There's a lot of excitement these days over the growth of the digital media industry in Toronto. But what exactly does the industry landscape look like? And how is it changing?

Those are the questions that occurred to Justin Kozuch as he was working as a web designer at Sapient last year.  "Why is it, in Toronto, as a tech-savvy and well connected place," asks Kozuch, "no-one's done research to capture the industry?"

So in true entrepreneurial fashion, Kozuch created a GoogleDoc with some basic questions concerning titles, skills and salaries, and sent them out to a handful of contacts. "I just wanted a 50,000 foot view of who we are as a digital media community.

Beyond just collecting data on Toronto's digital scene, Kozuch wanted to release the data to the community in a free and accessible format. "There's something great about data liberation," he says. "You can see it in levels of government, too, they're slowly making available to the public all the data they have hidden."

Members of Toronto's ICT community started to pay attention to Kozuch's project, and he eventually partnered up with Jon Lax, a partner at Teehan+Lax, a strategy and user experience agency based in Liberty Village. Over the span of four months, they looked at existing research and assembled a more ambitious proposal to survey ICT professionals across the city and throughout Canada.

The proposal was picked up by the team organizing the Mesh Conference ("Canada's Web Conference"), interested by its ambitious scope. To support the program, Mesh launched the annual Mesh Prize, "a new initiative to support the Canadian digital media industry," to the tune of $40,000.

As the inaugural recipient, Kozuch rebranded his project (49 Pixels) and began to put together a plan.  In Fall 2010, Kozuch released his first survey, and is actively recruiting ICT professionals to participate in the data gathering process.

At 49pixels.ca, digital media companies can work through 60 questions on themes such as location, hiring practices, number of employees, revenue and salaries.  In early 2011, look for the next stage of their research study to be launched. Kozuch plans to send out individual surveys designed to capture the size of the workforce in order to answer the question, "what's the digital persona of our industry?"

Kozuch wants to classify ICT companies in a manner that's meaningful to the industry. "We want to create a proper taxonomy of the industry," he says. "Statistics Canada still classifies digital media companies as either 'software' or 'graphic design'."

This designation might have made sense in the late 90s, but the industry has since changed. "Let's create a classification structure that properly organizes people according to what they do," says Kozuch.

In true deference to the fluid nature of the industry, Justin will also be performing interviews with hundreds of people and determining the employee categories afterwards. He doesn't want to create categories only to find out they're not representative of the industry.

Another phase of the project will be ongoing and is focused on the clients of digital media companies. "What are the needs and trends of the clients in the digital medias space?" he asks. This section will consist of interviews with 50 big brands to see what they need from providers.

"What are these brands using digital media for?" asks Kozuch. "There's an emergent need for this kind of data. A business can't make decisions on data that's five years old."

Kozuch is pleased to be conducting such a project in Toronto. "I think we've got a really great space here in Toronto," he says. "We have such passionate people who love to help others. People here love to collaborate and share solutions to problems they have in the industry."

When the results come back, he fully expects people to be surprised. "We've got a lot of small to medium sized companies -- I think way more than people think," he says. "There are a lot of micro-agencies with 5-15 people. Especially in this economy, I fully expect there's a lot of them popping up. The best time to start a business is in a recession. The barriers to entry are low right now for entrepreneurs."

Looking ahead to Mesh 2011 in May, Kozuch is excited about the possibilities of such a valuable collection of data.  His final report will be in a format designed for easy remixing and analysis. "This is as much for the community as it is of the community and by the community," he says.

To gather people together for the interviews, Justin has been relying heavily on social media strategies as well as traditional PR and communications campaigns. Still, if you work in the digital industry and want to share your experiences with Justin, check out the site at 49pixels.ca and check back on 49 Pixels in April to see what you've had a hand in creating.

Joseph Wilson is a freelance writer on issues of science, technology and culture.