Day: May 24, 2009

On tomorrow night’s Council agenda

Tomorrow night the Council has a fairly busy schedule, with a few things that people might want to comment on:

  • Renewal of funding for Bowker Creek Initiative – Come and speak for this as the BCI is a critical cross-municipality body for the preservation and rehabiliation of Bowker Creek
  • Summer Council & Comm. of the Whole schedule – Come see when Council and Comm. of the Whole is going to meet during the summer. Usually they cut the schedule down due to holidays.
  • A variety of development variances – most of these are likely uncontrovertial, but 2064 Penzance has a bunch of letter associated with it, which often means at least a few people are bothered about it.

Read the full agenda (PDF). Sadly, they don’t assign unique file names, so this will always point to the latest council agenda, not the one specific to May 25th.

As per usual, the Council meets in the Council Chambers of the Oak Bay Municipal Hall (2167 Oak Bay Ave) starting at 7:30pm. The meeting is likely to take at least 2 hours, given its length.

Vancouver embraces open standards, data and open source

City of Vancouver emblem

A few days ago Vancouver was considering becoming an open city, embracing open source, open standards and open data. This week, that idea became a reality as Vancouver City Council adopted Andrea Reimer’s proposal.

What does this mean in the short term? Likely not much. We are in the middle of a recession, which means there is probably little software aquisition going on and thus little new open source software. As open standards usually follow the software that uses them, little is likely to change on that front either.

Which brings us to open data, where we will likely see the most immediate change. Much of the data that the City of Vancouver could release they have already collected, such as geospatial or demographic data. To get a good idea of the vast amount of information that becomes avaiable when a government takes the leap, take a look at this list about data.gov, the new US Federal government website dedicated to releasing as much data as possibly freely.

In my own little part of the world, we in the OpenStreetMap community here in Canada have been collaborating with the federal government’s Geobase project to get their data imported into OSM. Sadly, much of the information there is second class, as provinces and municipalities keep their latest and greatest to themselves.

Hopefully this decision, and the City of Toronto possibly following suit, will encourage more and more municipalities across Canada to realize that the value they will get from freeing their data and adhering to open standards far eclipses the lost revenue they might have gotten otherwise.