Government Operations committee  Yes, the U.S. federal government and a lot of the states, and the U.K. were probably earliest off the mark with the open government initiatives. But there are lots of countries and jurisdictions that have done well. There are now over 400 jurisdictions, national and subnational g

Government Operations committee  We looked around the world, because we were a little late to the game, and found that a lot of jurisdictions were taking a lot of flak because they were just dumping data sets that were easy to dump out there, but weren't really of use to people. That's why we went with the votin

Government Operations committee  I'm not aware that it has been discussed. I think everybody understands the need and I think everybody is waiting patiently for a champion.

Government Operations committee  It's grind-it-out difficult work.

Government Operations committee  I think we already have a number of forums that work well. I used to be the corporate CIO for the Province of Ontario. We have a forum at which the CIOs from Treasury Board as well as from each of the provinces, and so on, get together regularly anyway. Maybe that would be some

Government Operations committee  We haven't got it approved yet but we're going for 90 days, so the information gets created and it's out within 90 days. That's the goal. We'll see whether that survives cabinet or not but that's what we're offering.

Government Operations committee  Sure. Whenever you're going to spend time trying to agree on language issues for metadata and standards in terms of formats, it's tedious work and it's long and involved. The benefits though, I think, are huge, and they're huge for a very long period of time. I think it would mak

Government Operations committee  Maybe I can start. Thanks for the question. All the research we've done suggests that the easier it is for access to information the more demand for information you'll get. We honestly believe that even though we are moving down a path that will both automate the front end of th

Government Operations committee  That's a great question. I'd have to give that some more thought. We use a lot of the federal government data now, particularly a lot out of Stats Canada. We use a lot of the place data, the geospatial data, that we've talked about already. Most of the data we use is very conte

Government Operations committee  Thanks very much for the question. It's a great question. What we know for sure is that all data has errors in it. Some of them were created, some of them occurred when the data was collected, and some of them were created and built-in as the data was put together. What we've fo

Government Operations committee  I'm going to delegate that to Marc. I think he has that level of detail. Thanks.

Government Operations committee  Yes. I think the biggest opportunity is around a common search feature. I have a slightly different view from what was expressed earlier. I don't think we should replicate the data all over the place. If we do that we're going to have huge storage costs, plus the complexity of

Government Operations committee  The top voted data sets right now are transportation data, finance data, and health and education data. Those would be the top ones. Am I missing anything?

Government Operations committee  In terms of actually using the data, we've had a number of applications created with our data. One is called iamsick.ca. The developers took information on hospitals, emergency clinics, pharmacy locations, hours and language of service, and a host of other things. Some of it came

Government Operations committee  I can start if you like. On the question regarding how data has to be free and what the costs are of opening up data, our costs depend on the size of the data set and what has to be done in the conversion. They're relatively modest. They're being borne by the ministries and they