 within the US. And there is a shift in the US to open data. So there's a lot of communities within the states that have all of their information online and we know through our research that investors and site selectors are doing the majority of their research online. So it's really critical to have the broad amount of data that is required in an online manner. The International Economic Development Council have their data selection standards that you may be familiar with and that's on average about over a thousand economic data points that investors and site selectors expect communities to have on hand. Additionally, through the research we've seen that where six or eight years ago site selectors would maybe have, you know, six to eight months to do their research that's really crunched down now into six or eight weeks. So that information needs to be available right away whether the investor and site selector is looking online or whether they're calling up the communities themselves to get answers to this kind of question. Now in terms of capacity, you know, one of the challenges that we've seen is that there are some communities across BC that don't have the resources, the capacity to undertake some of this work because it's quite a lot of research and pulling together of the facts and stats as I'm sure you may have experienced. So certainly there are some organizations across the province that do have the staffing and the resources to do this but we can recognize that there's a bit of a gap that we want to help bridge. So the Community Profiles application that is on the BritishClemia.ca site right now does provide some of this data but it's for less than 50% of BC's incorporated communities and there are no profiles for First Nations. In terms of the opportunities side of things, there were about up to a think a thousand and Amy you could chime in but about a thousand opportunities one time within opportunities BC so it's a lot of work to get those opportunities in and to manage those community profiles. Also it was clear to us that the applications themselves were leading investors or visitors to the websites down what we say you know is cul-de-sac. They have to go into the site, find out information and then backtrack out of the site to find information about what opportunities might exist in that community or vice versa if they're interested in a community they have to exit the site and go back in somewhere else to learn. So we really wanted to bring all of these together and over and above all of these challenges in the world of online search Google has been changing their algorithms for Google Pages where if your site is not mobile, mobile responsive, you get a lesser ranking within Google. So that is also a challenge because not all communities have their economic development pages optimized for mobile and so that's a big change that's out there as well. So what we decided we needed to be able to do was provide BC communities with a greater profile online with the economic data that we know investors need. We want to allow a forum where investors can self-match to communities and opportunities and we want to provide communities with the instant access to the data that they need to respond. So what we've done is we've integrated the information we currently have available on our website which is a lot of facts and stats about BC's competitive advantage in the priority sectors and we've been able to integrate in the investment opportunities and community profiles and so that is what we are here to talk about today. With the website we already have in place, BritishColumbia.ca. It is our primary vehicle for international online marketing. It is a part of all of the work we do with our trade and investment reps around offices in countries and cities across the world and it is our 24-7 virtual trade rep. So we know that there are points of information that investors and international audiences might want to understand about our sectors and they'll be able to come straight to our site and find that and now they'll be able to understand more about the specific communities and those opportunities. In terms of reach for this website we have about 700,000 page views in the last year and 30% of that was from international audiences where China was the largest component of international views to our website. The site itself is translated into Korean simplified Chinese and Japanese and also it is responsive to the Google sites like I mentioned momentarily. All right so for the data that is on this site that we'll go through in a moment I just thought I would give you a quick snapshot of the type of data that the community profiles will have. So we're thinking of it as microsites so there's about over 390 individual microsite pages for communities across British Columbia and those are municipalities, regional districts, first nations, as well as the economic regions in the province. So building on that we have up to about 1,300 data points per community that we've been able to roll up together in a centralized fashion for pushing half a million data points that are available to communities across BC and investors in a format that is easy to use and analyze. So the types of data that we have within this site that you'll see in a moment. So demographics and labor force, major employers, we've got access to maps, we have listings of sites and buildings and opportunities. We have a lot of information about transportation so that is proximity to whether it's ports or airports, we have railway data, the major sectors, proximity to research and education facilities and quality of life information. So part of this information is stored within a centralized government database so this is so that we can do the work to collect the data and make sure the data is up to date and then it automatically and dynamically will appear on the profile page for a given community. Now some of the data points that are available through the site are provided directly by the community so some of you may have been in touch, received a call or outreach from the BC Economic Development Association and I believe we have Dale on the line today as well listening in. So the BC Economic Development Association had reached out to communities and to gather some of the community managed data so there are some data points that we'll look at in a moment that are best provided by the community so that's about who your contact is and kind of a marketing description and some of the quality of life measures as well. Also within this data is a