Government Operations Committee on April 10th, 2014

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll continue with the line of questioning I ran out of time for with Ms. Bates and Ms. Chiara Ubaldi.

Ms. Chiara Ubaldi, I asked, of political context within open data, whether or not there might be an incentive to prevent data collection to ensure that it is not disseminated by governments. Have you had any experience or any thoughts or concerns about that?

After you, I'll follow up with Ms. Bates, please.

[Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi]

What we have come across is that some governments have had some hesitation in opening up data sets, for privacy and security reasons, but also for quality-related reasons, meaning that data sets that have been collected for a long time are not always of the quality, in terms of timeliness and of accuracy, that is required, for instance, by the community to reuse the data.

There are concerns in that sense, but I think the more we move ahead in the implementation of open data policies, the more those concerns can be tackled.

I hope this answers your question.

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

Thank you.

Ms. Bates

[Dr. Joanne Bates]

Thank you.

This is coming back to the question of whether transparency can impact upon behaviour of the public sector institutions. This is a key argument that we see around transparency and the Freedom of Information Act—issues that we see in the media of politicians deciding to use private email accounts rather than their work email accounts to avoid the Freedom of information Act.

For open government data, I have not seen that behaviour modification in the way that we've seen it for the Freedom of Information Act. Then again, I haven't looked for it, and as far as I know there's been no research done to explore this as yet. So I can't give a concrete answer with regard to open government data.

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

Thank you very much.

My next question is to Mr. Sterling.

One of the values of reporting on open data advancement would be.... In Canada, each department provides a report on plans and priorities, and we have the main estimates—a very similar system, I understand, to the U.K. system.

In the U.K. or in other jurisdictions, have reports on open data initiatives and progress been included, instead of from across government or at a very high level, from individual departments and agencies that are required to report their initiatives and progress on open data initiatives?

[Richard Stirling]

Each department in central government in the U.K. reports on its progress through to the Cabinet Office, which then publishes reports on departmental progress.

The other thing we're doing is to publish as open data the reporting on other measures; for example, office utilization, compliance with procurement frameworks, etc. This means using open data to underpin the behaviour change and the compliance with some of the more stringent cost-saving measures that have been put in place around austerity. You use open data to drive people and drive the behaviour.

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

Ms. Chiara Ubaldi, would you have anything further to that to offer concerning other jurisdictions?

[Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi]

I believe that France and the United States have a similar approach, and I think Spain has as well. Increasingly, governments are moving towards that road.

Individual agencies are a big part of the ecosystem within the public sector in opening up data—more and more, the idea is to have a regular reporting on the implementation of the open data initiative—and also across levels of government.

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

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

I will now give the floor to Ms. Brown for five minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for having me back to the committee.

To all the witnesses, I'm just subbing in for one of my colleagues on this committee for a couple of meetings. So I haven't been privy to all the discussion that has taken place prior. I'm sorry that I won't be able to come back to all of the meetings because I am finding this discussion really interesting.

My particular responsibility in our government is that I'm parliamentary secretary for international cooperation. I've had the opportunity to visit a lot of emerging economies. I know that many of these economies are going to leapfrog over where we have been in our development process simply because they're going to have access to technologies that we've had to develop. I was 200 miles northwest of Juba, in South Sudan, two years ago and everybody has a cell phone. I'm amazed by the technology that is out there and the access that people have.

I know in a study that we did in our foreign affairs committee a year ago, we had Scotiabank in, and they were doing a particular project in the Caribbean with people who are doing telebanking now because in so many areas there just aren't the facilities, the bricks-and-mortar facilities. So Scotiabank is developing a process in the Caribbean for many of those countries to have access to telebanking services.

I look at this and think with the leapfrog ability that's going to happen for many of these emerging economies—and maybe this is a question to you, Ms. Ubaldi, because the OECD, the European countries, are working in many of the emerging economies, along with us as partners—are there developing programs that are looking at emerging economies to help them from the get-go, to start with open data and to be able to communicate this information? I think it would be very instrumental in helping them as governments trying to build communication with their citizens—an open government communication strategy.

Do any of you know of anything that is being promoted?

[Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi]

Very quickly, the answer is yes. From the OECD perspective, we have, in particular, three programs. One is for Latin America, which covers all Latin American countries, not only Chile and Mexico, which are member countries.

The purpose is to transfer the practices and experiences from OECD countries to non-OECD countries and emerging economies. The impact that we're seeing is extremely important because some of these emerging economies are extremely active in terms of open data. We are then working in the MENA region, specifically on open data as part of the open government project. We are working in Southeast Asia.

So the answer to you is yes, and then globally—and Richard may join on this—there is the Open Government Partnership. I think one of the main values of the Open Government Partnership is really to help emerging economies and developing countries through the international collaboration to leapfrog and utilize open data...and even open government and the value creation we were talking about earlier.

