OpenFile Comes to Ottawa

A little more than a year ago, Nick Taylor-Vaisey sent me an email. “OpenFile comes to Ottawa” was the subject line. I didn’t know Nick, at the time, and the name OpenFile meant even less to me.

It was a concise email. It described OpenFile as “a collaborative news outlet that launched earliet this year in Toronto” and went on to invite me to meet with Nick and possibly come on board as OpenFile expanded to Ottawa. His pitch – that OpenFile was “a sort of marriage between citizen journalism and professional journalism” where story ideas would come directly from the community – appealed to me. I read the message. Then I ignored it.

Why would a journo with experience in public broadcasting and a hard-on for community reporting ignore a message like that? Easy. I thought I had heard it all before. As a freelancer, with some decent experience, I get emails much like Nick’s fairly often. They usually describe some intriguing and innovative online platform for journalism – investigative, long-form, public (take your pick) – and go on to explain why I should get involved. Of course, I’ll have to work for little or no money, the pitch continues, and that, frankly, is where I lose interest. I’d love to help, but I can’t afford to do it for nothing or next-to.

Luckily (for me) Nick emailed again and luckily (for me) I was intrigued enough to take a closer look at the OpenFile site for Toronto. That’s when I signed on. And I was thrilled to be part of the Ottawa launch. Now, I haven’t made a heap of money freelancing for OpenFile over the past year, but I think I've been compensated fairly. And, more importantly, I've also had the opportunity to be part of a very cool journalism experiment.

There have been some glitches along the way. No doubt. For example, I scored a heck of a scoop when I stumbled upon the fact that Toronto mayor Rob Ford had exaggerated his academic (and football) experience at Carleton University. That garnered some attention in the Toronto Star and at J-Source. Nice splash for a new online upstart. Too bad a computer error in the posting date made it look like the Toronto Star had our scoop. Fail. (David Rider, Urban Affairs Bureau Chief at the Star, was good enough to credit OpenFile Ottawa, at least.)

In general, however, freelancing for OpenFile has been a blast! I've had the chance to publish some really cool things like this funky little map that shows the location of licensed childcare providers across Ottawa and the age of children accepted into care. It hasn't made a big media splash, but many parents have thanked me for putting the map together. That's because it highlights, among other things, just how hard it is to find licensed care for kids younger than 18MO in Ottawa and added some real local context to the daycare debate that was part of the 2011 Federal Election. Score one for the public sphere. Yeah! Can you tell I’m proud?

I've reporter plenty of other stories for OpenFile over the past year. Some of them were better than others, but all of them were stories that just wouldn’t otherwise have been told. OpenFile has grown plenty in that time as well. I hope that continues. Welcome to Ottawa OpenFile. Congrats on a successful first year. Pleasure to know you.