On May 21, 2009, Vancouver passed an important resolution to encourage technological openness in the City. The city is committing to making more data available, which will encourage citizen oversight and understanding of what the city government is doing.
The resolution is below, but an important immediate impact – as reported by CBC news – will be on the video archive of City Council meetings:
For example, she said, videos made at city hall, including videos of council meetings, are currently in a proprietary format that cannot be posted on YouTube. They can only be viewed on the City of Vancouver website by people who have the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer. She expects that to change.
The city is committing to open/accessible data, open standards, and open source software (not by mandating it, but by mandating its consideration when replacing or acquiring new systems).
The open policy has already led to interesting uses by local citizens.
Vancouver Resolution
WHEREAS the City of Vancouver is committed to bringing the community into City Hall by engaging citizens, and soliciting their ideas, input and creative energy;
WHEREAS municipalities across Canada have an opportunity to dramatically lower their costs by collectively sharing and supporting software they use and create;
WHEREAS the total value of public data is maximized when provided for free or where necessary only a minimal cost of distribution;
WHEREAS when data is shared freely, citizens are enabled to use and re-purpose it to help create a more economically vibrant and environmentally sustainable city;
WHEREAS Vancouver needs to look for opportunities for creating economic activity and partnership with the creative tech sector;
WHEREAS the adoption of open standards improves transparency, access to city information by citizens and businesses and improved coordination and efficiencies across municipal boundaries and with federal and provincial partners;
WHEREAS the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) is a not-for-profit society created as a partnership between local government, provincial government and major utility companies in British Columbia to share and integrate spatial data to which 88% of BC local governments are members but Vancouver is not;
WHEREAS digital innovation can enhance citizen communications, support the brand of the city as creative and innovative, improve service delivery, support citizens to self-organize and solve their own problems, and create a stronger sense of civic engagement, community, and pride;
WHEREAS the City of Vancouver has incredible resources of data and information, and has recently been recognized as the Best City Archive of the World.
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City of Vancouver endorses the principles of:
- Open and Accessible Data – the City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns;
- Open Standards – the City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats of media;
- Open Source Software – the City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT in pursuit of open data the City of Vancouver will:
- Identify immediate opportunities to distribute more of its data;
- Index, publish and syndicate its data to the internet using prevailing open standards, interfaces and formats;
- Develop appropriate agreements to share its data with the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) and encourage the ICIS to in turn share its data with the public at large;
- Develop a plan to digitize and freely distribute suitable archival data to the public;
- Ensure that data supplied to the City by third parties (developers, contractors, consultants) are unlicensed, in a prevailing open standard format, and not copyrighted except if otherwise prevented by legal considerations;
- License any software applications developed by the City of Vancouver such that they may be used by other municipalities, businesses, and the public without restriction.
BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED THAT the City Manager be tasked with developing an action plan for implementation of the above.