ontarioseo, Author at Open North

How nonprofits can leverage online budget consultation

Posted on June 10, 2013

Much like municipal governments – school boards, labour unions and residents’ associations must ensure that their directions match the preferences and needs of their membership. While in-person consultations and annual meetings are important and effective tools for reaching consensus, there are many limiting factors such as time, travel and knowledge that can hinder participation in […]

Alberta Open Data Portal launches

Posted on May 31, 2013

On May 28th, the Province of Alberta launched their open data portal at data.alberta.ca. The portal is their first major open government initiative. The portal launched with over 280 data sets and allows for residents to request additional data sets. Four of Canada’s ten provinces now have open data portals or official initiatives, with hopefully the rest to […]

New Citizen Budget pricing for small municipalities

Posted on May 27, 2013

Open and transparent budget governance is a value held by many governments regardless of their size. While it is often the federal and provincial legislatures or largest municipalities that draw attention in the press for releasing financial information to the public, it is important to recognize the efforts of small towns and cities across the country. […]

Postal code accuracy analysis and the Personal Democracy Forum

Posted on May 24, 2013

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 […]

Postcode data quality

Posted on May 23, 2013

Open North’s Represent web service allows Canadian citizens to enter a postal code to find their electoral districts and elected officials. This blog post will discuss some of the challenges in performing this (deceptively simple!) task. As previously discussed, elections offices sometimes provide a file that assigns each postal code to one or more electoral districts. In those […]

BC Election results and Rackbin

Posted on May 17, 2013

This week, Christy Clark’s Liberals stunned many pundits by returning to office with a majority government in British Columbia’s provincial election. As we mentioned in a previous post, The Tyee used our Represent API to build a BC Election Map for voters. Post-election, the map now serves as a great resource to review polls and understand how the Liberals pulled out a win! […]

Obama’s executive order and VeloPlan

Posted on May 10, 2013

This week President Obama issued an executive order mandating open and machine-readable formats for all new and modernized government information systems. As the White House blog explains, new data must be served in CSV, XML, JSON or other machine-readable formats and via APIs when appropriate. This order, which will affect procurement of new government systems, is similar to […]

Thank you for supporting MyCityHall.ca and MaMairie.ca!

Posted on May 8, 2013

Wow! Thanks to your combined contributions and support, we raised over $4750 for free, open source, citizen engagement tools for Montreal and Toronto through Indiegogo. Although we did not reach our goal on Indiegogo, once we include the support from earlier contributions and our Google Montreal sponsorship, we have over $19,000 for the development of these reusable civic engagement […]

GO Open Data Conference and revisiting the Geocoder case

Posted on May 3, 2013 (September 6, 2023)

David Eaves (an Open North board member) revisited the Canada Post/Geocoder.ca case, which recently escalated, on his blog. In this post, David explores the financial challenges Canada Post’s policies put on the nonprofit sector, referring to the costs Open North would incur (up to $50,000) if we elected to use their data products for our Represent service. David concludes […]

MaMairie fundraiser success

Posted on April 26, 2013

The Open North team, Louise Harel, Marc-André Gadoury and Alex Norris We would like to extend a great big thank you to all of our friends and supporters who joined us on Wednesday night for our 5@7 in support of MaMairie.ca – we raised over $400 in one night! We were thrilled to be joined by Councillor Louise Harel, […]

Author: ontarioseo

Posts by ontarioseo