For our second instalment of Samara's "Profiles in Civics" we talked to Larry Franschman, a Toronto-based lawyer who helps run a number of innovative websites and services that provide Canadians with information on ways to engage with and access politics and government. According to Larry, he's just a guy "just trying to make commonsense improvements" because "that's everyone's job."  We liked Larry, and are excited to tell you about one of his online resources, Civic.ca, here on the Samara blog. 

Please tell us about civic.ca.  What does it do?
Civic.ca is a fast, easy, comprehensive way to find your elected representatives in Canada. It’s a website that allows you to type in your address and connect to the municipal, provincial and federal government representatives in your area. It also provides thumbnails of your municipality’s home or services page and your provincial and federal level government services pages for more context and convenience. The website serves as a way to organize government around you, not the other way around. 

What led you to create the site? 
In 2010 I developed vote.ca, which aimed to provide easy access to voting place information, and later also candidate listings, based on location and across jurisdictions. The usage and response of citizens, candidates, political parties and government to the service has been pretty amazing, and it has become a commonsense way for Canadians to get voting and election information. Civic.ca does the same thing for another information set we all share: elected representatives. The fact that such a service didn’t already exist shows the scope of work yet to be done in terms of how we harness the internet to better our democratic processes.  Government now has an online storefront, which is great, but we’ve barely started to see the benefits that open(ing) data have for increasing access and engagement. We’re behind schedule I think. 

Anything you'd like Canadians to know about this site in particular?
Civic.ca is the fastest, easiest way to find your multi-leveled government representatives and services in Canada.

What do you hope it achieves?
The service was built for speed, scalability and utility, and so I hope it gets used widely as a simple search tool for citizens, educators, advocates, and government. We use thumbnails to aid navigation and serve as a window on government web standards, so I hope it also promotes a more even municipal data layer as well as more open data cities, where ward specific presentation is possible. The idea for the site is to help us move towards a more citizen-centric way of organizing government and civic resources. 

What are your next steps with the site?
Short term will be to expand geographic coverage. I’ve added into the database municipal information for every city/town in Canada down to about 5000 population (Quebec a little more) based on last census, but I’d like to include every municipal website in Canada regardless of size; that’s our country online. The big picture is that there’s so much more government and civic information that can and should be organized around your location, for a personalized civic dashboard, so this project will continue to grow and I hope continue to frame public data for public good.

For a full list of the online engagement resources to which Larry Franschman devotes his time, visit http://our.ca/larry.franschman/. You can also reach him via Twitter @evote.