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?