2021 Canadian Open Data Awards Winners

2021 Jury Statement

The first Canadian Open Data Award was given by hosts, Open North, at the Canadian Open Data Summit 2015. By adopting every category the 2015 committee had used for their selection process and giving each a separate award, and also creating an award for individuals, CODS16 hosts New Brunswick effectively created the Canadian Open Data Awards, plural, to celebrate and encourage excellence in open data across Canada. Subsequently the committee added an award for the Rising Star to acknowledge and promote new open data initiatives and young organizations and dropped one category to create a data quality award, reflecting the realities of the national Open Data movement.

A hiatus, first while the Canadian Open Data Society was formally incorporated and then when the COVID-19 pandemic prevented a Canadian Open Data Summit in 2020, has meant that it has been more and two-and-a-half years since the last call for nominations. That means the open movement has not had this special opportunity to encourage people and recognize their work in the field. But we are back to stay, with the formation of the Society!

For the Canadian Open Data Awards 2021 (CODA2021) the jury is awarding a full slate of eight prizes. The five main categories of CODA honour achievements in accessibility, innovation, democracy, impact, and data quality. At the last awards, while some submissions did mention laudable early efforts toward improving data quality, the 2018 jury felt that not enough attention had been paid to this increasingly critical element of Open Data and therefore decided not to give an award in this category for 2018. But the Open Data field has progressed dramatically in three years: this was the strongest overall body of submissions that have ever been sent to CODA, and every award is being granted. The jury wishes to make it clear just how difficult it was to choose winners from among so many fine, varied, and successful candidates, and praises all for their achievements. We also encourage nominators to submit updated nominations in 2022!

The jury also notes for next year’s CODA organizers a hope that they will direct some of their early efforts towards sourcing nominations of greater diversity. This year we were pleased to see that there were submissions in French and English, and from the public, private, and non-profit sectors; next year we hope that those strengths will continue and be augmented by gender, geographic, and other diversities. Of special note: although two of the previous three winners of Canadian Open Data Leader of the Year were women, there were no nominations from or for women this year.

2021 Canadian Open Data Awards Winners

Open Data Accessibility Award: Department of Forests, Wildlife and Parks Government of Québec, for Forêt ouverte

Ministère des Forêts, de la Faune et des Parcs du Québec / Department of Forests, Wildlife and Parks, Government of Québec, for

Forêt ouverte/Open Forest

Forêt ouverte/Open Forest is an interactive Web map that allows all users of the territory of the private and public forest of Quebec to access, free of charge, various government cartographic data related to knowledge and sustainable management of forestry resources. Produced by the Forest Inventories Branch of the Ministère des Forêts, de la Faune et des Parcs du Québec, the interactive map was created in 2017, but has officially borne the name Forêt ouverte since April 2019.

The constant search for usability is the leitmotif behind the development of Open Forest and the Open Geomatics Infrastructure (IGO) on which the interactive map is based. Based on a collaborative model, IGO is an open web geomatics solution that meets international open standards in geomatics. The free-of-charge policy adopted by the Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks in 2017, and the shift towards open data, marked a turning point in the dissemination of geographical data associated with the forest. The Open Forest interactive map visitor statistics demonstrate the real interest in this type of open data access. The number of unique visitors, recorded monthly, jumped dramatically from 38,000 in fiscal year 2019-2020 to nearly 167,000 in 2020-2021, and its clientele is now global.

Thanks to its free format, its ease of use and the relevance of the information disseminated, Forêt ouverte/Open Forest makes it possible to democratize geographical information for non-expert customers in the field of geomatics. For these and all their accomplishments to improve accessibility to data for practical and meaningful use by experts and non-experts alike, the jury awards the Open Data Accessibility Award 2021 to the Forest Inventory Directorate, Department of Forests, Wildlife and Parks, Government of Québec.

