GEO-C aims at increasing transparency, facilitating collaboration among citizens and enabling the participation of citizens in the improvement of their cities’ operations, quality of life, and local economy. The Open City Toolkit (OCT) is the resulting platform of the project, accruing in a single place all research outputs and contributions produced by the doctoral researchers. In essence, the OCT is a collection of tools, applications, services, datasets, specifications and guidelines to empower citizens to participate in and shape the future of their cities, and to deliver services based on open data that are useful for citizens, businesses and governing bodies alike.
Example tools are being added continually to the OCT, as they become available. Below are sample list of tools to improve transparency and enable citizen participation. The full list of components is accessible here
A web application for citizens & tourists to get a better overview of the crimes in Greater London.
An interactive map for citizens & city councils to see households data from Münster between 2010 and 2014 colourfully.
An interactive map for citizens & city councils to go through migration statistics from Münster between 2010 and 2014 in a nice way.
An interactive map for citizens & city councils to browse population data from Münster between 2010 and 2014 in a pleasant way.
An interactive map for citizens & city councils to get an idea about the number of employees subject to social insurance contributions in Münster between 2010 and 2014 in a nice way.
An interactive map for citizens & city councils to explore unemployment data from Münster between 2010 and 2014 in a pleasant way.
A platform for citizens & city councils to visualize apps and data usage within the Open City Toolkit.
A survey platform for city councils to collect data about how citizens' place perceptions, and their relationships, influence participation in a given urban area.
An interactive map for citizens & city councils to see results of the 2016 referendum regarding opening shops in the Münster city center in a nice way.
Curated datasets are continually being uploaded to Zenodo. Source codes of applications generated within the project are accessible from GitHub. Both Zenodo and GitHub are safe, according to their product descriptions (check here and here). Data from the OCT is redistributed under the CCO license (the data can be reused and modified by anyone) or the CC-BY license (the data can be reused and modified by anyone provided that the data creator is credited on any copy of the data made). Software code is redistributed under the Apache v2 license (every interested party can reuse the code without worrying about patents owned by contributors to the OCT code). In summary, datasets and code from the OCT are available on (reliably stable) online platforms; they are perpetually reusable, without any charge.
GEO-C is funded by the European Commission within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, International Training Networks (ITN), European Joint Doctorates (EJD). The funding period is January 1, 2015 - December 31, 2018, Grant Agreement number 642332 — GEO-C — H2020-MSCA-ITN-2014.