Join the HART team at the 2023 Canadian Open Data Summit in Victoria, Canada on November 24th, 2023. The summit will bring together open data advocates, practitioners, and users focused on the themes of open data, digital futures, AI, actionable data for equity, inclusion, and diversity, and open energy.

Sam Roberts is the Communications Officer for the Housing Assessment Resource Tools project out of UBC, where her role is to make housing data accessible and understandable to communities across Canada. Faced with the extraordinary hurdles to access land data for this research led her to spearhead a new project in land data access, specifically exploring the barriers that exist across Canada for researchers, governments, and individuals to basic information about available land data.

Mark J. Richardson is the Chief Technology Officer at Rich Analytics. He has 25+ Years of consulting-experience with public-sector clients at all-levels of Government in Canada, and was part of the City of Toronto’s Open Data Advisory Group which helped define the City’s first official Open Data Master Plan in 2018, and was a citizen-member of the City of Toronto’s Planning Review Panel (2015-2017). Mark is the Founder and Technical-Lead of the HousingNowTO.com affordable-housing tracking and transparency project since 2019. Using common tools such as Google maps, photographs, videos and data-visualization, HousingNowTO.com removes industry jargon, thereby minimizing misinformation and enhancing transparency and opportunities for genuine civic engagement. The HousingNowTO.com project was given an Innovation Spotlight by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation in 2021.

Valesa Faria is an accomplished city builder with over 15 years of professional experience in housing policy, real estate development, asset management and business development. As Director of Housing Policy & Strategy in the City of Toronto’s Housing Secretariat, Valesa is responsible for working with City divisions and agencies, government partners, the private sector, and community partners to support delivery of the City’s ambitious HousingTO 2020-2030 Action Plan.