Laying Out the Challenge – Geothink Summer Institute Day 1

The main atrium of the Environment 3 Building at the University of Waterloo between sessions at Geothink’s Summer Institute.

By Drew Bush

The day began with a warm welcome from Geothink Head Renee Sieber, associate professor in McGill University’s Department of Geography and School of Environment. By afternoon, the City of Ottawa had presented the 29 students attending Geothink’s Summer Institute at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada with the challenge of engaging its citizens with city natural areas.

Each day of the institute alternated morning lectures, panel discussions and in-depth case studies on topics in crowdsourcing with afternoon work sessions where professors worked with student groups one-on-one on their proposed solution to the City of Ottawa’s challenge. As the institute progressed, more time was given to the seven student groups to work on their solutions and prepare a final pitch to the city on day three.

The morning lecture topics ranged from “Conceptual Foundations in Crowdsourcing” to “The Future of Crowdsourcing in the Public Sector” and were taught or co-taught by Sieber, Robert Goodspeed, assistant professor of Urban Planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning; Daren Brabham, assistant professor in the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalistm and Communication; and Monica Stephens, assistant professor in the Department of Geography at State University of New York at Buffalo.

Not sure what constitutes crowdsourcing? The goal of the institute, run as part of a five-year Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) partnership grant, was to provide undergraduate and graduate students from Geothink’s partners with knowledge and training in theoretical and practical aspects of crowdsourcing. And that’s a topic Brabham has been studying, as he puts it modestly, for “several years.”

“And I’ve been trying to look at how to take this model, which I define as connecting organizations with online communities to mutually solve problems or produce goods,” he told Geothink. “Taking that model which as been used in business and a number of for profit endeavours and trying to translate it for governments, for non-profits, for public health.”

On Day 1, students at Geothink’s Summer Institute worked together to solve Ottawa’s crowdsourcing problem using the knowledge gained in earlier sessions as well as individual areas of expertise. Much like many real-world challenges that crowdsourcing has been used to address, the presentation from the City of Ottawa made clear that the problem the city faced was complex and multifaceted. Goodspeed helped to summarize some elements of what was expected of students.

“What a wonderful, rich context, I mean, who knows what the problem is?” he told students. “Is it that people are going to too many parks or the wrong parks, or which people are we talking about? We have no idea…And I think this is very typical for a lot of problem settings you’ll encounter. And, in that sense, almost any month they showed could have been itself a crowdsourcing application.”

Watch a clip of Goodspeed’s introduction here:

After they’d been given a chance to start discussing ideas for crowdsourcing applications in their groups, Sieber and Stephens helped students to begin thinking about the geographical aspects of the applications they were designing as well as technical limitations they might face.

“So, this is a summer institute on crowdsourcing, why do we even talk about geography?” Sieber told students later in the first day. “Because most open data, most data that comes out of government has some geographic component in it somewhere. So it’s useful often to tie crowdsourcing to geography.”

“If nothing else, that implies there is a jurisdictional aspect to the way that people communicate with government, that is that people are bounded in place,” she added.

Stay tuned for more iTunes podcasts from the Summer Institute here, check back on Geothink for synopses of days two and three, and, of course, watch more of our video clips (which we’ll be uploading in coming days) here.

Watch a clip of the presentation the City of Ottawa gave our students here (Beware, for the technophobic, it was conducted over videoconference).

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

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.

A First Hand Account of McGill University’s Team-CODE’s Experiences in the 1st Annual ECCE App Challenge hosted by Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI)

By Jin Xing

I was one of three Geothink students who competed in the Environmental Systems Research Institute’s (ESRI) ECCE 1^st Annual App Challenge hosted by the institute’s Canada Centre of Excellence. Team CODE-McGill, which consisted of McGill University students Matthew Tenney, Carl Hughes, and myself placed second in the competition that concluded on March 20 with the announcement of a winning group from the University of Waterloo.

Although our three team members each has a different research interest, each of us studies topics related to open data. Our Community Open Data Engage (CODE) application was sparked by an exchange I had with Hughes when we discovered we both call Toronto, Ontario home after the competition had already begun. In fact, it was only after Hughes told me that my neighbourhood was “a better” place to live that we began to interrogate the question of how to evaluate a community using open data.

As we worked on our submission, we noticed that community-level open data attracts more attention than data on the whole city. In particular, we found citizens were more concerned with data on traffic, education, and recreation resources in their own neighbourhoods compared to other types of data. Our creation: A new approach for exploring a community using an open data platform that connects people and communities.

However, the application that we designed required a number of trade-offs to be decided in the span of only one week. First, we struggled to choose whether to include more data or to favour an easy-to-use interface. In particular, we wanted to develop functionality to integrate a greater variety of community data but didn’t want the application to become too hard to use. After several hours of discussion, we decided to favour an approach that centered on making open data “easy and ready to use.”

