Government Operations committee  Sure. It's difficult for me to speak on the issue because I'm not responsible for the B.C. statistics agency. I can tell you certainly there is a lot of expert opinion out there that the results of that decision had made the usefulness of that data more challenging. The exact impacts of that I'm not totally clear on because I'm not very close to that issue, but I think you would hear in the experts the challenge of using that data.

Government Operations committee  I think the practical benefit is mainly about.... I'm going to try to describe this in a couple of different ways. One is the opportunity that open data provides to help people be successful in the things that they want to do themselves. For example, in my case of the education application that I told you about, the Minister of Education published open data and then used that data to create a service for parents that helps them understand the data profile of various schools.

Government Operations committee  I think, through the work of the open data and open information working group, which I referenced in my remarks, we're trying to create opportunity. We're beginning some work that will be looking specifically at this question of search, and what we would call it is “federated search”.

Government Operations committee  Well, we're attempting to be as smart as we can.

Government Operations committee  We have some RDF data, not a lot of it. It's a new-ish format that a lot of our.... I think the thing to remember about where we're at is that a lot of the systems where we will be pulling data to publish aren't designed to create data in the RDF way. RDF is a really interesting and powerful data format because it can create those interconnections among different datasets, but we haven't done a lot of that so far, no.

Government Operations committee  Yes I would echo Ms. Nadeau's comments. I actually don't think the issue is us stepping on each other's toes, it's more an issue of us not sharing enough. The opportunity to actively share data and in an open way means that we can be consuming each other's data much more seamlessly and repurposing those things for the things we need within our own respective context.

Government Operations committee  Well, some are doing more than others, but yes, all of them are. Probably the largest contributor in volume is the Ministry of Health. I think the smallest contributor is the Ministry of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation. It just has to do with how much data they're holding and what they are able to make open.

Government Operations committee  We are almost always in consultation. One of the strategies we have always used is to be wide open with our users. We're constantly engaged with them through events as well as through social media and other tools. I think the best thing I can say about the response we have received is that we have served over 300,000 users since we launched three years ago.

Government Operations committee  My understanding of McKinsey's work on this is that the value that's created is a culmination of not only sort of commercial economic gain but also productivity. So the answer to your question would be yes, there are opportunities to create more streamlined services that could be more efficient.

Government Operations committee  I would hesitate to use the word “profit”, but I would say that we would be able to achieve savings using open data as part of our service delivery design, yes. With those savings we would be able to release those funds for other purposes.

Government Operations committee  One of the challenges with that question is that there are so many. One thing that we are active in doing is beginning to share transportation data and highway event data in a much more consumable way. That data will be able to inform anyone who is in the business of moving goods and services around the province of British Columbia how to do that more efficiently.

Government Operations committee  There are a number of them. Let me go back to a couple of examples where it's been important for our purposes in B.C., just to give you some insight. We use data as a matter of course when we're doing a lot of communications around public policy issues. That's at a level of using statistics and facts, quick facts and news releases, all the way through to providing interactive maps that allow people to dive in specifically to understand a particular issue in depth.

Government Operations committee  There are a few things. I could start most directly to your question about the issue of wait times. The Ministry of Health publishes online, although I don't believe they're publishing any open data yet, but you can go and look online about wait times for specific surgeons or for specific kinds of surgery.

Government Operations committee  Thanks very much for having me. As ever, it's a really fun thing to be able to come to a committee meeting like this. You probably don't get public servants saying that to you very often but when you're coming from a provincial context, it's really interesting to come and talk to federal colleagues.