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

Thank you.

Mr. Stirling, you looked like you had some comments.

[Richard Stirling]

I endorse everything that was just said. Our work in this area is focused around Africa, in particular. We are looking at supporting them in building their open data strategies and supporting their local economies because as you identified, they don't have the legacy. They have a huge amount of talent and drive. In my opening remarks I identified that this is a global market and a global opportunity. This could be a great way for them to build local businesses that serve customers around the world and grow their economy to catch up.

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

You're right; they have a great deal of ability. My son-in-law is from Ghana. He is currently the guest professor at the University of Mines and Technology and is supervising the master's classes for electrical engineering, so the talent pool is there. With this kind of access to information from their own governments, I think we would see some of these economies grow like wildfire, I would think.

I have one other question—

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you. The time is up. I'm sorry.

Now we'll go to Mr. Ravignat.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

My question is directed to Madam Bates.

I want to follow up on something my colleague Madam Day was asking about in regard to how Canada scored on some of the indicators. You mentioned that it has to do somewhat with the relationship with other levels of government. I wondered if you could unpack that. Where does the problem exist, precisely?

[Dr. Joanne Bates]

For the open data index study, which is basically counting the number of data sets that have been opened in a number of different categories, there was a note on that study that because of Canada's federal system, the public transport details, for example, were not held at a federal level. They were held at a more localized level, which caused issues in terms of being able to rank Canada relative to other countries in that field, which led to a zero in that case. There will be other data sets, I imagine, similar to the timetable data, which will lead to a zero score, even though the kind of governance situation is different in other countries.

Thank you.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

My next question is for Ms. Da Sylva, whom I thank for being here with us.

It worries me a bit that a data expert like yourself should find the data made accessible by the government difficult to use. If an expert like yourself has trouble, I guess every other Canadian has trouble too.

If you could only make three or four suggestions to further democratize the use of Government of Canada data, what would they be?

[Lyne Da Sylva]

Actually, I was referring to trouble with automated data use. This comes back to something Ms. Bates mentioned earlier. The expression “open data“ does not just mean public and freely accessible data, it also means data in a format that computer applications can use.

Some data from the Canadian government are perfectly accessible to people. I had no problem viewing a certain number of maps and accessing certain data. It is just that it so happens that some data is in zipped Word files. As a human being, I have no problem dezipping and reading a Word file. However, this unstructured data is much more difficult to analyze directly with a computer, unless you use natural language processing technologies to extract unstructured text and structure it so it can be used.

One solution would be to take suitable data sets and put them into formats that are already structured. CSV files are an example of structured data. It is also possible to go all the way to true RDF format, the champion of “reusability“.

I am not an expert in all formats, for example, those for visual geographic data or maps. I am not an expert on the part of those files that is digital data and the part that enables them to be viewed. There is certainly a data subset that could be stored in tabular format.

The idea is to structure the information. That is what will make the data more open in the intended sense. The fact that the data is accessible to Canadians poses no problem whatsoever, but that is not what actually makes for open data. You may have 190,000 data sets, go through them and try to find something of interest. However, the principal of open data is about having more easily reusable formats.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you, Ms. Da Sylva.

To conclude, I will invite Ms. Ablonczy to ask the last question.

[Diane Ablonczy, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I appreciated the responses to my question about the practical benefits of this initiative. They were very helpful.

To follow up, I wonder whether countries that are committed to this course of action are confining themselves to just putting as much data as possible out into the public domain, or whether they are linking, prioritizing, or triaging information based on the results that are anticipated and desired.

How is this being approached? Is it in a logical, prioritizing fashion, or is data just being put out with the hope that at some point somebody will do something practical with it?

Maybe Mr. Stirling should begin.

[Richard Stirling]

The U.K. government is taking an approach of prioritizing and triaging data sets around impacts. That's partly for the practical reason that government is huge and you need to start somewhere, so you might as well start with the high-value stuff.

This linked back into the discussions that we've had with the sector panels and the open data user group and the feedback mechanisms, hearing what the existing industry would find useful, but also hearing what the innovative, disruptive start-ups also would find useful, and using that to then set the backlog and prioritize the data sets that they'll focus on day to day.

Now that is something that we also play a part in, in that we try to bring our start-up and our membership community...and act as their voice to government, to say this is what would be incredibly helpful.

[Diane Ablonczy, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Ms. Ubaldi , in other jurisdictions, how is that working?

[Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi]

The tendency is to prioritize the release of open data sets based on the needs and the values of the community of users. That implies a big effort made by governments right now to better understand the demand, meaning to engage with the various groups of actors, which is not an easy task, but they're moving towards that direction.

We are seeing a new level of sophistication. The governments may have started with opening as much as possible, and now they are becoming more targeted in prioritizing which data sets to release.