Government Operations Committee on April 3rd, 2014

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you, Mr. Eaves.

Now we'll go to Madam Brown for five minutes.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Witnesses, I'm only a visitor to this committee. I'm filling in for one of my colleagues, but I find this discussion really exciting, and my word, it's phenomenal where it can go.

Ms.Dybenko, I had the opportunity to visit Communitech in Waterloo, and I visited the MaRS building in Toronto, and so I have been exposed to some of this. I don't consider myself any sort of a technical wizard by any stretch of the imagination, but this absolutely fascinates me.

Ms. Dybenko, in your opening comments you talked about this being our next natural resource. Canada is incredibly blessed with natural resources. If this is our next natural resource, what kind of transformation is this going to have for our economy? We know that when we started building cars we stopped building buggies, so the opportunities are there.

You talked about the challenges with getting venture capital. What incentives can we put in place to help venture capitalists become engaged?

Mr. Gayler, maybe you have some comments from the perspective of Microsoft. I'm sure you have a long history of looking at how new technologies come on board and how that is aggregated into the business.

Could you both comment ?

[Ginny Dybenko]

I'll start by talking about what I think is really necessary for the transformation of this opportunity for Canada, and that is our young people. I believe it's a matter of doing the best we can to produce the knowledge worker of the future. By that I mean not necessarily just engineers or just computer scientists or just mathematicians, but also bringing in arts and an understanding of the humanities and social sciences as well to create individuals who are fluent and creative on all levels. Only by doing that are we going to create the natural cycle.

Renée spoke very compellingly about this. We have so many bright young people in Canada, so the ideas are not the issue, they truly are not, but if we can prove, as we have in the Waterloo area with the kind of universities and colleges we have, that a huge labour force is being created in that region, then the rest will come. Venture capitalists from Silicon Valley are already turning their eyes to Canada. Unfortunately, they now attract the young people to come down—my son among them, I should say—to work in California, but over time, if we're able to prime the pump enough, my belief is we can create our own ecosystem here in Canada.

Mark.

[Mark Gayler]

Yes, I think I would totally agree with that. I think there are already examples of where we've seen transformational things being done with government data that's being used by commercial entities.

One of the examples that David will be very familiar with was back in the early days of the City of Vancouver's open data. A local firm of architects here used some open data to predict water levels and the impact that would have on the local downtown area in Vancouver. The comment that I loved about that was that it wasn't that we couldn't get access to this data before as a commercial entity; it was that we didn't know who to talk to. We didn't know how to get this data. It was just too difficult. So the fact that the data was published enabled us to do something new and innovative with that information that helped our business and ultimately benefited our customers.

I think this is a very simple example of how this data can be used in partnership with commercial organizations. Of course data has been commercialized for years. This is nothing new. There are whole industries built on it—advertising, marketing, demographic data, retail analysis data, and organizations around that. This is something that the commercial industry is very familiar with and makes money with in different ways.

I think the key here is to establish the partnerships between the government data sources and those third party commercial sources. Once you start combining the data in this way, transformative things start to happen.

Let me give you another example, again from Vancouver. When Vancouver shared parking data initially, it shared parking data around the use of city-owned meters. It didn't have the commercial parking data because it didn't own that data, so it didn't publish that. The commercial parking companies weren't publishing their data because they were effectively in competition with each other and the city. It actually took a third party developer, an independent developer, to actually take the published City of Vancouver data and the commercial data and combine them. This is something that naturally neither the city nor the parking entity would do off their own bat. It took a third party independent developer to do that.

I think this is the value of these partnerships. By sharing the data in the first place, you can create these chains of reaction. The more partnerships you bring to bear on this, the more valuable the data gets.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

[Mark Gayler]

The last thing I would say—sorry, I have just one more point—is that we have a sea, an ocean, of data coming down the line. If you guys think the data we're sitting on today is it, it is not. Even the data that the government alone will produce is nothing compared to what we call “big data”, which is the wealth of research, scientific, and commercial data coming down the line. The potential for combining that and creating more economic value is absolutely huge.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

Mr. Byrne, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I was interested to hear, Mr. Eaves, one of your comments. One of the objectives, I guess, of this study would be to assist the government in moving the initiative along. You mentioned that there was one practice, at Industry Canada, that you found contrary to the spirit of the G-8 commitment that Canada was making.

Are there any other circumstances or practices that you may be aware of that you could share with the committee, where you sort of question or want to raise whether or not the Government of Canada is running contrary to the G-8 charter or to the spirit, generally speaking, of what an open data portal, an open government, is supposed to be about?