connection to the First Nations Consultative Areas database so that's about traditional asserted traditional territories and that's embedded within the site as well. One of the primary building blocks of this whole application is around the concept of open data and sharing data so there are multiple different organizations both within government and outside of government that are collecting and using this type of information and what we really wanted to do was centralize it so that more people and organizations can take advantage of the work it's just a lot more efficient and it means that everybody is using the same data so the way that we're doing that is with the BC Economic Atlas is another application within JTST you might have participated in a recent webinar so that application is using some of the same data as well as the First Nations Economic Development Database that is a project of the Aboriginal Business and Investment Council and so we're pulling in some information from there as well. In terms of opportunities what we've really tried to do is automate the generation of those opportunities within the site. We understood that with opportunities BC it had a peak of around a thousand but there was a lot of work that would go into maintaining that and so we thought that we could look to partners who were already in the environment that were doing similar type of work in terms of showcasing different opportunities so what we've done is we have partnered with Venture Connect to be able to draw in businesses for sale that are for sale across the province and there are listings throughout the province through them and we've pulled in sites and buildings for commercial and industrial real estate through a company called Spacelist which is Vancouver based but they have listings for across the province and across the country as well. Those two automated feeds will give us around 6,000 opportunities right off the bat when we launch and soft launch is in a couple of weeks and so that way communities have these opportunities right off the bat on the pages and they're integrated into those community profiles which again I'll show you in a moment but we're also enabling communities to focus on the unique investment opportunities and that's that first box you see on the screen there and that is where we've built a flexible platform that communities can enter in opportunities that maybe are municipal in nature or perhaps it's a First Nations investment in partnership opportunity or it could be partnerships and investments for private companies so it could be looking for our D partners or equity investment so we've created it in a way that we are able to provide a platform to showcase all of these different types of opportunities and make it as simple as possible to bring in that information and provide investors what it is that they need and I will also state that for the Venture Connect and the Spacelist opportunities this is our starting point for pulling in data from organizations that already collect it so as long as the technology is there on another on another listing we would be able to work to pull that in and so at this time these are the two that we were able to work with so this is this is just a point in time that we will continue to evolve so I will jump into the demo in just a moment but Josh I don't know if you had a question you were going to ask at this point yeah no that's that's great thanks Sue for for the presentation thus far just a quick poll just to help us give a better sense of of how many people are watching the webinar with you just helps us get a better sense of of numbers because you know that some of you do partner up so on the screen in front of you please click the the radio button that that best applies to you and we'll close the poll in probably about 20 seconds or so good seeing lots come in here we've got about 88 percent of you voted 90 percent that's great thank you wonderful couple people asleep at the wheel that's all right and yeah with 93 percent I think I will close the poll there thanks very much well that's great too I'll I'll hand it back to you for for the live demo thank you all right I am going to jump in here now tell me is it the right screen up yeah you're you're going to go there yeah you got the right screen awesome okay perfect forgive me all righty so some of you may already be familiar with the British Columbia dot ca website that was redeveloped within the last two years and is our primary online push for international marketing when it comes to exports as well as investment attraction so within the new site that is launching again in a couple of weeks the new features that is we know that investors often come through our site looking for information on a sector as opposed to coming in looking for information on the community or an opportunity so what we've done is integrated the opportunities in a community information within our sector pages so you can see here one of the example pages that we have now I should also state that the information that you see on the screen that this is dummy data because this is our prototype site again we're soft launching in a couple of weeks so so there are no cows involved in the ICT and wireless sector that I know of nor are there grapes so anyway so on a sector page a lot of this information you'll see here is already available on the site but what's new about it is that we've been able to integrate some of the information that is community specific so one of the categories we have on the community profile pages relates to leading employers we've heard from investors that they want to understand who those leading employers are in the area so that they may even end up reaching out to those employers to find out you know how their success has been and how they find at the labor market and different different questions like that so it provides good context to an investor so we draw that information in on to the sector page here so we always will show a connection back to the community that that company is from another dynamic part of the sector pages that we have is around the areas of concentration and again this is just a placeholder map but what this map is designed to do is show where in the province there is a particular concentration in labor force for a given sector so we'll be able to show this information for at the regional district level and the economic region level as well so perhaps you would see a strong representation in the Fraser Valley for example if this was the agri-foods page so and on the bottom