Nitobi Fulfills Government 2.0 Initiative with VanGuide, A Social Map for Vancouver

In early 2010, Nitobi teamed up with Microsoft Canada and Vancouver open government experts to build a web and mobile social mapping application that would make City of Vancouver government data more easily accessible and useful than ever before. The result is VanGuide, available for free at http://vanguide.cloudapp.net and on iTunes for the iPhone. The VanGuide website and iPhone app provide an easy way for Vancouver residents and visitors to access, tag, rate and comment on Vancouver landmarks and locations.

VanGuide combines two key technologies: Vancouver’s Open Data catalogue and Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) platform.

Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue is the City of Vancouver’s initiative to encourage citizen engagement, foster digital innovation and improve service delivery. It provides public city data freely in a variety of human- and machine-readable data formats. Some of the catalogue data includes: bikeways, city boundaries, parks, dog off-leash parks, fire halls, parking meters, rapid transit lines, shorelines, and even building footprints. Importantly, Microsoft’s OGDI puts government data in the cloud, making it easily accessible for developers like Nitobi to access and work with the data.

VanGuide renders City of Vancouver open data on a social city map where user can click on landmark categories-such as libraries, schools or bus stops-to discover the services closest to them. Users can tag the landmarks or add their own comments and map data.

“Yes, we want users to rate their favorite parks and community centers,” said Jesse MacFadyen, “But, we also want them to add their own personal data, like the location of the best sushi restaurant in town, or where they first met their wife. We hope users will add info about their personal experiences at specific locations so that VanGuide offers more perspective than just a point on a map.”

Nitobi developers Jesse MacFadyen and Shazron Abdullah built VanGuide on the Microsoft Azure platform. Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform that allows applications to be hosted and run on Microsoft datacenters. It serves as a runtime for VanGuide and provides a set of services that allows development, management and off-premises application hosting. “Microsoft Azure is an easy framework to work with and provided a strong foundation for VanGuide,” said Jesse.

Because VanGuide would be both a Web and mobile app, including iPhone, Microsoft looked to work with experts in cross-platform development. “We actively work with specialists like Nitobi to advance application development using Open Data catalogues on a variety of platforms to help government organizations meet their transparency, citizen participation and agency collaboration goals. By helping Canadian cities transform how they deliver services, our continued focus is on interoperability and helping enrich the experience of the user,” said Nik Garkusha, Open Source Strategy Lead, Microsoft Canada Inc.

Another innovative app feature is VanGuide’s sign-in system. Rather than having to create new login credentials, users sign-in to VanGuide with their Twitter credentials. By entering a Twitter name and password, users can immediately interact with the map and add new data. VanGuide even displays tweets occurring near a user’s location so she can see what others geographically close to her are talking about.

The VanGuide project code base has been released as an open source framework to allow others to create mash-ups using the framework. By open sourcing the framework, Nitobi and Microsoft hope to see lots of citizen participation and collaboration.

“The open source nature of the project really appeals to us,” said Andre Charland, Nitobi’s CEO. “As creators of the popular PhoneGap open source project, we see the value of collaborating with the development community to build bigger and better projects over time.”

Check out the VanGuide website or download the free iPhone app from the iTunes store.