I have a few different ways to answer that question.
The standard for transparency has increased substantially in the past 24 months or so. The idea of a transparent and accountable government certainly has been around for a long time. What we're seeing with respect to the Internet age is that citizens have a much higher expectation for transparency. I'll use the example of scorecards that are produced by government.
In the health care sector, for example, there are wait times. Governments historically would produce scorecards or performance indicators, and that would be the idea of a transparent approach to results. Today citizens want to understand what data went into the scorecard. They don't want to see the bar graph; they want to see the raw data. They want to make their own decisions as to whether or not what's reported by government is supported by the facts and the data. What you're seeing increasingly is that citizens are asking for the underlying fact base that went into the report.
Now, not all citizens are able to analyze and manipulate that information, so in a way you're in a bit of a catch-22, because other citizens actually want the report because they don't have the capacity to go off and analyze data and create their own. This is what we're seeing, for example, at the provincial level in the education area. The education area is a good example. Community groups are starting to get together to look at the data available across government programs and put together their own report cards on school performance. They want, for instance, to combine data on teachers making salaries of $100,000 or more with what the average student score is in the classroom.
Ministries of education are finding they'll have reports on school bus utilization. A parent group will say, “I'm standing on the street corner and I'm seeing the bus go by. That bus looks full to me. I don't know why you think it's not full and why we have to collapse the route. Could you please give us the data that you're using to determine that the buses are full?” It's increasingly difficult for governments to say that they're not going to give them those data. Once you start down that path, it becomes a matter of getting the next piece of data, and the next piece of data, and now they can combine data from five or six different sources and create their own scorecard.
That's what citizens want when they talk about open government: open data. That's what citizens are after.
What you find is this: if the U.S. releases 304,000 or 305,000 data sets, or if B.C. releases 500 data sets for the purpose of their environmental contest, it gets very difficult for governments to justify why they're not releasing 501 or, if they have 500 data sets, why they released just 499. If they had 300,000, why did they only release 250?
It's a philosophy. If it fits a certain kind of criterion, we're going to make it available. It's easier to default to why it's not being made available than to justify every single data set that's made available. You can split hairs on open government, open data, unlocked government, etc., but it's really a question of trying to get to what citizens in today's Internet world expect of their governments with respect to transparency.
