Posts By David Eaves

What Governments can Learn about Citizen Engagement from Air Canada

Yes. You read that title right. Yes, airlines are not known for their customer responsiveness. Ask anyone whose been trapped on a plane on the tarmac for 14 hours. You know when Congress has to pass a customer bill of rights for your industry you’ve really dropped the ball. Air Canada, however, increasingly seems toRead… Read more »

Visualizing Firefox Plugins Memory Consumption

A few months ago the Mozilla Labs and the Metrics Team, together with the growing Mozilla Research initiative, launched an Open Data Visualization Competition. Using data collected from Test Pilot users (people who agreed to share anonymous usage data with Mozilla and test pilot new features) Mozilla asked its community to think of creative visualRead… Read more »

Cablegate vs Wikileaks and the new porn

I’ve been trying trying to play around with a graphic to show the difference between the wikileaks driven cablegate and the pentagon papers (ah to live in an era before the suffix gate appeared everywhere). Here is the best I’ve got so far – would love to hear others suggestions or their own versions. ThereRead… Read more »

From Public Servant to Public Insurgent

Cross posted from eaves.ca. Are you a public insurgent? Today, a generation of young people are arriving into the public service familiar with all sorts of tools – especially online and social media driven tools – that they have become accustomed to using. Tools like wikis, survey monkeys, doodle, instant messaging or websites like wikipedia,Read… Read more »

The Challenge of Open Data and Metrics

One promise of open data is its ability to inform citizens and consumers about the quality of local services. At the Gov 2.0 Summit yesterday the US Department of Health and Human Resources announced it was releasing data on hospitals, nursing homes and clinics in the hopes that developers will create applications that show citizensRead… Read more »

Creating effective open government portals

Originally posted at eaves.ca————————– In the past few years a number of governments have launched open data portals. These sites, like www.data.gov or data.vancouver.ca share data – in machine readable formats (e.g. that you can play with on your computer) that government agencies collect. Increasingly, people approach me and ask: what makes for a goodRead… Read more »

On Governments and Intellectual Property (or why we move slowly)

Originally posted at eaves.ca David H. sent me this short and fantastic article from Wired magazine last week. The article discusses the travails of Mathew Burton, a former analyst and software programmer at the Department of Defense who spent years trying to get the software he wrote into the hands of those who desperately neededRead… Read more »

Which App for Climate Action do you like most?

Originally posted at eaves.ca Yesterday, at 5pm PST the Apps for Climate Action team at the Province of British Columbia released the list of 17 applications created using data from the Apps for Climate Action data catalog. At the moment anyone can register and vote for the application that they think is the best. I’dRead… Read more »

On Policy Alpha geeks, network thinking and foreign policy

In the past few weeks the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) and the Canadian International Council (CIC) both launched new visions for Canada’s foreign policy. Reading each, I’m struck by how much overlap both documents have with Middle to Model Power, the Canada25 report written 5 years ago by over 500 young Canadians from acrossRead… Read more »