Open Data Exchange 2013

Slides

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 22:39:00 -0400

Pictures

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 22:29:00 -0400

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Program

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:00:00 -0500

Morning Session - Open Data Stories; Panel Discussions

9:00 AM Introduction and Welcome

9:20 AM Winning with Open Data - Panel 1

Michael Lenczner, CEO, Ajah

James McKinney, Technical Lead, Open North

Michael Roberts, Acclar & IATI

Pete Forde (moderator), Hacker Tourist

10:10 AM Les données ouvertes en action - Panel 2 (en français)

Sébastien Pierre, fondateur, FFunction & Montréal Ouvert

Guillaume Ducharme, gestionnaire dans le réseau de la santé et membre du collectif Démocratie Ouverte

Josée Plamondon, co-conceptrice, ContratsNet

Jean-Noé Landry (l’animateur de discussion), fondateur, Montréal Ouvert et Québec Ouvert

11:15 AM Future Avenues for Open Data - Panel 3

Corey Chivers, PhD candidate, Biology, McGill & Montreal R User Group

Tracey Lauriault, Open Data advocate & Postdoctoral Fellow, Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre, Carleton University

Petko Valtchev, Professor, Computer Science, UQAM

Ted Strauss (moderator), Co-founder, Trudat

12:15 PM Lunch will be provided

Afternoon Session - Digging into Data; Workshop and Lightning Talks

1:00 PM Data Dive Intro - Exploratory Data Analysis with Trudat

1:40 PM Data Dive

We will dive into interesting Open Data sets with experts on hand to guide us through the weeds, including data on

International Aid

Government contracts

Biodiversity

and more…

3:15 PM Lightning Talks

Diane Mercier, chargée de projet principale en données ouvertes, Ville de Montréal

Trina Chiasson, InfoActive

Christian Gendreau, Canadensys

Trevor Bekolay,Waterloo University

Steve Reitano, Open Data Survey

Anton Dubrau, cat-bus.com

Heri Rakotomalala, MTL NewTech

Julia Evans, MTL all-girl hack night

Roberto Rocha, Montreal Gazette

Edward Ocampo-Gooding, Open Data Ottawa

4:30 PM Closing - An Open Exchange of insights and learnings

What is Open Data?

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 15:52:00 -0500

Open Data refers to data that is made publicly available, is discoverable and interoperable, and has little restriction for reuse.

Governments, organizations and institutions publish data openly to build engagement among their constituents.

Journalists, researchers, and entrepreneurs use Open Data to understand important trends, share insight and create better web and mobile applications for the public.

Everyone benefits when confusion and lack of knowledge yields to better understanding and transparency.

Watch Tim Berners-Lee talk about the successes of Open Data (from 2010).

Time & Place

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:01:00 -0500

Saturday, 6 April 2013 from 8:30 AM to 5:00

Jeanne Sauvé House, McGill University
1514 Doctor Penfield Avenue
Montreal, QC H3G 1C6

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Tue, 11 Dec 2012 14:24:00 -0500

Speakers, Panelists & Organizers

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Conference organizers

Naomi Kincler

Naomi is the business founder of Trudat. As an Epidemiologist, her experience inspired her desire to create better tools for collaborative data analysis and discovery. Naomi has led significant public health initiatives for almost a decade; from Maternal mortality reduction in India to Tuberculosis control in Malawi to Obesity prevention in New York City. Hailing from Montreal, she has lived in Jerusalem, Barbados, Mumbai, Baltimore, and NYC. She is a graduate of McGill University (BA 2005) and Johns Hopkins University (MPH 2009). She is also a 2012/2013 Sauvé Scholar. She loves maps, cities, and the communities that make them come alive.

Ted Strauss

Ted Strauss is co-founder of Trudat. He is focused on designing and building web tools for collaborative data discovery. Ted began his career as a research assistant in psycholinguistics, at Columbia University and University of Connecticut, building computer models of language process and designing psychology experiments. He built data portals within his lab and later on contract for other labs. Later, Ted worked in the trenches as a developer for startups in New York City and Montreal. He brings a passion for research, software development and entrepreneurship to his latest endeavor Trudat, a web startup that makes data discovery more collaborative and social.

Panelists

Corey Chivers

Corey Chiver’s research focuses on the development of forecasting, risk, and impact assessment models of non-native species. By combining computational simulations with both biological and sociological data, his research aims to provide decision support to resource managers and policy makers. With an emphasis on uncertainty quantification through the construction of Bayesian models, Corey analyzes the implications of various human and biological factors on the spread of fresh water invasive species, including: 1) environmental and demographic stochasticity, 2) dispersal network structure, and 3) human behavioural feedbacks to policy decisions. Together, this research provides novel insights into both ecological processes and environmental policy.

