Category Archives: In The News

Geothink Summer Institute to Kick-off Monday, June 15, 2015!

The Environment 3 Building (EV3), at the University of Waterloo, where the summer institute will be held.

By Drew Bush

Get ready Geothinkers, this year’s Geothink Summer Institute will run from June 15-16, 2015 and will be held at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. Check in at our Summer Institute web site, where we’ll be live tweeting the day’s events.

The agenda is jam-packed with big names in the emergent field of crowdsourcing, which one Geothinker calls “a web-based business model that harnesses the creative solutions of a distributed network of individuals.” That’s from the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalistm and Communication Assistant Professor Daren Brabham, who will be giving one of the morning’s first sessions to more than 30 undergraduate and graduate students who have registered to attend.

Other speakers include Robert Goodspeed, assistant professor of Urban Planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning; Monica Stephens, assistant professor in the Department of Geography at State University of New York at Buffalo and Geothink Head Renee Sieber, McGill University associate professor in the Department of Geography and School of Environment. Check out the full agenda here.

Speakers will explore topics related to crowdsourcing in a hyperlocal world where geospatial technologies like Google Maps and GPS-enabled cellphones enable massive quantities of data to be collected. In today’s world, there are tweets about potholes, mobile applications which deliver directions to the nearest coffee shop, and large databases only recently opened by many governments around the world.

The summer institute is hosted by Geothink, a five-year partnership grant awarded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in 2012. The partnership includes researchers in different institutions across Canada, as well as partners in Canadian municipal governments, non-profits and the private sector. The expertise of our group is wide-ranging and includes aspects of social sciences as well as humanities such as: geography, GIS/geospatial analysis, urban planning, communications, and law.

If you have thoughts or questions about the article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca.

RECODE Open Data Youth Leader – My View on A Week of Open Data Events

By Suthee Sangiambut

This article contains personal reflections from Geothink’s Newsletter Editor and Student Coordinator, Suthee Sangiambut.

This year’s Canada Open Data Summit and International Open Data Conference confirmed that open data and open government are quickly becoming mainstream topics for all sorts of disciplines and subject areas. I consider myself part of the open data community, due to my masters research on open data as well as my involvement in the Geothink grant.

I had heard of some of the people and institutions prior to the event and felt excited to have the chance to talk in person. My own interactions with representatives of government and non-profits had already indicated a lot of optimism and passion for open data and government. From this perspective, I got what I was expecting – plus an eagerness to tackle problems of implementation. My hopes of getting an update on the current status of open data in Canada were also met, especially with people from so many sectors and multiple levels of government.

The panels and workshops throughout the week were informative. In particular, I enjoyed Bianca Wylie’s great line that “open government is government,” as a way to set our expectations of how essential the idea of open data has become for many governments.

It was interesting to listen to speakers from Canada, USA, and beyond on different open data-related initiatives. The panels confirmed for me a couple of observations: those implementing open data and open government initiatives around the world are facing similar problems (such as resources, politics, organisational culture), engagement through one-off events (such as hackathons) is insufficient, and there is still work to be done to make studies and evaluations (especially in the non-profit sector) more rigorous.

I had assumed that there would be groups of attendees who would be sending different messages. However, after listening to talks on “Moving beyond the hackathon” at the Canada Open Data Summit, and various panels on “Open Cities” at the IODC, I found speakers at both making the same point—that citizen engagement with open data needs to go beyond one-off events such as hackathons, and that we need to address the issue of ‘capacity building’ or ‘data literacy’.

As an aside, this issue of ‘training in open data’ also surprised me as a conversation that was both too broad and too vague. And the idea of ‘open data skills’ should have been discussed in much more concrete terms, as attendees were not able to separate out what levels of programming or analytical skills were required. On the other hand, this level of vagueness was also quite appropriate, given the rate of change we experience in technology. In fact, attendees often spoke on similar subjects but used slightly different terminology.

I was also rather surprised to see representatives of organisations and governments implementing open data initiatives in developing countries. What was surprising for me was that, to some of them, open data was another tool to tackle corruption. The potential for open data initiatives in countries experiencing endemic corruption is quite different from countries with much lower levels of corruption. What attendees appeared to be assuming was that open data could be a catalyst for social change.

