Blog article: Quarterly Update (Q3 2025)
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At Toronto Open Data, we’re putting in effort to make sure we work in the open. To that end, here’s a summary of what our team accomplished between July and September in 2025.
Overall Traffic
Our traffic tends to dip in Q3, and this year was no exception. In fact, this Q3 was slightly lower than previous years. That said, we don’t really consider this dip noteworthy because our 2 year overall traffic trend is still positive.
Dataset Traffic
With our dip in overall traffic, we did see datasets creep into our top ten most used that rarely do so. Most notable was our Parking Tickets dataset, which at the time of writing this is undergoing some upgrades to improve how its updated. We think this dataset’s traffic spiked because of some recent council activity on the subject. Similarly, council also requested the publication of Parking Lot Occupancy data, which coincidentally we published shortly before writing this article.
Equally noteworthy is seeing more traffic going towards promotions of the 2025 Open Data Awards, which we’re pretty excited about. Last year, successful candidates were featured on our site’s Gallery page, and were invited to show off their work to members of city leadership (including a city councilor).
Supporting Community
We played host to our friends at Civic Tech Toronto, hosting a few of their weekly hacknights at City Hall. If you didn’t already know, you can watch all the presentations on their Youtube channel.
We also sponsored Civic Spark, a 220 person strong, 2 day event focused on the themes of community involvement and public life (something, we believe, open data has a role in). The conference featured speakers from various levels of American and Canadian government, academic, and not-for-profit sectors (this included a co-inventor of one of Google’s search engine and web spam patents, a co-founder of Civic Tech Toronto and the Open Data Institute Toronto, and the former Chief of Staff for 18F (a digital services agency within the American Federal Government), and the former Chief Digital Officer for the Ontario Public Service.
What else?
- We finished updating our dataset pages to address some long standing issues
- We’ve drafted a new Open Data Policy for review by our Chief Technology Officer’s office
- We made some upgrades to our Requests pages to add a bit more detail to each requests’ status
- We’ve been iterating on a process to identify staff reports sent to council or committee that have open data in them
What’s next?
The rest of the year has a few things in store for Toronto Open Data. We’ll upgrade our site’s tool for exploring datasets, we’ll give our homepage a facelift, collect final submissions for the 2025 Open Data Awards, launch a new tool for collecting public inquiries, and work on our roadmap for 2026 and 2027.