Open Data for Democracy Award: Government of Ontario Open Data Team

Amy Bihari, Hao Qin, Cody Schacter, Eric Giang, Corey Trott, Justin Duckett, Sage Hall, Bianca Sayan, and Christine Hagyard

Access to COVID-19 data has been crucial to understanding and responding to the coronavirus in Ontario. Ontario’s open COVID-19 data has been viewed over 15 million times and has been used to create influential insights by journalists, epidemiologists and other community members. Recognizing the significance of data access and transparency during a pandemic, Ontario’s open data team worked to mobilize this critical data and support Ontario’s response to an unprecedented health crisis. They created new processes and acceptance of safe, rapid data sharing. They maintained a flow of timely, whole-of-government COVID-19 data to inform the province’s pandemic guidance and services, and help Ontarians take appropriate steps to stay safe. Ontario’s data catalogue has become home to the ‘best in Canada’ collection of COVID-19 open data as described by media and open government academics. This was achieved by engaging with champions from across the government, identifying where key data was hosted and working to overcome culture and data literacy hurdles to sharing usable data. Better data culture is key to a transition to a modern, data-informed government. In addition to building up a data culture, this team has worked daily throughout this pandemic to extract data, clean it, prepare it for inclusion in government reports and for public release.

For these efforts to foster democracy through pioneering data-sharing channels and new approaches influencing a critical culture shift in government, and their model of open communication during a time of crisis, the jury awards The Government of Ontario’s Open Data Team the Open Data for Democracy Award 2021.

Open Data for Impact Award: Qwhery

In 2019 Matt founded Qwhery as a “voice-first” solution provider that helps cities connect their open data to voice-enabled devices like Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant. This enables residents to ask their smart speakers the same questions they would call 311 for, but without the wait times. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Matt quickly pivoted his startup to support two major initiatives:

The first was in collaboration with Concordia University and the Institute for Investigative Journalism. Qwhery implemented a platform for staff and journalism students to capture COVID-19 data through open data sources across the country, focusing on Long Term Care Facilities, Prisons, and Indigenous communities. This data was then shared across the country to news agencies to help tell the story of these communities and facilities through engaging data visualizations.

The second initiative was providing COVID-19 case data through text messages, with daily or weekly updates. This information can also be accessed by anyone with an Alexa enabled device, by saying, “Alexa, ask Q One One how many COVID-19 cases are in my area?” – curating authoritative data in context to the user’s location, instantly, accessed openly via John Hopkins University in the United States and Esri Canada on behalf of Health Regions across Canada.

Qwhery sends over 125 text messages every day since May, 2021, and over 150 weekly texts to users, all for no cost to them. Currently, Qwhery is working with many municipalities across North America to connect their open data to Q-1-1 so that residents can quickly find who their councillor is, where they can play tennis, what the zoning bylaw is for their property, what’s being built nearby and, submit service requests for reporting things like potholes, low water pressure, tree issues, and many more, all by asking Alexa or their Google Assistant.

Co-founder and CEO, Matt Pietryszyn (finalist for Canadian Open Data Leader of the Year 2018) has been an advocate for municipal government transparency and community engagement for almost 20 years. Matt’s mission was to educate staff and citizens on the importance of eliminating data silos within organizations to gain operational efficiencies and sharing purposeful open data with constituents giving them access to what’s essentially ‘their’ data, building trust and sharing innovative ideas and solutions with their municipality. Many municipalities are now opening their data. With someone long a model and innovator in Open Data at the helm, Qwhery is putting that data to work, and getting it in front of citizens, in the devices and applications that they use every day. For their innovative, accessible, impactful approach, Qwhery Inc. is a worthy winner of the Open Data for Impact Award 2021.

Open Data Innovation Award: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ)

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) for “Visualisation des données basé sur des données ouvertes et liés”.

The BanQ has won for its project, Data Visualization based on open and linked data.

The aim was to try to break out of the usual framework of research-and-results display in order to encourage the exploration and exploitation of open and linked data. The technological objective was to be able to test and improve the various visualization tools in a web browser, and to develop their in-house expertise. Two professors from École Polytechnique de Montréal and two of their students worked with BAnQ on this project. The results enabled the achievement of the objective. A proof of concept is available at http://banq.witify.io Interestingly, an open dataset of musical adaptations was also deposited on Données Québec following the work carried out (https://www.donneesquebec.ca/recherche/dataset/repertoire-des-adaptations-musicales).

Some use cases explored by the visualizations:

  • How artists work together
  • The origin of a specific song
  • The country in which a song appears in another language for the first time
  • The songs of an artist of a certain origin that have been adapted in another country

The successful project has enabled the BAnQ to better fulfill its leadership role in the library and cultural community. It has also resulted in three presentations by BAnQ and Polytechnique, one poster at an international conference and a scientific article in an IEEE journal.

For achieving a proof of concept that makes the data attractive to their users – something always of interest to CODA juries – and for the fact that the project involved not geomatics nor other common scientific areas of enquiry in open data, but cultural data, resulting in real leadership in the library and cultural fields, the jury awards the BanQ the Open Data Innovation Award 2021.

