studies, like Monmouth which I had shared previously.

 

I’m not sure that there is a clear distinction between "development permit applications" and "development applications”. The wording of “Financial data (revenue, expenses…)” seems to overlap with “Financial - actual expenditures”. If we merge those and also “transit data”, we get:

 

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications

7. Crime information
8. Road construction (511 data)

9. Political financing
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns

Great work!

 

James

 

On May 1, 2014, at 12:35 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Hey All,

 

The results from the top 10 datasets survey are in.   You can find them here: https://www.surveymonkey.net/results/SM-7Y5RDST/

 

I have to apologize, somehow Transit got in there twice.  It's clearly in the top ten in both cases so I think it's safe to say it's in the top ten.

 

We intentionally left the overlapping items and so we also see a few entries near the top around "Development Permits", "Land Use Changes", and "Rezoning Permits".  

 

Most of the entries are fairly distinct but there are a few that seem to me to be a bit overlapping.  So, we could either take the top 10 with the most votes (combining the two "Transit data" entries into one) - or we could attempt to eliminate any redundancy so we have 10 fairly distinct entries.  I am open to suggestions.

 

Here are the top 20 for your reference which should be enough to get us down to 10.  Please look at the link above for the actual numbers.

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications
7. Financial - actual expenditures
8. Crime information
9. Road construction (511 data)
10. Transit data
11. Development applications
12. Political financing
13. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns
14. Contracts
15. Property assessments
16. Health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)
17. Public consultations
18. Salaries
19. Building citations (problems with structures etc...)
20. Minutes of meetings

Cheers,

Herb

 

 

--

 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

<a href="tel:[phone]" style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

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

 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

<a href="tel:[phone]" style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

 

--

 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

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

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

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CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
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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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[Nick Skytland]

Hi Natalia and James - 

We have two locations in Canada at this point - one in Edmonton and the other in Whistler.  It'd be great to get National Day started in other cities such as Vancouver and Montreal (we've had some interest but no solid bites yet in either city) or others.  If anyone is interested, let me know and we can talk more.  If not, that's okay too and we'll be doing National Day again next year.  

Nick

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 2:18 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Nick,

Sorry to change the topic, but which Canadian locations are participating? I can only find Edmonton.

Thanks,

James

On May 20, 2014, at 1:56 PM, Nick Skytland <[hidden email]> wrote:

Is anyone interested in writing up a blog post, or cross-posting the article, on the hackforchange.org website as part of National Day of Civic Hacking?  We have a number of Canadian locations this year and with about 120 events taking place around the world, it might help draw some attention to this!  

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 12:10 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

adjusted!

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 5:54 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Tracy,

Thank you!

The list you used was the not-quite-finished one.  There should only be 10 entries and they are:

Canadian Open Data Community Top Ten Wanted Municipal Datasets - May 2014

1. Rezoning permit applications
   
2. Land use changes
   
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
   
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
   
5. Transit data
   
6. Development permit applications
   
7. Crime information
   
8. Road construction (511 data)
   
9. Political financing
   
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns
    

With #1 being the most desired.

Cheers,

Herb

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 9:22 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

I have finally posted the list of top 20 here!  Please forgive the delay.  Herb let me know if I got the story right!

http://datalibre.ca/2014/05/20/2014-open-data-summit-top-10-most-wanted-datasets/

Cheers
t

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 10:46 AM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey James

Great feedback - thank you! I particularly like the use of the census to encourage other cities to go open. I agree with the need for the census to be bilingual and looking for help in that area. 

Looking forward to hearing from others :-)

Cheers Jury

Jury Konga, Principal

eGovFutures Group

 

Open Knowledge Foundation - Canada Ambassador

Canadian Open Data Institute - Co-Founder

Ontario IPC "Access by Design" Ambassador

T.  <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">905-640-7377

C. <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">647-393-8045

Skype.  jury.konga

Twitter @jkonga

www.slideshare.net/jurykonga

Sent from my iPhone

On May 19, 2014, at 10:51 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Jury.

