City of Vancouver Opens Up City Data | Hacker News Reader

City of Vancouver Opens Up City Data

data.vancouver.ca

20 pointshuhtenberg10 comments

In case you missed it (I did), so has San Francisco - with so many local hackers this can only be a Good Thing. http://datasf.org/ - it was posted on HN a month ago but sank without comment, so give vijayr his overdue karma: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=772966

Jason Birch, with/for the City of Nanaimo has led the way here for a few years:

http://www.jasonbirch.com/nodes/ http://maps.nanaimo.ca/nanaimomap/

not nearly enough information on it as I would like, but it's a start. For now it's a bunch of csv on stuff like Community Centres and Schools. I'd like to see hours of operation, directory of phone numbers, link to pictures, link to maps, link to transit grid...and other things that are useful. But it's a start.

Locations of public washrooms, fountains, banks, and where one can purchase transit tickets would be handy for any good-sized city.

It's great to see multiple open data formats being supported. But I expected more "meaty" data, such as:

http://crimemapping.edmontonpolice.ca

The cynic in me believes that the police will use this somehow to increase their funding. But it is great information to get into the hands of citizens. And it's worth visiting just to see the "don't sue us" click-through agreement!

But why is it so painful to open up transit data? Are there any good examples of accessible transit data?

Anybody else in Vancouver suddenly worried that our infrastructure will be messed with now? Hey World, you know those Olympics in Feb, well here are some electrical conduits you can fuck up for the event! WTF?

One could make a similar argument that open source operating systems are inherently less secure as malicious hackers would know all the weaknesses.

I think it's a matter of perspective. Obviously a product that has a large open source volunteer base will be more secure because of their ability to mobilize against security threats. So the City of Vancouver is Open, but not Open Source because they are not allowing masses amount of people access to change things. I guess you could say that if we could real time vote to change city decisions, then it would be open source.

Most open source projects have a leader who decides what additions and changes to commit. I don't see the City of Vancouver being any different - as long as citizens have the ability to push changes that the city can then decide to commit.

I for one fear the repercussions of providing the terrorists latitude/longitude of all of our city's drinking fountains. If we can't trust them, we'll have to resort to drinking pre-bottled water!

All of the information being provided is available upon request anyway. I doubt there are any terrorists that are REALLY committed to causing problems, but not committed ENOUGH to go to city hall and request the information - or for that matter, use a free call-before-you-dig service.

After they fail to do so, maybe this idea can be sold to more municipalities. 'See, Vancouver's still standing, plus they saved $$$ by letting their citizens point out improvements instead of paying high-priced management consultants.'

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