Guillaume Ducharme

Détenteur d’une maîtrise en administration de la santé de l’Université de Montréal et d’un DESS en gestion et développement des organisations de l’Université Laval, Guillaume Ducharme a occupé de 2007 à 2011 le poste de conseiller-cadre à la qualité et à la gestion des risques à l’Hôpital Louis-H. Lafontaine. Il a également assumé les fonctions de vice-président du Réseau pour l’amélioration continue de la qualité (RACQ) de 2008 à 2011. Depuis 2011, il est le représentant du Québec à la Collaboration internationale des praticiens et intervenants de la qualité en santé (CIPIQS) et siège au conseil d’administration du Conseil québécois d’agrément depuis 2012.

Pete Forde

Pete Forde is an acclaimed technologist, serial entrepreneur and open source community leader. Pete was an early proponent of Ruby on Rails and Ajax web techniques. In 2004 he founded Unspace Interactive, the first Rails consultancy. He started BuzzData (now LookBookHQ) in 2011 and is now a technical strategy consultant. An avid traveler and occasional touring rock drummer, Pete is passionate about pinball and film photography.

Jean-Noé Landry

Jean-Noé est le co-fondateur des initiatives citoyennes MontréalOuvert et QuébecOuvert, il siège sur la Table de concertation sur les données ouvertes de la Ville de Montréal, à titre de représentant de la société civile, et est membre du Chantier sur la démocratie du maire de Montréal. Il est membre du conseil d’administration du Centre des organismes communautaires (COCo) et travaille à titre de responsable de la formation au bureau parlementaire du NPD à Montréal. Il a aussi travaillé avec la National Democratic Institute (NDI) et les Nations unies (ONU) dans les Balkans, en cijordanie, en Afghanistan, au Kenya, et en Russie.

Tracey Lauriault

Dr. Lauriault is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre. She is currently working on the SSHRC Partnership Development Project entitled Mapping the Legal and Policy Boundaries of Digital Cartography which is part of the GCRC’s research stream of Law, Society and Cybercartography. She was the Research Leader for the Pilot Atlas of the Risk of Homelessness funded by HRSDC in partnership with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. She also led a GCRC case study and a general study of Archival Policies of Science Data Archives/Repositories for International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES) 2. She has been called as an expert advisor on a number of Canadian public consultations on access to and the preservation of data and has made a number of submissions to House committees and other consultative processes on the topic of access to research data. Tracey Lauriault blogs at datalibre.ca

Michael Lenczner

Michael Lenczner is a Montreal-based entrepreneur who uses technology to positively impact society. As CEO of Ajah, he has developed an online fundraising research service to Canadian non-profits that capitalizes on dozens of different government datasets. Michael is a leader in the field of civic technology and engagement, founding Ile sans fil and co-founding Canada’s Civic Access discussion list and citizen initiatives Montreal Ouvert and Quebec Ouvert. He also serves on several boards and working groups, including Apathy is Boring and the City of Montreal’s Working Group on Municipal Democracy.

James McKinney

James McKinney is Open North’s executive director and technical lead. He was an early contributor to Montréal Ouvert – a citizen initiative to promote open access to civic information – starting with the popular apps Resto-Net and Patiner Montréal. He is an active voice in the Canadian open government and open data communities. James uses technology to promote online citizenship and participatory democracy. He is a frequent contributor to government and corporate transparency projects, like OpenCorporates, and open-source projects, like Drupal. He has presented on open government and technical subjects at Drupalcon, Hacks/Hackers and Pecha Kucha.

Sébastien Pierre

Sébastien Pierre est le fondateur de FFunction, un studio de visualisation de données qui aide les organisations à mieux comprendre et communiquer leur données. Sébastien est activement impliqué dans le monde des données ouvertes (open-data), en tant que co-fondateur de Montréal Ouvert et de Québec Ouvert, deux initiatives citoyennes qui promeuvent l’ouverture des données à la ville de Montréal et dans notre belle province.

Josée Plamondon

À titre de consultante en architecture de l’information, Josée effectue des mandats Web “front end” et “back end” d’organisation de contenu afin d’améliorer la performance d’applications, de systèmes d’information et de sites Internet. Passionnée par la dynamique de l’information dans le contexte social, local, mobile et multi écran, elle collabore également avec différents groupes de recherche, dont le Living Lab de Montréal, afin d’expliciter les processus informationnels. Diplômée en bibliothéconomie et sciences de l’information, elle détient également un MBA.

