Brampton Wins Award of Excellence

Brampton has been ranked one of Canada’s youngest large cities and one of the best places to live in Canada.

Brampton has been ranked one of Canada’s youngest large cities and one of the best places to live in Canada. We’re a growing city, undergoing constant improvement, and now, the City has won an award of excellence for a very cool initiative!

You may have noticed that Brampton has put forth one major new initiative for open data quite recently: Brampton’s GeoHub offers an entire online platform for the public to access government data across a ton of different sectors, such as Infrastructure, Arts, Culture, and Tourism, and Health and Safety.

This week, the City of Brampton received Esri Canada’s Award of Excellence for using geographic information system (GIS) technology for its Open Government initiative.

According to Esri, the GeoHub is “an open data platform which has increased the transparency of the City government to residents and saved money.”

Ultimately, the GeoHub makes public information more accessible using GIS. 

“By using GIS, Brampton has encouraged residents to access the City’s site and more deeply engage with their community.” says Alex Miller, president, Esri Canada. “This has also saved the taxpayers thousands of dollars. In the first year of its use, the City saved about 588 hours of staff time.”

That’s right – thousands of dollars were saved from your wallet thanks to the GeoHub!

Recently, Brampton was also ranked one of Canada’s most open cities for the same Open Government initiative, the GeoHub.

This is all part of the City’s OpenGov plan, for municipal transparency with data. Clearly, it’s working – we’ve made this list and jumped into the top ten most open cities within just one year.

Through the GeoHub, Bramptonians can explore, filter, download, visualize, and analyze a wide range of data to their liking. 

“In building a future ready city, we’re committed to excellence in government services. With the GeoHub, we are not only providing transparency in service; it is also our aim to foster innovation and transformation in how we interact with our citizens,” notes Joseph Pittari, Commissioner of Corporate Services for Brampton. “Through the GeoHub stories and mapping features, our residents can get a better understanding of their community and its surroundings.”

If you’d like, you can even create an app for Brampton using the data available and no coding! It’s a truly useful system.

“The project has been so successful that the number of open datasets served up through the GeoHub increased from 15 in the first year (2015) to 243 datasets, documents and apps today – a 1,500+ per cent increase,” say Esri and the City.

“And when more people work with better information, decision-making improves.”

For more details on Brampton’s Open Government initiatives, click here.

Go, Brampton!