My main take-home points were on citizen engagement and the need for sustained engagement. Furthermore, the conversations on capacity building were very welcome, as they help to address the issue of keeping people actively engaged with open data in the long term. Increasing people’s programming and analytical skills could potentially increase their demand for data as they increase their capacity to inform themselves of new data or the potential for new types of analysis. However, opening a new open data community or initiative in one’s own community would require a long-term plan in addition to short events.

If I met local open data activists in Thailand (my home country), my recommendations would actually be rather different from what I learned at the Canada Open Data Summit. Continuing on the thread from above, tackling transparency and accountability in countries experiencing endemic levels of corruption with the use of open data is perhaps a step too far. Solutions must always be appropriate and tailored to the locale. In the case of large digital divides (both in terms of broadband access and skills), gaps in education (both in society and in the public sector), and low quality in government data collection, it is really quite debatable whether or not open data is an appropriate or even cost effective solution to both social and economic problems. The first step to implementing open data and open government initiatives, is to think about democracy and its various forms. There is no single way to implement democratic government and I think this is an important point to recognise, as the open government and open data movement are, at the highest level, still ‘one size fits all’ movements. In the conversations during the week in Ottawa, there were only two situations mentioned where it was acceptable to withhold data – security/strategic assets and privacy. In countries like Thailand where democratic government is implemented very differently from Canada, open data activists in Thailand must be able to resolve the principles of open government and open data with their local contexts.

Thank you to the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation for their support with the RECODE programme, and thank you to Open North for their organisation of the Canada Open Data Summit.

For more summary of the events of the week, see our posts on the Canada Open Data Summit, IODC 2015 Day 1, and IODC 2015 Day 2.

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, please get in touch with Suthee Sangiambut.

Our Take: Geothink at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting 2015

By Drew Bush

Andrea Minano at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois.

From April 21 to April 25 2015, Geothink’s students, team, and collaborators presented their research and met with colleagues in Chicago, Illinois at the now concluded 2015 Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting. Over the week, Geothinkers gave 16 presentations, ran a panel discussion, presented posters, organized and chaired four sessions, and gave two plenary speeches. See who attended here.

“The AAG is always an excellent conference but this year I think was the best one I’ve attended,” Harrison Smith, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, wrote in an e-mail to Geothink.ca. “The Geothink community was in full force and we gave some excellent presentations that definitely put us on the map.”

Of his own work, Harrison reported positive results as well. Find his abstract here and below.

“I received some very excellent questions and positive feedback from the audience,” he added. “I have also been given the opportunity to further develop my paper into a journal article for peer-review by the invitation of a member of the audience, and so I will continue to develop this research for Geothink and the larger academic community.”

Others held a similar opinion of the conference that attracted over 4,500 presentations, posters, workshops, and field trips by leading scholars, experts, and researchers in the field.

“Fabulous,” Claus Rinner, an associate professor at Ryerson University, wrote of this year’s conference. He noted that a poster he presented with his graduate student Victoria Fast “was quite an important piece for me, as it juxtaposed two of our very recent ‘results’ with those of a former student, all meant to better frame future VGI and Geoweb research.”

Geothink collaborator Muki Haklay, professor at University College London, also hosted the session entitled Beyond motivation? Understanding enthusiasm in citizen science and volunteered geographic information and two more sessions on OpenStreetMap Studies. He wrote extensively about these sessions and the conference on his own personal blog as well.

“As you can tell from all the blogging that I’ve done, it went really well,” he wrote in an e-mail to Geothink.ca. “The Public Participation GIS and Citizen Science sessions that I’ve attended, and the OpenStreetMap Studies sessions were all very interesting and stimulating, and helped to progress the thinking in these areas.”

Geothink held its pre-conference workshop on Monday, April 20 entitled “Citizen-Government Relations for a Digitally-Enabled and Location-Aware World.” Presentations included those by Scott Bell, Piotr Jankowski, Renee Sieber and one by Ashley Zhang, Rob Feick and Stephane Roche among others.

“I was fascinated by Professor [Teresa] Scassa’s research on the legal issues when we open up transit data,” Sieber wrote to Geothink.ca about a workshop she said exposed everyone “to the sheer diversity of Geothink, from apps that enable the sharing economy, to privacy implications of transit data, to the participatory potential of civic hackathons, to graphical user interfaces for the intellectually disabled, to the frontier of urban citizen science.”

