Leaving Edges Open for City Innovation - Boston

There are many indicators out there given the tectonic masses of data rocketing around our collective computing devices and systems. Cities and governments are awash in it. Finding ways to connect people with skills and interest to the challenges we face is something that needs to be pursued much more intensively. There are great experiments and functioning platforms for this already but our cities need to grow in this platform space more than nearly anywhere else.

Boston has a really interesting website that includes indicators of urban health in a variety of sectors accompanied by easy ways to dig into areas of interest to learn more. It's a kind of jumbo sketch board where you can see what needs to be done and then perhaps dig in and shift the balance in favour of a solution.

The City of Hamilton would benefit from a system like this - link OpenHamilton with a wide range of other sectors and agencies to develop a map of the needs, opportunities and innovation centres that interested citizens can follow and contribute to. Half the challenge of engaging people in change is giving them right-sized and right-timed productive work to do and then, in turn, provide public feedback to see how the inputs are actually leading to changes that matter.

It is well documented that we use less electricity when we can see directly what that decreased use is and what difference it makes. When we can't see it, our commitment wanes and we find ourselves following old habits. Make the data sing, dance and serve the common good. It won't do any of those things if it is fragmented, locked up, unintelligible, or static. We need to see. We need to know.

There is the hopeful movement in this direction through Hamilton Vital Signs. A much more interesting angle would be to link this to dynamic inputs where possible, a whole range of contributing factors that are relevant, volunteer or professional opportunities, and a host of other things. There's not much static about life. Really interesting things will happen when our writing and reporting are more robustly rich and dynamic.