Technocon 2010

Editor's Notes

• #5: Larimer County, State of Colorodo
• #11: "The nightmare scenario … is that either Greece defaults, forcing investors to take a severe 'haircut' on their investments-loans, or the Greek authorities could honour the country's debts and simply shut down all nonessential operations,"
• #13: Seniors comprised 13% of the CDN population in 2004, but are expected to hit 24.5% by 2036At the Federal level, in the Canadian Public Service, 1 in 3 employees is over the age of 50 and approximately 33% of federal employees are eligible to retire by 2015. In British Columbia, 45% of managers and 35% of bargaining unit employees are eligible to retire by 2015. The same general pattern holds true for all governments across Canada as well as for Broader Public Sector employers.Another trend that is occurring in Canada is increased urbanization with more than eighty percent (80%) of Canada’s population residing in urban areas
• #15: Fundamental frustration with the citizen doing business with the governmentDifferent parts of government are completely separated from the other…There was story in the paper a few months back of a woman searching for her missing daughter. She was dealing with a federal government department and they kept telling that whatever info they had was subject to privacy legislation and could only be shared with her daughter…
• #16: YouTube just celebrated it’s 5th year anniversary (I believe yesterday)
• #23: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/681635http://www.canada.com/technology/Commissioner+rules+Facebook+serious+privacy+gaps/1796690/story.htmlJennifer Stoddarthttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/cabinet-expenses/http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/04/20/bc-facebook-ray-lam-facebook-photos-james.html240 M investment in Facebook
• #28: http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/cbc-article.aspx?cp-documentid=23955659
• #34: Online Agenda & Meeting Management Solution for Microsoft SharePoint & the Citizen Service Platform
• #37: The new and improved Eye On Earth combines the power of our latest technology (Windows Azure, Microsoft SQL Azure, Bing Maps, Silverlight) with the availability of a wealth of environmental data. Working in close partnership with the European Environment Agency (EEA)  we are delivering a new level of real-time information availability and interactive collaboration on the Environment within the EU. Eye On Earth will enable the EEA to offer both water quality through WaterWatch, and air quality through AirWatch, which for the first time is comprised of Ozone (03)  and particulate matter (PM10) and Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2). Not only is this information available from 32 countries, in 25 languages (as of December 2009), but Eye On Earth also gives the EU’s 500 million citizens the ability to offer personal feedback and observations on their own experiences of water and air quality. Europeans can start to contribute to Environmental monitoring and have an impact on a “Better Climate” – by helping raise awareness of problem areas and supporting policy makers and environmental experts in decision making and recommended actions.
• #41: The Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) is an initiative led by Microsoft Public Sector Developer Evangelism team. OGDI uses the Azure Services Platform to make it easier to publish and use a wide variety of public data from government agencies. OGDI is also a free, open source ‘starter kit’ (coming soon) with code that can be used to publish data on the Internet in a Web-friendly format with easy-to-use, open API's. OGDI-based web API’s can be accessed from a variety of client technologies such as Silverlight, Flash, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, mapping web sites, etc.Whether you are a business wishing to use government data, a government developer, or a ‘citizen developer’, these open API's will enable you to build innovative applications, visualizations and mash-ups that empower people through access to government information. This site is built using the OGDI starter kit software assets and provides interactive access to some publicly-available data sets along with sample code and resources for writing applications using the OGDI API's.For DevelopersThe Azure Services PlatformThe Open Government Data Initiative is based on Microsoft's Azure Services Platform, a powerful and innovative new cloud-computing platform that helps developers quickly and easily create, deploy, manage, an drun Web applications and services at Internet scale. To learn more please visit the Azure Services Platform home page. Querying OGDIOGDI exposes data through REST Web services. The basic format of an OGDI service call is http://ogdi.cloudapp.net/v1/container/dataset?query, where:container is the name of the container (for example, "dc" for the District of Columbia's data sets).dataset is the name of the data set (for example, "CrimeIncidents" for the Crime Incidents data set in the DC container).query is your set of query parameters, expressed using a subset of the ADO.NET Data Services query syntax.Note that OGDI currently only suppports the $filter and $top query options in the ADO.NET Data Services query syntax. Example queries using the Crime Incidents data set are available on the Data Browser page of our Interactive SDK.Also note that if a property has a null value for a particular entity in the data set, it will be omitted entirely from the result set returned by OGDI. For example, in the Crime Incidents data set, the "method" property is only returned for records that have a "method" value in the underlying data set. Your application design should take this into account and handle potentially missing properties.Data FormatsBy default, OGDI returns data in the Atom Publishing Protocol format. This format can be easily consumed by a variety of platforms, including Microsoft .NET, Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python. Refer to the code samples on the Data Browser page for examples.OGDI can also return data in the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format, which can be conveniently consumed using JavaScript and other technologies. To return data in JSON format, simply append the format=json parameter to your query. For example, to retrieve crime incidents in Washington, DC that occured during the police department's evening shift in JSON format:http://ogdi.cloudapp.net/v1/dc/CrimeIncidents?