This is a cross posting with visiblegovernment.ca
My friend, Jennifer Bell over at visiblegovernment.ca, asked me to write about a recent and interesting presentation extolling the benefits of an “open city”, so here goes. The presenter, Mark Surman, outlines his idea for using collaborative technologies to improve the quality of life and efficiency of a city (Toronto). Based around the concepts of the open-source mouvement, he claims that if cities put the right tools in place, citizens will build low cost ways to access, share and enhance information. There are examples of this already working in different cities; but, he argues it takes significant endorsement from the city to get the projects off the ground.
If the projects require city data, the developers need to be sure that they will not be punished and ignored by the city, but rather endorsed and listened to. The first step to obtaining support from the tech community is an opening of municipal data. This would include items like by-laws, building permits, and other related material. Without access to information, how can we possibly use it?
Once the information is free, there still needs to be incentives to drive innovation. Competitions are good, but the largest incentive, and what has driven wikipedia, mozilla and other open source solutions, is the recognition that the contributing members obtain from their peers. They feel like they are making a difference and that is a currency of its own. If the city takes the results from websites seriously, then we will inevitably see more sites dealing with municipal affairs.
For too long, citizens have been separated from their governments by a slow and daunting paper-based bureaucratic wall. But just as Mozilla (Firefox Web Browser) grew from an idea, to a team of 60 developers, to 100 contributors, to millions of users; the same can be done with government information.
Transparency and accessibility will drive the governments of the future, so let’s get started.
P.S. On a similar note, we are happy to announce Nimonik will be adding over 20 cities to our coverage. A complete list and details will be added to our site shortly, stay tuned!
