Hamilton’s Open Data movement continues

Open Hamilton (@OpenHamilton) organized an event last Thursday February 16th at City Hall on The 5 W’s of hamilton.ca. The group met to discuss the purpose of the city website, its design and framework, and the role of citizens in relation to the website.

The meeting featured a wide-ranging discussion on topics such as…

• The possibility of using an open platform such as Drupal as a basis for a new city website
• Usability issues, and the idea that the website navigation should be organized based around how citizens think about information
• Communication issues, such as referring to the nature of the data instead of the data, and making an argument for the cost saving nature of open data apps

Michael Canton (@valleytownmedia) wrote a blog post on the meeting, available here.

The group has organized The Bay Hackathon for March 2nd to March 4th to develop more apps utilizing open data, details thus far are available here. The group is also seeking developers and data experts for garbage collections apps, details available here.