Feb.23: International Open Data Day, Calgary

[Grant Neufeld]

I'm hoping to have an event in Calgary to mark International Open Data Day on Saturday, February 23, 2013.
http://wiki.opendataday.org/Calgary2013


No details have been worked out yet, so it's wide open for folks to organize and shape the agenda for the day.

Where can we hold this?

What do you want on the agenda?
- presentations?
- tutorials?
- coding?
- social?
- videos to screen?

What time would be good? (morning, afternoon, both... how long should we go?)


Thanks!
Grant Neufeld
@grant on Twitter

Twitter hashtag: #yycdata

[Simon Timms]

I'd be up for some hacking. I don't have any specific ideas in that area but ideas tend to flow out of these get togethers pretty well. 

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[Jason Mehmel]

I'm also interested, but only tentatively available. My schedule has been complex lately.

~Jason

[Grant Neufeld]

I'll be bringing up International Open Data Day at the CivicCamp event tonight (7pm at Auburn Saloon, 712-1 Street SE).
https://www.facebook.com/events/401780529915785/


Help still needed!

We still don't have any concrete plans, time, or location. Suggestions and leadership on this are more than welcome :-)
(My organizing time is quite constrained right now, so if it's just left to me the event will be pretty minimal.)

For a location, ideally somewhere central (or at least close to LRT station) with one or two "workshop" rooms that can seat about 20 people with a video projector that can be plugged into a laptop.


Possible agenda ideas:

Possible presentations:
* intro to open data (I can readily do this).
* the experience of the folks who've written Calgary Transit apps using the City's transit data. (anyone know any of the folks who've written the apps?)* review and critique of the City's public data pilot project.
* intro to using G.I.S. data. (anyone have experience with this?)
* integrating data with Google Maps. (anyone have experience with this?)

Activities:
* review of open data services and datasets in other jurisdictions; compiling a list of things we might like to see from the City.
* planning for advocacy to get the City to move ahead with Open Data.
* app-making session - work together on an open data related app (e.g., website or mobile) project for Calgary.

Any other ideas?


Thanks!

[Grant Neufeld]

One of the things I've been thinking of as a possibility to work on for Open Data Day, is to try to do some work on a "yycdata" web app project I've been thinking about - and occasionally talking about - since the City's public data pilot project was launched.

This would be a website/web-service to provide a computer API (application programming interface) to (some of, although ideally all of) the data sets the City has made available to support people building dynamic applications.

The problem this addresses is that the City only provides their data sets in multi-step downloads where you have to go through a shopping cart process to get access to the files, and many of the files come in zip archives which require the further step of unarchiving.

The project I'm proposing would put the data online in a way where software developers could write their programs to just talk to our "yycdata" site to dynamically load the data (including subsets of the data rather than having to pull the whole file every time).

This could make it a lot easier for programmers to write apps to use the data.

Use of the data would still, unfortunately, be restricted by the City's over-limiting license terms. But a tool like this would be part of pushing the City to move from restricted-use "public data" to actual Open Data.


Another idea, building on the above, would be to build out the "yycdata" project to allow for user-contributed data - in addition to the City's datasets. Perhaps even a way for users to make amendments and additions to the City's datasets, too.

This could be a platform for crowd-sourcing public data.


Thoughts?

[Simon Timms]

I like the idea. I did start something once for pushing transit data into a more usable format but it turned out to be such a manual pain that I moved onto a more interesting project. If we ensured that consumers of the data clicked through the same licence the city provides then I don't see what the issue would be. It isn't a glamorous project but it would remove a bar for using the data. 

[Kathryn Blair]

Hi everyone - I can't make it on Feb 23 unfortunately.