Information & Ethics committee  The answer is yes. I want to be very clear: On an open data portal, such as the City of Vancouver has...no one can go and change the data the City of Vancouver has.

Information & Ethics committee  They can take the data, and then they can change the data they have on themselves and then share that, but the fidelity of that data is maintained, because anybody who looks at something that's created with it will simply go back to the original and compare them and say “Why did you change these things?”

Information & Ethics committee  So any bill any ministry ever paid over 25,000 pounds was going to be made available to the public.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Sorry, I can't speak to Australia because I haven't seen as much of what they've done with the open data, but I was in London at the announcement when the British government announced that it was going to release all spending data. Again, this is not budget. This is actual spending data, down to the 25,000-pound level.

Information & Ethics committee  No, by ministry.

Information & Ethics committee  Not geographically. But you can take that data and look at where that money is being spent, because you see the bills, so you can see where the post office is, and things like that, and you can begin to digest geographically where it ends up. I remember a Conservative minister stood up and said, “I know that people are going to find things out that we're not happy about, and I also know that it's going to make us better”.

Information & Ethics committee  I do think we need to call on its better nature, but I think we also need to call on its desire for fiscal responsibility, its desire for economic development, and its desire for democratic engagement.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. I think that number was generated.... I won't say I'm intimately familiar with the methodology that produced that survey, but I believe that was a kind of combination of improved efficiencies within government and new businesses and efficiencies that would be created in the private sector because of better access to data.

Information & Ethics committee  That's a good question. I don't have a good answer for you in the short term. Can you directly attribute a savings to the release of a given data set? That's going to be a very tough challenge. What I think you are going to be able to see, over time--and I think again we're very early days--is certain economies that have access to more information about their economy and the communities they serve, and because they have more access to information, they are going to become more efficient and they are going to grow faster.

Information & Ethics committee  That's right.

Information & Ethics committee  I believe it's for anybody.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. Anybody in the world can go to Data.gov and download a data set.

Information & Ethics committee  I want to be clear. I don't think that if we start sharing information tomorrow, millions of Canadians are going to show up and start downloading this data. I actually think that would be a terrible metric to use. The way we need to measure this isn't by the number of people who downloaded a given data set, but by the economic value and by the democratic engagement that it spurs.

Information & Ethics committee  I want to focus the conversation again. Those were the three laws of open data, not open government.