Government Operations committee  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 discu

Government Operations committee  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

Government Operations committee  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 utilizatio

Government Operations committee  I'm going to say that it depends on who you think the users are. It depends upon the sector whether advertising is the best way of reaching them. It could be that the most effective way to increase the awareness of the data is to send it to whatever the representative body of the

Government Operations committee  There are a number of bodies being set up to foster that international collaboration. There are technical committees working at the Open Government Partnership, which I actually think has a Canadian co-chair at the moment. There are similar bodies working in places like the OECD,

Government Operations committee  I would endorse taking a sector-by-sector approach. In the U.K., we have established sector panels to be the focal point for this conversation between the departments who have the data and their agencies, and the industry working to provide services in that area. To provide the v

Government Operations committee  Thank you. Yes, we are independent, non-partisan, and not for profit. In terms of the firewall and keeping that status, despite being in receipt of public money in the U.K., our corporate structure is that we're a company limited by guarantee. We have no government representa

Government Operations committee  I think this is one of the reasons that any such activity needs to be underpinned by strong principles around a presumption in favour of publication of the open data, because that helps build trust in the idea that nothing adverse is happening through the centralization. The oth

Government Operations committee  Thank you. I view open data as an enabler of things in the economy. The benefits of open data come from people being able to find out how to do things faster, cheaper, or better. The examples that I used in my introduction are, I think, examples that address the “so what?”. The

Government Operations committee  Yes. The rankings that I showed put Canada eighth, and the biggest areas of difference between where you are and where the countries at the top are currently are around social impacts and also some of the core data sets, which haven't been released but I think were specified in t

Government Operations committee  In the publication of data.... The private sector is, depending on the sector, slightly ahead of the public sector in collection. But the business case for the public sector in opening up its data is clear, and in the private sector—

Government Operations committee  The private sector is ahead of the public sector in customization and profiling. I'd just draw the distinction between open data that tends to be information around a cohort or around a place, and the personal private data that shouldn't be made open in general.

Government Operations committee  There are good reasons why some public data wouldn't be made open, but I think the presumption should be that public sector data should be made open where possible.

Government Operations committee  I would say that the culture change comes from people seeing benefits themselves in how they're using data. The NHS Information Centre is now much more gung-ho on the open data agenda because someone else has come in and provided them with a service and some analysis that was use

Government Operations committee  Yes, I think so.