Hacknight #125 – with Benjamin McNamee

Date: January 16, 2018

Venue: McKinsey & Company

Presenter: Ben McNamee is the Director of Measurement, Evaluation, and Business Intelligence at the Ontario Trillium Foundation. Ben oversees the Foundation’s business intelligence, impact measurement, program evaluation, and Open Data strategies.

Presenting: Ben spoke about his work building a data culture at Ontario Trillium Foundation. He touched on the recent launch of BI@OTF, their automated BI tool, and how this work supports the foundations strategy of bringing outcomes-focused granting and evidence-based decision making to the non-profit sector.

Highlights:

• Fostering a data-driven culture to better target, measure, and evaluate their impact
• On creating a data-driven culture: importance of leveraging existing behaviour vs. forcing adoption of new behaviours
• Importance of generating excitement around data culture to become “infectious. Examples included: “Fun Facts Friday” about date, hype video, scavenger hunt, data jams, upcoming hackathon

"When you have a question, is the first response: what does the data say?" @benjmcnamee on buildng a #dataculture at @ONTrillium pic.twitter.com/Z4VRh7eFZu

— Emily Macrae (@emilyamacrae) January 17, 2018

.@benjmcnamee building a culture of data @ONTrillium #CivicTechTuesday #CivicTechTO pic.twitter.com/12ul8sOdmW

— Raphael in Boston for NACTO 9/5-9/10 (he/him) (@DumasRaphael) January 17, 2018

@ONTrillium is using #data to move from reactive to proactive community investment. #dataculture @benjmcnamee #civictechTO @CivicTechTO pic.twitter.com/M8tipnZSoV

— Stuart McLaren (@StuartDMcLaren) January 17, 2018

Announcements:

• Open Data Team
  Something launches tomorrow? Yay!
  https://drive.google.com/open?id=1oLAG3XwgBALHKuUO5VTes0rcSf1tafCl
• Tech Reset Canada
  “A core objective and purpose of technology should be to advance the quality of life of all citizens.” (by Henrik Bechmann for Bianca Wylie)
  techresetcanada.org
  • There’s a new tech advocacy group that has just launched called Tech Reset Canada. It’s looking for new members to join on and to take part in the first of many campaigns.
  • This first campaign is about Toronto’s open data master plan
  • City of Toronto has had an Open Data policy since 2011, but for the first 5 years it has been slow to see investment and commitment.
  • The Open Data & Civic Tech Communities have been working with Staff & Council to have the City develop, adopt and fund the new open data master plan for 2-years
  • The new plan is expected to go to the Mayor’s Executive Committee on Wed. Jan. 24th (*next week).
  • Website and sign-up is techresetcanada.org – we’ll send details about how to get involved in a letter writing campaign.
  • Finally, big shout out to Mark Richardson for being such a persistent voice and force on the issue.
• Smart Cities Challenge
  Federal Government has launched this program
  $50 million up for grabs
  What should we pitch? Help us!
• MGCS Open Government Challenge
  Open Government challenge
  The Annual Open Government Symposium
  Looking for: anyone who has hackathon or conference experience!

Project Pitches:

Project	Lead(s)	Description / Needs
Civic Tech 101	Andrew	Go to the back room —> There will be a board game! Go with Andrew (guy in the hat)!
CodeAcross 2018 Planning	Alex	Hackathon planning for Code Across 2018 on March 3 at TPL. Challenge wrangling tonight.
Bike Parking	Jake	Description: A webapp which will allow cyclists to drop a pin on a map of Toronto indicating insufficiencies in bike parking infrastructure. We believe that the most valuable data to improve Toronto’s bike parking will be crowdsourced. What we’re doing today: Aligning teams for the release of our MVP–it’s an exciting time! What we need: Developers, Designers, Researchers, Data Analysts, Communicators
TTC Subway Dashboard Project	Raphael	Transit agencies are bad at communicating successes and failures: leaving users with most salient experience in their memory: their worst one By communicating transit performance in a way that users understand, they might better appreciate how good transit is while understanding why it’s bad when it’s bad and then. Build the political will to improve transportation. Been scraping a bunch of subway data from the TTC, still working on processing data Looking for:  Data geeks, A logo https://github.com/CivicTechTO/ttc_subway_times
Law and Design Team	Avery	Improving access, usability of legal information. Need: User researchers, graphic designers, website builders, anyone with interest in legal issues
Women and Colour	Mohammed	What we’re doing tonight: Going over some updates in design Reviewing outstanding development tasks Determine next steps for development What we need: Javascript developers (React + Sails) for website development Digital marketers for speaker engagement Community managers for partnership outreach Bonus: Person good with grant applications to apply for OTF grant Womenandcolor.com
TheCarded.ca	Sharky	What we’re doing: User testing a book What we need: Your voice (in january)
Chalmers Cards	Zach	Description: Chalmers Cards are laser-cut wooden handouts that explain how to access public resources for folks in tight financial situations. Stuff like toll free numbers for shelter referral, financial aid registration, and free legal aid. The cards are laser cut onto wood so the information doesn’t get crumpled. Plus people think they’re cool so the cards don’t get lost! These cards have been a real hit! What we need: -Graphic Designer to help design the card layout! -Laser Cutters -Feedback

 

Participants: 72