Discussions included plans for two forthcoming books, the first an empirical book devoted to findings and the second a compilation of essays on the future of the Geospatial web and open data. Find out more about the presentations and plans in the most recent edition of the newsletter.

For some, giving a presentation at the AAG itself led to important reunions with colleagues while also providing opportunities for new experiences.

“While in Chicago, I re-connected with fellow Geothink partners, engaged with a series of scholars who have influenced my research, attended my first mapathon, and met those working in the geospatial industry,” Andrea Minano, a masters candidate at Waterloo University, wrote. “Overall, this experience exceeded my expectations and I am thankful for the opportunity to network with such a vast range of individuals working in the field of geography.”

The AAG annual meeting has been held every year since the association’s founding in 1904.

Please find abstracts for presentations mentioned in the article below.

“Smart cities should mean sharing cities”: Situating smart cities within the sharing economy
By Harrison Smith, University of Toronto
Abstract:
This paper situates smart cities within a larger global movement of the sharing economy. The sharing economy, exemplified by services such as airbnb.com and Uber, has emerged as a new niche in entrepreneurial capitalism and global consumer culture that targets highly mobile populations, and exploits web 2.0 mapping technology and location based services that have become increasingly necessary to navigating smart cities. This has not only brought forth questions of how incumbent service providers such as hotels and taxi companies will respond to such competition in the market, but also the underlying regulatory challenges for municipalities, particularly as many sharing economy enthusiasts press for libertarian self-regulation. This paper seeks to: 1) situate smart cities within a sharing economy by focusing on the cultural and affective relations between cities, global capitalism, and geo-spatial media; 2) outline the discourses of regulating the sharing economy as it presented by incumbent service providers, municipalities, and sharing economy entrepreneurs; and 3) to present preliminary findings of a comparative study of various North American cities as they have either sought to embrace, regulate, or reject the sharing economy.

Conceptualizing Volunteered Geographic Information and the Participatory Geoweb
By Victoria Fast,* Ryerson University; Claus Rinner, Ryerson University; Blake Byron Walker, Simon Fraser University
Abstract:
Volunteered geographic information (VGI) represents the contribution of local knowledge by citizens through the pathways of the participatory geospatial Web (pGeoweb). These crowdsourced data and user-generated geographic content are gaining influence on government operations, urban and regional planning, and a broad range of societal decisions. Despite this growing influence, there are few conceptualizations of VGI and the pGeoweb.

This poster summarizes our research in three directions: (1) taking a holistic systems perspective on the projects, participants, and Geoweb components employed in creating VGI; (2) examining the effectiveness of public participation on the Geoweb through the study of engagement, empowerment, and enactment processes; and (3) classifying user contributions by data formats and contents types.

Some of our results include the view of VGI as an information product that is well within the realm of GIS concepts of data input, management, analysis, and presentation. We also argue that the term “VGI”, as presently used, should be replaced by volunteered geographic “data” (and/or “content”). Even though pGeoweb projects are often bottom-up initiatives, we posit that there still is a “provider” with (sometimes covert) authority over the project. Finally, we characterize pGeoweb projects by their data/content types, including locations, categorical observations, numeric measurements, parameter settings in models, annotations, narratives, stories, media files, and opinions. Accordingly, we distinguish crowdmapping, citizen sensing, citizen reporting, map-based discourse, and geosocial media applications.

Overall, these three interrelated conceptualizations will strengthen the role of Geographers and GIScientists in the burgeoning field of VGI and pGeoweb research and development.

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca.

Part 2: Our Project Head on North American Civic Participation and Geothink’s Projects

By Drew Bush

Renee Sieber, associate professor in McGill University’s Department of Geography and School of Environment.

Part 2 (of 2). This is the second in a two part series with the head of Geothink.ca, Renee Sieber, an associate professor in the Department of Geography and School of Environment at McGill University. In this second part, we pick up the story of how Sieber sees civic participation in North America during an age of technological change. Catch Part 1 here if you missed our coverage of Geothink itself; its vision, goal and design.

Talking with Renee Sieber means finding exuberance and excitement for each of Geothink.ca’s projects and the work of all the team members, collaborators and partners. One place to start such a conversation is with how many cities make information available to the public.

“Cities are also publishing enormous amounts of data—it’s called open data,” Sieber, Geothink’s head and an associate professor at McGill University, said. “And this data can be turned into applications that for example can allow citizens to more easily know when they should put their recycling out and what types of recycling [exist], where there is going to be traffic congestion or traffic construction, when the next city council meeting will be held and what will be on the city council agenda.”

