[open-government] Thank you all for #odhd!

Mon Dec 6 09:14:55 UTC 2010

Hi all,

Last Saturday was a great day! I was totally energized at the end of the
day.

In Enschede (a city in the Netherlands, in the eastern part, on the German
border), we had 9 people there for the entire day. Local entrepreneurs,
civil servants, students. One city council member with a background in IT
has been there for the entire day, happily hacking along with us. We also
had about the same number of people dropping by during the day for a short
time. Departmental heads of the city administration dropped by to see what
was going on (one in charge of geo-related things, one the head of info
management). Also the dept head for statistics and research of the
neighboring city Hengelo visited us (his manager told him to go check it
out.). Turns out he's an ex colleague of mine when we were both working at a
research company 10 years ago. He invited me over to explain open gov data
in more detail to him and explore what can be done in his city. That
appointment is set to take place in the coming 3 weeks. Several people from
ITC (a univ for cartography) were there, and they are going to see what
geo-data they can open up by themselves, as response to the city opening up
geo-data.

The city, thanks to the work of 2 enthusiastic civil servants, released
about 25 data sets on the occasion of this event. Ranging from data about
neighborhoods, to sewage systems, busstops, buslines, house numbers,
building permits, geo height lines etc. Those datasets will also be formally
published now on the city's website, and listed in the Dutch national data
catalogue that is currently being build (based on CKAN). The idea is to have
a subset of the national data catalogue appear as the local data catalogue
at http://enschede.nl/data

Two prototypes have been build:
1) a map overview of all building permits requested, with link through to
the underlying plans ( http://bouwplannen.heroku.com/ )
2) a map overview of all company bankruptcies in the city (still to be
combined with industrial zone mapping to see if location has something to do
with  it.) ( http://opendata.royvanderveen.nl/ )

For me the best result is not what we built, but 1) a first wave of data
sets, and more important still 2) a whole group of 'new' people who are now
visibly interested in open gov data, and willing to help move it along in
our city.
We plan to meet again in January to discuss ideas and practical things we
can do.

At the end of our activities we had a video session with the group in
Helsinki Finland, as well as with the group in Vienna, Austria to talk about
the event, outcomes, and ongoing discussions.
The #odhd twitter stream and Hello World map from Ottawa displaying those
tweets around the world was a great source of inspiration and way to show
those dropping by this was not 'just' a handful of local geeks playing with
some data.

Thank you all for making this a great event. Thank you David for keeping the
idea rolling forward.

best,
Ton
-------------------------------------------
Interdependent Thoughts
Ton Zijlstra

ton at tonzijlstra.eu
+31-6-34489360

http://zylstra.org/blog
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