Blog article: Wrapping Up the Year: Our Journey in 2023 

Published on January 22, 2024
Wrapping Up the Year: Our Journey in 2023 

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As we enter a new year, it’s a great time to reflect on the strides we’ve made in enhancing our services and engaging with our community. Our team has been buzzing with activity throughout 2023, and we’re excited to share some highlights with you.

Community Engagement and Knowledge Sharing 

Our commitment to staying connected with our audience and sharing knowledge has remained a priority. We’ve published blog stories from our community showcasing how the public uses open data.  We’ve also facilitated and attended a two-day hackathon at Brain Station, delivered two Civic Tech Toronto presentations:  How good is Toronto’s open data? and How does Toronto use open data? and did a CKAN Monthly Live presentation. We also attended the AWS Summit 2023 and the Big Data and AI Conference in Toronto to keep our fingers on the pulse of our technical environment.   

Our presence at conferences like the AWS Summit 2023 and the Big Data and AI Conference has allowed us to engage and learn from others in the field. 

Enhancing Our Digital Presence 

This year saw significant updates to our portal pages, ensuring they remain clean, user-friendly, and up-to-date. We’ve also refreshed our gallery, showcasing new apps and maps that utilize our data, demonstrating the practical applications of our work. 

Enhancing our Data Management and Quality Score 

In a major step towards efficiency and scalability, we moved our intake process to JIRA. This enhances our ability to communicate, track, update, and be accountable for the work we do.  

Moreover, we’ve upgraded our Data Quality Score (DQS) methodology, ensuring the highest standards of data integrity and reliability. 

Technical Advancements 

Our technical team has been particularly busy. We’ve automated parts of our JIRA publishing pipeline, significantly reducing manual work in the data publishing process.  

Public Queue  

We’re gearing up to display the status history of our dataset intake process openly providing both a comprehensive dataset and an interactive dashboard. This way, you’ll be able to see where we stand in our progress of publishing or updating datasets on the portal.  

By the Numbers 

To give you a sense of our productivity this year, since December 2022: 

  • We’ve handled a total of 199 tickets in our queue, addressing a wide range of requests and inquiries. 
  • 102 significant updates to existing datasets – this includes updating schemas, metadata, or formats. This does not include adding records, which we do dozens of times daily
  • We’ve introduced 32 brand new datasets. 
  • Out of the tickets received, we’ve “closed” 42 of them. This closure indicates instances where no further action was necessary or possible in response to the requests made. 

As we bid farewell to 2023, we’re grateful for the challenges we’ve overcome and the milestones we’ve achieved. Our journey continues, and we look forward to another year of innovation, engagement, and excellence in serving our residents, visitors, and the general public.