The second trade-off involved the selection of ESRI JavaScript APIs. In particular, we had to choose ESRI ArcGIS API or ESRI Leaflet for open data integration and visualization. At the beginning, I preferred the ArcGIS API due to its rich functions. But Tenney pointed out it was actually over-qualified and may delay the page loading which caused the team to decide to use Leaflet.

Finally, we had to decide how to integrate social media. In particular, we needed to decide whether the Twitter content should be loaded from data streaming or just retrieved from the back-end. All of us felt it was cool to have a real-time Twitter widget on our application’s page, but we didn’t know how to get it to choose the right tweets. For example, a user named Edmonton might say nothing about the City of Edmonton city, and our code would have needed to filter it out in real-time. Considering the difficulty of developing such a data filtering AI in one week, we decided to include it only on the back-end. To accomplish this, we used Python to develop a way to harvest and process data, while the ESRI Leaflet handled all the front-end data integration and visualization.

Our application included data on school locations, health facility locations, grocery store locations, gas station locations, green space, cultural facilities, emergency services, census dissemination areas and Twitter data, all of which were presented as different map layers. We employed the Agile developing method for CODE, meaning we quickly built the prototype for CODE and tested it, then repeated this process with additional functions or by re-developing bad code.

In actuality, though, we built three prototypes in the first two days and spent another two days for testing, selecting and re-developing. The Agile method helped us keep CODE always functional and easy to extend. The only drawback of using Agile was the local code synchronization become necessary before we pushed it to GitHub. If two of us pushed at the same time with different code, our GitHub would be massed up. By late Thursday night, we had nearly finished all the planned coding and had even begun to improve the user experience. The search widget and navigation buttons were added in the last day to make open data easy and ready for use in our CODE application.

We felt that by putting information in the hands of concerned citizens and community leaders, CODE is a proof-of-concept for data-driven approaches to building a strong sense of communityacross cities. CODE also connects people and governments by allowing them to create forums for conversation in specific communities across a city or search social media sites to find other people in their area.

Furthermore, by integrating and visualizing open data at a community scale, CODE demonstrates a new approach for community exploration. In fact, users can search and select different open data for certain communities on one map, and corresponding statistics are shown as pop-ups. In the initial phase, we provided this community exploration service for citizens in Edmonton and Vancouver.

Overall, I felt attending this ECCE App challenge was a great experience to integrate ESRI web technologies with open data research. It proves open data can act as the bridge between citizen and cities, and that ESRI products significantly simplify the building of just such a bridge. We believe more applications will continue to be inspired by the ECCE App challenge and that open data will become closely used in everyday life. Thanks to ESRI, we got a chance to help shape the next-generation of community exploration.

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Jin Xing, Geothink’s Information Technology Specialist, at jin.xing@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.

Spotlight on Recent Publications: Exploring the Hyperbole Behind Crisis Mapping Through Chronic Community Development Issues

By Drew Bush

McGill University Masters Student Ana Brandusescu, lead author on the paper “Confronting the hype: The use of crisis mapping for community development.”

In a paper published this month, Geothink researchers critically examined the role that crisis mapping software such as Crowdmap can play when used to instead facilitate development issues in three Canadian communities in Vancouver and Montreal. They argue that such platforms hold many technological constraints, including an intrinsic short-term feel that makes it difficult to deploy on the chronic, long-term issues common to community development.

Entitled “Confronting the hype: The use of crisis mapping for community development,” the paper was published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies by McGill University Masters Student Ana Brandusescu and Associate Professor Renee Sieber along with Université du Quebec à Montréal Professor Sylvie Jochems. Please find the abstract below.

Each of the case studies examined in the paper involved a different set of circumstances. In Montreal, the researchers worked with a community of low-income immigrants in single-family homes who predominantly spoke French. In contrast, one community in Vancouver consisted of young middle-class families living in subsidized student housing while the other was an ethnically diverse low-income community living in rented housing. Both Vancouver communities predominantly spoke English.

“The Vancouver cases had issues resembling crises, for example, immediate rezoning, antidensification, and loss of social housing,” the researchers wrote in the paper. “The Montreal organizers wished to address longer term issues like the recording of community assets.”

In each community, the researchers prepared participants at initial community meetings by using storyboards or comic books to explain the process of mapping. Furthermore, a manual they created helped application managers and community members understand how to manage the application, submit reports (via texts, tweets, Web reports, e-mails and smartphone message), geolocate reports, and handle messages that might contain personal identifiers or foul language. In Vancouver, the managers consisted of community activists while in the Montreal case the managers were part-time professional community organizers.

Although each community differed in their implementation of the mapping software and program, the findings were striking.

