Luke Closs discussed how open data can enable sustainable innovation. He provided five lessons: (1) cities miss out on small, cheap innovations that citizens create; (2) small hacks can lead to big products and services, as demonstrated by the evolution of his VanTrash app into the Recollect platform; (3) open data makes municipalities low-hanging fruit for companies and innovators; (4) small communities greatly benefit from releasing open data to lower barriers for outsiders; and (5) lack of standards limits investment in innovations as solutions cannot easily scale or spread between locations. He argued that open data allows new services at lower costs, improving lives and enabling competition.

1. Sustainable Innovation
with Open Data
Luke Closs
Founder, Recollect.net

2. This guy, so what?
• Builder of software products & services
• Have worked with Silicon Valley
startups and large enterprises
• Many roles: developer, coach,
consultant, architect, product designer
• Many years focused on The Web

3. Open Data, so what?
• Interested in open data since
Vancouver’s Open3 motion in 2009
• Worked on many open data projects:
• VanTrash, Budget visualization, gut, Parliament scrapers,
Corporate registry tools, Election finance tools, Recollect, Open
Data catalogues, Marine AIS Traffic, CKAN, datadotgc.ca,
sidewalk chalk dataviz, hackathons, Open Data Day, …
• Started an open data business!

4. This talk, so what?
(Let’s decompress my talk title, it’s not all
buzzwords, I promise!)

5. Sustainable Innovation
with Open Data

6. Sustainable Innovation
with Open Data

7. Sustainable Innovation
with Open Data

8. Ideas &
Projects Products Services Infrastructure
Hacks

9. Ideas &
Projects Products Services Infrastructure
Hacks

10. Ideas &
Projects Products Services Infrastructure
Hacks
Many of these ideas will “fail”.
That’s okay.

11. Ideas &
Projects Products Services Infrastructure
Hacks
The good innovations typically
move to the right.

12. Ideas &
Projects Products Services Infrastructure
Hacks
Citizens Established Vendors

13. Sustainable Innovation
with Open Data

14. Sustainable Innovation?
• At the community level
• Hackathons, new datasets, …
• At the product level
• How to move innovations into
infrastructure?

15. Five Lessons

16. Lesson #1
Cities are missing out

17. Ideas &
Projects Products Services Infrastructure
Hacks

18. Small Innovations
• Lots of small / cheap / free innovations
are being created.
• Innovations are lost because cities
cannot endorse them.
• They are too cheap for cities!

20. Nobody will use this
• It’s not official, it’s not even linked to.
• IT won’t take it on without a SLA.
• There is no business to provide a SLA.
• If there was, the cost would be too low.
• This project will never improve.

21. Why is that bad?
• The city can’t do cheap things
• The city can’t collaborate with citizens
• This limits opportunity for new vendors
to provide greatly cheaper services.

22. Speaking of great
new services …

23. Lesson #2
Small hacks can lead
to big things!

24. ~3 years ago: a blog post

25. A few months later …

26. VanTrash
• Exclusively focused on citizens
• Several citizen focused innovations
• Reminders
• Calendar feeds
• Fast and easy!

27. Time passes …
• Tremendously positive feedback from
citizens.
• “The Marriage Saver”
• Week after week our numbers grow
with only word of mouth.
• 311 uses us?

28. November 2010
• “Lets bring this to more people”
• More people within Vancouver
• More people in other cities
• Start re-architecting, re-branding, re-
building, Re-collecting.

29. Early 2011
• We launch Recollect.net
• Built to help citizens everywhere
• Built for Municipalities
• Reduce costs - 311, website, IT
• Improve communications

31. Embed Recollect
• Embed on city website
• Optimized for mobile
phones (iPhone,
Android, Blackberry, …)
• Optimized for modern
browsers
• Secure, monitored,
scalable.

32. Messaging Dashboard

33. Metrics

34. Ad-hoc geo messaging
• Targeted notifications to particular
geographies
• “Trucks are snowed in for your zone”
• “Burst water main”

35. And we’re cheap!
Ask about our
URISA BC
20% Discount!

36. Lesson #3
Open Data makes
you low hanging fruit

37. Low Barrier
• For companies like Recollect
• For citizens looking to port apps from
other places

38. Examples:
• Edmonton - super easy
• KML, CSV open data, < 1hr
• Kamloops - pretty easy
• SHP open data, < 2hr
• Abbotsford - Impossible!
• No open data, not scrape-able

39. Lesson #4
Small communities
greatly benefit from
Open Data

40. Small Municipalities:
• Don’t have a lot of IT resources
• Don’t have big IT budgets
• Don’t have a big community of
developers and high tech companies

41. So …
• Lower the barrier for outsiders to
innovate with your data!
• Copy what the bigger cities do
• Release similar datasets
• Use standards as much as possible!

42. Lesson #5
Lack of standards
limits investment

43. • People will use non-standardized data
• … but it’s really hard to scale out
• … and it means we need to re-invent
the wheel for each municipality

44. • Certain problems won’t be tackled
• Innovations won’t spread

45. Standards can be simple!
• Don’t make them more complex than
they need to be.
• Standards are just agreements
• Use web friendly standards
• Avoid proprietary standards!
• Avoid anything that requires
proprietary tools to work with

46. In closing
• Open data allows new innovations:
• which provide new services
• which make life better
• which makes vendors compete on
service and price
• which can radically lower IT costs

47. Thank you
• I’d love to hear why I’m right or wrong.
• I’d love to bring Recollect to your city.
• 20% off first year of service for
conference attendees!
• luke@recollect.net or @lukec