About Open Council

What is Open Council?

Open Council is an ad-free, non-partisan, independent, non-governmental site with a simple aim: to make it much easier for anyone to follow what is going on in their municipality’s council.

It is a collection of encyclopedic information about municipalities, election candidates and elected officials that can be attributed to reliable, published sources in an effort to pick up where local news and Wikipedia leaves off in the pursuit of democratizing knowledge.

To do this, we make information more easily accessible by publishing Open Data and data acquired through Freedom of Information requests while following Content Standards with the goals of improving municipal transparency and accountability, and increasing civic engagement.

What are the goals of Open Council?

  • Increase government transparency and accountability
    Encourage and assist our representatives in making better decisions by increasing transparency and accountability.
  • Increase public engagement and participation
    Encourage community involvement in local government activities and decision-making processes by making information easier to access.
  • Improve government decision making
    Encourage data-driven decision-making by representatives and voters by assessing and comparing the effectiveness and efficiency of municipalities.
  • Promote Open Data adoption
    Encourage the implementation of Open Data policies by municipalities by providing examples of implementation and use cases.

Promote the use of performance indicators

Base the success of plans and projects on specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and programmed results.

Promote jurisdictional scans

Many municipalities (or their consultants) conduct “jurisdictional scans” of “comparator municipalities” before implementing new programs or making significant changes to existing ones.

Why?

Municipalities in Ontario had total revenues of almost $57 billion in 2020. However, municipal politics doesn’t get nearly as much coverage and visibility as federal or provincial politics, and individual stories or topics are hard to follow.

In addition, most municipal entities such as candidates, council members and organizations are not eligible for their own Wikipedia page as they do not meet Wikipedia’s notability test, which states:

Just being an elected local official, or an unelected candidate for political office, does not guarantee notability, although such people can still be notable if they meet the general notability guideline.

What is Open Data?

Open Data is structured data that is made freely available online for anyone to download, modify, build on and distribute without any legal or financial restrictions in a way that is easy to access (eg. searchable website) and in a format that is simple to reuse (eg. tables in an Excel spreadsheet).

Under an Open Data approach, all data is required to be made open and available by default, unless there is a legal, privacy, security, confidentiality or commercially-sensitive reasons reason for it to remain confidential/closed.

The data we use is from the thousands of datasets governments already collect, generate and maintain for their own use that have been made available through Open Data initiatives.

I want to help/volunteer/partner with you. Can I?

If you feel like you have something to contribute, we absolutely want to hear from you. Please reach us at [email protected]. We usually respond within 24 business hours.

If you are interested in tracking your municipality’s town council, join our Discord. You can help by monitoring votes taken during council meetings, conflict of interest declarations, integrity commissioner complaints and investigations and more.

There will also be times when our team reaches out to you to get your help. We hope you say ‘yes’!!!

Contact us

We are not MPs, MPPs or council members, and we don’t work for the government. We are only interested engaged Canadians. If you want to get in touch with your elected representatives, enter your postal code on this page (coming soon), or use the call or email buttons found at the bottom of council members’ profile pages. Please don’t contact us for help with government problems or to express general political opinions.

Questions, corrections and comments related to this site are very welcome, though! We are always looking to improve. You can complete this form or send an email.

Data sources

Open Council contains information licensed under:

Attribution

Unless otherwise noted, the original content on this website is made available under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

This means that it is completely free of copyright and can be used or shared as you wish. Though not strictly required, we do kindly request you attribute us by linking back to our homepage from your publication or project.

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