Transparency, Media and Technology: Creating Wins for Citizens at the Local Level

A little while back Chad Skelton, a reporter at the Vancouver Sun, emailed us that he would like to use our maps for some of the news stories he was working on. We’d been working on creating an embeddable widget for our maps and thought this would be great chance to test one out. Specifically Chad had FOIA’d parking ticket data from the city of Vancouver and wanted to show where the ticket hot spots were.

We set up Chad with a test account on a virtual server, running GeoCommons, and let him go to town. What he created (without writing any code) was really quite impressive. You can see the embed below:

Maker.maker_host=’http://maker.demo.geocommons.com’;Maker.finder_host=’http://finder.demo.geocommons.com’;Maker.core_host=’http://core.demo.geocommons.com’;
Maker.load_map(“maker_map_6″, “6″);

The story ran on the front page of the website and it was great to see GeoCommons maps being distributed across the Web. Chad was also kind enough to contribute the FOIA’d parking data to the public GeoCommons site and you can download it here:

Parking Tickets for ‘Time Limit Exceeded’ , Vancouver, 2004-2008

Parking Tickets for ‘No Stopping’, Vancouver, 2004-2008

Expired Meter Tickets Issued, Vancouver, 2004-2008

Tickets issued for ‘Permit Parking’ , Vancouver, 2004-2008

The cool synergy in this is the potential of media working with government to make data more transparent through accessible and open technologies.