2022 Canadian Open Data Awards Winners
2022 Jury Statement
The Open Data Awards were created to celebrate excellence in open data across Canada. The awards provide an opportunity for the community to recognize their peers' contributions to the field. As a movement that is constantly evolving, it’s also an opportunity to bring visibility to new ideas and encourage cross pollination, so that the open data community continues to advance and flourish as a whole. For the many who work behind the scenes and advocate for more openness, transparency, inclusion and better services for all people in Canada, we salute you. On behalf of the jury, we look forward to celebrating you, open data stars, in 2023!
2022 Canadian Open Data Awards Winners
Don’t take our word for it! Head to our YouTube channel to hear more about these projects from the winners themselves.
Open Data Accessibility Award: City of Edmonton
The City of Edmonton has worked improving the user experience as well as the quality of data available on its open data platform. Among their achievements, we highlight the release of 1 300 datasets, improvements in the navigation of the portal and the development of citizen applications to make data more accessible to the general public (e.g.: Citizen Connect, Building Edmonton and Edmonton Budget).
Open Data for Democracy Award: City of Hamilton
The City of Hamilton has multiplied its efforts to put open data to work for a stronger democracy and citizen participation. In 2022, the City launched dashboards that provide information on themes such as housing and homeless, which became essential sources of information for their population, employees, elected officials and the general community. They also released a variety of applications based on open data to facilitate access to the 2022 municipal elections.
Open Data for Equity Award: City of Calgary
The City of Calgary was distinguished in terms of the potential impact of its open data, by publishing an equity index in 2022. This index is composed of 20 indicators which fall under 5 categories that enable mapping of the inequities on their territory and creates potential avenues to take action to improve the health and well-being of their population.
Open Data Innovation Award: Vélo Info
As part of the HackQC (in French) 2022 competition, Vélo Info developed a crowdsourcing application (in French) to enable data collection of the conditions of the Montréal cycling network in a few clicks. This data fills gaps in municipal open data sources and encourages the participation of the local population. Their application is the perfect example of a virtuous data sharing cycle.
Open Data Quality Award: Canada Energy Regulator
Since 2003, the Canada Energy Regulator has digitized more than 14 000 tables, 1 800 figures and 4 000 maps through the form of data that is now publicly available. In 2022, the organization launched BERDI which, through data science and a unique approach, categorizes and facilitates the search and access to high quality data.
Canadian Open Data Rising Star Award: Living Data Project
The Living Data Project is a rising star, and will surely create future rising stars in the Canadian open data community. Their unique approach offers training and internships to teach the best practices in open data, reproducible research, synthesis science and scientific collaborations. To date, 193 students have benefited from the training and 35 people have completed a 6-week long internship in various workplaces (government, non profits, retiring academics) while applying the FAIR and CARE principles.
Canadian Open Data Excellence Award: Curbcut
Curbcut is a project from the McGill Sustainability Systems Initiative and earned an excellent prize for the data exploration tool as well as their sharing of resources and information. The platform uses a number of open data sources to encourage a wider reflection on the challenges surrounding urban sustainability and communities which are most impacted. A large body of work to aggregate, prepare and clean data is undertaken before publishing the data to ensure quality. In that sense, the platform facilitates discoverability and accessibility of data and enables data download according to the original licence.
Canadian Open Data Leader of the Year Award: Lucas Cherkewski
The open data leader of the year is awarded to Lucas Cherkewski. Lucas works on civic tech and open data projects in his spare time, including as a past co-organizer of Ottawa Civic Tech. He tries to make already public information more accessible, improving access to government data and information for the public good. In November 2022, He built an intuitive, accessible, mobile-friendly website to explore the transcripts of the Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC). This work included developing open source R code to parse and analyze the hundreds of pages of PDF transcripts and to generate an easy-to-read website where the data can be explored by date and by speaker. Lucas’s POEC Explorer raises the bar for public reporting on public commissions, and sets a model for organizations to follow in the future. It’s an inspiring project to highlight, both for the quality of the work itself, and for how it was built fully in the open. His innovation in this area expands thinking around open data itself, inspiring us to make more data open in the future…even if it comes from PDFs!
Media Contact
Paul Connor, Executive Director
Canadian Open Data Society
admin@opendatasociety.ca