Category Archives: oa.cities

San Francisco Board of Supervisors Unanimously Passes Resolution in Support of Digital Rights For Libraries | Internet Archive Blogs

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“In a stunning show of support for libraries, late yesterday afternoon the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to support a resolution backing the Internet Archive and the digital rights of all libraries.

Supervisor Connie Chan, whose district includes the Internet Archive, authored the legislation and brought the resolution before the Board. “At a time when we are seeing an increase in censorship and book bans across the country, we must move to preserve free access to information,” said Supervisor Chan. “I am proud to stand with the Internet Archive, our Richmond District neighbor, and digital libraries throughout the United States.” …”

David Eaves: ‘The open data battle now is to demonstrate value, and that’s hard to do’ – Open Knowledge Foundation blog

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“Starting January 2023, we are meeting 100+ people to discuss the future of open knowledge, shaped by a diverse set of visions from artists, activists, academics, archivists, thinkers, policymakers, data scientists, educators and community leaders from all over the world. 

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s team wants to identify and debate issues sensitive to our movement and use this effort to constantly shape our actions and business strategies to deliver in the best possible way what the community expects from us and from our Network, a pioneering organization that has been defining the standards of the open movement for two decades.

Another objective is to include the perspectives of people from diverse backgrounds, especially those from marginalised communities, from dissident identities, and whose geographic location is outside the world’s major financial powers.

How openness can speed up and strengthen the fights against the complex challenges of our times? This is the key question behind conversations like the one you can read below….”

Subscribe to Open | Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy

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“The Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy (JCCPE) is available through a Subscribe to Open model in an effort to achieve the goals of broad dissemination of content valued by scholars and researchers….

Subscribe to Open (S2O) is a sustainable and equitable business model that offers a wide range of benefits to researchers, libraries, and the community at large. Institutional subscribers access the content through subscription, as with a regular subscription model. What is unique to the model is that once an annual subscription threshold is met, the volume year becomes available as open access. This makes the content available to all without any cost to authors….”

Panel discussion: Building geospatial data capacity at the municipal level Tickets, Wed, 18 May 2022 at 12:00 PM | Eventbrite

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“Municipalities are the level of government closest to residents. Geospatial data is critical in planning the infrastructure and delivering the services that residents interact with daily. More broadly, sharing geospatial capacity can enable municipalities to collectively address challenges extending beyond any community’s borders.

Yet, the ability to fully leverage geospatial data varies significantly between communities. Collaboration – that is, sharing data assets, infrastructure, and knowledge – can help municipalities to gain capacity they would not otherwise be able to access in order to improve internal data practices; share collective intelligence and make mutual decisions on issues of regional importance; unlock geospatial information for community-based economic, social, and environmental initiatives, and; present a united ask for resources from higher levels of government.

Join Open North for a virtual panel discussion where we will address questions raised in our recent report such as:

What issues can most benefit from greater collaboration and sharing of geospatial resources between municipalities?
What are the barriers to forming and sustaining collaborations?
What can we learn from successful existing collaborations?
How can provincial governments, civil society, and the private sector better support collaborations? …”

Code The City 24 “Open In Practice” Nov 27-28, 2021

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The theory of being open is great but what does it mean in practice to work openly, to make data, images, information and code open for others to re-use? And how could that benefit your organisation – or you as an individual?

At this hack event we will explore by practicing how we be more open and support some of the key concepts that Code The City was set up to champion.

We’ll have a number of challenges (which we will list further down this page and expand on as we get nearer the event). These will trigger prototype projects which we will work on in small teams throughout the weekend. These projects will explore

Open Data – creation, curation, finding, improving; data scraping; using the data to build new products and services.
Open Licensing – taking and sharing images with open licences
Open Working – sharing our code on Github for re-use under permissive licences.

Research to Results: An Analysis of Citizen-Generated Open Data | Data-Smart City Solutions

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“Once Meijer and Potjer finished their empirical analysis of the 25 cases, Meijer and Potjer concluded that citizen-generated open data can certainly provide improved information for public governance, but concurrently can also be used to challenge current power structures and city decisions. As a result, Meijer and Potjer posited that the addition of citizen-generated open data to public governance should be viewed as both “collaboration and contestation.”

For example, while citizen-generated open data produces data as a foundation for collaborative governance, it can also strengthen and work with governance by providing new checks and balances based on the data collected. Meijer and Potjer explained that to understand the role of citizens in this new environment of government with social media, is to know that the public governance will include both collaboration and conflict.

Meijer and Potjer’s second conclusion states that citizens engage in the generation of data to both collaborate with their governments and challenge current government positions and policies. There are distinctions between friendly, adversarial and neutral interactions—yet all of these interactions better inform governments on what their citizens are looking for. However, the researchers both concede that the impact of the data is too narrow and still in the exploratory phase.

In the end, despite realizing that citizen-generated open data can also challenge the positions and structure of city government, the greater amount of information and “multi-actor collaboration” utilizing that data does indeed help governments make more accurate data-based decisions for their cities by taking in both suggestions and criticism from the new form of data….”