The Award Goes To: 2022 Canada Open Data Awards Winners Announced!
Open Data Awards celebrate excellence in open data in Canada. They give communities a chance to recognize the contributions of their peers to the open data field. The awards allow increased visibility to new ideas, as well as “encourage cross-pollination” so the open data community continues to grow.
Below are the 2022 Canada Open Data Awards Winners.
Open Data Accessibility Award: City of Edmonton
The City of Edmonton improved user experience and quality of available data on its open data platform. The city has released 13000 databases, made improvements in its navigation portal, and developed citizen applications to make data more accessible to the public.
Cyrus Tehrani, Chief Digital Officer and Director of Innovation for the City of Hamilton.
Open Data for Democracy Award: City of Hamilton
The City of Hamilton is being recognized for its efforts in democracy and citizen participation. 2022 saw the launching of dashboards to provide essential information for all on several topics (including housing and homelessness). A variety of applications based on open data were also released to help with election access.
Open Data for Equity Award: City of Calgary
The City of Calgary, recognized for its potential impacts of open data, published an “equity index” in 2022. The index consists of 20 indicators under five categories, enabling the mapping of a territory’s inequalities and possible actions to improve population health and well-being.
Open Data Innovation Award: Vélo Info
Vélo Info developed a crowdsourcing application in French for the HackQC 2022 competition. In a few clicks, it enables data collection of conditions of the Montréal cycling network. The data fills in municipal open data source gaps and encourages the local population to get involved.
Open Data Quality Award: Canada Energy Regulator
In 2022, Canada Energy Regulator (CER) launched Berdi, which collects data from CER and makes it accessible to the public. CER has digitized more than 1800 figures, 4000 maps, and 14000 tables through publicly available data. CER used data science and a distinctive approach to facilitate access to high-quality data.
Canadian Open Data Rising Star Award: Living Data Project
The Living Data Project is a unique approach offering training and internships to teach the best practices in open data, reproducible research, synthesis science, and scientific collaborations. There have been 193 students have benefited from the training and 35 people have completed a 6-week long internship in various government, non-profit, and retiring academics workplaces.
McGill Professor, David Wachsmuth, of the Curbcut project.
Canadian Open Data Excellence Award: Curbcut
Curbcut, a project from the McGill Sustainability Systems Initiative, is recognized for data exploration too, as well as sharing of information and resources. Several open data sources are used to encourage reflection on challenges surrounding urban sustainability and communities. A large amount of work is done to prepare, clean, and aggregate data before publishing the data.
Canadian Open Data Leader of the Year Award: Lucas Cherkewski
In his spare time, Lucas Cherkewski works on civic tech and open data projects. Cherkewski makes already public information more accessible by improving access to government data and information. He built an intuitive, accessible, mobile-friendly website to explore the transcripts of the Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC) in 2022.
Find a longer description of each award winner here.
