This week, supporters of the open data movement celebrated a major victory in Toronto, as Mayor David Miller announced that not only would the City release all its transit data to Google Transit by mid-2009, but that the City of Toronto would explore options to “open source everything” that it does.

The announcement was made at the City of Toronto Web 2.0 Summit, which started off as an extremely frustrating exercise because the morning featured a panel by city councillors that had no clue what they were talking about. I’m glad I suffered through the panel and stuck around, because Mark Surman’s luncheon keynote was exactly what the mayor (and the rest of the city) needed to hear.

Mark’s presentation is embedded below, but I do recommend you all to visit his post so you can listen to the audio of his presentation as well — not only because he gave me a shout out, but also because he’s remarkably engaging. His keynote obviously made an impact on the mayor, who made his bold promises based on the challenges that Mark outlined during the talk.

Torontoist has a great breakdown of the Summit, but for some more insight into building a better Toronto through participation on the open web, check out some of the posts by some of the luminaries of the Toronto web community.

Mark Kuznicki, the man I turn to for all things community, talks about the promise of the mayor’s announcement:

The moment was the culmination of a lot of our hopes and dreams for a city that understands the power of open, the meaning of participation and a signal of a more effective and responsive government of and for the people of Toronto. Will Pate and I have offered our assistance to make this vision a reality and we hope others will join us.

Tamera Kremer had some great ideas on how to make such an event even better in the future:

Some kind of “next steps” to keep moving the discussion and planning forward and encourage participation — there are, as we saw at the event, a lot of talented individuals inside the government who could easily be the point persons to manage something like a wiki (which if the two days had included workshops or similar direct participation could have been frameworked) to solicit ideas and keep the citizens who wanted to engage and share informed of what was on the agenda (and recruit organically from their local circles - build momentum). It’s a challenge of course to coordinate in government, but “idea labs” are something that should be on the radar.

Michael Lewkowitz is taking some of the thoughts and ideas discussed at the Summit and starting a process of coming up with next steps:

So I ask, what do you think about the premise, the conversation, and do you want to participate in this conversation (or maybe you are already having it)? A couple of us have floated the idea of having a conversation at MaRS the morning of Dec. 11th.

Toronto has always been a hotbed for web-savvy people that are engaged in civic issues (see Metronauts, SustainabilityCamp, OpenCities, OneBigLibrary, etc.) and it’s great to know that the City is now committed to listening to those people.

There are exciting times ahead for this city, and I’m glad that I’ve been invited to be a small part of the excitement ahead.