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Represent, our lookup service for electoral boundaries and elected officials, depends on accurate postal code data to determine who represents you, given your postal code. A major challenge for many organizations using postal codes is that the most accurate datasets costs tens of thousands of dollars. Courtney Claessens, one of our volunteers, recently published a first analysis comparing the accuracy of different free postal code datasets, including the recently released forward sortation area (FSA) boundaries from Statistics Canada.
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The 2013 Personal Democracy Forum will take place June 6th and 7th in New York City. This annual event brings together top minds working on open government and civic engagement to discuss technology’s impact on politics and democracy. In honour of Aaron Swartz, this year’s conference theme is “Think Bigger.” Two of Open North’s Board Members, David Eaves and Jonathan Brun will be attending PDF, and we look forward to hearing about their experiences.
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The National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) and the Knight Foundation have partnered to present a new Civic Data Challenge for raw civic health data. The contest runs until July 28th and encourages submissions of applications and visualizations that have direct impact on public decision-making.