Welcome to developer.gov.bc.ca
[Editor’s Note (November 9, 2019): This post was originally posted elsewhere 5 years ago today. In the interest of making our “historic record” available here on Medium, we’re reposting a series of articles originally posted — opportunistically, there was nowhere else to do so at the time, we didn’t have a website…heck, we still don’t have a blog— on the DataBC site. As we do so, we’re enjoying a handful of ironies. First, while this post referenced the launch at that time of developer.gov.bc.ca, that site didn’t really become a real thing until years later. Also, we — the current Exchange leadership — were alerted when reading this post of two things previously unknown to us: (1) The original founders of the BC Developers’ Exchange, while not themselves heavy hitters on Twitter, had nonetheless established a hashtag for their work: #bcdevex. Searching it today, was also found out (2) that unaffiliated developer Monica Granbois had created a bot to repost Opportunities posted at bcdevexchange.org: https://twitter.com/bcdevexbot. We’re now trying to figure out whether this is all very awesome, or the source of a bit of a :facepalm: … think we’ll go with the latter (Hi Monica! And thank you.) Back to the article from 5 years ago…]
Here is Our Idea
Through initiatives like DataBC and Open Information, the B.C. government has made great strides towards providing greater access to quality data and services. Improved access to data will help enable a thriving data economy. We want to engage developers, industry and the broader public sector in a different, more focused way as part of a broader effort to stimulate technology growth in B.C.
As part of our ongoing effort to improve access to data and web services, we created developer.gov.bc.ca, which will act as a new web portal to public sector Application Programming Interface (APIs). Currently, public sector APIs and web services are scattered across multiple websites, which is both cumbersome and convoluted. To make your work as a developer easier, we are listing them here, and will add more as they become available.
We also need your help to design a program that not only improves your experience as a developer but also helps us understand how working with public sector digital resources like code, data and access to services through APIs might create opportunities for you and your business to grow. We want to understand how we can do better at providing code, data and APIs, and explore purchasing approaches that can help government buy what you make. We intend to consult a broad range of people in technology, industry and the broader public sector, for their views on how a provincial developer program — what we’re calling the BC Open Development Framework — can be used to further the economic and social progress so important to the success of our province.
We’ll be writing about the progress of the work on the DataBC blog so be sure to read and give your feedback.
Try Something
The public sector in B.C. offers a number of access points to data and web services including APIs. A few examples that you can try today include:
- BC Geographical Names Developer Web Site
- Geomark Web Service Developer Guide
- BCLaws API
- City of Surrey Open Data API
- TransLink Open API
You can find more web services in our Catalogue.
Originally published at https://data.gov.bc.ca on November 9, 2014.
