## 3 Case Study: Open Data at the Canadian Municipal Level
Moreover, many other Canadian cities would follow suit with their own open data projects and apps competitions, and an Edmonton-led alliance of Canadian municipalities known as the \"G-4\" would facilitate a further sharing of competencies and ambitions in this regard [17]. In a manner akin to the DC experience upon which the Edmonton model was based, therefore, data availability and a corresponding apps competition may be viewed as small but important steps along a winding and potentially more transformative path. With respect to this wider transformative potential (and thus the relationship between open data and wider forms of open and innovative governance), three aspects of the City of Edmonton example are noteworthy. First, open data personifies the notion of a \"smart community\", a concept first devised in California in the 1990's by researchers there and one that continually becomes more relevant through various phases of technological and online innovation, including today's emphasis on mobility. Indeed, underscoring this relationship, Edmonton has been a participant in IBM's showcase \"smart cities\" initiative in recent years, a program that reinforces the importance of proximity and community even in an increasingly virtual and mobile era (a summary of the applicability of the concept to Edmonton is available online [18]). The notion of a smart city is a fluid and widely-encompassing concept (as is the case in Edmonton where the label under the auspices of the IBM program includes an array of initiatives), but it nonetheless reminds us that there are important public and collective interest as well as private interest dimensions to technological and information infrastructures and resources and their deployments and usage. Secondly, the City of Edmonton's initial open data catalogue and apps competition are now viewed through the wider municipal prism of \"open government\"--an expansive shift in language meant to address some of the wider cultural cleavages at play in a public sector that has not traditionally viewed information resources and their management as functions conducive to systemic openness. Accordingly, the City's pursuit of open government has revealed fundamental tensions within the public sector stemming from, in most all democracies the underlying historical principles of secrecy and hierarchy that have codified information usage and management. On the one hand, there is a commitment to heightened transparency that has become a hallmark of the Internet era. Yet on the other hand, there is trepidation and recognition of limits in this regard. Indeed, in the digital era there is evidence that many governments have sought to limit openness in attempts to ensure consistency in disclosing and messaging information--or alternatively in justifying blockages of access on a widening cadre of policy and political grounds [19]. Access to information system have thus become increasingly formalized and costly processes of reviewing and administering requests--reflecting a mindset of imposed rather than embraced and regularized openness. Such tensions relate directly to the City of Edmonton experience (and a wider evolution of open data in Canada, as explained further below). City officials responsible for open government initiatives in several municipalities acknowledge considerable friction in moving their agenda forward through a legalistic and regimented access to information regime built up over decades (with considerable resources devoted to such causes). Moreover, an online review of the City of Edmonton's main portal finds the open government agenda (including open data catalogues) subsumed within a more traditional communications apparatus much more predicated upon informing rather than involving the public in, local affairs [20]. Accordingly, the coexistence of traditional media intermediaries and new social media capacities is an important dimension of the open data experience both externally and internally.