With the local census, I think there’s a greater opportunity to engage the municipalities themselves in filling in the census. By filling it in themselves, they’ll recognize what’s missing, and maybe add some datasets to improve their score in the index. This would also help us identify the open data leads in each municipality and build relationships.

However, it should not only be about municipalities with open data. Half of the 50 largest municipalities don’t have open data yet. This census should be used to motivate those cities to adopt open data. We should reach out to clerks in municipalities without open data to ask them to fill in the survey, and ideally use the opportunity to better understand whether they are considering open data, what the challenges are, etc.

Open North is starting a new project that will involve the more labor-intensive, talking-to-cities activities that I described, so it won’t be difficult to add in a request to participate in the census. We’ll be starting that project next month, at which point I’ll be able to give more details (not my choice, the funder’s).

I also really need to stress that it’s very important for the census to be bilingual.

What are the timelines / time-windows for the Canadian version? (e.g. timing of initial outreach to custodians, amount of time reserved for validation, ultimate deadline, etc.)

James

On May 19, 2014, at 1:43 PM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi James

 

Catching up … there’s essentially three tasks that require assistance:

1.        Community/Custodian input to the census (series of questions to answer for each of the pre-defined data sets);

2.       Census “Editor” or “Validator” – this requires someone that can assess and confirm/edit the community input.  This task must be undertaken by a community member and not the data custodian.

3.       Census Administration – initial setup and updates to the website and census config and updating to new versions.  The census is a work-in-progress - see Github  https://github.com/okfn/opendatacensus

 

The initial input can be done by anyone – I’ll be reaching out to the local municipal open data custodians and encourage them to input the initial info.  This can also be done by the members of the local open data community.

 

The initial work was done by the OKF UK but this initiative is for Canada’s version of the Local Open Data Census.  I’m wide open to suggestions on the process as James you and Tracey had experience with the national census.  There are a number of ways to possible approach the editing/validation task – Herb had an excellent suggestion that looked to thematic SMEs to look at their speciality datasets across all the jurisdictions – example being Stephane for Transportation.  I’ll be having discussions with the census coordinators in other countries and would welcome everyone’s suggestions to make a Made in Canada solution for us.  Thanks.

 

Cheers  Jury

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf OfJames McKinney
Sent: May-16-14 2:49 PM
To: civicaccess discuss
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] Top 10 Municipal Datasets

 

Can you describe what tasks people can assist with?

 

James

 

On May 16, 2014, at 2:15 PM, Jury Konga <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello all,

 

Agreed this is a great start and something to build on over time.  Yesterday, at the GO Open Data Conference in Toronto #GOOD14,  I announced that the Open Knowledge Foundation – Canada will be ramping up to launch a Canadian Local Open Data Census this summer.  The OKF local version template began in February with a number of countries participating – here’s the U.S.  version  http://us-city.census.okfn.org/    Here’s the initial blog post by Rufus Pollock http://blog.okfn.org/2014/02/04/announcing-the-local-open-data-census/

 

I’ve talked to Herb and a few others about this project and looking for others that might be interested in assisting.  See some similarities in the Top 10 and the OKF list – there is some latitude in changing data sets used in the census although the idea with standardizing the data sets is to allow comparisons not only within our country but also with other countries local data.

 

Let me know if you’re interested.

 

Cheers  Jury Konga

 

OKF Canada Ambassador

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf OfJames McKinney
Sent: May-16-14 1:26 PM
To: civicaccess discuss
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] Top 10 Municipal Datasets

 

Awesome! And now to share the list with open data municipalities, so that we get more datasets released from this list, and fewer datasets like helicopter landing sites. Nelson mentioned sharing with MISA, for instance.

 

I don’t know if the list will change every year, but I think it would be worthwhile to repeat next year, based on what we’ve learned. For example, as Linda wrote, we can work with open data municipalities to do better promotion. And as Heather wrote, we should think of ways to get the survey to people outside of open data. We can also make it bilingual. I’m sure we can continue to improve the list of survey options; my only comment at this point is to split up “locations of things” to be more specific.

 

Following up on another of Heather’s comments, if we can get municipalities to release "Top Searches on Government Websites” as a dataset, that would help inform the list of wanted datasets as well.