This open data forms the basis for how many modern technologies use programs to simplify and facilitate citizen interactions with city garbage services, transportation networks or city policies and processes. In particular, one Geothink project aims to interrogate how standards are created for open data—no easy thing, according to Sieber, when you’re talking not just about abstract data but even more abstract metadata.

“So why should one care about that?” Sieber asked. “Well, we should care about that first of all because the reason that people can now get up-to-date transit information in cities all over North America and, indeed, cities all over the world is because of a very small open data standard called GTFS, the General Transit Feed Specification.”

This prototype successful standard (or way of structuring public transportation data) resulted from a partnership between Google and Portland, Oregon. And, according to Sieber, it’s not about visualizing the data but standardizing its structure so that it can be used in equations that allow cities to show when the next bus will arrive, the best ways to get from point x to point y, and to put all this information on a map. In fact, Open511, a standard for traffic and road construction, explicitly styles itself after this prototype.

“It’s really interesting for us to figure out what new data standards will emerge,” added Sieber. “For example, will there be one to show traffic construction all over the country or all over North America?”

Yet it marks only one way Geothink is examining citizen interactions with cities. At Ryerson University, Associate Professor Pamela Robinson is working on examining civic hackathons where cities bring together techies and interested citizens to find innovative ways to design and build applications for city data and improve city services. The problem, according to Sieber, is that after the hackathons many such applications or proofs of concepts disappear. For example, some recent winners of a hackathon in the United Kingdom felt that too many applications end up up in the back alleys of BitBucket or GitHub.

“So it can be a quite frustrating experience,” Sieber said. “And cities and the participants alike look towards ways to try to retain that enthusiasm over time and to build on the proofs of concept to actually deploy the apps. So Pamela is conducting research on how to create that technological sustainability.”

In yet one other project, Geothink has partnered with the Nova Scotia Government’s Community Counts program located in Halifax, Nova Scotia to study the preferences of end-users from community-based management organizations or non-profits who utilize the open data from the province. Community Counts’s mission is to make it easier for such organizations to use information such as socio-demographic data, although the organization itself just lost funding in the province’s most recent budget.

“This is very different from working with apps from open data because with apps you generally know who the developers are but you don’t know who the end-users are,” Sieber said. “So we are conducting a project with them to ask questions of the end-users to find out what they find valuable or challenging in using data. And we’ll then infer that to the challenges and opportunities of working with open data that cities produce.”

So how does all this reflect on what civic participation means today in North America? Governments can now know if you visit certain parks, go to certain places for coffee, and meet certain friends while doing either. So, theoretically at least, they can now design urban spaces and cities themselves to be safer, more vibrant, and better suited to the range of activities taking place in these places.

“That seems both incredibly convenient and incredibly Orwellian at the same time,” Sieber said. To find out more about her views of civic participation, stay tuned for our next Geothoughts Podcast by signing up to receive it on iTunes.

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca.

Part 1: Why Geothink? We ask Geothink’s Head about the Partnership’s Vision and Goal

By Drew Bush

Renee Sieber, associate professor in McGill University’s Department of Geography and School of Environment.

Part 1 (of 2). This is the first in a two part series with the head of Geothink.ca, Renee Sieber, an associate professor in the Department of Geography and School of Environment at McGill University. In this first part, we talk with Sieber about Geothink itself; its vision, goal and design. In our next installment, we’ll pick up the story of how she sees civic participation in North America during an age of technological change.

Now in the second year of a five-year partnership research grant funded by the Canadian Government’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Geothink.ca involves 26 researchers and 30 partners in examining the implications of increasing two-way exchanges of locational information between citizens and governments. Yet the vision for this type of collaborative, cross-disciplinary project began years before.

“Geothink sprang from an idea that we’re in this period of huge technological change when it comes to our ability to communicate with cities as citizens, and cities’ ability to communicate with citizens,” Renee Sieber, the project’s head and an associate professor at McGill University, said. “So we have Yelp and Yelp allows us to communicate about restaurants and accommodations in cities. We have FourSquare which allows us to socially check-in and temporarily become mayors of places in cities.”