[David Eaves]

I think there are numerous examples and I don't say this to pick on this particular government. As previously said, all governments get cautious around sharing data and information. One of the reasons we have a competitive political process is to keep people honest.

There are two points I'd love to make.

One is I think there are all sorts of macro examples. For example, people were curious about the F-35 spending. Parliament demanded documents, and then those documents were produced in 100 boxes and printed out. What this meant is that if you were someone who was actually interested in learning anything about this, you couldn't do keyword searches of that. You'd actually have to go through and read every single piece of paper. This is what we call hiding things by making them available but in formats that are completely useless or very hard to use.

I think those types of behaviours are examples of a government where they're not actually interested in transparency and they're certainly not actually interested in sharing information. I'd be looking for ways that we could curtail governments from doing that in the future, so when I ask for a document, I get it in a machine-readable way so I can do keyword searches and go and find the interesting things.

I'd love to see more around actual budget data being made available for downloads, so that people can actually.... How do we make the government more legible to the population so they can see where money's getting spent and they can see how their tax dollars are being used? I think all governments have a long way to go, but we, in particular, have a long way to go. And the U.K. is actually a very interesting example around this. They've made all spending data down to £500 downloadable and publicly available. So you can actually go and see how each department is spending its money. This has been interesting to the public, but I think it's actually been very interesting even to the people in government, because they can actually now access how the money's being spent in a very direct way. Their staff can, and they can do their own analysis.

I think even government officials, elected officials, have found this dataset to be very interesting.

Another example would be the access to information requests. I see no reason that when someone makes an access to information request, that document is not being put in a publicly available database so that if I now want to do the same access to information request, I'm not going through the whole thing all over again. I can go and scan the ones that have already been done and you can save me a whole bunch of time, but more importantly, you can save government and taxpayers a whole bunch of time by not having people running around and gathering up the same documents and doing the same assessment all over again. I think it's in everybody's interest to make that happen.

So those are cumulatively the things that I would say. At a high level, a recommendation that you could make.... One of recommendations we made in Ontario with the open government task force was actually creating rules around procurement. So you say any system that is bought by this government that is going to produce data must have in its procurement demands, as part of the specifications, the ability to extract that data easily. So if someone comes along and asks for something, there's no longer this question of, “Oh, well, the system's old or it's hard to use and we can't extract it.” We've actually built that in as a requirement so we make it easy to extract information.

Changing procurement rules is one of the most powerful tools that you have at your disposal to think about how we can make data more accessible to people.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

On that specific subject, would you be able to expand upon that through a letter to the chair of the committee? Because I think that's something that, unfortunately, 30 seconds is not going to cover well.

[David Eaves]

Yes, agreed.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Also, in that same vein, if there are other specific items that you really want to highlight to the committee...and I'm saying this to all the witnesses. If there are any other specific items that you may wish to highlight to the committee, you would have an opportunity, and I'm sure the chair would agree, to be able to write a letter to the chair, and that would be considered, I'm sure, by the committee, to be part of the witness testimony for the purposes of our report writing. I think you'll get a consensus on that.

Could I, then, just share the floor with some of the other witnesses, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Yes, certainly.

I remind you that you can always submit documents to us through the clerk, and we will take them into consideration during our study.

Would anyone like to add something?

[Mark Gayler]

Sorry, are you asking for final comments? Is that your question?

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

No. I was giving you an opportunity to answer Mr. Byrne's question.

There will be other questions anyway. Just before we adjourn the meeting, I will give you an opportunity to add a few words.

Mr. O'Connor, it's your turn.

[Gordon O'Connor]

Thank you.

For 40 or 50 years, technology has continued to generate machines that provide more and more information to people. If I think back to 3,000 years ago, in Athens they had the Acropolis. All the citizens would arrive at the Acropolis and discuss issues and pass judgment, etc. But as populations got bigger and more organized, we went into silos and categories, etc.

Nowadays, we have trillions and trillions of pieces of information that citizens can't get at. I'm looking at the trend lines of what's going on here, and it seems to me that if open data actually becomes open data throughout this country and other countries, we'll be moving back towards the Acropolis again. That will affect governments, the organizations of governments, etc.

For your final thoughts, I wonder whether you have any opinions on how open data is going to affect governments.

I'll start with Ms. Miller and run the other way.

[Dr. Renée Miller]

That sounds good.

I think open data is going to lead to an open government revolution. It has the potential of making governments more participatory, down to a much finer grain than we have right now.

This is my call to ensure that, even at the beginning of the open data revolution, we make channels for the flow of that information back into the institutions. I think we can make better decisions based on data. We're seeing that revolution in education. We're seeing data-driven education. We're seeing data-driven medicine. We're going to see data-driven governments where we're using past best practices in order to bring that back into government. I think it's an exciting opportunity.