“In this article, we explored the reality behind the hype of crisis mapping and revealed that hype through its repurposing to community development,” they write in their conclusion. “We confronted the zero-cost argument and found numerous technology constraints, which confirmed the challenges of introducing a new technological medium to community development processes.”

“Burns asserted that knowledge politics concerns the role of power in developing a map but the politics also refers to the overall hype to which we so easily succumb,” they add later in their conclusion in reference to a paper by a researcher at the University of Washington, Ryan Burns, entitled Moments of closure in the knowledge politics of digital humanitarianism. “If we acknowledge and then work past the hype then perhaps we will achieve more meaningful and sustainable systems.”

Abstract
Confronting the hype: The use of crisis mapping for community development
This article explores the hyperbole behind crisis mapping as it extends into more long term or ‘chronic’ community development practices. We critically examined developer issues and participant (i.e. community organization) usage within the context of local communities. We repurposed the predominant crisis mapping platform Crowdmap for three cases of community development in Canadian anglophone and francophone. Our case studies show mixed results about the actual cost of deployment, the results of disintermediation, and local context with the mapping application. Lastly, we discuss the relationship of hype, temporality, and community development as expressed in our cases.

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.

Geothoughts 4: Have We Broadened the Audience? Civic Participation in an Age of Digital Technology

Geothoughts 4 examines how civic participation is changing with the advent of geospatial digital technologies.

By Drew Bush

We’re very excited to present you with our fourth episode of Geothoughts. You can also subscribe to this Podcast by finding it on iTunes.

This podcast examines how civic participation is changing with the advent of geospatial digital technologies that allow for cities to collect many forms of data on their citizens and for citizens to communicate with cities and about all that happens within them. We interview Geothink’s Head Renee Sieber, Associate Professor in McGill University’s Department of Geography and School of Environment, to find out her opinions on this subject.

Thanks for tuning in. And we hope you subscribe with us at Geothoughts on iTunes. A transcript of this original audio podcast follows.

TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO PODCAST

This week we sit down with Geothink Head Renee Sieber to discuss how geospatial digital technology continues to reshape citizen interactions with cities. Sieber is an associate professor in McGill University’s Department of Geography and School of Environment.

[Geothink.ca theme music]

Welcome to Geothoughts. I’m Drew Bush.

“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. 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 neighborhoods 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.”

For example, 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.

“Indeed, we can customize the city to individual desires. Well, that seems both incredibly convenient and incredibly Orwellian at the same time.”

Now in the third year of a five-year partnership research grant funded by the Canadian Government’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Geothink involves 26 researchers and 30 partners in examining the implications of increasing two-way exchanges of locational information between citizens and governments.

“Cities are facing tremendous budget cuts, so they may not, they literally may not have the money to have lengthy public meetings. They may need to respond quite rapidly to challenges, so they may not have the time. So it is in everyone’s best interest to try to create smooth yet meaningful interactions, and we have technologies to do that—both technologies in terms of your phone and also technologies in the imbedded infrastructure of cities. But how is that going to affect a very deep meaningful conversation, and in deep meaningful ways that cities respond to the needs of their residents and the needs of factors outside their municipalities?”

That’s where the interdisciplinary research of Geothink’s team and collaborators as well as its partnerships with many cities come in, said Sieber. All of these new interactions and ways of governing or being a citizen require research to be better understood.

“Well it’s a really exciting time. It’s an opportunity for citizens to be engaged when they don’t necessarily have the time to attend a meeting. So they can both watch city activities online through their own dashboards. They can communicate as issues arise. They can, perhaps cities may wish to create polls of online sentiment or they want to alert citizens of emergency situations or of interesting happenings in a city.”

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, according to Sieber. 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, Sieber added.

However, that doesn’t mean that more digital opportunities haven’t translated into more opportunities for citizens to interact with their cities and their services.

“I think we are in an environment in which we have really broadened opportunities for citizens to participate through social media, through these various kinds of devices that we have. So I think its very exciting and also we can have citizens more fully engaged as members of the city in reporting in monitoring events in real time.”

However, Sieber cautions that we must remember technology is not a panacea.

“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. 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.”

[Geothink.ca theme music]

[Voice over: Geothoughts are brought to you by Geothink.ca and generous funding from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.]

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

Geothink at the International Open Data Conference – Day 2

By Suthee Sangiambut

This Friday saw the conclusion of the International Open Data Conference (IODC) 2015, with an atmosphere of optimism and celebration. Attendees came from all corners of the world in numbers far greater than previous conferences—one indication that the open data movement may be gaining momentum. On this final day, stories of open data implementation were shared from both the developed and developing world.

Friday’s panel emphasized questions that went beyond the release of data. A panel which included top officials from Canada, the United States, and the World Bank answered questions on how to break down data silos to ensure people can work together. Commonly referred to as open by default, the panelists felt data ownership needs to be discouraged so that more data ends up in this format.

