I’ve been playing with doing this for a few months now— mapping the data that comes to the public in report-form regarding changes to properties within the City of Brantford.

Credit to my colleague here at the Expositor, Susan Gamble, who suggested it to me in the late summer. The idea is that you would map all the different things that cross city council’s desk in one form or another. Things like requests to rezone a property, minor variances before the committee of adjustment, requests for official plan amendments and the data that comes to the community services committee in terms of demolition permits and building permits.

Caveats as always— building permits are only captured in the monthly reports to council if the value of construction is over $50,000. As the map grows, there may be the occasional property pin where the data becomes stale, meaning I don’t get a chance to update the information that pops up with the pin.

I’ve entered into this with no overriding reason. It’s not, for the moment, pinned (ha!) to any related project I’m working on for publication in the pages of the Expositor, though it may be in the future.