Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for inviting us here today. The experience of the City of Ottawa has surpassed all our expectations. We are cooperating with other municipalities in developing common standards and tools. For instance, an application developed for the City of Ottawa can easily be trans

Information & Ethics committee  At the city, since day one we have involved the legal department to see what the risks were with the data we were putting out there. Also, working with my colleagues in the G-4, we engaged a think tank here in Ottawa to look at all the legal aspects of open data from a licensing

Information & Ethics committee  I would like to make a comment on the statement you made a bit earlier. From our perspective, we don't own the data, but our residents do. We at the municipal level are the custodians of that information. We're just making the information available for them. It's their data. We

Information & Ethics committee  I am not a city developer. I consider myself a technical person. I'm here to serve the public. The public has paid for that data already. I just give it back to them.

Information & Ethics committee  We ask them. It's that simple.

Information & Ethics committee  What we did was engage the community. When we did the first data set release, there were 17 of them. The way we did it was we talked to the community, and they said those were the ones they would like to get. As part of our website, we asked the public which data sets they would

Information & Ethics committee  We did it through our website. We have a website called Apps4Ottawa.

Information & Ethics committee  The question was which data set you would like to get. And we just monitored it on a regular basis.

Information & Ethics committee  I think one of the keys to our success was that we engaged the media from day one. We engaged them. And when we publicized our Apps4Ottawa contest, we said that if you need more information, go to our website. On a regular basis we provide regular updates, and they have taken car

Information & Ethics committee  We don't have a sense of whether anybody was rejected or decided not to participate. But one of the rules of the contest is to encourage people to develop multilingual applications, which is a reflection of the community out there. Nobody was eliminated if they only provided it

Information & Ethics committee  No. We're making the data available. It's the residents who decide what's important for them and what application they're looking for. We got the community to vote as well on the preferred apps for the residents. It's not only the judges who decide who will win. There will also b

Information & Ethics committee  We don't see any barriers either. I don't see why it would be more difficult. I think the principles are the same. If the federal government decides to do that, you will be very successful. I don't see any reason why not.

Information & Ethics committee  To answer your question, I would like to talk about data formats. When we make data available for citizens to download, we use the format used by the city. Let's look at the geospatial data example. There are two or three standards in the industry, and we make our data available

Information & Ethics committee  Like my colleague from Vancouver, I can tell you that the information is very important to us, but I cannot tell you how much we are paying for it. That being said, when we put the motion for open data in front of the IT subcommittee for a vote, one of the questions we got was w

Information & Ethics committee  We never did any study to determine how much money we had saved, but let's look at the result of our open data Apps4Ottawa contest. The initial investment was $50,000. That's it. Out of that contest, we received over 100 applications, either for smartphones or for websites, etc.