Evidence of meeting #37 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was moore.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Web programmer, As an Individual
Yes. The State should be doing many things to get young people involved. I don't have any solutions to propose, but I do believe private citizens have a meaningful role to play.
Bloc
Carole Freeman Bloc Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC
We witnessed in 2009 some political will on the part of leaders around the world to adopt more open and more proactive information disclosure practices. The election of Obama was one example. The governments of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Finland and Mexico all moved to become truly open.
The order came from the top, because the political will must exist. The process moved very quickly in the United States, once the go-ahead was given. In a mere 45 days, the Data.gov website was up and running. On February 6, a request was made for information about all government activities. A response was forthcoming with the prescribed 60-day period. So then, the process is moving forward everywhere and proactive disclosure of information is proceeding smoothly and quickly.
Australia appears to be leading the way at this stage. You went to Australia, Mr. Moore. What difference did it make gathering the information on site rather than over the Internet or by videoconference? Did travelling to Australia change anything? What did you learn that you could bring back with you to Edmonton?
The problem stemmed from the fact that the States, the provinces, the municipalities and agencies all have different approaches.
Would you care to comment on what I've just said?
Chef Information Officer, Information Technology, City of Edmonton
Absolutely, it was very important to be there. I was invited to go and share what we were doing too. They had questions for me along the lines of what we were encountering. It was the same thing they were encountering, which was really cultural issues within the middle management of the civil service.
I had an opportunity to talk to Nicholas Gruen, the chair of their task force. Nicholas was just a business leader in Australia, but in being there and talking to them about how they did what they did, I realized that although Australia was similar to us in terms of being a Commonwealth country, their culture was very different. Moreover, what they do at a state and a local level is very different. From that opportunity to talk and really compare notes, the thing that I found was that they were as much interested in what we were doing at a local level, because it doesn't exist there yet, as I was in finding out what was happening at a national level there.
In comparison with what we are doing, they are absolutely further ahead. They are running into some challenges with the things they want to do next, as the public in Australia want better access to the Internet first, as there are some regulatory issues. People are saying “Don't give me open data; I want more Internet.”
We're in a slightly different position. You talk about the Obama administration and the time it takes to do things, but if the City of Edmonton can pull together 12 data sets in three weeks and put up an open data catalogue, I think, given a little more time, we can do that at both the provincial and federal levels.
As I said earlier, I really believe that the people—the staff, the public servants—are ready to move. We just need that clear direction from the leadership.
Bloc
Bloc
Carole Freeman Bloc Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC
What is the most important thing you learned in Australia as far as your project in Edmonton goes?
Chef Information Officer, Information Technology, City of Edmonton
The thing that was confirmed for me, which we were planning to do and had started to do and they had done, was engaging the community. They didn't just have a task force made up of civil servants and public sector people, but they had gone a number of times with web forums and Twitter and social media to engage people. So the engagement was the most important thing.
Carole Freeman Bloc Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC
Thank you, Mr. Moore.
Unfortunately, my time is up. I did have several more questions for you.
Liberal
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Moore, and Mr. Mulley, for being here today. Your enthusiasm for your work is very helpful as we begin this study.
Mr. Moore, you mentioned you were working with other cities, that you were looking particularly at revisions to the licensing arrangements and the catalogue. I read somewhere about the Code for Canada organization. I'm wondering what the Code for Canada project is about and if it's related to what you are doing, and could you expand on the issues you're discussing with other cities?
Chef Information Officer, Information Technology, City of Edmonton
Absolutely, and I would just tell you that I love the Americans, and some of my relatives are American, but I'm also highly competitive. When I see good things happening, I want to adopt them.
As for the Code for Canada project, we're working on a partnership with a group in the U.S. called Code for America. Code for America was built on the same theory as Teach for America, in taking qualified, professional teachers and putting them in schools that need the teachers. So Code for America is doing something similar, in taking qualified programmers and coders and helping them work on projects for cities across the U.S. We're in discussion with the other cities on that.
The first thing we decided we needed to do as a group of cities was to deal with the licence. The licence we have, we believe, is an open licence. It's an international licence. But some developers in the country have pointed out that it's not as open as it could be. Because Toronto and Ottawa use the same licence that Toronto and Vancouver do, we're working together. We have talked with CPIC in Ottawa and are doing some work with them. What we want to do or plan to do, as Mr. Mulley talked about, is to move to a creative commons licence. If you look at Australia and the work they're doing, as well as Seoul, in South Korea, they are very aggressive in moving towards that creative commons licence.
We, as a city, publish all of our pictures and YouTube videos under a creative commons licence. From my perspective, a couple of years ago all of the rules in the world changed during what Richard Florida calls "the great reset”, and we are really in that open space. Cities, provinces, and national governments have that opportunity to share in it. So we are working very closely with our counterparts in Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver. We all face the same challenge, so we might as well put our resources to use and draw like solutions.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Mr. Moore, as I'm new to all of this, could you tell me specifically what the difference is between an open licence and a creative commons licence? What are the specific differences?
Chef Information Officer, Information Technology, City of Edmonton
We believed that our licence was open and gave people what they needed, but the creative commons is just a little more accurate in terms of use. It encourages more things, such as giving credits and in how they can be used. I'm not a lawyer, so you'd have to seek some clarity on that. We have some great lawyers with the city.
But there were some small things that were pointed out to us by some of the developers. We want to remove barriers, and we feel that the creative commons is.... The thing the creative commons provides is an international standard. So this is beyond Canada. The information flows, so we want to have a better alignment internationally.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Mr. Moore, how does it work when the city is making available its data and people are repurposing the data? Some people are going to make money on that. How does that work? What's the city's policy on the commercialization of these data? Perhaps you could say something about that.
