Biography | Ryan Merkley — The City Hall Showcase That Opened Toronto's Data Catalogue

People treat a municipal open-data portal as a technical launch that follows a staff report.

Toronto's first catalogue arrived as a mayoral announcement in this civic square.

On 2 November 2009 Mayor David Miller opened toronto.ca/open at the Toronto Innovation Showcase, held at City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square.

The site put machine-readable city files — transit, parks, licensed child care, priority neighbourhoods — under a royalty-free licence anyone could reuse.

CBC reported the launch the next morning.

A developer published a ward map forty-six minutes after the announcement, according to NOW Magazine.

The work behind that day sat in the mayor's office.

Ryan Merkley, then a senior advisor to Miller, had spent the year pushing the file.

At ChangeCamp Toronto in January 2009 he asked civic hackers what an open-data wishlist would look like.

A 2 November 2009 Slaw interview with organizer Mark Kuznicki recorded that question as the hinge between a community meetup and a city website.

Toronto's own open-data history page later dated the first catalogue to fall 2009 and the formal policy to 2011.

The portal came first. The by-law caught up.

That sequence matters.

Merkley was not a chief information officer. He was a political staffer who treated public data as something the city already owed the people who paid for it.

The City of Toronto still runs an open-data program from this hall.

The first files were few. The principle was not.

Cambridge, Ontario, is listed as Merkley's birthplace. The public record does not pin a hospital or a house, and this project does not.

The first place where his career leaves a documented mark is this square, on a Monday in November, when a mayor flipped a switch and a catalogue went live.

From here the same argument — that public knowledge should be reusable — followed him to Mozilla, Creative Commons, and Wikimedia.

The building is still City Hall. The square still carries Nathan Phillips's name.

A visitor standing on the pavement can see the curved towers Miller's government occupied when the site went up.

Photos: Toronto City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square, Taxiarchos228, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Rannie Turingan, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (9 May 2014).