- The Tyee released their new Election Map & Guide for the British Columbia provincial election. This tool, which enables citizens to understand the race in each riding, uses data from our Represent database of electoral boundaries and elected officials.
- Presidential Innovation Fellow Phillip Ashlock posted today to the Open Knowledge Foundation’s blog about the failure of many government open data portals to include basic information about government. Phillip points to OpenlyLocal, OpenStates and our own Represent as examples of initiatives that try to bridge the information gaps left by our complex systems of government. The post also introduces the new W3C Open Government Community Group, started by our executive director, James McKinney, which seeks feedback and collaboration on open government data standards.
- Earlier this week we joined Minister Tony Clement in Toronto at a roundtable discussion to talk about the future of data.gc.ca. We posted about our experience and William Wolfe Wylie also covered the event at canada.com
- On March 27th, the Gov 2.0 Toronto Meetup group will host a social-mixer/fundraiser on our behalf at Joe Badali’s. We hope to bring the open data community together with city councillors and citizens interested in the future of civic engagement in Toronto in support of our Indiegogo campaign for MyCityHall.ca. Also, there will be free cake!
- Sunlight’s Open States project shared their “Open Legislative Data Report Card” which compares all 50 legislatures’ completeness, timeliness, ease of access, machine readability, standards and permanence to determine their transparency grade. In a related blog post, James Turk explains that “identifying these commonplace problems can go a long way toward addressing them.”