We have a green light! As I hinted back in May, I’m going to run my consulting course this fall (CSC490 for undergrads, CSC2125 for grad students), but with a twist: every project will involve doing something with the data that the City of Toronto is about to start making available for citizens to use. The course will run 3-5 pm on Mondays from September to December; we hope to know by late July or early August exactly what data sets we’ll have access to.
I’d therefore like to ask you all for help. First, if you’re a current or former student, please help me get the word out about this course. (I only have access to students’ university email accounts, which most don’t check over the summer, particularly if they’re doing a PEY internship.)
Second, if you had access to everything the city knows about itself, what questions would you ask and why? Suggestions so far have included finding out how the introduction of larger blue bins has changed the amount of recycling the city does, seeing who’s providing what kind of food at what cost to city schools, and as-close-to-real-time-as-possible updates on crime statistics by neighborhoods. What else could we build that would make your life better and help the city deal with all its myriad challenges?
- http://www.toronto.ca/fire/cadinfo/livecad.htm
Hi Greg, very interesting agenda for this course!
I do not know Toronto well enough (never been there) to come up with questions about the colour and size of your recycling bins but what I would do is put the data in context (what Tim Berners-Lee calls Linked Data): If you start an article on, say, recycling bins (e.g. in an educational wiki environment, so that others can join in with their experience), all sorts of questions will spring up: What is the best size, colour scheme, or collection schedule? What is the history of garbage collection in Toronto and elsewhere, and how does it relate to the programming concept of the same name? Or, a bit more abstract, is the traveling salesman problem an adequate description of the traveling garbageman problem?
Each of these topics will require some sort of data to be incorporated, and those from Toronto could be used to get things started, thereby propagating the message that Toronto is opening up and possibly inciting others to follow. Once they chip in (say, from Singapore or Umeå), it will also become possible to put the Toronto data in perspective — how do their respective ecological footprints, PISA scores and other characteristics compare?
Pingback: The Third Bit » Blog Archive » Fall Projects Redux
Pingback: Call to Action: Join the Toronto Open Data Community : Remarkk!