$filter=shift eq 'EVN'&format=jsonGeospatial DataMany of the data sets in OGDI also include geospatial data, which is returned in the Keyhole Markup Language (KML) format. This format is compatible with popular desktop and Web-based mapping technologies including Microsoft Virtual Earth, Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Google Earth. To return geospatial data in KML format, append the format=kml parameter to your query. For example, to retrieve geospatial points in KML format for crime incidents in DC that occurred during the police department's evening shift:http://ogdi.cloudapp.net/v1/dc/CrimeIncidents?$filter=shift eq 'EVN'&format=kmlNote that if the data set that you are using does not include any geospatial data, a KML query to OGDI will return an empty result set.JSONPTo mitigate security vulnerabilities associated with cross-site scripting attacks, Web browsers generally prevent client-side JavaScript applications originating in one network domain (for example, yourdomain.com) from making HTTP requests to other network domains (for example, the ogdi.cloudapp.net network domain that hosts the OGDI data services). This can prevent JavaScript applications hosted in another domain from making straight-forward calls to the OGDI data services, but there a variety of techniques that can be used, such as this widely-used IFRAMES-based technique described by Michael Mahemoff.OGDI's data services also provide direct support for the JSONP technique. Using this technique, OGDI's data services will call a callback function that you specify, passing in the results of your query in JSON format as an input format. To use this technique, issue a query with the following additional parameters: format=json&callback=yourCallback, where yourCallback is the name of a JavaScript callback function defined on the Web page issuing the request.Refer to the JavaScript sample on the Data Browser page for an example of using JSONP with OGDI. In that sample, the AdditionalDataLoaded() function is the JSONP callback function.ADO.NET Data Services Client LibraryDevelopers using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Service Pack 1 (or later) can use ADO.NET Data Services to access data from OGDI through easy-to-use .NET classes. OGDI provides a complete sample library for using OGDI with ADO.NET Data Services.this library now.This library includes a pre-built set of data service contexts built using T4 template code generation. Refer to the README file in the sample package for instructions on re-building the data service contexts to reflect the most current data sets available through OGDI. PagingOGDI and the underlying Windows Azure Table Storage service support paging through large sets of query results. The documentation for Query Timeout and Pagination in the Windows Azure Table Storage service provides a complete description of how OGDI and the underlying Azure platform support paging. You can also refer to the "C#/ASP.NET Paging" sample on the Data Browser page, which demonstrates how to perform paged queries using the ADO.NET Data Services client library.
• #50: City provided a citizen with census data, he did the conversion from xls to csv and republished it back to the city.
• #52: Allows residents to monitor requests for services such as a list of reports of potholes, abandoned vehicles and code violationsThe potential of cloud services has also led city officials to consider revenue generating ideas such as creating custom dataaggregation and mashup services that could be sold to businesses.
• #70: Individuals, whether in the context of citizens or consumers, are online 24x7x365 and they want to engage with organizations from whatever device they may be using at that moment, be it a laptop, tablet, phone, etc. For organizations, there is an opportunity to engage with these individuals and gain valuable insights, but this often must be done within the constraints of existing budgets. TownHall provides a cloud-hosted solution in a low-cost, low-friction fashion. TownHall, with its multitude of existing and planned clients, allows organizations to engage individuals on whatever device they may be using at a given moment.TownHall also delivers valuable insight. Recognizing the value of collecting data at the level of the individual, TownHall is delivered with a reputation system that incents users to create profiles. Every engagement an individual has with the site results in the collection of data that is associated with a profile and which can be used for analytics. To drive continued engagement within the community, TownHall’s reputation system awards points and badges for every contribution to the community (asking questions, answering questions, or voting). In our first beta customer, NASA, we’ve seen this reputation system prove itself to be very effective, with some individuals earning just under 2 million points in just under 6 months.
• #71: Fundamental frustration with the citizen doing business with the governmentDifferent parts of government are completely separated from the other