of our sector pages we'll be able to incorporate opportunities so we would show the three most recent opportunities that are in this given sector moving towards the bottom of the page we have success stories and we know that investors want to read those success stories to see who's gone before them in their given sector so it's a bit of a companion piece to that leading employers along the same line that investors want to understand what else has happened in that sector or in that region in times recent times gone past so for success stories we will have them embedded here that's already something we have on our website but there will be new functionality and within the new system and it will also appear on community profile pages so I'll take a moment now and jump over to one of our community profile pages there we are we've got camlips as our example again this is a prototype so the data that you see on the screen may not actually be the proper data so I'll take a step back just for a moment to talk about where this data has come from you saw on the slide earlier with the with the triangle that some of the data we have collected from that centralized source so that it's it's we found that it's easier for us to collect that data in one go rather than communities across BC look for that data so part of the data comes from the centralized warehouse and then there were other data comes from communities and as I mentioned before the BC economic development association had has been working tirelessly over the past few months reaching out to the economic development officers across BC as well as some chief administrative officers and others who fulfill similar roles for their community so this is the sample of what what that community page looks like and so right off the bat you see that we have content that is up at the top here and this is the place where your community can really talk about your strengths it's kind of the marketing content that is able to be edited at any time by communities and so this is really where you know you can talk about your strengths and some of the unique features of your community we have a map obviously now when this is live it'll always show the proximity to Vancouver because we understand that investors may may only know about Vancouver so it provides them that reference point and we have some of our key stats up here at the top these are also available in a format where you can export the data down below here which we'll get to in just a moment but it provides that snapshot of information for that investor we have the local contact so this is the local EDO or CAO whomever it is that has been identified as the person as that first point of contact we expect that the that first point of contact within the community will really be the one that an investor would reach out to the other contacts are provided more for a frame of reference certainly with the provincial contacts you know we have heard from investors that when they're when the government is associated with something it adds some it there it adds a level of credibility so especially in Asian markets so it's nice to to add that in but we do expect that the community would be the primary contact now as we move through the page you can see that we've got a communities nearby this is an auto-generated feature that will show the closest 12 communities that are nearby a just given community and that will include First Nations as well and then this is a part of how you can or a user can discover other areas of the province that they may not have known about so they may not come into the site looking for information on merits for example but when they're through through the site and on a page like this they would be able to discover other parts of of the province and other options that are out there for their investment we have the closest major centers so we like to show that in proximity some of the other major centers we have within the the database is I believe we've got Calgary and Spokane Seattle Anchorage so not just Vancouver as that reference point I mentioned a moment ago the asserted traditional territories in the area so this widget at the side will be able to display a list of the First Nations that have an asserted traditional territory in the area and really embeds that that level of knowledge that we really want to impart to the investors give them access to all of the different information that they may require as they do their research and speaking of research we have the statistics navigator so this is really where the data lives we have demographics so this is stats can data of course so we have worked with BC stats to to consolidate this into our major database we have a variety of different categories of information within the demographics we have leading employers which I mentioned earlier this is information that can be provided by communities as well as we are exploring a third party provider to be able to give us access to corporate data to to help out in that front as well taxation so some of the stats that we have pulled together are the same for everybody in the province so whether it's sales tax or income tax we've worked to kind of gather that together and have it all in one place where we would be responsible for updating it property tax we've been able to work with the local government division on pulling together that information as well so that is something that is automatically updated and communities wouldn't need to wouldn't need to think about maintaining that piece of the information labor force data is something that we have been able to work with with our partners within government to to collect that information you may be familiar with the work BC website and that also uses some of this information so it's that gets back to the data sharing principle that I was speaking about so a variety of different labor related things this is proximity so this is about the research and education centers that we have across the province and it will always show the closest ones and we have transportation this is another proximity one that I had mentioned where we have automatically loaded in that information and there are some the calculations happen within the system for which ones are the closest we have utilities information and then we have our quality of life information much of this quality of life information is provided by the communities so average daily temperature and climate information we've been able to collect from from federal government and then but we have some of the other