Hello, and thank you to the committee for inviting me to participate this morning. It's bright and early in Vancouver.
My name is Mark Gayler. I work for Microsoft Canada. I've been working with Microsoft for more than 10 years. I'm a technology strategist for Microsoft Canada. I work primarily with municipalities. As part of that role, I'm a subject matter expert on open data and open source technologies.
I'd like to comment on a few things. First of all, I very much appreciate the comments by my colleagues David and Ms. Miller just previously.
One of the things I have experience with is working with different governments around the world, and so I've been engaged with open data projects in Canada, but also in the U.S.A.., Colombia, Japan, central and eastern Europe, and the U.K. I'd like to make some comparisons, even though I totally and fully agree with David's comment earlier on that it's dangerous to make comparisons in terms of a league table. But I think there are some insights we can gain from what other countries are doing compared with how open data has evolved in Canada today.
I'd like to start there, and then I'd like to pick up on a couple of other points that my colleagues have raised already.
What is interesting about the way open data is evolving around the world is that it's evolving in different ways based on the way that government agencies have chosen to engage it.
For example, in the U.K. and the U.S., we see a very top-down approach whereby the U.K. and U.S. governments at the very top levels of government have sponsored open data initiatives. They are driving adoption of open data throughout government departments and agencies, and we see this top-down approach as it flows downwards through the government infrastructure.
I would say that in Canada what we have seen is more of a bottom-up approach to open data. In early days it was adopted primarily by the cities, and then the provinces caught up. I think Vancouver started in April 2009, and we have seen other cities adopt open data initiatives. Then the provinces have come in, and I think the federal government has come in after some of these cities and smaller agencies had already adopted open data initiatives.
That explains why we see different countries and different initiatives at different stages of evolution, to a certain degree.
In the U.K. and U.S., I would say that open data initiatives across government are fairly mature and fairly consistent in the way open data is thought of. I would say that in Canada we see open data being adopted in different ways at different levels of government jurisdiction.
The second point I'd like to make around this is that as we look around the world, it's important to understand that open data itself is not an end point. Open data is a transition to something else. It's an enabler for other things to happen. It's an enabler for such things as economic stimulus, as we have discussed, and I'm sure we'll discuss more on that during the session. It's an enabler particularly for citizen engagement, getting citizens actively involved and participating in the business of government.
I think it also represents a cultural change internally for government and government agencies. When I've been around the world talking to national and provincial and state governments about their open data initiatives and the way we can use open data to engage citizens, particularly those parts of citizenry we may not already be engaged with, a big comment that I get at the end of my engagement with that particular government is: this is great, but now that we have this capability to share data and to collaborate, we want to do it internally as much as we want to do it externally. I think that point was made very well by my colleagues previously.
The opportunity for the Canadian government here is to provide guidance, to provide a framework to take the open data initiatives that already exist, to create opportunities to share more open data, to engage citizens and third parties and encourage them to share this data and use this data, and to enable the sharing of the data in such a way that it can easily be consumed by any of the actors in the ecosystem, be it a data scientist, a researcher, a citizen, an application developer, or a student.
But it's very important that we understand that this is a cultural change that will lead to other positive benefits; this is not just about sharing data itself. And so it's important that the government provide a framework to encourage parties to collaborate around the sharing and reuse of open data—private-public partnerships, for example—and particularly engage those parts of the citizenry with whom perhaps we are not already engaged and get them actively involved in the business of government.
Let me give you a very simple example. Two weeks ago we ran a teen hackathon in the city of Surrey. The City of Surrey is sharing its open data; they have an open data portal. They invited teens, young people from the ages of 13 to 19, to participate in this hackathon. For half a day we worked with them with technology and showed them how to produce applications. What was interesting is that at the end of it we asked for feedback and ideas, and it was amazing to see these teenagers come up with ideas about how to use transit data to better navigate through the city, how to use weather data to better understand when weather might affect particular tourist spots or landmarks.
You could look at that initially and just say that these are interesting ideas but ask whether they would ever come to any kind of fruition. But what was really interesting about the whole thing was that the city was stimulating students and young people to think about engaging the city in ways that had not previously been possible. These were young people who were thinking about actively working with the city—visitors to the city, citizens of the city. Getting them excited and engaged in looking at ways to improve city services both for visitors and for folks who already live in the city is quite transformational. This is a very simple example of transformational cultural change that can be brought about by sharing open data.
Another example I will give you, from a cultural aspect, comes from when I was engaged with the Government of Colombia. I was invited down there to provide some guidance to them about the way they would share data with their citizens. When I went down there I said I was surprised that the Government of Colombia was thinking about sharing open data, because they're not known, to an external person, for their openness or the way they might engage a citizen in a transparent way; that it might be considered to be a threat to the government.
They said that this was their entire reason for doing it. Whereas other governments say they're doing this for economic stimulus or doing it for better engagement with certain parts of society, in Colombia they are doing it deliberately to show that they're being open and transparent. This is part of their cultural change with their citizens.
The last point I would like to make is that I think the opportunity is huge for Canada to be a leader in this area. Even though we look around the world and see open data initiatives evolving in different ways, we have a long way to go with open data, to speak to David's point earlier on. There is much more that can be done and there is much more transformational benefit that can arise out of open data.
But I think the government can help. It can stimulate this by providing, for frameworks for working particularly in public-private partnerships, guidance in the sharing and openness of data, and also by providing ideas and guidance about the sustainability of open data and how it can be part of the ongoing business of government and citizen engagement, rather than just being seen as an end in itself.
Thank you very much.