Well, I can give you a couple of examples.
A very brief one is that we had an app that was developed, called VanTrash. Anybody in the public could dial up and find out when their trash and recycling were going to be collected.
What that did—and I think Monsieur Michaud mentioned it—was that our own staff on the 311 line and in the sanitation department actually started to realize that their schedules and how they did their work were now being analyzed and critiqued by the public. So they're taking quite a different attitude to how they set up their schedules. And our 311 staff are using that app immediately so they can turn a citizen's call around much more quickly.
On a more complex agenda, we recently reported back to council on our housing and homelessness agenda, which is a very high-priority issue for our mayor and council. It's a very difficult problem in Vancouver. It's nothing new. It's been going on for a long time, but we have a council and a mayor who really want to steepen the curve of making some positive change.
We spent many months developing a presentation to them that had a lot of data in it and that collected data that wasn't normally brought into that discussion. We haven't put it on the website in an open data form—in other words, that people could go in and analyze. But we just took the simple step of taking that PowerPoint that told the comprehensive story in about 60 slides and making it available to the media and putting it on our website. It's amazing the response from so many different partners and agencies and even individual citizens. And the media have come back to us to said, “Wow, I understand this whole issue much better than I did yesterday before I went through it.”
And it's not a terribly high-tech way to do business, but I think we're learning that telling the story and using good data and the best data that you have and then being able to share that—particularly if people can go in and analyze your data once you get your data sets—is very powerful and everybody gets smarter, and I believe we'll move faster.