“It’s a very different world in which we can on a Saturday evening or an early Monday morning know what’s happening in our cities and comment on what’s happening in cities,” she added. “It’s technologies like sensors in road networks that allow cities to know how we’re travelling through a town, where we are meeting up with people to, for example, create dynamic neighbourhoods of where people congregate and want to see their friends to then create better urban design for cities. So the technology is really transforming the way we can have this interaction.”

It’s these types of technology-transformed interactions that Sieber and Geothink’s researchers will chart and begin to examine the implications of. In part, that’s because not all applications of new digital technologies have positive connotations. For example, these technologies make it easier for cities to conduct better surveillance of citizens since they can track people through the cell-phones they carry or by the places they check into.

Such privacy concerns have the potential to make people very uncomfortable, particularly because it means placing more trust in governments and technologies that could misuse or abuse this data. Other problems include the mistaken belief that new technologies mean more people can access and interact with their cities. While efforts to take some conversations or debates online might be advantageous to certain populations, it can also be disenfranchising to others, according to Sieber.

“Democracy can be very, very messy, and sometimes you need to get people who don’t necessarily agree with each other in the same room with each other,” Sieber said. “You can not necessarily rely totally on harvesting, for example, Tweets or Facebook posts to understand public sentiment. Democracy and perceptions about what a city should do are often much more textured than that.”

And that’s exactly why Geothink incorporates perspectives from different disciplines within academia including geography, law, communications, urban planning and computer science. For Sieber, the overall goal is to get a better handle on the diverse set of interactions that technology has made possible between cities and their citizens.

“But we also need to reach beyond the academy to businesses, to lots and lots of cities and representatives of cities about how they experience these changes in real-time, what technologies do they use, and how it has shifted their conversations with citizens,” Sieber said. “So what are they seeing on the ground? How are they engaging citizens via media-like hackathons, for example, where they’re bringing in coders? Are they seeing the same sorts of people, or do they think that participation is being extended and broadened, or does it seem to be just as narrow as it was before?”

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca.

Crosspost: Canada’s Information Commissioner Tables Recommendations to Overhaul Access to Information Act

The Access to Information Act was first passed by parliament 1983 (Photo courtesy of en.wikipedia.org).

The Access to Information Act was first passed by parliament in 1983 (Photo courtesy of en.wikipedia.org).

This post is cross-posted with permission from Teresa Scassa, from her personal blog. Scassa is the Canada Research Chair in Information Law at the University of Ottawa.

By Teresa Scassa

Canada’s Access to Information Act is outdated and inadequate – and has been that way for a long time. Information Commissioners over the years have called for its amendment and reform, but generally with little success. The current Information Commissioner, Suzanne Legault has seized the opportunity of Canada’s very public embrace of Open Government to table in Parliament a comprehensive series of recommendations for the modernization of the legislation.

The lengthy and well-documented report makes a total of 85 recommendations. This will only seem like a lot to those unfamiliar with the decrepit statute. Taken as a whole, the recommendations would transform the legislation into a modern statute based on international best practices and adapted both to the information age and to the global movement for greater government transparency and accountability.

The recommendations are grouped according to 8 broad themes. The first relates to extending the coverage of the Act to certain institutions and entities that are not currently subject to the legislation. These include the Prime Minister’s Office, offices of Ministers, the bodies that support Parliament (including the Board of Internal Economy, the Library of Parliament, and the Senate Ethics Commissioner), and the bodies that support the operations of the courts (including the Registry of the Supreme Court, the Courts Administration Service and the Canadian Judicial Council). A second category of recommendations relates to the need to bolster the right of access itself. Noting that the use of some technologies, such as instant messaging, may lead to the disappearance of any records of how and why certain decisions are made, the Commissioner recommends instituting a legal duty to document. She also recommends adding a duty to report any unauthorized loss or destruction of information. Under the current legislation, there are nationality-based restrictions on who may request access to information in the hands of the Canadian government. This doesn’t mean that non-Canadians cannot get access – they currently simply have to do it through a Canadian-based agent. Commissioner Legault sensibly recommends that the restrictions be removed. She also recommends the removal of all fees related to access requests.

The format in which information is released has also been a sore point for many of those requesting information. In a digital age, receiving information in reusable digital formats means that it can be quickly searched, analyzed, processed and reused. This can be important, for example, if a large volume of data is sought in order to analyze and discuss it, and perhaps even to convert it into tables, graphs, maps or other visual aids in order to inform a broader public. The Commissioner recommends that institutions be required to provide information to those requesting it “in an open, reusable, and accessible format by default”. Derogation from this rule would only be in exceptional circumstances.

