TORONTO: Earlier this month, Toronto city officials met with local web designers, developers, and community activists at the city’s first ever “Open Data Lab” at Toronto Innovation Showcase.  The event followed the launch of TO’s open data site, toronto.ca/open, that morning.  Here’s a picture of the action, taken from Mark Kuznicki’s summary of the event:

Toronto's Open Data Lab


The event had a particularly novel structure, featuring 10 minute speed-dating sessions between city IT staff and local developers, followed by parallel half-hour brainstorming sessions.  The Mayor of Toronto, David Miller, later met with open data volunteers for beer.

 

ITWorld quotes Mayor Miller describing the city’s open data initiative:

“Anyone can download, analyze and mash up our data or write applications to make it more accessible and useful. It is an invitation to Torontonians to do what they do best: create, innovate and build a better city,”

The Open Data Lab spawned a vigorous discussion group, here, where ideas are debated and formats are suggested to the city.  City officials have been doing an admirable job of keeping on top of the discussion.  To help with the task, a Toronto citizen created a web app, datato.org to organize and prioritize requests for the city.

Note: A panel discussion on Open Government from earlier in the day at Toronto Innovation Showcase is available as a webcast.

EDMONTON: City of Edmonton IT staff hosted an Open Data workshop at City Hall this weekend.  The focus of the event, attended by 45 local developers, was brainstorming around the city’s upcoming open data catalogue.  Read coverage of the event by the Edmonton Journal.

VANCOUVER: The City of Vancouver will be hosting another Open Data Hackathon event at City Archives December 9th.

As a side note, there are indications that Vancouver will start publishing road repair advisories next month in GeoRSS, a format which includes encoded geographic co-ordinates.  The change in format will enable applications that, for instance, allow users to subscribe to upcoming repairs to roads on their commute, or in their neighbourhood.