statistics like the events that are happening in the area the cultural places those are all things that communities can provide and then we also have government so this is just a way to be able to include who the who the representatives are at the various levels within within the site speaking of various levels within the site it's probably good to notice well that we have always have links back to the regional district that a community is in as well as the the economic region and this way users are able to kind of go up and see at a higher geography what types of communities are are in that area what opportunities might exist so we have industry sectors and this is a companion essentially to the areas of concentration map that we looked at on the sector page so this is driven from labor force data and it shows the the top three sectors by by jobs numbers that that drive that that economy and so this again will link back through to the to the page the sector page because we really want to encourage discovery within the website now we have opportunities so as I mentioned previously our site will have opportunities displayed on all of the community pages and they will present the unique opportunities that I mentioned as well as showing the sites and buildings or those businesses for sale and then we have the success stories as I mentioned as well that they are embedded into the into the community pages now I'll go over to one of the opportunities no I won't I will go to one of the First Nations pages since we're speaking about communities so we can click through to one of the this is the Kamloops First Nation so this is a really similar setup to the to the municipality page there's some data that's a little bit different but by and large it's still serving the same function certainly with the overview and introduction area here where where a community can really talk about what makes their community unique and what opportunities might be might be available and again we have the proximity and through to the stats navigator as well and opportunities and success stories one of the unique pieces about the First Nations page is a connection to the First Nations economic development database and that is the treaties and agreements this is something that automatically feeds in from that other website and again can show investors success stories and things projects and agreements that have already been in place to give them a sense of the current economic climate you know one piece that I don't believe I mentioned on the the other community page is community links we really want the site to be able to marry together the data that we can collect and we can maintain with with fields and space for communities to customize their own page so certainly I spoke about the marketing content here but also within community links this is where a community can post links to their own active websites or if they have if they're a part of regional committees this is where you can include those hyperlinks you can also upload your own resources and media so if you have different brochures or or any you know videos information photographs you can attach those as well and so that really provides another way for communities to tell their own story and also link through to social media and lastly one of the customizations is also the cover photograph we have some placeholder imagery that has been sourced through UBCM that is already in the site but once we we go live communities can edit and change around the photos and any of their their custom data as well so as I mentioned at the bottom of the pages you can see that we have the opportunities embedded right in there so I can have a look over here at one of the investment and partnership opportunities so this is one of those unique opportunities where where a proponent would enter in their information directly into the site so a proponent could be could be a private company in BC or it could be the municipality if there's a co-development opportunity that that that your community is interested in binding partners for you can enter that one directly in here so there's always a connection back to the region or the community that the opportunity is in where applicable it connects back to a sectors that we have highlighted on our page and so those are the BC jobs plan priority sectors so in this instance it's ICT and wireless so we've designed this platform for opportunities to be really flexible so that we can accommodate a wide variety of opportunities that may exist across the province so this is really where a proponent can can identify that it's equity that they're looking for or whether it's a partnership and we also have factored in a more general category other that would allow for a variety of different opportunities so similar to the the community profiles we allow proponents to add their own material on here on this is you know almost a landing page a profile for that opportunity but you we also encourage proponents to include their own links and include their own PDFs and media here as well so the community the listing contact rather is up here in that that upper right hand side so this is where we would where we would be expecting investors to kind of connect through and they can click contact now and it takes them to an email form and it goes automatically to that to the listing proponent for them to get additional information we do have a community contact on this page so this would be whomever the designated contact is for the community that this opportunity has come up in but it's expected that that is really there as the as the providing more information about the community type of inquiry as opposed to an inquiry about that opportunity so you can see that there's customizable content within here there's mapping functionality as well a similar investments and partnerships listing will will appear at the bottom of the pages again this is to encourage investors to understand what else is available and then we have a really brief community profile that will allow an investor to get a snapshot of what's happening within that community so as I mentioned earlier in the presentation we have automated feeds coming in for the other categories so the the sites and buildings and those businesses for sale and so those ones don't need to be entered into the site directly they would be entered into space list and venture connect for free and automatically those opportunities are are pulled in on a daily basis into our site so for the proponent it's you know better bang for their