It’s been a busy few weeks, here in Toronto.
Hot Docs and the the CFC’s own WSFF have both come and gone, bringing cosmopolitan crowds of storytellers to the city in its finest season. Subtle Technologies and Random Hacks of Kindness also wrapped up their mashings of art and science this past weekend. NXNE, just around the corner, promises an influx of cultural ideas and icons. IdeaCity murmurs sweet nothings to Toronto’s digerati of a Walt Mossberg / Margaret Atwood rap battle…
With all of these intellectual shindigs afoot; I’ve found myself thinking a great deal about the interactions between our city, the various confluences of ideas that constitute its pulse, and the technologies powerfully shaping our existence and discourse alike. As popular and academic writers delve deeper into the systems associated with innovation, collaboration, and discovery; more ideas surface that refer to our urban brains as networked, and our social networks as organisms.
Conveniently, this past Saturday I had a front-row seat at the always-fun Subtle Technologies festival for a panel discussion on the topic. CBC’s Dan Misener stirred a discussion between OCADU’s Sara Diamond, Mozilla’s Mark Surman, and BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow; on the topic of how we might build a city that “thinks like the web.”
Back in 2006, I shot this photo of Cory and learned not to interview people in construction sites to thematically evoke open-source.
Early on, it became apparent that the conversation was going to swing “open”, widely. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise – Doctorow is a writer and curator who’s made a living (and sometime-cult vassalage) upon the spines of free books, Surman runs Mozilla as much like a research lab on open-ness as a software company, and Diamond is a multidisciplinary researcher and artist whose day-job involves elegantly catapulting Canada’s oldest and largest art school into the 21st century.
But while open source philosophy, design, and practice present a myriad of interesting processes and metaphors by which we can learn from the web in the intelligent development of our cities, some of the most interesting social disruptions of the web have been in terms of articulating the monetary value of information. Was a panel featuring three open-source advocates really the most objective approach to the topic? The argument for open source in terms of municipal (or provincial, or federal) governmental data is that information acquired through the use of taxpayer dollars is a public good. The benefits you can attain by bringing $100,000 datasets to everybody who wants them, for free, are surely significant. The UK organization mySociety has done an extensive job of rendering transparent the data and processes central to government’s operations, for example.
But as I often do at exciting multi-person panels and presentations, I found myself playing devil’s advocate.
I think Mark Surman is a great speaker, but unfortunately I have to do this for 20 minutes beforehand so I don't accidentally blurt anything.
Open source governmental data is one example of the web influencing the creation and inhabitation of cities… but what other possibilities exist? At the core of the growth of the web has been a diversity of innovative new approaches to the commercialization of information. A decade ago, few seemed to have any idea how to successfully sell and market digital music, and now the largest retailers of most media are largely digital. What lessons have we learned from micro-transaction business models for digital content that we could apply to governmental data, or statistics? What would be the downsides… and what might be the benefits?
The artistic and entrepreneurial opportunities of open data at a municipal level dominated the first half of the panel, and by the time we reached the end, I was having trouble justifying a question that trounced a few positions and case studies from the previous hour. There’s no doubt that the benefits of open-sourcing governmental data are significant, and that those benefits seem to blossom outwards as long as they themselves remain open(ish). Open data makes it easy for people to sell streetcar arrival apps (coming soon to a TTC bus near you), adopt puppies (apparently municipal datasets around humane society operations are some of the most popular in the Western world), and engage in high-tech GIS adventuring.
A poster dedicated to positive open-source citizenry and governance. Ooh-rah!
But there are benefits to a non-open approach to information (there’s got to be a better opposite for ‘open’ than closed… or locked… or bricked… argh). A few decades ago, Statistics Canada implemented a controversial new strategy – instead of classifying collected and collated information as a public good with zero strings attached, StatsCan would tie a few (strings) on and charge for some uses of that data as a significant cost recovery tactic. An interesting move, and one rather at-odds with the open source model that has emerged in the years since. Unfortunately, even at its peak the program wasn’t terribly successful – censuses are expensive – and little more than 4% of StatsCan revenue in the 1990′s came from the sales of products and services.
This image depicts the divergent ocular biology evolved by politicians to observe the world.
Tony Clement is back in the headlines this week, following up his Assault on the Longform (this will make a great science-fiction adventure movie if we can pull the wool over our kids’ eyes…) and Battle for Bandwidth with a strategy for increased user fees to offset a tax rate plateau. What might be the outcomes of a new micro-transactional approach to municipal data in a political and social climate of increased user fees? Free beer is all well and good, but it seems to me that charging for data that remains free-like-speech is also quite appealing.
What about a City App Store, where the keepers of the information can balance their (low overhead) books by selling maps of the plumbing beneath Yonge Street, or interface not only with the data but with all manner of Creative Commons-licensed visualizations thereof… I’d certainly be on board with paying for some of the city’s currently Open Data if it were packaged in a compelling experience design by some of Toronto’s best and brightest. San Francisco’s already been doing this for a few years with great uptake… if not (yet) revenues.
Open Data in this city is young, and perhaps even vulnerable to attack… Wouldn’t it make sense to create a profitable and self-sustaining office of Open Data, rather than one near-exclusively nurtured on funds subject to classification as “gravy” at a moment’s notice? Taking inspiration from GeoNames (the online database of over 7,500,000 geographical POI’s) perhaps the City could give unformatted and open-certified data away for free, while selling access to curated and contextualized data. The model of open data curation and sale is also being tweaked by SimpleGeo, a company that gives away the first 10,000 data interactions per day through a free API, but charges based on quantity above and beyond that. Do cities have the right to curate “vanilla” open data into sellable products and services? Should they?
If we’re going to design new ways for our cities and communities to work, we might as well strengthen and utilize our understanding of the technological systems that we’ve already set in motion… they may prove valuable as tools. It’s hard to imagine the wave of growth in open-source technology and uptake coming to a standstill… but it’s still worth considering how other contradictory innovations originating on the Internet and its surrounding cobwebs might well apply to the design of our cities. *
Trevor Haldenby is an interactive producer and photographer living in Toronto. He has attended Wilfrid Laurier University, Rhode Island School of Design, CFC Media Lab, and is presently completing a Master’s of Design in Strategic Foresight & Innovation at OCAD University.
* There’s no better place to think about this topic than at a *free* panel discussion… thanks, Subtle Technologies!
Header image from Tim Morris’ Flickr stream