I am interested in deliberative & participatory democracy and the way I go about this is via open data. Public data are created by all levels of government for governing (e.g. Census, Radarsat data). My work as of late, has been toward making OUR public data sets available to the public at no cost, in machine readable open and accessible formats within a creative common or the like legal infrastructure. Open Data is one way for Canadians to have what they need to inform public policy decisions along with our governors. Some of my uses public data can be seen in this atlas (http://gcrc.carleton.ca/homelessness) or these reports (http://www.fcm.ca/English/View.asp?mp=1237&x=1115). I have a particular interest in the preservation of scientific data, communication & geospatial data infrastructures, cybercartography and olfactory media. Here are a few things I am involved with:

datalibre.ca – http://datalibre.ca/
civicaccess.ca – list – http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss
ogWiFi – http://www.ogwifi.ca/

Bio – https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
Publications – https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault+Publications

I’m interested in connecting with anyone (particularly researchers) with an interest in cognition, in particular as it relates to judgment and decision-making, working memory and cognitive biases. Also, anyone working in related disciplines, such as behavioural economics.

I run a startup that has developed a novel decision-assisting software application that is currently being used in the e-commerce space:

2-minute overview video:

http://www.choicebot.com/cber/video/

My talk from the recent TEDxOttawa event:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRW-HR2VjSo

Nick.