Blog article: Top Open Data Moments in 2024
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Public Presentations
In September, Technology Services invited Civic Tech Toronto to host their weekly hack-nights out of Metro Hall, creating an opportunity for engaged, tech-savvy residents and public servants to meet and learn from each other. Over four weeks, over 200 people joined in online and in-person.
The events were a chance to showcase innovative technology work happening at the City, including our latest climate models, how we’re using data to optimize our vehicle fleet or improve shelter services, and our efforts to bring 311 into the digital era.
If you’d like to learn more about Civic Tech Toronto, attend one of their upcoming hacknights, join their Slack, or just stay tuned; we’re hoping to host the group again in 2025!
The Requested Datasets
In 2023, Toronto City Council mandated that Toronto Open Data share a list of datasets that they plan on publishing. In May of 2024, Toronto Open Data published our Toronto Open Data Intake dataset. This dataset lists every unit of work (ie: tickets in a queue) that the Open Data Team has worked on and is working on to investigate, publish, or update datasets on the portal.
That dataset, while it published all the details someone would need to see the Open Data Team’s current and past workload, was not convenient for users to get quick insight from. To address this, the team added user interfaces over this dataset, and put them throughout the portal.
The 2024 Open Data Awards
This November marked the launch of the Toronto Open Data Annual Awards, celebrating innovative uses of open data. The campaign encouraged submissions from internal staff, residents, students, and businesses who demonstrated impactful applications of the City’s datasets. Judging and final award winners to be announced early 2025.
Data Quality Score Update
Building on the Dataset Quality Framework introduced in 2019, the team made significant updates to the scoring system in 2024. These updates help ensure datasets meet higher standards and better serve users’ needs.
Future Path
Near the end of this year, we also did a team theory of change activity aimed at linking our everyday activities with the big-picture goals of the Open Data team.
How does our work uplift important metadata standards amongst our colleagues help ensure open datasets can be used to create a better City?
How does our work with open-source software like CKAN contribute to the open government / open source / open data ecosystem locally and abroad?
We’re still finalizing the map, but hope it’ll be a useful tool going forward, as we think more about how we monitor our impact and create feedback loops to continuously improve the program.
Community Datasets
Discussions and insights have been gathered from the experiences of Open Data teams in Ottawa, Montreal, and Finland on integrating community datasets. A policy recommendation paper on community datasets, including a jurisdictional scan, is currently in development. Once completed, it may be shared as a blog post or considered for inclusion in the Open Data policy framework.
By the Numbers
- We handled a total of 212 tickets (individual request or inquiry submitted to the Open Data team) in our queue, among them 47 open data inquiries were made
- 120 significant updates to existing datasets
- We’ve introduced 48 brand new datasets
- Out of all the tickets received, we’ve “closed” 50 of them – This closure indicates instances where no further action was necessary or possible in response to the requests made.
The Who’s Who…
We welcomed 8 new members to the team in 2024, who are doing awesome and much needed work! Here they are, in no particular order.
- Luke Simcoe – Who’s handling our Policy Refresh and and a go-to resource across multiple projects
- Veronica Yeung – Who’s working on a number of service design tasks, including designing the connection of staff reports to council and committee to Open Data
- Angel Li – Our Toronto Urban Fellow who’s helping us handle parts of our Policy Refresh
- Adam Foord – Our frontend developer who’s helping publish our intake queue and refresh our dataset page
- Jamie Beverley – Our backend developer who’s helping us scale the portal to handle bigger data and complicated workloads
- Anson Liang – Who’s helping us design, build and scale infrastructure
- Swati Arora – Who’s helping build a data modeling practice at the city
- Mohamed Shakeel – Who’s also helping us design, build and scale infrastructure
We are excited for this growing and talented team. Can’t wait to see all the great things they pump out in 2025.
