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The subtitle of this website, "The City That Thinks Like The Web", is the name of a talk that was given a couple of times in the last year or so by Mark Surman,
by Maciek416 17y ago
The subtitle of this website, "The City That Thinks Like The Web", is the name of a talk that was given a couple of times in the last year or so by Mark Surman, a Toronto-based evangelist for the Mozilla Foundation. One of these talks was given with our city's mayor ( http://twitter.com/mayormiller http://twitter.com/mayormiller ) in attendance, and things have slowly but surely gained steam ever since. Miller has been extremely interested in pushing open data initiatives in Toronto with both the transit system and other services.
With his term ending soon, I wonder what the next mayor's stance will be on open data / city hacking / revision-controlled urbanism. This is one of those issues that you either totally "get" or completely fail at (in the worst possible political way), and it would be a shame to see us regress along such a frail axis; Long-established systems with regulations, rules, vested contractual / public-private / labour-union interests are extremely difficult to evolve and untangle.... That we have enthusiastic buy-in from the very top is really impressive, I just hope it continues in a truly open manner.
- joeythibault 17y agoI hope they continue and expand the practice. It seems like a cool initiative, though I'm a little fuzzy on what the products of the initiative are. For example, you can get the foodbank data, which would be great for finding the exact locations of the nearest foodbanks...say, if you were homeless and had an iPhone. Could be great for transit times and getting around the city too. If I'm missing the point of the open data please enlighten me.
- aduric 17y agoI like mrtron's suggestion.