The City already publishes the numbers. We publish the story.
Calgary's Open Data Portal is one of the most transparent in Canada. Crime statistics, school directories, property assessments, parks, transit stops, services — all of it lives at Calagry City's open data portal, free and well-licensed.
The problem is shape. The raw data is published one dataset at a time, often in spreadsheet form, almost always without the cross-references a person actually thinks in. Nobody browsing for a place to live wants to download a CSV and join it against a polygon shapefile.
Calgary Communities YYC is that join, presented as a publication. Every community gets a single page that answers the questions a relocation prospect or a long-time resident might ask: What is it like here? Is it safe? What does it cost? What's changed?
Calm reporting. Sourced figures. Honest caveats.
- Attribution on every figure
- Every chart and number on this site carries a visible source line — which dataset it came from, when it was last refreshed, and any methodology notes. If we can't link it, we don't publish it.
- Cautious AI verbs
- When AI summarises a community, it speaks in cautious terms — appears to, tends to, observed. Never categorical. Every AI-generated paragraph is labelled and dated. The model output is grounded in the data shown on the same page.
- No red, no alarm
- Direction of change (crime rising, prices falling) is shown with weight and a small glyph — never with red type or a colour swap. The brand has no “danger” colour. Calm reading.
- Canadian English
- Neighbourhood, not neighborhood. Centre, not center. The community names are uppercase because the City's planning data publishes them that way; everywhere else, body copy follows local convention.
- Ads, clearly labelled
- The site is supported by non-intrusive advertising. Ads sit between sections, never inside a chart card or data table, and always carry an “Advertisement” label. Cookies for analytics and ads only run if you accept on first visit — decline and neither fires on your device. Details on the privacy page.
- Soft-delete only
- Records that disappear from the upstream source are archived with a reason, not erased. Historical context survives across syncs — communities that vanish from Calgary's planning dataset still show up in older reports.
Every section is sourced. Most of it is the City itself.
The bulk of what you see comes from the City of Calgary Open Data Portal — community boundaries, schools, property assessments, parks, services, fire stations, transit stops. Crime statistics come from the Calgary Police Service. Every section carries the source it was drawn from.
AI insights are generated monthly per community, grounded in the same dataset you see on the page. Every generated insight carries a date and a model attribution. We don't generate insights to be interesting — we generate them to summarise. Details on the methodology page.
Data licensed under the Open Government Licence — Calgary.
The City of Calgary publishes its data under the Open Government Licence — Calgary. This site reproduces and combines that data with the licence's attribution and acknowledgement requirements respected on every figure.
A publication, not an institution.
Calgary Communities YYC is a single-author publication rather than an institution. There is no editorial board, no team, and no funding round. What you see here is one person's reading of the same open data the City publishes. The project began as an exploration of the City's Open Data Portal and grew into the publication you are reading now. It also doubles as a developer's portfolio piece, which is why the typography, accessibility, and editorial restraint were worked through so deliberately.
Made in Calgary, for the city that built the data.