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 […]
Read More… from Postal code accuracy analysis and the Personal Democracy Forum
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 […]
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! […]
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 […]
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 […]
Read More… from Thank you for supporting MyCityHall.ca and MaMairie.ca!
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 […]
Read More… from GO Open Data Conference and revisiting the Geocoder case
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, […]
The Treasury Board of Canada announced a new pilot project to increase the ease of submitting and paying for Access to Information and Privacy requests online. So far, the new portal only allows requests to be sent to Citizenship and Immigration, the Treasury Board and Shared Services Canada. More government institutions are expected to join after the one-year pilot […]
Read More… from Transparency Camp and the Participatory Budgeting Conference
If you live in the Montreal area, join us on April 24th at Station-C for a 5@7 in support of our fundraising campaign for MaMairie.ca. Meet the Open North team and talk about strategies for encouraging open and transparent government in Montreal! Halifax, Nova Scotia is the most recent large Canadian municipality to launch an open data portal; the City […]
James McKinney, our executive director, will be speaking on the opening panel of Open Data Exchange 2013 at the Jeanne Sauvé House on April 6th. Throughout the day there will be panels in both French and English. Joey Coleman, of Open Data Hamilton, published an overview of Hamilton’s open data policy process thus far. This interesting article is a great […]