 

Thanks, Herb, and everyone who helped make this first top 10 list!

 

James

 

 

On May 14, 2014, at 11:13 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello All,

 

Thanks to everyone who helped out, voted, shared, discussed and otherwise furthered this project.  Much appreciated.  James, thanks for removing the duplicates.  I suggest we consider it complete at this point.

 

Canadian Open Data Community Top Ten Wanted Municipal Datasets - May 2014

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications
7. Crime information
8. Road construction (511 data)
9. Political financing
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns

With #1 being the most desired.

 

Tracey, could we please post this on datalibre so we can all refer to it there and let our various networks know about it?

 

Thank you!

Herb

 

ps: I also suggest we review it on a regular basis, perhaps yearly to start?

 

 

 

 

 

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think your edits are right on the mark James.   Thanks for doing that.

 

Does anyone else have any feedback or suggestions on this before we consider it done?

 

Keep in mind, this is our first attempt.  I expect we will do this once per year at a minimum - so we will have more opportunities to refine it.

 

Herb

 

 

On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 5:56 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

These are very useful results!

 

I knew from other studies that planning & development was of great interest, but this shows which datasets are prioritized within that theme: i.e. zoning data (1,2) is more in-demand than development applications (6,11). Sunlight has a series on zoning data:

 

https://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/municipal_zoning/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/05/23/the-landscape-of-municipal-zoning-data/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/06/05/the-impact-of-opening-up-zoning-data/

https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/06/07/recommendations-for-stronger-zoning-data/

 

They also dove into Asset Disclosure, Campaign Finance (12), Crime (8) and Lobbying:

 

https://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/local/

 

It’s interesting to see that health inspections (16) and building citations (19) are as low as they are. Health inspections are published by several cities in Canada, and both datasets have seen standardizations efforts by Code for America. However, this result is in keeping with the results of similar studies, like Monmouth which I had shared previously.

 

I’m not sure that there is a clear distinction between "development permit applications" and "development applications”. The wording of “Financial data (revenue, expenses…)” seems to overlap with “Financial - actual expenditures”. If we merge those and also “transit data”, we get:

 

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications

7. Crime information
8. Road construction (511 data)

9. Political financing
10. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns

Great work!

 

James

 

On May 1, 2014, at 12:35 PM, Herb Lainchbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Hey All,

 

The results from the top 10 datasets survey are in.   You can find them here: https://www.surveymonkey.net/results/SM-7Y5RDST/

 

I have to apologize, somehow Transit got in there twice.  It's clearly in the top ten in both cases so I think it's safe to say it's in the top ten.

 

We intentionally left the overlapping items and so we also see a few entries near the top around "Development Permits", "Land Use Changes", and "Rezoning Permits".  

 

Most of the entries are fairly distinct but there are a few that seem to me to be a bit overlapping.  So, we could either take the top 10 with the most votes (combining the two "Transit data" entries into one) - or we could attempt to eliminate any redundancy so we have 10 fairly distinct entries.  I am open to suggestions.

 

Here are the top 20 for your reference which should be enough to get us down to 10.  Please look at the link above for the actual numbers.

1. Rezoning permit applications
2. Land use changes
3. Financial data (revenue, expenses, liabilities, equity, etc..)
4. Locations of things (fire hydrants, drinking water fountains, public toilets, bike parking, ...)
5. Transit data
6. Development permit applications
7. Financial - actual expenditures
8. Crime information
9. Road construction (511 data)
10. Transit data
11. Development applications
12. Political financing
13. Real time traffic flow data and daily road usage patterns
14. Contracts
15. Property assessments
16. Health inspections (e.g. Yelp's LIVES specification http://www.yelp.ca/healthscores)
17. Public consultations
18. Salaries
19. Building citations (problems with structures etc...)
20. Minutes of meetings

Cheers,

Herb

 

 

--

 

Herb Lainchbury, Dynamic Solutions

<a href="tel:[phone]" style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

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<a href="tel:[phone]" style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">250.704.6154

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

 

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

http://www.dynamic-solutions.com

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