The Perils, Pitfalls, and Promise of Open Government – a Geothink Interview with Daniel Paré

By Drew Bush Earlier this month, Public Sector Digest’s first Open Cities Index ranked Canada’s municipalities according to their openness in supplying municipal data online. The index examined the number of data sets available in three areas of accountability (e.g. elections or budget data), innovation (e.g. traffic volume or service requests), and social policy (e.g. crime rates or health performance) … Read More

GIS in the Classroom: Geography and the Law

By Naomi Bloch This Wednesday, November 18, marks the 16th annual GIS Day. Throughout the week, Geothink will present a series of posts looking at some of the ways in which our collaborators, partners, and friends around the world are critically examining and using GIS as a tool for civic engagement and understanding. The community snapshots presented this week highlight diverse perspectives and uses … Read More

Torts of the Geoweb: (or the liability question) Part I

By Tenille Brown, PhD student in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa Recently, on March 3rd as part of the continuing Geothink Project, I hosted a Twitter chat about tort liability with Mapping Mashups. This online forum was joined by Geothink partners and friends and the primary topic discussed was the role of tort law and how … Read More

Spotlight on Recent Publications: Teresa Scassa at the Intersection of Intellectual Property Rights and Municipal Transit Data

By Drew Bush This story was originally reported on Teressa Scassa’s personal blog which you can find here. In a paper just published in the Fordham Urban Law Journal, Geothink researcher Teresa Scassa argues that the actual laws governing intellectual property (IP) rights are often surprisingly irrelevant in disputes over rights to municipal transit data. Instead, she finds that being … Read More

Paper Spotlight: "Enabling Access and Reuse of Public Sector Information in Canada" by Elizabeth Judge

Enabling Access and Reuse of Public Sector Information in Canada: Crown Commons Licenses, Copyright, and Public Sector Information Elizabeth Judge University of Ottawa – Common Law Section October 14, 2010 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1956549 Abstract:  Although the proactive disclosure of public sector information has been called a “basic right of citizens” and a “public right,” Canada has not yet implemented a national strategy … Read More

Geothink 2nd Annual General Meeting – Ottawa, ON, Canada – 2014

Geothink is happy to announce it’s second annual general meeting (AGM) June 11-13th being hosted at the University of Ottawa. Agenda for 2nd Annual General Meeting June 11 – 13, 2014 (Ottawa, Canada) Position papers related to talks available on Geothink.ca. —– Wednesday, 11 June 2014 19h00Get together for a drink/dinner at The Black Tomato (drinks sponsored by IBM) (near … Read More