I like to think of myself as a pretty creative person. This past weekend, however, I got to meet a whole lot of creative people – many much more creative than me. 

I was privileged to experience firsthand what happens when you put a bunch of these insanely creative people in the same room for two entire days.  This is exactly what happened at the True Growth Civic Hackathon this past weekend.

Hosted by the University of New Brunswick’s Maker Space, this civic hackathon was incredibly timely considering the perfect storm that is now under way. With the current trend for global urbanization, leaders need to find innovative solutions to make their infrastructures work in ways that they were not originally designed for. The convergence of technology and the vast amounts of data now available translates to an infinite number of innovative possibilities.

Today’s cities have access to inexpensive technologies capable of capturing and storing huge amounts of data. This data can be sensor data taken from wireless traffic cameras, infrastructure monitoring of buildings and bridges, mobile health and fitness, and people tracking to name a few. Government organizations also have access to many sources of data ranging from property tax assessments, geographic mapping, and location based service information.

It has been recognized that sharing such data can lead to things like smarter transport, lower energy consumption and increased efficiencies and productivity.

Over the course of the sunniest weekend that I can remember, this civic-minded event focused on ‘people solving problems for people’ using open data. That is, data that organizations make available to the public without restriction on usage or distribution. Making such data open has the ability to transform a city by increasing transparency of governance and enabling outside expert collaboration. The reality is, most government agencies do not have the resources to create innovative solutions, nor do they typically enjoy a culture that allows for failure – a prerequisite of innovation. Allowing citizens to apply their specialized skills and localized knowledge from an outside perspective is a powerful model that benefits from experimentation.

The group of 20+ civic hackers present was complemented with people traveling from other cities, and even other provinces to compete. Imagine, people care enough about making a difference that they are willing to invest in traveling to another province to help solve problems. Good food, great conversation, and new friends made sitting inside during this first weekend of summer awesome.

At the end of the weekend, there were three amazing products completed.  These ranged from a portal to all pertinent information on a given address (see civic311.com), an interactive virtual city tour, and a service to find the location of the most desirable parking spots in the city.  All of these were built using open data, which, as we all quickly found out, is scarce.

This event should serve as proof of the value of open data. Despite how open the government claims to be, we still have a long way to go.  For example, we may have ‘access’ to property tax information, but it is not ‘open access’. 

Open means unrestricted.  Open means sites like propertize.ca would flourish – the very site that property assessors are rumoured to use themselves because it is better than their own site.  Need another example?  Try to obtain your city’s geocoded civic addresses, something you can create yourself if you know how, just to see the restrictions placed on it and anything you build on top of it.

The true smart city empowers its citizens from the bottom up to create a living lab.

The true smart city empowers its citizens from the bottom up to create a living lab. While there are glimmers of brilliance being shown in the innovative work being done across city departments like transportation, energy, and public safety. This is just the beginning as the real data mining and analytics opportunities arise from opening all data and combining these datasets together. Powerful transformative insights exist in these combined open datasets, and they are just waiting to be unlocked to provide useful patterns, trends and predictive power. Tim Berners-Lee tells us of the innovative power that comes from blending different data sources together to enable people to do “wonderful things in ways we would never have imagined”.

‘Government 2.0’ should be in stark contrast to the opaque, “we know better” attitudes of current bureaucracies and needs to embrace the power, innovation, and insights that the crowd will bring to advance good governance. Government should not squander the opportunity to shine a very bright light on its practices with open data (such as pseudo-open policies that attempt short-term gains by monetizing access rather than seeking the big time savings that will come from innovation by allowing open access by all to all).

Every elected government in the free world claims they are simply interested in improving on the cost effective delivery of their systems and programs; if this is indeed a core value, then there should be no hesitation in inviting the electorate to scrutinize their performance and provide valuable feedback and innovation to achieve improvements in cost and service.

There are very few options for governments to both reduce spending while increasing economic activity, but embracing an open access approach just might provide that opportunity. The spoils will go to the government who chooses to take a leadership role in fostering technology innovation in big data analytics by adopting true open-access.

James Stewart James Stewart, Ph.D. candidate,  is an intelligence analyst at Predexa Analytics and teaches data mining at the University of New Brunswick. This blog first appeared on the Predexa website.