First of all, thank you for inviting me to come and speak before you.
Looking around the room, I don't think any of you know me, and I don't know you either, because I don't come from the cultural world, per se. I'm a Canadian but I'm an engineer, a techie--one of those digital guys--and I've spent most of my career working in the digital world.
The company I'm part of is located in Waterloo, but it's based in many other centres throughout Canada. It's Canada's largest software company. What's interesting about that is not that we're a software company, but I've spent most of my adult life outside of our country; we're a billion-dollar firm, but 95% of our revenues come from outside of Canada. So we're a so-called 5/95 company.
I've spent probably the last 25 years working in the Internet to enable a lot of other cultural industries and nation-states and what have you. We make software that probably about one in three people use every day on the Internet. We make it for companies like BMW or the BBC or FOX News or Canal 5, etc., so we do this throughout the world.
That led me to getting more engaged in Canada, because a few years ago I realized that when it came to digital technologies, Canada was not adopting them as rapidly as I was seeing them being adopted elsewhere in the world, or in the different ways that were occurring elsewhere. So I got involved with several initiatives, one being a federal centre of excellence that was created two years ago, called the Canadian Digital Media Network. It was a so-called CECR, a centre of excellence for commercialization and research. The idea was to bring together all the various types of organizations in the country--from universities to private sector to public sector and so on--to start talking about this and start sharing research and what have you.
Perhaps the most compelling thing that's occurred in the short time since this centre was created is that it has run two national conferences. I've just come from the second conference, called Canada 3.0, held in Stratford just in the last two days. What I found very interesting--and I hope this will give everyone on this committee encouragement--was that it was like going to Woodstock; not that I'm old enough to have gone to Woodstock, although I'm almost old enough. There were many passionate Canadians there. There were 2,000 people there. The first year we were expecting 500. This year we expected around 1,000. We had so many people come, and yet we had not really advertised this conference, not through all the normal means. It was certainly adopted virally. We had a lot of people come.
I thought I'd share with you some of the things I heard. The sharing is just to give you an idea. There will be more fundamental documentation available to you as well, but the conference occurred just 48 hours ago. However, in keeping with the digital media theme, the viral or virtual aspects of the conference were available to all Canadians. We had more than 2,000 people participate online. If you want to go through the tweets right now and the blogs and what have you, you're welcome to do that. All the videos are up on the various sites to do with the conference.
Formal documentation will be created in three waves. Neither I nor the Canadian Digital Media Network is advocating anything. We're just trying to have a conversation about the impact of digital. In terms of the three waves that you'll see, in the next few days the conference chairs are going to create a communiqué that will be published for everyone to see, which will basically summarize what I hope to summarize for you right now. In about a month's time, the group will provide a written summary that's more fulsome, about 40 pages, that summarizes all the debates.
Just to give you an idea, there were 2,000 people, and they were broken up into five session themes, and there were session chairs who ran each of the session themes. So it was a very collaborative conference. You'll see that if you have a chance to read all that stuff.
Finally, there is a virtual site to which there are more than 3,000 people blogging and collaborating in a social media context--sort of like a Facebook--about the impact of digital on the country from a whole variety of perspectives. Just to give you an idea, of the 2,000 people who were there, there were 500 youth from either the university or high school level. Of the remainder, about one-third was from the public sector, one-third from the private sector—that's from the creative community and the like, toolmakers and tool users—and then one-third from the public sector.
Among the things that were debated was the issue that people generally thought our country needs a goal that encapsulates digital as a means of delivery. We've--maybe clumsily--referred to it as a “moon shot”. Some of the people at the conference said that's an American reference, and maybe this should be “beyond the next spike” or something like that.
The point is that to captivate all Canadians in this and to really explain to maybe the non-digitally literate, it would be wise for us as a country to have a goal. What that goal might be is something open to debate, obviously, but we did talk about some of the things that might be in such a goal.
The other thing that was interesting about this conference was that there was a measure of frustration--these are people who obviously are already very engaged in the digital world, which is why they came--and there was a lot optimism about the opportunities for the future. So it was a mixed bag.
The other thing I found very interesting in the group was if you're under 25 years old now, you don't measure yourself perhaps the way the above-25 do. They have a very interesting split of being Canadian but also global. Again, I'm not a social scientist, etc., but it's a fascinating thing that you could easily notice in this conference that they have a different perspective perhaps from the over-25 crowd.
The other thing that became very clear is there are new and old business models that are completely in conflict with each other, the so-called long tail of how to recoup any kind of endeavour, whether it's cultural or any other. These business models are different and there is a transition, and it's a pretty brutal transition.
There was a great concern at the conference that if we didn't act soon on some things we would become a digital colony, and a colony not unlike the country experienced maybe 40, 50 years ago prior to the formation of the tri-councils and all the efforts that were made during the 1960s and 1970s. So there's a great angst about that, because one of the great data points we had presented to us is that depending on how you measure it, between 1% to 4% of all the content in Canada is digital, and that means either 99% or 96% is not. That's something I've noticed as I've travelled the world. Other nation-states have pretty substantial digitization efforts under way and we do not. We are not going to pass on our culture if we do not have it digital. If you're under 25 and it's in a book, you don't read it. You go online.
We have some great debates about connectivity in the country, but if we're just simply connecting to content outside our country, maybe we have to think about our goals a little bit more.
Digital literacy had no debate at all. It was clear: we need a program of digital literacy, very much in the same way that we would have thought of literacy 100 years ago as we moved from the farms to the cities and started to require people to become knowledge workers and to be able to read.
There was a big debate on the goal, about whether the goal's aspirations should be about economy or about our country as a nation. Again, it was a debate, and I think it was a fascinating one.
Something that I think you might find interesting, because I know you have a cultural focus, is that unlike other efforts...and this perhaps is the most important thing to remember, if anything, from anything I've told you. In the past, when we had radio signals or TV signals, you could discriminate what was cultural against what was business, etc. Take phones; you could maybe torture it and say they were both cultural and business. In the data world, with digital bits and bytes, if I'm sending an accounts payable invoice, or if I'm sending a song, it's on the same conveyance.
This goes to the heart of productivity and our country itself. How do we organize ourselves digitally? It's not an easily defined thing. Perhaps that's the greatest challenge with digital: it impacts everything. There is just not one part of our socio-economic structure that is not being impacted by this. So it is very much a centre-led type of thing, and I think that perhaps is one of the great challenges.
Along with productivity as a benefit, at the conference everyone talked about health care, and how health care in general in our country could benefit greatly by the adoption of digital.
The last thing to leave with you is this. There did seem to be a consensus among people that there were three themes that needed to be dealt with in the digital world and how it impacts culture. It came down to connectivity, content, and collaboration. They were cute to use three Cs, but what they meant by it was that, first, connectivity refers to speed and the fact that it's available; content refers to digitizing something or else it just does not exist in this world; and collaboration refers to the ability of people to have access and to have the digital literacy to be able to make use of those tools.
I'll stop there. I'd be happy to take any questions about these activities and my experiences.