Aldermen Brian Pincott and Joe Ceci are putting a motion before council on Monday, directing administration to outline a strategy to make city data more available and easily accessible to citizens.

DJ Kelly broke the story on his blog today. You can find it, including the full text of the motion here. Currently, there are already a number of reports, as well as council agendas and minutes available on the city website, but, according to Pincott, this would also make available raw data.

"We've crunched the numbers for our purposes," he says. "Now we can open it up to let people do what they want with it." He adds that the idea was first brought to him by Kelly, and others active in the online community after they saw it being done in other cities.

Of course, there probably will be privacy concerns coming from some camps, but the motion directs administration to identify information that can be disclosed "while respecting privacy and security concerns." Kelly has more about this on his recent post.

Ceci's two cents on the motion were, "It is important because, as Calgarians, we've all paid for this information to be collected. We should protect for privacy and security and those kind of things, but people should be able to use information the city collects."

Pincott says he is very excited about the possibilities, even though he doesn't know what they are yet. "Who knows?" he says. "That's the nice thing, by making it open source people will do things we haven't even thought of with the data. It's the power of we; getting the city more engaged with the community."