About Open North

As Lead Technical Partner of the Community Solutions Network (CSN), Open North operationalizes its open smart city approach in the first-ever capacity-building advisory service for communities of all sizes across Canada. The Applied Research Lab is funded by the McConnell foundation to develop its research agenda.

The Open Smart City Guide v1.0 presents the first-ever definition for an Open Smart City and serves as a starter kit for city stakeholders and decision-makers. Open North partners with the National Democratic Institute to support a data-centric public consultation in Ukraine. It publishes other reports on data standards, open data, and Canada’s open government leadership.

The first Municipal Open Data Do-It-Yourself-Toolkit is developed in collaboration with 10 municipalities. The DIY model inspired similar toolkits in South Africa and Latin America.

Launch of the publication How Can We Improve Urban Resilience With Open Data? at the OGP Annual Conference in Paris. Open North co-hosts the first global Open Cities Summit in Madrid, Spain.

More than 200 participants attend the Canadian Open Data Summit (CODS) in Ottawa hosted by Open North. Jean-Noé Landry becomes Executive Director of Open North.

Open North becomes co-lead of the standards stream of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) open data working group and publishes its first reports on open data standards. The organization joins the SSHRC-funded GeoThink research partnership in Canada.

The Citizen Budget (CB) prototype is launched in Montreal. CB is deployed more than 120 times in municipalities in all regions of Canada, becoming the most widely used online budget consultation tool in North America.

Lead and supports key civic tech projects and open data standards initiatives, including Open511 (open format to publish your road event data), Popolo (international open government data specifications), OpenParliament (a website that helps Canadians find what their federal representatives are up to), and Represent (free API of elected officials at all levels of governments).

Founded by James McKinney, Open North focuses on building online tools to improve democracy by accessing reliable government information and facilitating meaningful citizen engagement through technology.