Government Operations committee  Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to address everyone this morning. I have a lot of content to cover so I'm going to jump right in. I'm going to address some of the questions that I think are important to the committee's agenda. I'll tell you a little bit about myself.

Government Operations committee  Earthquake data is a good example because it's one of the few real-time data sources that exists within open data. One of the biggest challenges within the different government layers is the unification of standards and protocols. The federal government is taking the leadership role, and in the Ontario government report that we released last week we actually advocate following the federal government policies when it comes to this one regard.

Government Operations committee  We really got involved with CODE and this particular event to give back to the government community. Similar to how we felt we were the beneficiary of the academic community, which was the reason why we created GCA, we got involved with CODE because we're a huge beneficiary of programs like SR and ED, and the media tax credit program in Ontario.

Government Operations committee  That's exactly what I'm trying to accomplish by spending my time and effort and energy on this. I went to Vancouver and I met with about 20 venture capitalists there. The way I've been doing it is through the venture capitalists and the investment angle. My hope is that through them, they will work with the entrepreneurs, and the entrepreneurs, combined with the VCs, will be the ones who can exploit the opportunity within open data.

Government Operations committee  I think this is an excellent question. This is a question that we should keep in the back of our minds throughout this entire process. So the title of the Ontario government report is “Open by Default”, and I think the way we should look at the data sets is that first we should screen them for security and privacy concerns.

Government Operations committee  Right. That's why it needed to be pointed out, so they could see how they could potentially benefit from this. One thing I think Colin can speak to phenomenally, with his unique perspective—I'll pass it over to you, Colin—is that when you combine open data and the transparency that it represents, along with social network feedback, you could really change the way government governs, potentially.

Government Operations committee  Thank you so much for that. I apologize for how fast I went through all that information. This will also connect to the question Mr. Martin asked about how we can enable the maximum benefit of this whole initiative for the government and citizens. One of the things I wanted to communicate by crowdsourcing, that whole concept of putting it out there to the crowd, is that as long as you can provide us the information and the data, the community will find a way to exploit and make use of this data.

Government Operations committee  There is going to be a natural evolution in this market. As with any technology sector, we'll go through a period of hype. We're not quite there yet, but there will come a time when the opportunity will get overestimated in a sense, and it will go through a natural cycle. In the maturity part of the cycle, you'll start to see tools being developed by independent developers that will make the development of these technologies easy to use, even for the layperson.

Government Operations committee  GameSalad. That type of product doesn't necessarily emerge in the early part of a cycle. It will emerge in the more maturing part of the cycle.

Government Operations committee  There are a couple of intangible ways to measure success, at least early on. The fact that the CODE hackathon had so many participants is actually a very good sign. It's a lot easier to get people to develop code for a game than it is for something like open data. The fact that the participation rate was that high was a good early indicator.

Government Operations committee  Presently the most popular data sets are the immigration data sets. You'll find that more than half of the top ten data sets are immigration data sets by nature. If you think about it, there will always be at least several million international folks who will be interested in what's going on with the latest trends in immigration.