Last week I spoke with City of Edmonton CIO Chris Moore about the history of the city’s open data initiative. The roots of Edmonton’s open data catalogue, launched last month, stretch back to February 2009, when the city’s IT group began to re-assess the way they deliver services, their internal culture, and their role in the city. It turns out that the catalogue, and city’s open data strategy, are the publicly visible face of a full revitalization campaign for the city’s IT group.

When Chris joined the city’s IT staff in October 2008, he found himself at the head of an unhappy group of people. Much of IT was dependant on external consultants. Morale was low, people felt locked into existing patterns, and staff were reluctant to speak their minds. As Chris started discussions to get at the heart of the issues in the group, he received an anonymous email saying that what he was trying to do was nice, but “I really don’t think any of this is going to change.”

Chris led a series of 22 town halls among the 300 city IT staff, which started with open talks about ‘the way things are’. Here’s a sketch drawn during one of those discussions. I think it speaks to anyone who’s ever worked in a demoralized environment:

Starting from those conversations, the IT group formulated a series of ten core values, which include collaboration, innovation, and open communication. They also formulated a group of desired outcomes for improved service delivery, and for city staff as creative IT professionals. The challenge was then to turn the values into concrete actions that could deliver these outcomes for IT staff and the city. The ideas raised in the discussions seemed in lock-step with the example set by Washington’s Digital Public Square, North America’s first open data initiative, and reports on its potential to spur that region’s social and economic development. Chris says:

“I realized we had all the right elements for implementing open data /open government here.”

Following initial discussions with citizens at Changecamp Edmonton, the city hosted a dedicated open data workshop that brought together software developers and open data activists to talk about what an open data initiative should look like. City staff then solicited the help of 39 people in collaborating on a report on open data, which culminated in the launch of the catalogue.

The next phase of the strategy, which will be announced at an Open City Workshop on March 6th, involves reaching out to a broader community of citizens, non-profits, grass-roots activists, and high school and university students, to get them motivated to work with the city to build a better community. According to Chris:

“It’s up to us, at the city, to be the social consciousness of the city, encouraging people to get involved.”

While the overall IT transformation campaign is still a work in progress, Chris sees a new energy in city IT staff. Internal communication has skyrocketed, as new ideas and solutions are proposed and debated on an internal bulletin board which sees approximately 200 hits a day. On a recent anonymous employee survey, the majority of IT managers strongly agreed (7-9 on a 9 point scale) that the transformation plan met their needs for personal fulfillment.

As to the benefits that Edmonton citizens will receive from the open data portion of the initiative, via applications that will be able to tap into the newly-available information, Councillor Don Iveson was quoted last month as saying:

“There’s a prospect for innovation that we haven’t even imagined yet.”