A cross-post from my friend Tracey over at datalibre.ca

Access to public data is one of the most popular VOTE topics in the submissions on the Digital Economy Consultation site. Here are the VOTING submissions that ask for open data, open access and open government.

1. Open Access to Canada’s Public Sector Information and Data is looking for some votes.
2. Improved access to publicly-funded data associated with research data Require open access to results of research funded by the Canadian taxpayer
3. Open Access to Canadian research
4. National Archives Content Online
5. Créer une licence « Creative Commons » du Canada
6. Protect and enhance digital freedoms for education

There has also been some writing about the consultation:

Michael Geist: Opening Up Canada’s Digital Economy Strategy

David Eaves: Canada’s Digital Economy Strategy: Two quick actions you can take

Take a few minutes to login and vote! If you can, provide a comment about how access to data has improved or will improve your work.

You can do great stuff with prosaic municipal data, and some cities, from Nanaimo to Toronto, are passing open data resolutions and starting to share information. Things are looking up. Communities are forming. But, unlike other countries, Canada doesn’t yet have a federal open data plan or culture. We can do better.

Also check out howdtheyvote.ca, a site that provides information on how your member of parliament has been voting, complete with “complete with voting history, dissension, attendance and speaking habits.”

There is an article in the Globe & Mail titled “If you won’t tell us about our MPs, we’ll do it for you” that summarizes some of these recent developments and provides the context for greater transparency and accountability from all levels of government.

Mapping For Justice

The Atlas of Canada, produced by Natural Resources Canada in partnership with Statistics Canada, presents a series of maps and accompanying analysis of national and regional data results from the 2006 Census. The first releases focus on Canadian population, age, marital status, immigration, visible minorities and mode of transportation. The maps are available on the Atlas of Canada website (http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/featureditems/index.html).

Future releases will cover topics such as educational attainment, the labour force, languages, housing and income.

Visible Minority Population 2006

Using Maps to Promote Health Equity

From the article:

“Google Maps is dynamic. Making customized maps through the service isn’t very difficult. But there are a variety of third-party tools on the Web that help you create fully customized Google Maps mashups. From Flickr geotag integration to wedding event mapping to just doodling, you can do it all.”

The Handbook on Geospatial Infrastructure in Support of Census Activities takes into account the recent technological developments in the geographic information area, which have been reflected in the recently adopted United Nations Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses, Revision 2, and puts into the hands of census planners and related personnel a technical guide on the contemporary methods, tools, and best practices that would support their census mapping operations more efficiently. An official copy of the Handbook is now available on-line and set to be published in print form soon.

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/sources/census/2010_PHC/Publications/Series_F103_more.htm

The Los Angeles Police Department is battling a virtual crime wave in downtown L.A. caused by an Internet map coding error.

If the department’s online crime map is to be believed, one might thing that a downtown location just a block from the LAPD’s new headquarters is the most crime-ridden place in the city. In the past six months, that location experienced 1,380 crimes–4 percent of all crimes mapped–or roughly eight a day.

The crimes were real, but a coding error with the system’s geocoding–the process of converting addresses into map points–caused the crimes to be represented at a default location, according to a report Sunday in the Los Angeles Times. The mistake caused many crimes to be mapped miles away from their actual locations, causing false trends to be reported while masking real ones, according to the report.

You can read the full story here

Came across this post on the very excellent Strange Maps blog. Since I find myself residing  in the pits of the front legs, I thought this would be an appropriate way to start off 2009. At least I don’t live in Owen Sound. To quote:

Elephants are native to Africa and India and… Canada? Well, not really, but if you tilt your average north-oriented map of Ontario 90 degrees to the right, the province’s southern peninsula will show a more than passing resemblance to an elephant, tooting its trunk.

The full article can be found here.