Access to Municipal PSI
Source: Google Public Policy Blog / Visible Governement.ca
Vancouver city motion gives citizens and businesses access to municipal data
On 21 May 2009 the City of Vancouver passed a motion that directed city staff to begin sharing the data and information the city collects, to share this data in open standards and to place open source on an equal footing with proprietary software.
The underlying principles of the motion work towards transforming Vancouver into an open city. Or, as described by Surman in writing about the initiative, he says a ‘city that thinks like the web’.
The motion (full text) commits Vancouver to freely share data with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions. Key points in the motion are:
- Open and accessible data: The City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns.
- Open standards: The City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps and other formats of media.
- Open source software: The City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles
David Eaves, social media expert and one of the key proponents and advisers behind the open Vancouver initiative, comments that among many positive outcomes of the initiative, one main benefit is that it will create new business and attract talent. He comments:
“As the city shares more data and uses more open source software new businesses that create services out of this data and that support this software will spring up. More generally, I think this motion, over time could attract talent to Vancouver.”
Other Canadian and American cities (Toronto, Portland, Washington DC) are moving towards similar initiatives and increased openness. Toronto is an example with plans in place to move forward.
The Toronto Mayor, David Miller, recently announced plans for an open data catalogue at the Mesh09 event during which he made a strong case for the benefits of open government (full announcement on video). Mayor Miller comments in an excerpt from the announcement,
“I am very pleased to announce today at Mesh09 the development of http://toronto.ca/open, which will be a catalogue of city generated data. The data will be provided in standardized formats, will be machine readable, and will be updated regularly. This will be launched in the fall of 2009 with an initial series of data sets, including static data like schedules, and some feeds updated in real time.
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