Earlier this week I was the keynote speaker for the Toronto Innovation Showcase. One of the things the mayor announced was the Toronto Open project. This activity opens up much of the cities information for the residents of Toronto to mashup into applications. They also announced an effort to coordinate the release of even more information.

By end of the first set of presentations there were already applications created for the iphone using some of the data.

The Toronto residents are being asked:

• What matters to you?
• What data do you want to access?
• What datasets and applications would you find useful?
• What's missing from this site?

This project is definitely looking to tap into the creativity the focus in Toronto can apply to problems on those cold winter nights. Here is another blog post on the event.