Michael Roberts

Michael Roberts is the co-founder of Acclar Open Inc., an organization dedicated to helping development organizations understand and produce open data. Michael helped to create the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard and is currently assisting the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in New York. Previous to Acclar, Michael was a former program officer and director of Bellanet c/o IDRC, a pioneering organization that helped foster collaboration within the development community. During this time he helped to initiate the creation of the International Development Markup Language (IDML) in 1998, an early open data initiative for sharing project/activity information that was adopted by the World Bank’s Global Development Gateway Aida Initiative — later to become Aiddata.org. He has worked with countless Donors, Foundations, and CSO’s to share data, and has a strong interest in the use of social media for strengthening online collaboration. Michael currently lives in Montreal.

Petko Valtchev

Petko Valtchev is Associate Professor at UQAM. He holds a Ph.D. in CS from Joseph Fourier University (Grenoble, France). Currently he heads the Knowledge acquisition, management and dissemination lab of UQAM as well as the Knowledge processing axis of the Montreal Cognitive Sciences Institute. His research focus is on methods for knowledge discovery in structured and semi-structured data, esp. linked data, as well as on applications of these to software, biomedical, telecom, legal, etc. datasets.

Lightning talks

Alex Aylett

Alex has been working on urban sustainability for close to a decade and is constantly struck by how quickly the field is evolving. He has worked in North America, Europe, and Africa. He is currently based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is doing research on what it takes to implement effective urban responses to climate change. Alex is also the lead organizer of écoHack MTL which will be Montréal’s first green city hackathon. Read more about Alex’s work at www.openalex.ca

Trevor Bekolay

Trevor Bekolay is a PhD student studying theoretical neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. He is part of the team that created Spaun, the world’s largest functional brain model. He is an advisor for figshare, a website that allows researchers to publish research outputs in an easily citable and searchable manner.

Trina Chiasson

Trina is the co-founder and CEO of Infoactive, an online platform for building interactive infographics with live data. Previously, she ran online engagement programs for Link Media and was as a nonprofit web consultant. Trina is frequently involved in open source projects that blend media and technology, ranging from civic hackfests to a Knight-Mozilla initiative for newsroom innovation. She enjoys the challenge of transforming numbers into art, and using data to tell impactful stories.

Anton Dubrau

Anton Dubrau (ant6n) is an independent developer in Montreal. He’s a recent graduate of McGill Unversity, where I got a masters degree in computer science, and a bachelor in computer science and math. He likes programming, math, maps and transit. His blog cat-bus.com demonstrates experiments with transit data, maps, and other projects.

Julia Evans

Julia Evans is a data scientist and programmer living in Montréal. In her free time, she plays with open data at home, and organizes events for programmers and aspiring programmers. She co-organizes Montréal All-Girl Hack Night, a series of developer meetups for women, and PyLadies Montréal, meetups and workshops for people to learn Python programming. She is most interested in uses of data that make people’s lives easier on a day-to-day basis.

Christian Gendreau

Christian est développeur principal pour le réseau Canadensys du Centre sur la biodiversité de l’Université de Montréal. Il travaille à faciliter l’accès aux données des collections biologiques canadiennes et aux données relatives à la biodiversité en général. Son but est de fournir les outils et données pour permettre de sensibiliser et éduquer les gens afin de les inciter à protéger la nature qui les entoure.

Edward Ocampo-Gooding

Edward Ocampo-Gooding loves connecting people and technology through technology and people. Developer talent scout and trainer at Shopify during the day, and Open Data Ottawa ruckus-raiser at night, he’s also a board member of Apt613, member of Awesome Ottawa, and co-organizer of Ottawa Ruby. Find him on Twitter @edwardog and on Github @edward

Sagar Pilania

Sagar Pilania is a strategy consultant with Deloitte Consulting in San Francisco. Sagar focuses on creating and executing business strategies for leading technology companies in the Bay Area. Prior to Deloitte, Sagar worked as a software engineer for Bloomberg LP where he developed software infrastructure for the world’s most widely used financial platform in the world. Sagar holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BS in Computer Science and Physics from SUNY, Stony Brook. Sagar is a history buff and has travelled to over 20 countries.

Heri Rakotomalala

Heri is an electrical engineer who has 9 years experience in designing, developing and launching disruptive startups, media ventures, community building initiatives, and inspiring events.

Steve Reitano

Steve Reitano is Chief of Information Management at SSHRC and NSERC responsible for managing the Councils’ information assets. With more than 18 years of experience implementing and managing information systems, he is now completing a Master’s Degree in Executive Management at Royal Roads University. Steve is earnest about information which is why he chose to conduct a research project on the benefits of Open Data. The project is a requirement for his MBA program.

Roberto Rocha

As digital projects coordinator for The Gazette, Roberto is the newsroom’s R&D department. He looks for ways to make stories more engaging using the power of the web and helps journalists think digitally about their beats. He loves dabbling in data journalism and thinks open data activists are modern-day heroes. He’s starting to dream in Python, which is awesome.