In particular, they felt such a cultural shift within governments would allow for knowledge sharing with the publics they serve and within the state. Furthermore, it would produce efficiencies that are impossible under today’s paradigm of data produced by a single agency for its own use. Instead, interoperability needs to be technical (such as data formats and standards which would allow the combining of data from different departments), human (common nomenclature and processes to allow communication between departments), and legal (so issues of copyright and intellectual property do not prevent data sharing).

Amparo Ballivan, a lead economist at The World Bank, added that governments not only need more openness in data but that “openness in partnerships” is also desirable. In other words, our outreach and educational programmes to promote open data and data sharing must be as transparent as the data they seek to open up.

“We are called to display the same kind of behavior that we demand of others,” she said.

Catherine Woteki, under secretary for research, education & economics and chief scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture, proposed another solution for this challenge. In particular, she felt that a ‘thesaurus’ is needed to provide links between data-sets in different silos. She emphasized a problem-driven approach to releasing data, with priority given to sharing the data needed to address real problems that has the highest impact.

Throughout the conference, there was also discussion on the role of intermediaries or the non-profit or advocacy groups that promote the usage and availability of open data. Intermediaries were acknowledged as crucial in bridging digital and data divides, to bring open data and its benefits to those unaware or without the skills to leverage it. Intermediaries will also be important actors when attempting to capture local knowledge.

Panelists in other sessions felt that the private sector has become interested in opening up data. At a panel titled “Corporate data sharing for the public good: shades of open,” there was much discussion on the potential benefits of having the private sector open up their data to the public. Potential first steps to be taken were: regulatory frameworks, connecting practitioners, and creating tangible use cases.

The day ended with a recap of the conference, hosted by David Eaves. Key points included: the move beyond engagement through hackathons, moving beyond simply releasing data on portals towards addressing impacts, and general inequalities such as digital divides. On the subject of intermediaries, it was noted that the public is still speaking mainly through intermediaries, resulting in a gap between the demand and supply sides for data. This gap needs to be bridged in order to meet people’s needs.

IODC 2016 will be hosted next year in Madrid, Spain. For web archives of the panels, visit the IODC 2015 website.

The Final take-home points:

Citizen engagement needs to become a more sustained effort
Standardization still needs to be pushed
Measurement of outcomes and impacts need to be formalized
‘Open’ culture and ways of thinking need to be promoted in all sectors
Data must move away from silos to become interoperable
Intermediaries are important actors that help bridge gaps between demand and supply sides
Problem-driven approaches to releasing open data should be encouraged

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Suthee Sangiambut, Geothink’s Newsletter Editor, at suthee.sangiambut@mail.mcgill.ca.

Geothink at the International Open Data Conference 2015 – Day 1

By Suthee Sangiambut

The 2015 International Open Data Conference (IODC) opened today, May 29, at the Shaw Centre in Ottawa. Below, we detail the conclusions from several panel discussions on open cities.

In fact, open cities were the featured topics in two of the day’s panel sessions. While a number of case studies were given, panelists emphasized that few cities (less than 1%) globally have adopted any type of open city initiative.

However, the case studies demonstrated the potential for sensing and data analysis to be used to improve resource allocation and targeting in a city’s public services. A good example given was by Stephane Contre, the chief analytics officer for the City of Edmonton. In particular, he mentioned how hotspot mapping using a kernel density function was done on light bulb point data and on crime point data. This results in new layers representing point data with continuous surfaces. Such a representation allows officials to layer the light bulb, other hotspot data, and various crime data sets, identify correlations, and identify areas in need of additional resources or patrolling.

Not only was there a focus on the data side of open cities, there was also an emphasis on the need for citizen engagement. Without citizen engagement in an open city initiative, city residents simply become receivers of public services. Feedback loops that allow citizen input are needed to make sure city officials can adequately gauge and react to the demands of citizens.

Furthermore, big barriers to releasing open data still remain, especially in the organizational culture within government and due to the lack of political support. Additionally, civil servants require better computer and data literacy to bring about a ‘data first’ mindset where civil servants keep in mind the idea of openness as well as the possible analysis they could perform on a given data set.

Closing remarks were made by Sir Nigel Shadbolt of the Open Data Institute (ODI) and Tony Clement, president of the Treasury Board of Canada, who both expressed great optimism for the future of open data. According to Shadbolt, the next step for open data is in empowering individuals with their own data. He believes a mashing of open government data with personal data and even mobiles and wearable personal sensors will allow us to create even richer data driven experiences that improve quality of life.

Follow #IODC15 for rapid updates by attendees on conference activities.

If you have thoughts or questions about this article, get in touch with Suthee Sangiambut, Geothink’s Newsletter Editor, at suthee.sangiambut@mail.mcgill.ca.