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

[David Eaves]

Ton - thank you so much for sending this email around. Incredible stuff.

Prompting governments to open up data like your city council did is one 
of the big reasons we wanted to start this day... so hearing this part 
of your story leaves me thrilled.

The fact that other cities in the region got interested as well is 
another fantastic outcome... exactly the kind of awareness raising we 
were hoping would happen.

I've added the projects you linked to here to the wiki:
http://www.opendataday.org/w/index.php?title=Opendata_Day_Projects&action=submit#Enschede.2C_Netherlands

where we are trying to keep track of the days artifacts.

Really, thank you for sending around this update. Is it okay if I post 
it to my blog?

cheers,
dave

On 10-12-06 1:14 AM, Ton Zijlstra wrote:
> 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 <mailto:ton at tonzijlstra.eu>
> +31-6-34489360
>
> http://zylstra.org/blog
> -------------------------------------------
>
>
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