Encouraging Innovation

NRU
Sept. 10, 2014
By Leah Wong

The Town of Oakville is four months into a one-year open data program, which was started in an attempt to stimulate economic development and innovation. Oakville is just one of many Canadian municipalities that is releasing data and allowing the public to create new ways to address public service issues.

To date the town has released 30 data sets and more are being released every month. Through the pilot the town is gauging public interest and deciding how best to release open data in the future, strategy, policy and communications director Jane Courtemanche told NRU.

Oakville is working with tech community group Silicon Halton to organize an open data meet-up, which will bring together government, business, education and community groups to talk about how access to open data can be used to solve different challenges these groups face.

“We’re bringing together people who don’t usually come together,” Silicon Halton co-founder Reema Duggal told NRU. “The hope is, by bringing these people together, good ideas and good connections will come from it.”

The town is hoping the cross-industry dialogue will help inform the direction of the pilot and create partnerships that will further develop ideas on how to improve municipal services.

“There’s an opportunity to see the solutions that they can come up with to assist residents,” said Courtemanche. “It’s really a tool to spark creativity and innovation.”

Releasing open data is beneficial to municipalities for a number of reasons including growing civic engagement, providing social value and increasing transparency, Canadian Open Data Institute co-founder Bianca Wylie told NRU.

“Cities have a huge opportunity on the civic engagement front and the social value front,” said Wylie.

Social value is seen with trip-planner applications, which help people get around and make the best use of their time. On the civic engagement front, open data connects people with information that can inform them about what’s happening in their community. This is useful for people who attend public consultation meetings as it shows the rationale behind a lot of decisions in a municipality.

“[When] data is used in decision making, it becomes so much more defensible and more understandable,” said Wylie. This can help reduce the emotional side of planning, as even if people are unhappy about an outcome, seeing the data can help them understand why a particular decision was made. This, Wylie says, increases transparency and public trust.

Application developers are using open data to improve municipal services. Apps such as Fix My Street, which allows people to report potholes or graffiti, provide the city with additional eyes on the streets. While it’s impossible for a municipality to track every piece of graffiti, for example, when resident’s record potholes or graffiti it can help expedite repairs and maintenance.

These types of applications only work if municipalities respond to them - it’s not enough to post data and ignore it. While someone can report a pothole through an online application, it’s only useful if a municipality responds, MaRS Data Catalyst public affairs manager Sameer Vasta told NRU.

“[Open data] allows other people to take the onus from the public service, people who are better equipped to do it, and raise efficiency on the municipality side,” said Vasta. “It also allows them to rethink how they’re engaging with citizens.”

Data also unleashes the creativity and skills of certain people in the community to become the translators, working to showcase the information in a way that enables more people to understand what it means.

“Cities can release a lot of data, but it’s a very small percentage of the population who can take one of these masses of data sets and do anything with it,” said Wylie. These people are able to repackage the information in a way that’s more accessible to the average resident.

Wylie said data can also help the community understand the challenges with city planning. Providing more information about traffic studies or density would show the public some of the complexities behind decision making.

“It’s a two-way street. We all need to learn a lot about our city to understand how our city makes decisions,” said Wylie.

“The point of it is getting away from data sets on a page and getting data out and active and into more people’s hands.”

Municipalities can also guide economic growth as people start businesses using open data. To better harness the community’s strengths, Vasta said municipalities should be listening to businesses, entrepreneurs and innovators on how they can better support this growth through the use of open data.

“Once we stop being scared of letting people create businesses on top of open data then we can start a whole eco-system of better public services built on open data,” said Vasta. There have been concerns in the past about whether municipalities should provide data for free if people are going to profit from it.

“We build roads so we can have products shipping back and forth and people moving through,” said Vasta. “Data pipes are essentially roads. They are allowing businesses to thrive through common infrastructure.”