18
Jan
2012
Robin Millette

ChangeCamp Ottawa 2010

Section: 
Note
Intro

These are my notes detailing the sessions I attended. You can also see an archive of my microblog posts for that event at http://millette.status.net/tag/cco10 or check out http://search.twitter.com/search?lang=all&q=%23cco10 and http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/cco10/interesting/ for twitter and flickr posts respectively.

Keynote: Guy … (CIO Ottawa)

Improve services (quality of life) for citizens at lower costs

Providing info to citizens so they can take better decision

Most of the info is already on the web, now we have to make it easier to use (info -> data).

Providing the data enables citizens and enterprises to build new projects.

g4: edmonton, vancouver, toronto, ottawa: building common standards together (get montreal/koumbit on board)

  1. release lots of data sets

  2. organize app contests (sept. - dec. 2010) (50,000$ budget allocated by the city of Ottawa)

    • who should be on the board
    • what would be the criterias
    • different categories (academics, profesional, students) - choix du public
  • current data sets
  • data sets being developped
  • data sets citizens want
unconference proposed topics
  • issues with terms of use (david fewer, cippic (ken here at cco10)
  • how to identify judges for app contest and which categories to use
  • effectivenes, usability, etc. (app contest criterias, eligibility)
  • data session: catalog state, missing data sets, formats, volatile data sets
  • federal, provincial and municipal roles: how to get data back and forth
  • apps, tools and toolkit to build data mashups
  • value of data for policy maker: data to build models, so we can ask the model questions, make projections, etc. How to get data available for modelling
  • free wifi access (honk kong: free “everywhere”: libraries, parks, etc.)
  • ottawa subset of osm (goal: proportional representation)
  • subrepresented voters
  • voting patterns (voting (camps) data associated with different polls)
  • how local media can support these types of initiatives, make it sustainable
  • conversation with my neighboor: open data, awesome! -What? - easy sell to some people, but still big marketing problem: how to make this cool?
  • how can people can make money off this?
  • orgs deliver services (techie stuff) around the city are doing stuff and need people (to volunteer)
  • models of buildings to appear in google earth (great opportunity for tourism, etc.)
  • municipal government: group of facilitators, others running for council) - http://knowingourcommunity.wordpress.org/ What questions to raise level of thinking; hold an openspace type event (participatory type democracy)
  • wikipedia took off: use something like it to develop policy to improve way of participation.
  • watering lawns and weather, what’s the deal? Federal info (weather) important to municipal level. What about data from other levels of government? Submunicipal, etc. Make sure data available at all levels is surfaced so people
  • problem of organizing data, how it’s distributed
  • cheap hardware, open data converging: feasible for people cheap real time (hyper)local sensors/monitors
Sessions

Measuring success

  • stakeholders: residents, bgo/community groups, business, politicians/public sector, homeless people, marketers, programmers, statisticians
  • Measuring success: who are the stakeholders (roles, programmers as wildcard proxies
  • making data available in the right format (programmer: xml; user: vizualisation; etc.)
  • Expectations: the costs (which side of the firewall is the data going to be?)
  • Long term: 10 year return on investment (for example)
  • Communication between city and end-users (developpers) - Getting feedback
  • Tracking data users and applications
  • Serendipity -> emergent outcomes
  • Amount of usage
  • Measuring success: one factor: proportional to usage #cco10; how many data sets are shared vs what the city holds
  • newfoundland had/has a community scorecard system; couple of ladies raised level of a community having the data available
  • increase quality of life
  • data as evidence encourages envolvment
  • who measures results and how
  • Is this data useful? Would other data make this one more useful? (Community initiatives)
  • Huge set of users not using iphones, ipads, smartphones; how to make sure data serves them too?
  • Authentification adds a huge level of problems (for users) it’s better to avoid
  • More public terminals to empower different classes of people
  • You can’t plan for all the uses
  • Democratizing innovation

Tools and apps

  • Apps for what? Web, Windows, iPhone? Write many times?
  • Yahoo pipes: could be easier to use
  • Levels of mashups: visual programming, scripting/filtering, programming
  • Modular programming, programming by layers
  • Yahoo Tables (YQL)
  • Parsing / scraping data - how hard is it to parse some given data?
  • Be strict in what you output and generous in what you accept
  • RSS when appropriate: chronological stuff, extensible, PuSH, etc.
  • Visible Government to get community involvment
  • HTML5 (offline, mashups, etc.)
  • Google Earth
  • Gapminder
  • http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/
  • Processing http://processing.org/
  • ManyEyes http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/
  • Hayden plnetarium renderer (3d fly-throughs with piles of data)
  • cytoscape http://www.cytoscape.org/
  • freebase gridwork (make scraping much easier)
  • http://programmableweb.com/
  • Types of data: multimedia, text, gis, table, images
  • Programming languages: python, perl, etc. (xml parsing, etc.)
  • Sweave: embed R code into LaTeX (add this to blogging software, people will start using it)