Okay, super psyched about this. Back at the Strata Conference in Feb (in San Diego) I introduced my long time uber-quant friend and now Wikimedia Foundation data scientist Diederik Van…
For those who missed it, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has announced it is launching an open data portal. This is exciting news. On Monday I was interviewed about…
With the possible exception of weather data, the most successful open data set out there at the moment is transit data. It remains the data with which developers have experimented…
The following job posting can be found on the MaRS website here. So here's a job for an open data advocate living in, or willing to move to, Toronto. For…
One of the things that struck me most about Beijing was the sheer size of everything. Beijing, it often seems, is built at a Las Vegas scale - the buildings,…
My friend Alexandra Samuel penned a piece titled "After a Loss in Vancouver, Troubling Signals of Citizen Surveillance" over at the Harvard Business Review. The piece highlights her concern with…
For a long time I've been thinking about just how much Github has revolutionized open source. Yes, it has made managing the code base significantly easier but its real impact…
... Because I'm behind the great firewall. It actually quite surreal being unable to check twitter - I didn't realize I would miss it so much. However, I can apparently…
Over at the Beyond the Commons blog Aaron Wherry has a series of quotes from recent speeches on healthcare by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in which the one constant…
This is truly, truly fantastic. If you haven't already read this stunning story from the Guardian: How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs. This is,…
Even sometimes my home town of Vancouver gets it wrong. Reading Chad Skelton's blog (which I frequently regularly and recommend to my fellow Vancouverites) I was reminded of the great…
Yesterday I was reminded by the fact that I have great friends – friends who are far better to me than I deserve. You see, yesterday was my birthday and…
A few weeks ago I finished "What Technology Wants" by Kevin Kelly. For those unfamiliar with Kelly (as I was) he was one of the co-founders of Wired magazine and…
Evolving thought: One of the large challenges of the 21st century is going to be reconciling our increasingly networked world with traditional notions of individualism. The more I look at…
This week at the Mesh conference in Toronto (where I'll be talking Open Data) the always thoughtful Jesse Brown, of TVO's Search Engine will be running a session title How…
Yesterday, Gerry T shared a photo he snapped at the University of Alberta in Edmonton of a "departure board" in the university's Student Union building that uses open transportation data…
Yesterday, New York City released its "Road Map for the Digital City: Achieving New York City's Digital Future." For those who missed the announcement, especially those concerned about the digital…
This past Saturday the Toronto Star published the following piece by Taylor Owen and myself on its op-ed page. Thought I'd put it here for those who might have missed…
Dear new MPs, Congratulations on being elected! You've every right to be excited - as a fellow Canadian who is hoping that the house can be changed, I'm excited too.…
Links on Social Media & Politics: Notes from “We Want Your Thoughts #4″
Last night I had a great time taking the stage with Alexandra Samuel in Vancouver for "We Want Your Thoughts" at the Khafka coffee house on Main St. The night's…