BuzzData’s beta is officially underway! We’re bringing a first wave of users on board today and more every few days from here on. We’re so excited (and exhausted)!

But first: We at BuzzData built this platform not just for people who are interested in data, but for people who have it. More and more people collect, use and wrangle data these days. They need a place to show off their work and collaborate with others in a way that’s truly efficient, dynamic and fun.

If you’re listening, please know: We built BuzzData for you.

We still have a lot of people to bring on board, but we’d like to let those with data onto BuzzData as soon as possible. You’ve waited long enough (and deserve better than Google Docs, for god’s sake!).

So if you’ve got data, let us know and we’ll hook you up with an account immediately. Email us directly at blog@buzzdata.com with the subject line “Got Data” and we’ll take care of you :)

Oh yeah! Wondering what BuzzData looks like? Check out the demo video for a taste: 

One last thing: if you haven’t signed up for the beta at all yet, seriously: what are you waiting for? Get on the bus, yo!

Every once in a while, it’s nice to be reminded that open data isn’t about data sets or apps, it’s about people and ideas.

Last night our CTO Pete Forde herded the BuzzData team over to the Gladstone to check out the latest Tech Talk Toronto speakers, a couple of young guys from Ottawa who work for an web company called Shopify. It wasn’t what I expected, but it was definitely a welcome surprise.

FROM LEFT: toronto.ca/open open-data curators Derek Matthew, Joseph McLarty, and Reham Gorgis, alongside the Tony Robbinses of Ottawa’s open data scene, Edward Ocampo-Gooding and Daniel Beauchamp. Photo courtesy of E. Ocampo-Gooding.

Though Edward Ocampo-Gooding and Daniel Beauchamp now work full-time at Shopify, their talk wasn’t a promotional plug for the brand. Instead, they gushed effusively and with unbridled enthusiasm (to borrow from Seinfeld) about the open-data community they helped forge in Ottawa.

“We don’t have that many datasets, we’re kind of envious of Toronto’s data,” Beauchamp said on stage, comparing the City of Ottawa’s open data catalogue to Toronto’s comparatively diverse data site. In fact, when the two first started compiling public data more than a year ago, the city didn’t even have a catalogue. “We had to go to the sites and write our Perl scripts and what-not and grab all the data from it — a real pain in the ass.”

The remarkable thing is they went and did it anyway — they scraped the public data, put together an effective promotional campaign for a hackfest, made the effort to target a broad audience across the city, and most impressive of all, got non-technical citizens engaged and participating as well.

“That’s my little cousin there,” Beauchamp said, while clicking through photo slides of the April 2010 hackfest. “She’s like 11 years old, and I said, you know what, I’m going to invite her out because open data is for everyone, so why not get kids there, too?”

Ocampo-Gooding pointed to another slide, this one of a woman, saying, “This is a mother who walked in and said, ‘Hey, I heard about you guys on the radio. What is this open data stuff about?’”

Rather than alienate her with technical talk, Ocampo-Gooding said he asked her point-blank what frustrates her most in her day-to-day life. “She said, ‘Oh, well, figuring out what to do with my six-year-old son on a Saturday morning is a monumental pain in the ass. It would be lovely if I could be informed of the things I could do.’ ”

From there, Ocampo-Gooding consulted his girlfriend Mary-Beth Baker, a local librarian and “the brains behind the operation,” he claims — about what city data would address this problem. Then, after assigning a developer and a designer to the team, “they were proto-typing in four hours.”

All told, Beauchamp and Ocampo-Gooding attracted more than 100 people that day — “on a Saturday morning,” Ocampo-Gooding boasted gleefully — including mothers, artists, librarians and journalists, in addition to designers and developers. Together, they built about 20 apps in a single day. When Ottawa’s CIO Guy Michaud stopped by, Ocampo-Gooding claims “his mind was blown” seeing citizens brainstorming city improvements together and having fun doing it. Clearly, open government and e-government can work, provided city leaders keep an - ahem - open mind about it.

“The first thing that happens with open data is people think ‘apps,’ ” Ochampo-Gooding said. “Someone thinks, ‘Oh I know what we need — developers!’ ‘Developers, developers, developers, developers! That’s exactly what we need!’ ”

“It’s not true, it doesn’t work,” he went on. “All you end up with is a sausage party. It doesn’t get things done.”

Beauchamp and Ocampo-Gooding’s commitment to keeping the open data movement inclusive and fun fosters a communal, gregarious energy that’s infectious — I felt it firsthand at last night’s Tech Talk. The audience laughed freely at the pair’s whimsical, jestering style, called out suggestions and comments and stuck around to chat and meet new friends long after the talk had ended.

Thanks for coming, guys!

-Momoko Price

Last week the U.K.’s Open Knowledge Foundation released a video extolling the virtues of open (government) data and institutional transparency in general. We hadn’t gotten around to watching it until now. It’s pretty slick. (Though there’s a distinct dearth of people with North American accents, except of course, for the omnipresent and always cheerful David Eaves. We need more open-data advocates on this side of the Atlantic).

If you’re not already a proponent of open data, this a good primer on why it’s important.

Check it out:

The general take-home lesson of this video is pretty clear: Transparency = efficiency (and honesty and innovation).

We actually talked to Rufus Pollock (from the video) back in March and it was interesting to hear what he had to say about the selfish reasons why an institution might want to “open up”: 

“One argument is simply that information communication and sharing is a hard thing. Often information is not shared very efficiently within an organization.

“If you’re trying to protect the information from flowing out of the organization, you tend to protect it from flowing within it, to some extent.”

“One of the reasons governments opened up its data is because it allowed better communication between departments.”

This is one of the major reasons why private companies adopt web-based project management portals — they put all their information in one place, thus keeping data and workflow centralized, as well as easily monitored and optimized.

In an ideal world, this is essentially what an open-data/open-government portal would be — an open, web-based portal that civil servants actually use, where citizens could see, in real time, what their representatives are working on and how they’re progressing.

Perhaps that’s part of the problem — the fact that government transparency initiatives are adopted not as a system-wide overhaul of an opaque, inefficient management system to a more streamlined and visible one, but as political window dressing, a web-based add-on to the bureaucratic status quo. 

Open-data/government initiatives shouldn’t be perceived by our leaders just as a way to appease the public, or even to foster new data industries and encourage ideas from outsiders. Transparency should first be perceived, as it is by many private companies these days, as a way to streamline and improve redundant workflow.

Once government departments are dependent on open, centralized, web-based systems to get work done, those systems would not longer be vulnerable to budget cuts and fickle politics, as we’ve seen with data.gov, because the government would be relying on it even more than citizens would be.

View Open Data Hubs Worldwide in a larger map

How does Canada’s new open data site data.gc.ca compare on an international scale? You be the judge. BuzzData compiled 84 other portals worldwide. Check them out — which ones do you like best? Why? Let us know — we’ll post the most insightful answers!

(Oh, and let us know about site status changes too!)   blog@buzzdata.com