I think the point is to create, in a sense, almost some inter-agency competition in which there are expectations set for every department about what will be released. In that way there's a certain amount of accountability and a requirement to move forward within the departments. If you want to know what people want, you can ask within the departments themselves to see what people are asking for. You may find that people are asking for certain kinds of information that the department is not providing at the moment, or is not in a position to provide, because of certain policies that may be in place. That's one way to identify what's out there.
As well, the kinds of competitions that we see taking place at the local level to try to encourage the use and reuse of that information could clearly be replicated at a federal level.
The other thing is to think about some of the people you bring in, as was the case with President Obama. They not only created this fundamental presumption and tried to push it forward, but they also brought some people into that administration with a clear commitment and expertise on open government and open data issues, whether that's the chief technology officer or people like Beth Noveck. Beth Noveck is a law professor who spearheaded what's known as the peer-to-patent project in the United States to try to deal with issues around patent review.
One of the big concerns around patents is whether or not there is prior art and whether or not a patent should be issued. The peer-to-patent project essentially tries to crowdsource that by opening up the various patent applications to the public to see if the public, as a whole, can identify particular kinds of prior art, which would thereby strike out the prospect that something could be patented. The USPTO in the United States has done trial runs of that peer-to-patent process, and I know that our own CIPO has been talking about the prospect of doing those kinds of things.
I'd note that many of these sorts of possibilities lie squarely within the prospect of being included within the digital economy strategy. If it's not clear that there is a direct link between what we're talking about today in terms of spearheading and unleashing potential innovation and using these sorts of new tools in a digital economy strategy for the country, it certainly ought to be. One would hope that as we move forward with the final strategy in the spring, there will be a role for open data and for openness more generally. That was mentioned in the consultation document that the government released on this issue last spring.