Thank you all for allowing me to appear in front of you. It's a nice treat. I've never spoken in such a beautiful room. I wonder if that fireplace works.
My name is Eric Sauve, and I'm vice-president at a local company called Newsgator. I suppose I'm here to represent an entrepreneurial voice in the discussion on why you would bother going down this road of open government.
In terms of my experience, I'm a vice-president at Newsgator. I was formerly the CEO of a company called Tomoye, which was recently acquired, and I sit on a few boards of start-up engineering companies that basically produce software.
My experience in the government space has been, over the last decade, in providing these types of software solutions to government, primarily in the United States but also to certain government agencies in Canada. I've had the privilege of being able to support probably about half a million government users working in the realm of collaborative government, open government, and that kind of stuff.
I was invited here to speak as an entrepreneur. My message for you today is that it's important to think about open government as an economic issue, not a political issue. Aside from access to information and all of these things advocacy organizations might be interested in with respect to the workings of government, in a modern economy, in an information economy, data are basically what creates companies.
One of the easiest examples to think of is Google. Google has no data. What it does is create a valuable service for people by using other people's data. It makes it readable. It does interesting things with it. It creates visualizations for it.
I would argue, and my experience is, that in fact open government should be viewed as a way to create economic wealth in this country. Information and data are really a kind of modern resource that companies can tap into to produce economic value and jobs.
What I'm going to do is walk you through just a couple of examples of interesting uses of open data that have created economic value.
There's a website called CrimeReports.com. For those who are not familiar with it, you can check it out online. Essentially, it takes local crime data, puts it on a map, and allows citizens to see what crime is happening in their area. A company was formed to provide that service, and that creates jobs.
Another example, which is a little bit more of a historical example but that I think is useful nonetheless, is the Weather Network. Companies don't collect data on weather. That's provided by the government. Of course, anyone who's on the Internet sees weather data everywhere. It's a big engine to draw people onto sites and keep them connected to sites. Of course, that can produce economic value in terms of the products they buy or the advertising they consume on the sides of those sites. I don't know exactly how many people work in the weather industry, but that industry certainly wouldn't be possible if it weren't for open data.
Another example, a more local example, is a website called Zoocasa.com. This is a site owned by Rogers Media, and it competes with the MLS site. Basically they take real estate listings and combine them with census data to provide a full picture of the neighbourhood people might want to move into. They see the house they want to buy, and then they can see the schools and maybe reports on how well those schools are doing. They can see the makeup, financial and otherwise, of the community they might move into. That's a really valuable service, because obviously it helps people to make more informed decisions about the houses they might buy.
The economic lens on that is increased competition. We all know that MLS is a site we all go to, and maybe it's a good idea if there are other sites. Economic value is created through competition. Of course, that competition is driven by producing that interesting value that consumers want to see. They want to see the full picture, as opposed to just what they get on MLS.
Another example is a company called PASSUR Aerospace. They take open air traffic control data and data that they collect as well about airplanes and their current trajectories and resell those data as a service to airline companies so that they can better predict when planes are going to land and, as a result, when they're going to take off. Of course, that has tremendous value to airline companies, because unless they can achieve the logistical perfection that's required to manage those huge operations, they're losing money all the time.
Google Maps is another and more famous example of value that's being created using government data. Another example, let's not forget, is the whole industry that has come out of GPS. It was Reagan's decision to basically make it possible for commercial entities to use GPS data, to get satellite signals and use them to create devices that.... Those of you who have phones may have bought an exercise app that uses GPS data. That's one small example of an industry created around data that were collected by government and made open for commercial gain.
In closing, I would say that I don't know a tremendous amount about government, but I think government has been essentially collecting data about all aspects of Canadians and Canadian topography—Canada, generally speaking—since Canada was created. The more we can start to think about making those data available and think about it from a perspective of economic value, jobs creation, and enterprise creation, the more we're doing a great service to the people of this country.
That's it.