Here’s an interesting new take on an Apps contest for developers. This one is sponsored by the Province of British Columbia and is being launched in tandem with a climate change data catalogue. The contest is open to residents of Canada, so if you care about climate change and want to show off your skills, check it out.

Check out this great deck on social innovation by my friend Mike Lewkowitz (@Igniter). It’s a great intro to the concepts of social innovation and social entrepreneurship. Mike and I share a very similar understanding of the state of the world, and the reasons we do the work we do.

Cool video. Be sure to watch through to the half-way mark.

Thanks to Chris Moore, CIO of the City of Edmonton, for inviting myself, David Eaves and Nick Charney to participate in Edmonton’s Open City Workshop held on Saturday, March 6th at the Art Gallery of Alberta. The discussions were rich, moving beyond open data and mobile apps to deeper questions of the relevance to democracy and community at the local level. This video captures the major content of the day, including our panel discussion on “Government as Platform”.

The open data and open government movements are now truly across Canada. With the major announcements Moore gave at the closing remarks, it is clear that the City of Edmonton is staking a claim for leadership in the emerging municipal open government ecosystem. This includes the ideas of a MuniForge for open source municipal software and a call for a Code for Canada project to mirror Code for America being supported by our friends at Sunlight Foundation in the United States. I’m really amazed at the growing momentum over the past year, and excited to be a part of it.

My ChangeCamp talk at Ignite Toronto 3 is online. My apologies if it’s a bit rough around the edges.
If you’re not familiar with the Ignite format, it is 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide, with the slides changing on a timer outside the speaker’s control. It’s hard to keep up to, but a fun and challenging format to distill ideas into intense 5 minute nuggets.
It’s a fun evening of community sharing ideas. I’ve also incorporated the format into full day unconferences as a way to prime the pump of ideas and get the day off to a high energy start.