Openness and reuse of digital photographs

Enabling reuse of City of Toronto digital photographs was an early justification for the development of our Digital Asset Library program. It is embedded in our approved mandate, to 'provide a digital asset management platform enabling collaboration, sharing and reuse of digital assets".

Can governments innovate? #govcamp grows up #opengov #opendata

Earlier this month I attended GovCamp, a conference for open government and open data enthusiasts and practitioners. A good breadth of speakers and panelists were loosely organized around three streams:  gov tech & open data, public involvement & communications, and public service innovation.  Dreamy!

The well attended conference did lose some of the free wheeling intimacy of the first evening GovCamp that met at the Toronto Reference Library in the summer of 2010.  That event, dubbed an “unconference” for its organic approach to the sessions, had every presenter introduce their topic for 1 minute on stage.   Attendees got a great preview of both the topic and the speakers themselves.  This approach beat deciding to attend a session based on a 4 or 5 word title by a long shot.  In the organizers’ defence, they had planned this but some opening speakers went over their time and the session introductions had to be cut.  Also owing to its smaller size, the previous GovCamp was more interactive.  Participants gathered to discuss particular topics at tables rather than listening to panelists and speakers in larger rooms.  That being said, there were many interesting speakers this year, and the unexpected conversations were equally enjoyable.  On to the sessions:

Openness, service classification and Rob Ford's service review #opendata #opengov #TOcouncil #TOpoli

Anyone following municipal politics in Toronto knows that there are huge pressures on next year’s municipal budget. Combined with Rob Ford’s promises to reduce government spending and outsource, the current performance and delivery of City services are being closely examined. As the Toronto Star has reported, consultants are being hired to review municipal spending and services looking for savings.

Defining Open Government #opendata #opengov #TOpoli

Awareness of Open Data within governments has gained considerable traction in the last few years. Arguably, Open Data has been successful partly because it is fairly easy to understand. It focuses on making freely available to the public an asset, data, that has already paid for through taxes. This government data can then be reused by programmers, web developers and others to build new services and applications. It also has the support of an active and engaged community of advocates inside and outside of government.

A related concept, Open Government, has been gaining attention recently. The idea is more abstract than Open Data, and also at an earlier stage of development. I was happy to read about these three pillars of Open Government proposed by an Australian Senator, Kate Lundy.