Evidence of meeting #42 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was public.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5 p.m.
Liberal
February 7th, 2011 / 5 p.m.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
Thank you very much for appearing today.
I think we all agree that for us to move forward and consider the evolution of open government at a national level, it's important to learn from the experiences of other levels of government.
Do you think that what works at a municipal or provincial level will necessarily work at a federal level?
Any of you can take that.
5 p.m.
City Manager, City of Vancouver
I do. Every level of government has their individual mandates, and the information is of interest to the public and the broader community--the business community, the non-profit community. As an example, your ministry of environment publishes data around permits and approvals, and we permit and approve different things. We permit buildings; the federal government permits mines and environmental assessments. I think it's all kind of the same business.
It may seem more complicated, but I think we're learning through these initiatives that the broader public has a tremendous capacity to deal with that complexity and sophistication. The easier we make it for them to access it, the better they do with it. So I don't see any barriers.
5 p.m.
Director, Information Technology Services and Chief Information Officer, City Operations, City of Ottawa
We don't see any barriers either.
I don't see why it would be more difficult. I think the principles are the same. If the federal government decides to do that, you will be very successful. I don't see any reason why not.
5 p.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Access, Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario
I think Monsieur Michaud said exactly what I was thinking, which is that the principles are the same. I know you've heard that Canada wouldn't be the first national jurisdiction to go down this road. There are already some road maps out there—particularly in Great Britain and the United States.
Cultural differences between jurisdictions may need to be considered, but I think the general principles are similar.
5 p.m.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
What kind of criteria do you use to determine which data sets you will produce for publication?
5 p.m.
City Manager, City of Vancouver
As I said, when you first start on this, you kind of go with what's easiest, because you're learning. You're bringing your organization along as much as you're bringing the public along.
It's really what's available. As I think many of us said today, don't start with the hardest, most politically sensitive data. Start with what's easy. But then, quite quickly, I think we all need to move to an assumption that all data will become public unless there are compelling reasons not to release it. Then you start to build your data sets in a whole different way.
Really, the criteria include, first and foremost, whether it is sensitive at a personal level. Will it confound privacy legislation and respect it? Is it interesting, and does the public want it?
Those are probably the most important criteria once you're past that.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
How do you determine if the public wants it? For example, with access to information, the government gets hundreds, if not thousands, of requests it never would have guessed it would receive. How do you, on a proactive basis, without actually receiving a request, determine that a data set would be of value to the public?
5:05 p.m.
Director, Information Technology Services and Chief Information Officer, City Operations, City of Ottawa
We ask them. It's that simple.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
5:05 p.m.
Director, Information Technology Services and Chief Information Officer, City Operations, City of Ottawa
What we did was engage the community. When we did the first data set release, there were 17 of them. The way we did it was we talked to the community, and they said those were the ones they would like to get. As part of our website, we asked the public which data sets they would like to get. Based on that, we saw which data sets they would like to get first, and we began to focus on those, and now we have 36.
Not surprisingly in Ottawa, the number one request was for transit information. Another was the park and rec guide we give to residents. The mayor has now put forward an initiative to make it even more available to our residents.
We asked them, and following the number of requests we received, we focused on those. That is how we did it. We asked them; it was that simple.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
5:05 p.m.
Director, Information Technology Services and Chief Information Officer, City Operations, City of Ottawa
We did it through our website. We have a website called Apps4Ottawa.
5:05 p.m.
Director, Information Technology Services and Chief Information Officer, City Operations, City of Ottawa
The question was which data set you would like to get. And we just monitored it on a regular basis.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
How did you drive traffic to that site? How did you get people to go to the site? The reason I ask is that I'm sure the percentage of the population that visits your site--with due respect, I'm sure it's a wonderful site--is rather small, as is the case with all government websites.
5:05 p.m.
Director, Information Technology Services and Chief Information Officer, City Operations, City of Ottawa
I think one of the keys to our success was that we engaged the media from day one. We engaged them. And when we publicized our Apps4Ottawa contest, we said that if you need more information, go to our website. On a regular basis we provide regular updates, and they have taken care of the publicity for us. And it hasn't cost the city anything.
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Thank you, Chair.
Mr. Michaud, I want to come back to the whole issue of translation and the importance of that or the need to do that. You mentioned that your data is provided in the language, I guess, in which it was gathered and whatnot, and so far, there haven't been any requests for translation.
I'm just wondering, in terms of the participation of citizens in the Apps4Ottawa contest or the folks who are using the data that's provided, if you have any sense that francophones are participating as much as francophones participate in the civic life of Ottawa generally. Is there any difference, or have they been eliminated from participation because a data set might have been in English or...? Is there any sense of that?
5:05 p.m.
Director, Information Technology Services and Chief Information Officer, City Operations, City of Ottawa
We don't have a sense of whether anybody was rejected or decided not to participate. But one of the rules of the contest is to encourage people to develop multilingual applications, which is a reflection of the community out there.
Nobody was eliminated if they only provided it in one language, but extra points were provided if they had it for more than one language.
5:05 p.m.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
But there wasn't any emphasis on French and English as requirements in terms of the contest or anything like that.
5:05 p.m.
Director, Information Technology Services and Chief Information Officer, City Operations, City of Ottawa
No. We're making the data available. It's the residents who decide what's important for them and what application they're looking for. We got the community to vote as well on the preferred apps for the residents. It's not only the judges who decide who will win. There will also be a portion where the residents vote.
5:10 p.m.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Dr. Ballem and Monsieur Michaud, I'm struggling a little bit with this idea of giving away a public resource to folks who might make private profit out of it in the hope that there is some economic benefit down the road. I hear the argument that this caused some great development and potential development. Are there other aspects of municipal government jurisdiction where governments give away something? Do we give away property? I guess we charge permits...we talked about permits.
I'm struggling here, as you can see, because this whole idea that we give away something the public owns in the hope that private enterprise might turn it into something else is a little troubling in the back of my democratic socialist brain here. Have you had those kinds of conversations in your jurisdictions?
5:10 p.m.
City Manager, City of Vancouver
Well, yes, and it's interesting that you should ask. This was one of the initial things that some of our staff raised as a concern. Was it ethical for us to provide a public resource--in this case, data--and then allow entrepreneurs to actually use it to make a profit?
There are a couple of things that I would say. First of all, I would absolutely echo Guy Michaud's earlier comments on that. In the end, a prosperous economy is really important. This is public data, and there are a lot of other things that are directly beneficial to the public interest that can also happen with that data. So we decided that we didn't have a problem with that.
However, what we do want to make sure of, in taking that data and making entrepreneurial ventures with it, is that they not come back and limit our ability to continue to share it widely and make it available to our public. There have been some instances where business sector partners have come to us and wanted to do something, but in return have wanted to limit liability or limit different areas of the openness of our whole initiative. This is something that is really important. That will quite quickly compromise the whole intention of this, which is to use open source, to make it widely available, and to allow that wide availability to continue and not be restricted by software licences or that sort of thing. I think Monsieur Michaud is more of a technical expert than I am, but maybe he wants to add something.
5:10 p.m.
Director, Information Technology Services and Chief Information Officer, City Operations, City of Ottawa
I would like to make a comment on the statement you made a bit earlier. From our perspective, we don't own the data, but our residents do. We at the municipal level are the custodians of that information. We're just making the information available for them. It's their data.
We can have a long debate about whether they should pay for it or not, but they've already paid for it at least once. Conceptually, I'm not sure why we should pay twice for the same thing. That's my personal opinion.
