Recreation registration process shows innovation eludes Toronto
Making data more open could solve nightmarish registration process.

thestar.com
By Edward Keenan
Sept. 1, 2016

There was good news for long-suffering parents in the Star on Wednesday: the city is improving the registration process for recreation programs. For years, it has been an annual trial by frustration on registration day, as people needed to note long lists of program codes and then use multiple devices at once to manically try to sign into overwhelmed servers fast enough to get their kid in swimming lessons or whatever. As I’ve written before, it was a semi-annual ritual that united the city in rage at its government.

Six months ago, Mayor John Tory promised to fix it. Wednesday, Jennifer Pagliaro reported here that the Parks and Recreation department has been upgrading servers to cut waiting times, making some tweaks to the system to make it easier to store the programs you want (rather than needing to input codes in a flurry on the spot) and is planning a complete overhaul of the registration process that should launch at the end of next year.

But the progress looks less impressive when, in the same story, you read about how one frustrated parent, Phil Vlatch, has already created a free mobile phone app (called “The Toronto FUN Guide”) that streamlines the process for parents. Most significantly, it allows them to search programs without resorting to leafing through the paper FUN Guide listings the city publishes. Vlatch told me it took him about three months to program the app initially, and it takes him about a week of seven-hour days to update it each season with new listings.

This prompts an immediate question, of course: why does it take the city years to do the task Vlatch did by himself in a few months as a hobby project? The answer is no doubt complicated. The city has accountability processes in place that suck up time and money, but prevent taxpayer money from being wasted or corruption from taking root; an independent operator like Vlatch has no one to answer to but himself in deciding how to build software and what features to give it, while government staff have their political masters to answer to and must consider how to serve all of the people of the city; if Vlatch’s project is a failure or doesn’t impress people, he’s only wasted his own time, while if the government’s official project doesn’t work, we all scream for them to be fired.

The point isn’t that Vlatch is good at something and the government’s staff are not. The point is that there are some ways, especially where technology is concerned, where the government is not very well equipped to develop its own products to the public fast enough to make any sense. And in some of those cases, hobbyists, activists, and private independent developers are well-equipped to do it better, faster, and at no cost to the government.

And yet, the city did not - and is not - making it easy for Vlatch. In order to make his application work, he needs to “scrape” information out of the PDF files of the printed Fun Guide. The city has denied Vlatch’s requests to provide that information in raw form - the kind of text file that they almost certainly already have on hand because they use it for their own web registration site.

The concept of providing raw information to the public so they can use it, called “Open Data,” is not new. The city has an Open Data office, and the mayor has talked a good game about harnessing it to encourage innovation and modernize the government. But the case of the scraped Fun Guide PDF shows how far we have to go - it’s a case where the most basic, existing, explicitly public information is not shared, even though the city is desperately aware of how phenomenally crappy its existing service on this file is.

Open Data activist Mark Richardson, who has been working for years to get Toronto’s government to release more, says cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago are way ahead of Toronto. Our government is very proud to remind us constantly that it is bigger than Chicago’s, but Richardson says that Toronto has released only 200 datasets in the past five years, while the Windy City has released more than 1,400.

It isn’t like Toronto doesn’t have reason to know how useful Open Data can be. In 2011, the TTC realized it didn’t have the capacity to build a good application to tell people, in real time, when their next bus or streetcar would arrive. So it made its GPS vehicle-tracking information available as a data stream to the public. Dozens of independent developers, almost right away, created apps - some worked better than others, some served different niche markets, a few have become everyday tools for commuters. Customer service was radically improved quickly at virtually no cost to the TTC.

In the case of rec programs, there’s reason to think Open Data could actually turn a profit for the city. Using available data about actual program registrations, Vlatch found that those famously oversubscribed programs - the ones parents were always frustrated to find full, moments after registration opened - weren’t all actually full. 105,000 spots - almost a fifth of all those available - in various programs went unfilled in 2015. But someone trying to register for a full program at one community centre today has no easy way to know that the same program is offered at a community centre four blocks away and has space available. If an app like Vlatch’s that allows people to search for similar programs filled even a quarter of those vacant spots, it would mean $1 million in revenue for the city, Vlatch estimates. (For his own part, Vlatch has made his “scraped” data available on his website redandwhitedesign.com if others want to use it.)

There is a whole untapped army of developers in Toronto who could create programs, websites, and applications to help people interact with the government better - for fun, for bragging rights, out of a sense of public service. Providing the data to allow that to happen is among the easiest, lowest-cost ways the city could improve its service to residents.

Vlatch just wanted to make things easier for parents. Realizing how the government pointlessly made it hard for him to do that - and makes it hard for others like him to do it in all kinds of areas of city life - is almost as enraging as the familiar Rec signup process.