OPEN GUELPH |
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IMAGES COURTESY OF THE CITY OF GUELPH |
It’ s being designed as a digital onestop-shop for services, information and participation opportunities. Within the site, residents will be able to create a customizable dashboard that will serve as a single window to connect with the city services they need.
“ If we do 100 things, citizens may only care about a handful of them,” said Best.“ Given the breadth of municipal services, it’ s important for residents to be able to tailor their digital civic experience to their needs. As examples, you will be able to register for swimming lessons, sign up for automated text reminders of your garbage collection schedule, report a wide variety of issues to the necessary departments or see your tax bill.” myGuelph is currently under development for an early 2018 launch. In the meantime, features and new digital services are being designed, user tested and released throughout 2016 and 2017.
Accelerated solutions Best said there are several other open government initiatives underway, all of them designed to“ unleash smart people on the city’ s challenges.”
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The Civic Accelerator is one of the largest such programs. It connects innovative startups with the city to create civic technology products that will improve service and efficiency.
“ We put out big picture challenges we have not been able to crack, or to which there was no obvious solution. Then we invited anyone, be it a startup or other innovator, to pitch their solutions to us,” said Best.“ The result is new creative partnerships that allow us to experiment and prototype, something that’ s not typically easy in government purchasing processes.”
On Aug. 17, Guelph announced it had selected two winners for challenges issued on June 20.
Milieu won the planning notifications challenge with a proposal for a web and mobile application that connects citizens, urban developers and city officials so they can collaborate on planning decisions.
Alert Labs responded to the water data challenge with a proposal for realtime alerts sent to a customer’ s phone for emergencies like floods or leaks, based on sensors that require zero technical skill to install.
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In September, employees from the two winning companies were embedded in city departments to accelerate the development of their solutions. The embed period will culminate in a demo day in mid-December.
Along the same vein, Guelph has also hosted hackathons that encourage skilled individuals to develop apps that can address specific public problems, using any of the 32 open data sets currently available from the city.
At a hackathon in early 2015, a coder created an app that delivered waste collection notifications to citizens. Recognized as a useful tool, Best said it is now being built out as an official product.
The city also worked with a local company to develop an app for municipal grass cutting crews.
“ We digitized the entire process so that when they leave a park, they click to say it was done,” he said.“ That info feeds into our open data portal. It creates transparency around park maintenance schedules and saves each person 25 minutes of paperwork at the end of every shift, so it improved internal efficiency, too.”
Financially minded Guelph residents can take a crack at the budgeting process through an online budget simulator that lets them suggest how to spend public dollars. In the coming years, Best said the simulator may become more of a concrete consultation tool for public budget feedback.
The city also has a civic innovation partnership with the University of Guelph called the Guelph Lab, which works to increase the capacity of both institutions to tackle complex challenges. For the city, it unlocks the civic potential of the university and applies it to local challenges.
Encouraging innovation Much of the good work being done in Guelph is driven by frontline staff members who recognize a need and envision a solution.
In early 2014, the city’ s former chief administrative officer met with a catchbasin cleaning crew to discuss some of the challenges they were experiencing on the job. Returning to her office, she tasked Suzanne Holder, project
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16 Q4 2016 www. amcto. com |