buck although they don't have to spend any money to do it so no buck but you can a proponent would enter in an opportunity on venture connect and then automatically will come over and populate on our site as well and you're able to search on our site by sector and by type as well and that is that is the general overview of the of the front end of our site I think that what we're going to be doing I will get into this in just a moment about our next steps they talk about training because we do have a whole administrative functionality that is in the in the back end of the site and that's where community contacts will will be able to have access to do the work to you know to edit their profile pictures or who their contact is or also approve opportunities that that come up within within the area so I'm going to jump back and open up my PowerPoint again Josh this might be a good time for some questions sure yeah we've got a couple of questions have come in here perhaps some something makes sense just given there the past content question a couple of questions from Terry have you considered including proximity to a regional hospital as a metric yes under under the stats navigator there is a section about healthcare under quality of life that lists out I believe it is need to double check if it's the number of beds or if it is the closest hospital but there certainly is healthcare data that's in there awesome that stats nav and a couple other quick questions from Terry I know these will be quick answers question one will the opportunities BC website still exist great question so Amy you might want to chime in on this one the answer is yes sure for the time being I can do that sure for the time being the opportunities BC website will still exist but once the new British Columbia dot CA website is launched and live then opportunities BC will be decommissioned but the opportunities maybe this is your next question Terry but the opportunities that currently exist within opportunities BC I believe there's communication that will go out today to talk to the proponents some who've used opportunities BC to start the the communication about how they'll be migrated so we're when we go live to our soft launch we will already have about 30 opportunities that will be incorporated into the new platform and and those that are more real estate or businesses for sale I think we'll be given some instructions about how to make sure that those opportunities are on our site when we go live to the public in September you're you're a good mind reader Sue that was in fact Terry's next question so there you go we've answered those off and with those questions out of the way maybe we'll just carry on just thinking that we have about 15 minutes left in our in our scheduled webinar today so we'll move things right along great thanks for all the questions Terry so in terms of timelines I can we've been working on this project for I keep saying 18 months but I've been saying that for about six months so maybe a couple of years since this project began and we began with a lot of research working with communities working with investors and site selectors and to kind of work with different audiences to really guide how we were going to develop this application so at April in April we had our demo site which is what you've just gone through today and we we were able to go through that site with some maybe some of you if you participated in the BC Economic Development Association Summit in April so we we were able to have our demo at that point while we were still continuing on with some of the community data collection and the development side we have had community feedback through dedicated usability testing and also that feedback segment is still ongoing and so this is our next phase as we move into the soft launch to keep getting that feedback and edits into the site you can see that we've got our soft launch happening it's probably going to be I'll say August 5th August 4th around there and that's where the site will be available for for the community editors to go in and see the site you can access it on the front end and you can also access into the admin side of the the screen as well and play around look at the data and you can edit your photos and and any of that community managed data so that's what we're going to be focusing on through the month of August and then moving out to the public launch we are going to be able to launch it publicly at at UBCM so we're looking forward we're looking forward to that a lot and that will not reflect the end of the project because the way we've designed the site is that it is really flexible to be able to incorporate other data sets and other other feeds so once we launch it's the development work won't stop we have additional functionality that we're going to be incorporating and again looking at other data sets so as I mentioned at the beginning of August is when we are going to our soft launch so you will receive a notice via email that you are available to go into that that site it's not password protected on the front on the front end of it so anybody if they have the dedicated URL will be able to go in and have a look at at this beta site at the same time our regular website British Columbia dot ca will still be running and that is the primary public site so early August will be sending out communication about how to access the site and you'll be able to log in and update your content as well later on in August we're looking at doing some training on how to update your profile and improve opportunities if you are the community manager approving opportunities that come up in your area again that opportunity approval is for those unique opportunities not there's no requirement to approve opportunities if they come in through venture connector space list because those are pre-vetted so it's really the the unique opportunities so so we'll be able to provide training in August and then we will also want to send out a survey to understand your experiences to date with receiving inquiries from international investors this is something that we will be tracking quite closely certainly we'll have available to us some reporting to be able to understand how the contacts are working and what those interactions look like but we want to understand a little bit of a baseline on on your experiences so far with with the programming that you already run independently so early September as I mentioned that we were going to have the live site so it'll just cross over and we'll have that available to our all