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Todd Sieling
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1 month ago
in Vancouver enters the age of the open city on eaves.ca
Data migration from legacy presents issues as a natural part of IT evolution, whether moving to more open formats or not, but the point is well taken. One thing that municipalities can look towards in thinking about this is the cost savings associated with going open. A few ways costs are reduced:
* licensing costs are typically much lower
* open data allows others to build the applications that municipalities can't take on, which in turn leads to more uses and users of that data. When there's proof of a decent portion of citizens taking advantage of open data, it's easier to get resources for doing more. It just takes the vision to make those first steps.
It *could* be an expensive undertaking, and it *could* not be. Translink opened up (some?) of its data and Google consumes it to provide transit info through its maps application. The costs to Translink were likely more to do with their own internal processes and *cough* red tape, and not in making the data usable.
* licensing costs are typically much lower
* open data allows others to build the applications that municipalities can't take on, which in turn leads to more uses and users of that data. When there's proof of a decent portion of citizens taking advantage of open data, it's easier to get resources for doing more. It just takes the vision to make those first steps.
It *could* be an expensive undertaking, and it *could* not be. Translink opened up (some?) of its data and Google consumes it to provide transit info through its maps application. The costs to Translink were likely more to do with their own internal processes and *cough* red tape, and not in making the data usable.
1 reply
1 month ago
in Vancouver enters the age of the open city on eaves.ca
This is fantastic news, David. With Translink also opening up a little bit at a time, we're seeing some really great possibilities emerge here. Thanks for your work on the initiative and for breaking the news here.
1 reply
david_a_eaves
Todd - agreed. There is also some promising movement at the provincial level with the work David Hume is doing in opening up their data. Our goal - how do we become the most open mega-region (as Richard Florida would call it) in the world.
Translink (the organization that runs transit services in the Greater Vancouver Area) is an obvious piece of the puzzle and I think they are starting to get it - they've come a long way, very promising.
Translink (the organization that runs transit services in the Greater Vancouver Area) is an obvious piece of the puzzle and I think they are starting to get it - they've come a long way, very promising.
1 year ago
in Twitter-storm: Blaine leaves, blame flies on Mathew's comments
I thought the TechCrunch post was scapegoating. To say that Twitter has failed to scale without posting any kind of uptime numbers is bad enough, but the overall perception of Twitter's reliability seems skewed.
Look at Twitter's performance at SxSW 07, where it really got noticed and started to take off. Any service would have its hands full keeping up with the sudden attention and growth, but Twitter fell down a lot at that event. Forward to '08, where there are nearly double the number of attendees, they all have iPhones now, and Twitter is very much on their minds and fingertips from the start. During that frenzy of use, I heard about only momentary failures.
Throughout that year, Twitter opened itself up through an API, adding scores of other web applications and their users to the demand, and yes uptime has gotten better. Somehow this all adds up to an inability to scale?
Since moving to a different host up to last weekend, a week or so after Blaine left, the service had been quite reliable, and I think that makes the weekend outage that much more painful. It hurt more because it hadn't hurt in a long while. I can understand people freaking out a bit, but to write such a scathing smear of Blaine's role there looks terrible on TechCrunch.
As for asking friends to defend him, I think the grownups in the room learned to walk by that kind of baiting in highschool.
Look at Twitter's performance at SxSW 07, where it really got noticed and started to take off. Any service would have its hands full keeping up with the sudden attention and growth, but Twitter fell down a lot at that event. Forward to '08, where there are nearly double the number of attendees, they all have iPhones now, and Twitter is very much on their minds and fingertips from the start. During that frenzy of use, I heard about only momentary failures.
Throughout that year, Twitter opened itself up through an API, adding scores of other web applications and their users to the demand, and yes uptime has gotten better. Somehow this all adds up to an inability to scale?
Since moving to a different host up to last weekend, a week or so after Blaine left, the service had been quite reliable, and I think that makes the weekend outage that much more painful. It hurt more because it hadn't hurt in a long while. I can understand people freaking out a bit, but to write such a scathing smear of Blaine's role there looks terrible on TechCrunch.
As for asking friends to defend him, I think the grownups in the room learned to walk by that kind of baiting in highschool.
1 reply
mathewi
Thos are fair points I think, Todd -- it's true that Twitter made it
through SxSW without even a hiccup, and maybe that got people thinking
the worst of the stability problems were gone. And even the issues
that have occurred since then haven't been all that big a deal really,
although they have been irritating. And there's no question they have
had to grow at a huge rate, given the number of other apps that are
being built on their API.
through SxSW without even a hiccup, and maybe that got people thinking
the worst of the stability problems were gone. And even the issues
that have occurred since then haven't been all that big a deal really,
although they have been irritating. And there's no question they have
had to grow at a huge rate, given the number of other apps that are
being built on their API.
Sure costs can be lower once you go through the process of analyzing data, standardizing and consolidating it. I'm with you there. And depending on the types of data your talking about you have to worry about privacy and security issues. But once you get it there I completely agree that it's the way to go. I just wouldn't want anyone to understate the potential complexities involved in making the transition. For example, I took a quick look at Freebase (Jim Pick mentions it below). If you're loading more than 1000 records into Freebase there's a data analysis/mapping... that has to go on with their team to get it into Freebase which makes sense.
The point I was trying to make is that it's going to be a lot more complex than a simple declaration. There has to be real $$$ behind the initiative. Given how cash poor most municipalities are I wonder how quickly this will be able to be undertaken.