Chef Information Officer, Information Technology, City of Edmonton
There are usually four things people ask me about: what about privacy, what about security, what about the money, and are people going to use the information against us? We have been charging for spatial data over the years. My perspective on it is that we are not in the business of making money on the sale of data. That's not our core business. The money has been collected through taxes or other funds to pay for the information. So over the last couple of years and going into next year, I'm actually removing the revenue from my budget on the sale of spatial data. We are not concerned about people making money on the use of our data. We call that economic development.
Even before we released our data--and Michael was sharing his story about Montreal, and I do everything I can to encourage them to release their transit data--we made our transit data available before our open data came along. It was in February of 2009. We did that because we were working with Google to put our transit data on Google for citizens. When we did that, we also released it on our website, and it's been updated every Thursday since February 18, 2009.
The neat thing that happened after we did that was that two local companies in Edmonton created applications. One, a small technology company, created an A-to-B routing map. Another, made up of three students from the University of Alberta in their second year, created an app to tell you when the next bus or LRT was coming. The really neat thing about that is that because the general transit data follows an international standard, those apps are actually being purchased around the world and used in other countries. For us, it's about economic development.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Do you have any sense of the difference between what you're forgoing as revenue in your department and the economic developments that are being created in the community? Do you have any sense of the numbers around that?
Chef Information Officer, Information Technology, City of Edmonton
I haven't stopped to study the numbers. To me, government has a responsibility to demystify government, and that's what our focus is. The District of Columbia, when they had their apps competition a couple of years ago, calculated that there was over $2 million of cost avoidance. In our apps competition this year, I didn't do that, because I just can't quantify it. But what I do know is that a number of software developers are selling applications at 99¢ and $1.99, and we're getting more information out to citizens. We're all about building a great city, and this just contributes to that.
Liberal
Conservative
Harold Albrecht Conservative Kitchener—Conestoga, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Moore and Mr. Mulley.
Maybe I can just give two disclaimers before I ask any questions. First is that I wasn't part of the committee when the study was initiated, so I'm not privy to the.... Well, I shouldn't say I'm not privy to it, but I didn't take the time to go through all the word-for-word testimony from the three meetings in April. Second is that I don't profess to be any type of technology expert, so some of my questions may seem rather elementary.
Mr. Mulley, you used terms like “open Parliament” and “ repurposing”, and you're convinced that repurposing could possibly increase participation in local government if you take some of that data. You talked, I believe, about your difficulty in Montreal in accessing the maps of the political jurisdictions. Their defence was that this was a mechanism for producing documents. In the material the commissioner presented to this committee earlier, one of her statements was that
Open government is different from proactive disclosure.... It's a form of proactive disclosure, but open government means that you don't only disclose information, but you disclose it in a format that can be disaggregated, as data that can be reused, and people can use different technological applications to analyze this information.
I don't think I'm concerned about analyzing information. I think all of us around this committee room are eager to see more open government, more data online. But I guess the concern I have as a non-technical person is whether there isn't a risk of someone taking the data or the information and reformatting it into a format that could look official on the part of any government, be it municipal, provincial, or federal, and actually be misinforming the general public. Is that a risk at all, or is this something that's not even a point?
Web programmer, As an Individual
I don't think that releasing data increases the risk of fraud. One can always commit fraud, but I'm not aware of a single case of anything like this happening in any of the open data efforts worldwide. I don't see the incentive to do something like that, to the best of my knowledge.
Conservative
Harold Albrecht Conservative Kitchener—Conestoga, ON
Mr. Moore, one of the statements you made was that you've changed your data sets to be more accessible. You used the example of PDF files, which you've changed now to make them more accessible. I just want to follow up on my previous question. Does the fact that they're not in PDF form make them more easily tinkered with, which could lead to possible misinformation, even if it's only a few key words?
Chef Information Officer, Information Technology, City of Edmonton
Absolutely. The question was raised with me when I presented our direction to counsel in January.
My response to that is that we always maintain the source data, so if something is changed, we can always go back to that. Moving away from PDF to machine-readable is just modern and makes sense. With our apps competition earlier this year, I was really hoping the Province of Alberta would join in releasing some data. They didn't, but the neat thing was that the apps developers actually scraped the data off the website, and have created apps for restaurant inspections and some of those things.
As I like to say to all orders of government, if you don't release your data, somebody will scrape it for you, and I think Mr. Mulley is a great example of that.
Conservative
Harold Albrecht Conservative Kitchener—Conestoga, ON
In relation to this committee gathering more information from a large cross-section of the Canadian public, you indicated there are multiple public servants who are eager, ready, and equipped to give us that information. This committee is interested in going beyond simply the public service. The other obligation we have is to collect this in a format that the committee can use in both official languages.
Do you have recommendations as to how we can do that effectively and really get a good cross-section of input, but at the same time respect the budget restrictions that this places us under?
Chef Information Officer, Information Technology, City of Edmonton
That's an excellent question.
One of the other unique things for Canada in the whole global open government movement is our multilingual approach and needs, and respecting that.
Let me step back a bit. There is something happening that is called “intrinsic motivation”. Mr. Mulley is an example of that. People will just do things because it's the right thing to do. With respect to budget restrictions, I think you would have no trouble finding people in this country to participate—not just the public servants who are ready to move but private industry as well as private individuals. We use the analogy of barn-raising in the west. We don't raise too many barns together any more, but we're actually doing it together as an intrinsic community as we are releasing data and creating apps to make it useful. The people and the country are ready to step up.
