This just came across my email via Michael Roberts who has been doing great work in this space. Open Data for Development Challenge January 27–28, 2014 — Montreal, Canada Do you want to share your creative ideas and cutting-edge expertise, and make a difference in the world? Do you want
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eaves.ca: The Importance of Open Data Critiques – thoughts and context
Over at the Programmable City website Rob Kitchin has a thoughtful blog post on open data critiques. It is very much worth reading and wider discussion. Specifically, there are two competing things worth noting. First, it is important for the open data community – and advocates in particular – to
Continue readingeaves.ca: The Real News Story about the Relaunch of data.gc.ca
As many of my open data friends know, yesterday the government launched its new open data portal to great fanfare. While there is much to talk about there – something I will dive into tomorrow – that was not the only thing that happened yesterday. Indeed, I did a lot
Continue readingeaves.ca: Proactive Disclosure – An Example of Doing it Wrong from Service Canada
Just got flagged about this precious example of doing proactive disclosure wrong. So here is a Shared Service Canada website dedicated the Roundtable on Information Technology Infrastructure. Obviously this is a topic of real interest to me – I write a fair bit about delivering (or failing to deliver) government service online effectively. I think it […]
Continue readingeaves.ca: Re-Architecting the City by Changing the Timelines and Making it Disappear
A couple of weeks ago I was asked by one of the city’s near me to sit on an advisory board around the creation of their Digital Government strategy. For me the meeting was good since I felt that a cohort of us on the advisory board were really pushing the city into a place […]
Continue readingeaves.ca: The UK’s Digital Government Strategy – Worth a Peek
I’ve got a piece up on TechPresident about the UK Government’s Digital Strategy which was released today. The strategy (and my piece!) are worth checking out. They are saying a lot of the right things – useful stuff for anyone in industry or sector that has been conservative vis-a-vis online services (I’m looking at you governments […]
Continue readingeaves.ca: Playing with Budget Cutbacks: On a Government 2.0 Response, Wikileaks & Analog Denial of Service Attacks
Reflecting on yesterday’s case study in broken government I had a couple of addition thoughts that I thought fun to explore and that simply did not make sense including in the original post. A Government 2.0 Response Yesterday’s piece was all about how Treasury Board’s new rules were likely to
Continue readingeaves.ca: Open Postal Codes: A Public Response to Canada Post on how they undermine the public good
Earlier this week the Ottawa Citizen ran a story in which I’m quoted about a fight between Treasury Board and Canada Post officials over making postal code data open. Treasury Board officials would love to add it to data.gc.ca while Canada post officials are, to put it mildly, deeply opposed.
Continue readingeaves.ca: The US Government’s Digital Strategy: The New Benchmark and Some Lessons
Last week the White House launched its new roadmap for digital government. This included the publication of Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People (PDF version), the issuing of a Presidential directive and the announcement of White House Innovation Fellows. In other words, it
Continue readingeaves.ca: The I Lost My Wallet – Doing Government Service Delivery Right
A couple of years ago I was in Portugal to give a talk on Gov 2.0 at a conference the government was organizing. After the talk I went for dinner with the country’s CIO and remember hearing about a fantastic program they were running that – for me – epitomized
Continue readingeaves.ca: Mainstreaming The Gov 2.0 Message in the Canadian Public Service
A couple of years ago I wrote a Globe Op-Ed “A Click Heard Across the Public Service” that outlined the significance of the clerk using GCPEDIA to communicate with public servants. It was a message – or even more importantly – an action to affirm his commitment to change how
Continue readingeaves.ca: Canada Post’s War on the 21st Century, Innovation & Productivity
The other week Canada Post announced it was suing Geocoder.ca – an alternative provider of postal code data. It’s a depressing statement on the status of the digital economy in Canada for a variety of reasons. The three that stand out are: 1) The Canadian Government has launched an open
Continue readingeaves.ca: Canada’s Action Plan on Open Government: A Review
The other day the Canadian Government published its Action Plan on Open Government, a high level document that both lays out the Government’s goals on this file as well as fulfill its pledge to create tangible goals as part of its participation in next week’s Open Government Partnership 2012 annual
Continue readingeaves.ca: Using BHAG’s to Change Organziations: A Management, Open Data & Government Mashup
I’m a big believer in the ancillary benefits of a single big goal. Set a goal that has one clear objective, but as a result a bunch of other things have to change as well. So one of my favourite Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAG) for an organization is to
Continue readingeaves.ca: Citizen Surveillance and the Coming Challenge for Public Institutions
The other day I stumbled over this intriguing article which describes how a group of residents in Vancouver have started to surveille the police as they do their work in the downtown eastside, one of the poorest and toughest neighborhoods in Canada. The reason is simple. Many people – particularly
Continue readingeaves.ca: Data.gc.ca – Data Sets I found that are interesting, and some suggestions
Yesterday was the one year anniversary of the Canadian federal government’s open data portal. Over the past year government officials have been continuously adding to the portal, but as it isn’t particularly easy to browse data sets on the website, I’ve noticed a lot of people aren’t aware of what
Continue readingeaves.ca: Access to Information, Open Data and the Problem with Convergence
In response to my post yesterday one reader sent me a very thoughtful commentary that included this line at the end: “Rather than compare [Freedom of Information] FOI legislation and Open Gov Data as if it’s “one or the other”, do you think there’s a way of talking about how
Continue readingeaves.ca: More on Google Transit and how it is Reshaping a Public Service
Some of you know I’ve written a fair bit on Google transit and how it is reshaping public transit – this blog post in particular comes to mind. For more reading I encourage you to check out the Xconomy article Google Transit: How (and Why) the Search Giant is Remapping
Continue readingeaves.ca: Transparency isn’t a cost – its a cost saver (a note for Governments and Drummond)
Yesterday Don Drummond – a leading economist hired by the Ontario government to review how the province delivers services in the face of declining economic growth and rising deficits – published his report. There is much to commend, it lays out stark truths that frankly, many citizens already know, but
Continue readingeaves.ca: Public Servants Self-Organizing for Efficiency (and sanity) – Collaborative Management Day
Most of the time, when I engage with or speak to federal public servants, they are among the most eager to find ways to work around the bureaucracy in which they find themselves. They want to make stuff happen, and ideally, to make it happen right and more quickly. This
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