What is an Open City?

How do you applies principles of opennes to an entire city? Ask Vancouver, which has posted the following motion on open data, open standards and open source:

BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City of Vancouver endorses the principles of:

* Open and Accessible Data - the City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns;

* Open Standards - the City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats of media;

* Open Source Software - the City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT in pursuit of open data the City of Vancouver will:

* Identify immediate opportunities to distribute more of its data;

* Index, publish and syndicate its data to the internet using prevailing open standards, interfaces and formats;

* Develop appropriate agreements to share its data with the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) and encourage the ICIS to in turn share its data with the public at large

* Develop a plan to digitize and freely distribute suitable archival data to the public;

* Ensure that data supplied to the City by third parties (developers, contractors, consultants) are unlicensed, in a prevailing open standard format, and not copyrighted except if otherwise prevented by legal considerations;

* License any software applications developed by the City of Vancouver such that they may be used by other municipalities, businesses, and the public without restriction.

If adopted, this will be pretty extraordinary - and a template for other cities who wish to re-invent themselves for the 21st century. Kudos to all involved: let's hope this goes through, and that others follow.

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