Canadians love for census Star Op-Ed
I’ve a small piece in the Toronto Star today about the census, Canadians reaction to it, and what it says about Canada. You can find it here: Canadians love for…
David Eaves
Lawful, Neutral and Chaotic: mapping the drivers behind social media, companies and states in the public sphere
I’ve been playing with ways to help some students understand the online space: i.e. who the actors are, and what motivates them around the big policy debates about the internet,…
Open Mandate Letters
The newly elected Government of Canada made its ministerial mandate letters available to the public last week. They are absolutely worth checking out both for their content and as a…
Moving to Harvard
Hi friends. Just a brief note to say that I’ve been invited to come to the Kennedy School of Government to be a Research Fellow in the Science, Technology and…
Government Procurement Failure: BC Ministry of Education Case Study
Apologies for the lack of posts. I’ve been in business mode – both helping a number of organizations I’m proud of and working on my own business. For those interested…
Canada’s Opaque Transparency – An Open Data Failure
Yesterday, at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada’s (PDAC) Canada Minister of Natural Resource, Joe Oliver, announced with great fanfare a new initiative to compel mining companies to disclose…
Great Hacks from the Open Data in Vancouver
Last weekend I helped host an Open Data Day in Vancouver. With the generous support of Domain7, who gave us a place to host talks and hack, over 30 Vancouverites…
Open Data Day 2014 – Five Fun Events Around the World
With over 110 Events happening world wide it is impossible to talk about every Open Data Day event. But looking almost every event on the wiki I’ve been deeply moved…
Open Data Day in 110 cities Worldwide! Here’s 6 things to do
It is, as always, with a fair amount of wonder that I watch the open data day wiki grow each year. This year there are 100 self organized events taking…
Open Data Day in Vancouver – Registration is live
I’m happy to share that this February 22nd there will be an Open Data Day event in Vancouver. The details are as follows: The event will take place at Domain7…
The dangerous mystique of the “open data” business
I’m frequently asked by people about how they can start an “open data business.” Let me first say that I love that the question gets asked. I love that people…
Open Data Advice for Librarian Coders
For the purposes of this post we will ignore how remarkably badass sounding the word librarian becomes when “coder” is added to the end of it. I recently had a…
Open Contracting Workshop in Montreal on Friday
This was sent to me by Michael Roberts who has been doing great work in the Open Data and Open Standards space in Canada. Please check this out: What: Open…
Open Data Day Google+ Hang Out
With just about a month to go until Open Data Day things are going well. There are quite a few cities that have been added to the open data day…
Santa Claus, Big Data and Asymmetric Learning
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law of Prediction This Christmas I had a wonderfully simple experience of why asymmetric rates of learning…
Open Data for Development Challenge on Jan 27-28
This just came across my email via Michael Roberts who has been doing great work in this space. Open Data for Development Challenge January 27–28, 2014 — Montreal, Canada Do…
Open Data Day 2014 is Coming Feb 22 – Time to Join the Fun!
So, with much help from various community members (who reminded me that we need to get this rolling – looking at you Heather Leson), I pleased to say we are…
The End of Canada Post and the Coming War for Your Mailbox
As pretty much everyone in Canada learned yesterday (and no one outside the country cares to know), Canada Post, the country’s national postal service will phase out home mail delivery…
The Importance of Open Data Critiques – thoughts and context
Over at the Programmable City website Rob Kitchin has a thoughtful blog post on open data critiques. It is very much worth reading and wider discussion. Specifically, there are two…
On Journalism, Government and the cost of Digital Illiteracy
Earlier today the CBC published a piece by Alison Crawford about Canadian public servants editing wikipedia. It draws from a clever twitter bot — @gccaedits— that tracks edits to wikipedia from government…