Open Data Quality Award: MobilityData

MobilityData is a Canadian non-profit organization that aims to accelerate the development and adoption of mobility data standards such as GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) and GBFS (General Bikeshare Feed Specification). MobilityData leads several working groups in connection with the development of these well-known standards. They established a working group to standardize shared data related to on-demand mobility services (e.g., taxis, Uber, Lift, etc.). Notable is the governance model. They brought together more than 30 international players (Canadian, American and European) to discuss needs and to ensure that they are representative of the entire mobility ecosystem, including private services, technology integrators, and representatives of services adapted for people with reduced mobility. To maximize the impact of developments, any new proposal must be supported by a technical partner (e.g. Transit, Google Maps, Uber, Chronos, etc.) who is committed to implementing them. Although access to the working group is paid, to finance MobilityData activities, the standards resulting from this work remain Open Source, and comments from the community are accepted before final adoption.

For a governance model that ensures the commitment of a core group of participants, increases its impact and broadens the representation of players who could not have afforded membership in the working group, and for their work to develop tools to ensure the quality of data shared for the goal of mobility data standards, the jury pleased to name MobilityData the winner of the Open Data Quality Award 2021.

Canadian Open Data Rising Star Award: FabmobQc

The Centre of Excellence for Open Technologies for Mobility (FabmobQc) is intended to be the catalyst for the development and enhancement of open innovation technology commons for the acceleration of sustainable mobility in Quebec.

Conflicts for parking space have always existed and have multiplied as more and more vehicles, such as carsharing vehicles, taxis, bicycles and delivery trucks, have also begun to claim access to the street. In order to facilitate the development of an open ecosystem for curbside data, SharedStreets has designed the CurbLR data standardization project. FabmobQc has been interested in SharedStreets projects since the beginning of its work. These were the inspiration for the City of Montreal’s bid for Montréal en commun (Infrastructure Canada’s Smart Cities Challenge won by Montréal in 2019). It is from their tools and visualizations related to the curb that FabmobQc proposed to the Urban Innovation Laboratory of the City of Montreal (LIUM) that one of the four themes of its contribution to the Mobility Data Hub be devoted to the intersection of curbspace data. Starting in the spring of 2020, FabmobQc began work on converting signage data for Montreal through the use of data available on the city’s open data site. (https://data.montreal.ca )

The jury wishes to applaud and encourage FabmobQc as a model both in its use of municipal open data to create information for solutions to a common urban problem and for “teaching others to fish.” FabmobQc has been working with local, provincial, and international stakeholders to develop tools and facilitate access to data from stakeholders interested in developing their own tools based on a parking standard. Therefore we name them Canadian Open Data Rising Star 2021.

Canadian Open Data Excellence Award: Government of Ontario Open Data Team

The standout submission of 2021 came to us from the Government of Ontario’s Open Data Team. As the government works to meet the complex issues facing our communities, more open, data-enhanced and informed approaches like this team’s will need to be explored, tested and evaluated. The model of open communication and data sharing during the COVID-19 pandemic will be a positive example for other rapid response teams. The data-sharing channels and approaches pioneered, and the validated, integrated COVID-19 data of 2020/21 will be available to and replicable by other jurisdictions for managing a variety of complex issues in the months and years ahead.

Canadian Open Data Leader of the Year Award: Richard Pietro

Richard Pietro, principal of the podcast ReOpenGov, and well-known Open Data volunteer in Canada from the Province of Ontario has put uncountable hours of work into the movement without reward and on a voluntary basis. By interviewing Open Data leaders and advocates on his own podcast, ReOpenGov in nearly fifty episodes to date, he has highlighted such milestones as the 2021 Code for America Summit, the founding of the Canadian Open Data Society in 2020, and the Toronto Womxn in Data Science Conference. He has also interviewed leaders in the movement such as former President of the Treasury Board of Canada, the Hon. Tony Clement, who in a real sense initiated Open Data at the federal level in Canada. In plain language for a general audience, Richard has made the innovations and potential impact of Open Data and allied efforts accessible and engaging. Richard has delivered webinars such as Storytelling in Government with Open Data and Open Data Iron Chef (turning Open Data into a basis for a Civic Technology application). His command of the narrative arts will surely bring the Open Data movement in Canada from good to great in the years to come.

Media Contact

Paul Connor, Executive Director
Canadian Open Data Society
admin@opendatasociety.ca