Yes, you could say we’re pretty stoked about this.
The City of Guelph recently launched its Guelph Civic Solutions Accelerator to blow some fresh air into the ways municipalities solve problems by embedding entrepreneurs within departments to co-create solutions.
Canada’s Open Data Exchange (ODX) is a partner, along with the Guelph Chamber of Commerce, Innovation Guelph and the University of Guelph’s Centre for Business and Student Enterprise. The accelerator concept emerged from the Guelph Lab, the city’s innovation partnership with the university.
From the ODX point of view, this pilot project is exactly what the open-data movement in Canada needs — a showcase to demonstrate how governments with data (about everything from dog licences to traffic movements) can work with entrepreneurs who are eager to use it in products they might develop or sell.
This fall, entrepreneurs will work alongside City of Guelph employees to deal with challenges that bedevil municipalities just about everywhere: wasteful water leaks, parking shortages in busy cores and low civic engagement in vital planning issues.
At the end, ideally, the city gets solutions to problems, and companies develop products, fed by open data, that they can sell to other municipalities.
There is a cool provision in the program that allows other public agencies — other municipalities most likely — to buy a product or service developed at the accelerator without having to put out a separate call for proposals.
Using open data to create products, build employment and grow companies is the great opportunity that ODX wants entrepreneurs and governments to explore.
But it’s not the only measure of success.
Even if, during the initial 3 month embed period, there is no home run in which a relatively finished product is created to solve a complex problem, the project will have made progress.
The city gets “some interesting prototype ideas. or we can decide to keep on working together,” says Andy Best, Guelph’s Open Data Program Manager.
Guelph is now taking in applications from individual entrepreneurs and companies interested in tackling the water, parking or civic-engagement challenges. The deadline is July 11 and we’ll know the successful applicants in early August.
In September, entrepreneurs picked for the program will embed themselves at city hall to work on the data and consult with their new public-service colleagues. “Accelerator” isn’t just a concept, it’s an actual space.
They’ll hold a solution demo day in mid-December.
All of this, by the way, came together remarkable quickly — six months. No small task.
One of things the city had to figure was how to make the accelerator program work within existing purchasing-and-procurement rules. In other words, the program has to function within a system it seeks to disrupt.
Traditional procurement practices — putting out tender calls and receiving bids — seem to favour bigger, frequent participants who have experience working in government and know the culture.
Smaller players have a harder time breaking in, which means governments aren’t exposed to radically different approaches to old problems. So, as it seeks to find solutions to other problems, the accelerator is dealing with an even more fundamental one.
ODX has been part of this initiative from its early days in January. We’ll connect the program to our partners within the Canadian Digital Media Network and to regional innovation centres across the country.
By helping the Civic Solutions Accelerator with such infrastructure as problem identification and data inventory, ODX will develop a framework for other governments to follow as they set out to work more closely with entrepreneurs.
Joseph Bou-Younes, ODX’s Data Entrepreneur-in-Residence, says the process itself is valuable in unearthing more data that innovators can use.
Yes, ODX is certainly excited by what’s happening in Guelph. The wall between entrepreneurs and the public service is beginning to crumble.
"We want,” Andy Best says, "to show that these innovative problem-solving models can flourish within local government.”
Kevin Tuer is Managing Director of Canada’s Open Data Exchange.