of our audiences that use the website and late September we're going to announce again as I mentioned that at UBCM and and keep the work going in terms of updating the site certainly you know we hope that that our community managers will will be engaged and we'll want to look into their sites and you know maybe on an annual basis updates some of that information though they are welcome to update it at any time and we'll probably be working to send out reminders on an annual basis and and remind folks that the site is available for them to to update and that brings me to the end of the of our the scheduled powerpoint so Josh I don't know if you have any other questions or if anything's come up that yeah we should do thanks thanks very much for that Sue and for the for the live demo there so yeah we do have quite a few questions that have come in so I'll just start going through the line here Tom asks who is ultimately responsible for entering your community's information so ultimately it is the the community's active representative when we go live at the beginning of August it's already been pre-populated through the work we did with the BC EDA so it would be the community manager who would approve any future changes so I think once we go through the reminder phase which will probably happen at the end of I'm going to say probably March we might send out another reminder but it's up to the community to decide if they want to change any of their marketing content or if some of the community managed data needs to change you know whether it's events or it's you know the community managed data a number of warehouses for example that's another one it's community managed thanks question here from Robert he's referencing the 700,000 page views and he's wondering what's being done to drive traffic to the site great question so we have optimized our website so we have worked with to ensure that the search engines globally will be able to to recognize our site and have it come up higher in ranking so what we've been working on is we have a Google campaign of course but also for the the search engines that are in Japan Korea and China where we have made modifications and continue to make modifications for it to rank highly internationally all of the community profiles and the opportunity profiles on the site have been designed in such a way with a template that we have keywords embedded right within the coding and then in the in the training we do have suggestions for both proponents and community managers with how they can how they can write the content to describe the opportunity or community in such a way that it's keyword rich and that that the international search engines will access it so that's the the online side of things but our trade and investment rep network around the world use this site as the as the anchor for information on the province so that is something that is embedded in all of the activities that they do and we're working with our TIRs to provide training straight to them TIRs trade and investment rep to work with them on how that they how they will be able to promote these new features so to their networks great thanks next question from Nelson it looks like he may have left he's not online but we'll answer it so for the benefit of the recording he's asking are unincorporated communities able to have a community profile on the website great question so the way we've the way we're able to address unincorporated communities is through that regional district page that can be customized to call out specific communities within it all of the data for it to be automatically updated is is based on on the regional districts and the municipalities so we wanted to be able to provide a flexible environment where we could talk about where a community could talk about about their competitive advantage and it's an improvement because on the first on the existing community profiles application we don't have any it's not automated to be regional districts so so that's how we're going to handle it with this new application great and it looks like the last question here to come in is from Blair and Blair asks if a PDF of your presentation can be made available not sure if if that's possible certainly the recording is but just wondering if if you're able to put up a PDF of the PowerPoint as well yeah it should it shouldn't be a problem with I do have a batch of communications that we're going to send out when we when we provide that new URL for August 4th so there'll be a number of different things that are in that email and that email will be going out to all of those who are identified as the community contact and as we'll also make sure that if there is if there are gaps we've got the list from today's webinar so that group will get it as well and just to follow up a bit more on that Blair you will be receiving an email in about a week from today that'll have a link to the recording and and I'll make sure that I bundle that PDF beside the recording link as well so it'll be there for your convenience not seeing any more questions come in right away I'll maybe give it another 15 or 30 seconds to to let any last minute questions come in but I think we had some some great discussion there we did and I will say that if there are any other questions that come up after the fact or if you talk with some of your colleagues feel free to just send me an email directly it's sue dot Wheatley at gov dot bc dot ca and and I'm happy to chat with you about about the project great one one last comment here from Robert he says fully supportive of third-party provider on employee numbers tough data to get in larger communities absolutely that's we want to make this as easy as possible for everybody and use the power of tech to uh to help us get there uh also got a comment in here from uh Dale wielden from the bc eda and he's saying uh we're also happy to answer any questions as well absolutely dale has been and and the folks at bc eda have been a tremendous help as we've developed and pulled together this information and we've been working with a group called the castle main group to help us with the first nations data that have been very helpful as well so thanks to both of them great well not seeing any other questions come in I just like to say a big thanks to sue and Amy for taking the time to present today and join us on the webinar series and also a big thanks to all of our attendees for your enthusiasm for this new project moving forward we hope you join us in future webinars but until then take care thanks everybody