Persistent and significant delays in the release of requested information have also plagued the system at the federal level, with some considering these delays to be a form of deliberate obstruction. The Report includes 10 recommendations to address timeliness. The Commissioner has also set out 32 recommendations designed to maximize disclosure, largely by reworking the current spider’s web of exclusions and exemptions. The goal in some cases is to replace outright exclusions with more discretionary exemptions; in other cases, it is to replace exemptions scattered across other statutes with those in the statute and under the oversight of the Information Commissioner. In some cases, the Commissioner recommends reworking current exemptions so as to maximize disclosure.

Oversight has also been a recurring problem at the federal level. Currently, the Commissioner operates on an ombuds model – she can review complaints regarding refusals to grant access, in adequate responses, lack of timeliness, excessive fees, and so on. However, she can only make recommendations, and has no order-making powers. She recommends that Canada move to an order-making model, giving the Information Commissioner expanded powers to oversee compliance with the legal obligations set out in the legislation. She also recommends new audit powers for the Commissioner, as well as requirements that government institutions consult on proposed legislation that might affect access to information, and submit access to information impact assessments where changes to programs or activities might affect access to information. In addition, Commissioner Legault recommends that the Commissioner be given the authority to carry out education activities aimed at the public and to conduct or fund research.

Along with the order-making powers, the Commissioner is also seeking more significant consequences for failures to comply with the legislation. Penalties would attach to obstruction of access requests, the destruction, altering or falsification of records, failures to document decision-making processes, and failures to report on unauthorized loss or destruction of information.

In keeping with the government’s professed commitments to Open Government, the report includes a number of recommendations in support of a move towards proactive disclosure. The goal of proactive disclosure is to have government departments and institutions automatically release information that is clearly of public interest without waiting for an access to information request that they do so. Although the Action Plan on Open Government 2014-2016 sets goals for proactive disclosure, the Commissioner is recommending that the legislation be amended to include concrete obligations.

The Commissioner is, of course, not alone in calling for reform to the Access to Information Act. A private member’s bill introduced in 2014 by Liberal leader Justin Trudeau also proposes reforms to the legislation, although these are by no means as comprehensive as what is found in Commissioner Legault’s report.

In 2012 Canada joined the Open Government Partnership, and committed itself to an Action Plan on Open Government. This Action Plan contains commitments grouped under three headings: Open Information, Open Data and Open Dialogue. Yet its commitments to improving access to information are focussed on streamlining processes (for example, by making it possible to file and pay for access requests online, creating a virtual library, and making it easier to search for government information online.) The most recent version of the Action Plan similarly contains no commitments to reform the legislation. This unwillingness to tackle the major and substantive issues facing access to information in Canada is a serious impediment to realizing an open government agenda. A systemic reform of the Access to Information Act, such as that proposed by the Information Commissioner, is required.

What do you think about Canada’s Access to Information Act? Let us know on twitter @geothinkca.

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca.

Behind the Scenes with Geothink Partner Yvonne Chen: Edmonton’s Open City Initiative

By Drew Bush

Sometime early next week, Edmonton’s City Council will vote to endorse an Open City Initiative that will help cement the city’s status as a smart city alongside cities like Stokholm, Seattle and Vienna. This follows close on the heels of a 2010 decision by city leaders to be the first to launch an open data catalogue and the 2011 awarding of a $400,000 IBM Smart Cities Challenge award grant.

Yvonne Chen, Strategic Planner at City of Edmonton.

“Edmonton is aspiring to fulfill its role as a permanent global city, which means innovative, inclusive and engaged government,” said Yvonne Chen, a strategic planner for the city who has helped orchestrate the Open City Initiative. “So Open City acts as the umbrella that encompasses all the innovative open government work within the city of Edmonton.”

This work has included using advanced analysis of open data streams to enhance crime enforcement and prevention, an “open lab” to provide new products that improve citizen interactions with government, and interactive neighbourhood maps that will help Edmontonians locate and examine waste disposal services, recreational centres, transit information, and capitol projects.

For Chen, last week’s release of the Open City Initiative represents the culmination of years of work.

“My role throughout this entire release was I was helping with the public consultation sessions, I was analyzing information, and I was writing the Open City initiative documents as well as a lot of the policy itself,” she said.