[Gordon O'Connor]

Ms. Dybenko.

[Ginny Dybenko]

I would like to point once again to engagement. I think lack of engagement of the citizenry is the biggest challenge that government faces today. I would see open data as a very useful tool to not only speak to the electorate but also to get opinion from them, and in doing so to get them involved in government affairs.

[Gordon O'Connor]

Mr. Gayler.

[Mark Gayler]

I think this is a very important point.

Going back to my point that I made earlier, the amount of data is only going to increase. I think where government can help is by providing easy access to that data, based on the way that consumers and citizens want to access it. Don't force them to go to a particular portal. Don't force them to use a particular type of technology to access that data. Give them the data in a way that's open, as a service that they can consume in the way that they want to.

Second, I want to give you two more examples about how transformative open data, combined with the sheer growth in the amount of data, really can be. The first one is with the City of Barcelona, where they have a program where they share bikes across the city. They provide bikes that can be taken from one transit stop to another. The City publishes data on the availability of these bicycles, which obviously fluctuates depending on time of day and also whether they are having events or not. The City combined that data with social media data. By tracking sentiment on social media, through Twitter, Facebook, and stuff like that, they're getting instant dynamic feedback about the citizenry, regarding the availability of these bikes, if there are enough bikes in a particular area, whether the bikes are of good quality.

What you can see now is government combining their data with the huge volume of big data that's out there and growing every day, and—to the point that I think Ms. Miller made earlier on—providing this to improve decision-making. I think this is where we see this going: an increase in data, the increase and ubiquity of technology, engaging consumers and crowdsourcing to enable government to engage and make better decisions.

[Gordon O'Connor]

Mr. Eaves.

[David Eaves]

You guys actually have a much bigger responsibility than I think people would let on. I'll maybe share that more in closing.

As an illustration of that, I love what Clay Christensen, a famous author and Harvard Business School professor, says, that when you destroy the value in one part of the value chain, it migrates to another. If you make software free, the value doesn't disappear; the value shifts over to the services, and now servicing the software is where the money will be located.

I think there is something similar around politics. When you knock the politics out of one part of the political chain, you don't destroy the politics, it just migrates to a different part. This is one place around data where you have an enormous responsibility. In a world of open data, you can presume that the information or data that government is creating will be made public. That used to be a political decision. It used to be a decision where a minister could say whether or not they'd share this or that data. But if we now presume that all data will be made public, we've now taken the politics out of that part of the chain. That doesn't mean the politics disappears; it just moves to a different part of the chain.

So I think one of the questions politicians will increasingly be asking themselves is, “If the data gets created, if that means it will be shared, I will have a lot more scrutiny over what data will get created in the first place.” Some people would argue that this is what happened around the long-form census, that we actually didn't want to have the data created in the first place because that meant there would be questions asked that government didn't want to be asked, or policies pursued that people didn't want to get pursued.

The data will become more political the more open it becomes. This committee needs to think about what the ramifications of that are.

I would follow it on to say that I would be very careful about presuming that data will lead to better decision-making. Having data-driven decisions does not mean a better decision. I only need to show you a map of a congressional district in Chicago, that looks like a tiny little filament running through nine different neighbourhoods, that makes absolutely zero sense. The reason that congressional district was created was to produce a very specific outcome.

That was a data-driven outcome; I want to be clear. You could never create that congressional district unless you had phenomenal data about who was living in what types of neighbourhoods and who you thought those people were and how they were going to vote. That was a data-driven decision. We could argue about whether it was a better decision or not. It was a better decision if you were trying to create the outcome that the decision created.

So we're not about to depoliticize any of this, and we're not about to end all of this. You guys have an enormous responsibility to be thinking about what the politics of data are, even if you're just talking about economic data. I don't want you to lose sight of that.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you, Mr. Eaves.

Mr. Blanchette, go ahead.

[Denis Blanchette, NDP, Louis-Hébert, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. O'Connor's approach is very interesting, as is Mr. Eaves's answer. That raises other lines of questioning, such as in terms of usage guidelines for open data. This goes beyond data sharing.

Mr. Eaves, I understand that you are in favour of full data sharing. However, there are some obstacles that cannot be ignored. For instance, Ms. Miller said that intellectual property needs to be protected. When it comes to companies, it would be difficult for them to share data that shows their weaknesses relative to their competitors, and that's perfectly understandable.

If the federal government decided to go ahead with data sharing, what kind of safeguards should the government or a large company implement to protect intellectual property and respect privacy, among other things?

I would like each of you to make a quick comment.