I cannot believe the uptake that this project received from Edmonton's open data community. I had several people step forward and offer to help including Catherine Szabo, Mack Male and Aaron Budnick. Despite this enthusiastic response, though, I am going to defer the start of this project until early March for one very good and exciting reason: The Edmonton Public Library has asked that we partner and make Naming Edmonton a community project. Great, right? But what does it mean?

While we have not discussed the details as of yet, I can say that Naming Edmonton will be featured on Open Data Day, and from this I can also imagine a much higher profile and thus greater citizen take up and engagement.

Citizen involvement is important to the project's success for a bunch of reasons:

Technical support - we could sure use some help migrating a lot of word files to excel;
Defining a work plan. I know it's boring, but having a plan to get from Ada to Zoie would be helpful in knowing what to do;
Thoughts on what the name data could be used for, this will help define some additional columns that we could crowdsource, and;
Naming Edmonton will need a huge number of people willing to populate the empty spreadsheet - in effect filling up the 10000 cells that will complete the dataset.

It's an ambitious project, and will require a large crowd from which to source data, but I think with the right plan and exposure we can do it.

What do you think? Let me know.