In fact, the document outlines city policy, action plans for specific initiatives, environmental scans (or reviews), and results from public consultations on city initiatives. More than 1,800 Edmontonians commented on the Initiative last October before it was revised and updated for the Council.

“The City of Edmonton’s Open City Initiative is a municipal perspective of the broader open government philosophy,” Chen adds. “It guides the development of innovative solutions in the effort to connect Edmontonians to city information, programs, services and any engagement opportunities.”

Like many provincial and federal open city policies, the document focuses on making Edmonton’s government more transparent, accountable and accessible. What sets Edmonton apart, Chen said, is a focus on including citizens in the design and delivery of city programs and services through deliberate consultations, presentations, public events and online citizen panels. In fact, more than 2,200 citizens are on just the panel asked questions by city officials as they design the Initiative’s infrastructure.

So what will it mean to live in one of North America’s smart cities? Edmonton is already beginning to provide free public Wi-Fi around the city, developing a not yet ready 311 application for two-way communication about city services, and working to fully integrate its electronic services across city departments.

“So one of the projects which has been reviewed very, very popularly is we have opened public Wi-Fi on the LRT stations,” Chen said of a project that includes plans for expanding the service to all train and tunnels. “A lot of commuters are utilizing the service and utilizing the free Wi-Fi provided by the city while waiting for their trains.”

What do you think about Edmonton’s Open City initiative? Let us know on twitter @geothinkca.

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca.

Studying Public Transport Behavior By Accident: Lessons Learned from A Graduate Class in Computer Science with Scott Bell

Saskatchewan’s bus lockout lasted one month (Photo courtesy of wn.com).

By Drew Bush

Sometimes the best research grows out of collaboration and study within the confines of a classroom. For Scott Bell, an associate professor of Geography and Planning at the University of Saskatchewan, a graduate class in computer science provided just such an opportunity.

The past few years, Bell has collaborated with a colleague in Saskatchewan’s Department of Computer Science, Kevin Stanley, to teach a research-based class that gives students hands-on experience using an Android application for smartphones to measure human behavior at 2-minute intervals. Specifically, the application uses a phone’s accelerometer, GPS, camera, Bluetooth and other sensors to monitor participants’ movements and behaviors.

Last fall, students in the class wanted to examine health beliefs and constructed a survey to administer to participants before the phones were given out. Unrelated to the class’s planned content, the City of Saskatoon locked out its bus drivers, resulting in a month-long transit lockout. The lockout began two weeks before class started.

“We didn’t know what was going to happen during the shutdown,” Bell said. “But during our design stage we included in our survey a series of questions about how the participants get to work, and all of our participants were students at the [University of Saskatchewan]… Do they prefer to take public transit? Are they regular transit users? That kind of thing.”

Afterwards, Bell’s class gave these participants the phones and tracked them for a month—with the lockout ending two weeks into this period. Bell and Stanley’s students could then look at how student movement patterns and behaviors changed during and after a time period in which public transport was unavailable.

“It was interesting,” Bell said. “And one of the main findings, was that there wasn’t a change in attendance. So when the strike, when the lockout was on, everybody was still coming to the university at about the same rate as they came after the lockout ended, so when transit was fully available again.”

However, Bell and Stanley’s students noticed that when the lockout ended student trips to and from school actually became quite a bit shorter. They hypothesized that when their participants were forced to find alternate means of transportation they often relied on friends with private vehicles or on their own car.

This new reliance on private vehicles made additional trips, like running errands, possible on the way home thanks to the flexibility they allow compared to public transit. While not yet confirmed in this research, Bell calls this type of behavior “trip-chaining,” an idea often mentioned in transportation geography. Once the lockout ended and these participants returned to public transport, such behavior ended.

“We did learn in this study that we could use this technique to study transit behavior and we’re thinking a little bit more about that,” Bell said. “About how we can maybe do that with some of the Geothink partners that have more open data policies regarding their transit data and transit use.”

If Bell and Stanley’s students had only examined student attendance rates and arrival times at University of Saskatchewan, then they might have concluded the lockout had little affect on student behavior. However, by using surveys and smartphones, this technique established how stressful it was for students and, perhaps most importantly, how behaviors actually changed on the ground.

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Drew Bush, Geothink’s digital journalist, at drew.bush@mail.mcgill.ca.