Phillip Smith

Apathy is Boring says "Parliament is sitting" for youth.

Exciting news that I missed at the end of last week (thanks Drumbeat!)... Ilona Dougherty from the awesome Apathy is Boring organization writes about (yet another) open data initiative -- this time, focused at Canadian youth:

We've been wondering for quite some time how we can make Parliament and the legislative process easier to understand for Canadian youth. With the help of the Department of Canadian Heritage, Micheal Lenczner, and Daniel Haran, we recently started developing website that aggregates Parliamentary data and (more importantly) makes this information meaningful to young Canadians.

An early version of CitizenFactory.com went live at the end of March. We're planning a publicized launch in the coming months, once additional features have been added.

Since our soft launch, we've been excited to see Michael Mulley (who was kind enough to help out during a Citizen Factory hack day) launch OpenParliament. Datadotgc.ca also launched, and - thanks to the work of David Eaves and others - Parliament has agreed to provide more data in XML.

Our goal with Citizen Factory is not only to provide this information to youth, but also to help them decode it and take action. Apathy is Boring has access to tens of thousands of youth across Canada with whom we'll share this tool.

We thought this was as good a time as any to tell you about Citizen Factory. We would appreciate your comments and feedback

Open data in Canada is clearly on a roll. Happy days ahead.  :-)

(Via Civic Access.)
 
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About

Hi, I'm Phillip Smith, a veteran digital publishing consultant, online advocacy specialist, and strategic convener. If you enjoyed reading this, find me on Twitter and I'll keep you updated.

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