Do you work for a municipal government? Are you interested in having your municipality run a Challenge of it’s own in 2017? ODX can help. Contact us to learn about the ODX Challenge program.
In early 2016 the City of Guelph presented Kevin Tuer and me with an opportunity.
Guelph was planning on launching its Open Government initiative, Open Guelph. Andy Best and the team were looking for interesting ways to generate interest in the portal, and the idea of open data sets. We wanted to engage people who were passionate about democracy, and about improving quality of life without increasing costs. The City decided to run an innovation challenge – the Guelph Civic Accelerator. And we, as ODX, were keen to help.
Why? Because our mandate is to drive innovation and growth through the effective, commercial use of open data. And some of the most useful, most valuable government data is held by municipalities. We saw an innovation challenge as a great way to bring companies to government to solve meaningful problems, and demonstrate the value of open data. So we treated Guelph as the pilot of our ODX Challenge program.
Demo Day on Tuesday February 22nd marked the culmination of that challenge. Two finalists, Milieu and AlertLabs, demonstrated their solutions to problems of civic engagement and residential water usage respectively. I'm excited to say that both have announced revenue-generating pilots with the City. You can read on or jump straight to the video.
AlertLabs and the Water Challenge
The City of Guelph will offer up to 600 homeowners a $50 rebate towards the cost of a Flowie Water Sensor.
The Flowie “measures and reports water usage, and detects leaks and abnormal usage when installed on your municipal water meter.”
Before, if there was a leak, or some other equipment failure, ratepayers had to wait two months for a meter read to detect it. Equipment failures leading to huge water bills are incredibly common; both the mayor and I had this happen to us in the past year.
With Flowie, homeowners get an email or mobile alert when things go wrong, right away, making it easy for them to detect and diagnose leaks.
Guelph believes that the combination of the rebate and the device will dramatically reduce end-user leaks, as well as overall household water consumption. Reducing consumption is much cheaper than adding new capacity, making the rebate a cost-effective way to support the water demands of a growing city.
Milieu and the Statutory Notice Challenge
Guelph also announced a paid pilot with Milieu. Milieu is an Ottawa-based startup that provides an online platform through which municipalities can notify residents of proposed planning decisions (including new developments, re-zoning, changes to Official Plans) and collect feedback on those proposals. This is important because, as noted in the challenge itself:
Municipalities have a legislated responsibility to notify the public about planning decisions (including new developments, re-zoning, changes to Official Plans), but existing notices are often confusing and unclear. Legal and regulatory requirements mean that the information contained in existing planning notices is often highly technical. This information and the ways in which it is commonly displayed make the notices difficult for many citizens to understand.
Milieu brings the consultation process into the twenty-first century. It provides Guelph with an easy way to track the citizens that are impacted by any land use change, notify them, collect feedback, and summarize that feedback in a scalable, automated way.
Thank You
We wanted to thank our fantastic partners at the City of Guelph, Innovation Guelph, the Guelph Lab and CBaSE for running such a great challenge. We look forward to continuing to work with the City and the companies to advance both civic innovation and the commercial use of Open Data.
