Evidence of meeting #40 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 make.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
--and with a mandate to investigate all of this. So it's very different from what we're doing here.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
So when you talk about political will, this is something our committee could deal with. The technicalities of the Government 2.0 commission are sort of outside of our scope, probably.
As an Individual
Yes, but if you look at the types of recommendations that committee made--or that task force made--I think they are very applicable to the types of issues you were looking into. And I think there are a number of recommendations in there that you might look to as models.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Okay.
You talked about how there are restrictions the House of Commons and Parliament put on the use of the information that's developed here, or made here, and you contrasted that with what Americans are doing. I know you've talked about what the White House does. There's a very sharp contrast to that. Can you say a little bit about how the White House approaches this?
As an Individual
The Americans have a wonderful system where all government information that is created is, by default, public domain. It has no licence. There are no restrictions, so you can use it to do anything you want. You can change it. You can build an entire business around it. You can turn it into satire. There's no limit on the creativity that's available to them.
What I love about this--and as someone who believes in the rights of citizens--is that what the Americans have managed to evade, at least when it comes to their government information, is a permission culture.
In Canada we have permission culture. If you want to use Canadian government information, okay, but you better talk to us first or at least read the fine print about what you're allowed and what you're not allowed to do. You have a creative idea, you have a piece of art, you have a company, you want to do all those things? Make sure you check the fine print.
In the United States no permission is required. If I have a creative idea, I can go and try it out. I can fail or I can succeed, but it's up to me. That makes sense, because my tax dollars already paid for all this information.
As an Individual
Yes, and this is one of the reasons you need to look at this so closely. People will say that if we lift crown copyright, who knows what will happen? To our south, we've had a neighbour who's never had crown copyright, and they have done, I don't know, relatively well economically and politically. So someone needs to explain to me what the risk is.
Liberal
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
Thank you very much for being with us today, Mr. Eaves.
I read that you're a public policy entrepreneur and open government activist, negotiation expert. You've been involved in a study into democracy and diversity at Queen's University. On September 29, 2009, you submitted the view that there are three laws to open government. I want you to help us dissect them a little bit more.
The first rule is that if it can't be spidered or indexed, it does not exist. Perhaps you could help us with the nomenclature a little bit. Start with spidered.
As an Individual
I want to focus the conversation again. Those were the three laws of open data, not open government.
Conservative
As an Individual
No, it's okay. I just want to make.... I feel it's very important that this committee has a very strong framework for understanding this problem.
As an Individual
So spidered and indexed means the data can be found. Most of us now look for information by using a search engine on the Internet, whether that's Yahoo! or Google or Microsoft Bing. We use one of these to go and find information.
There's a reason why those search engines know where all the information is: they do what we call “spidering”. They have little things that kind of float around the Internet and they go and find where the information is so they can then point you to it when you look for a relevant term.
If you happen to have data that you say you're willing to share with the world, but you have it on a server that's not connected to the Internet or you don't allow Google or Microsoft or Yahoo! to spider and index, in my opinion you don't have open data. If it's open but nobody can find it, it's really not that open. So that's the first rule.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
Okay.
If it isn’t available in an open and machine-readable format.... I think the first clause of that statement is self-evident, but how do you define machine-readable? Do you mean it would have to be readable by your average person's computer or MacBook that a Canadian would have sitting in their living room?
As an Individual
Yes, that's exactly it.
This piece of paper is not a machine-readable document. And a PDF, which is very often the publication vehicle of choice for most governments, I would argue is not a machine-readable document. You open it in a machine, but very often you can't copy the text out of it--or even if you can, it copies in a very messy way. I want the data in a format in which I can reuse it.
Conservative
As an Individual
No. I don't think it's in the interest of this committee to get into the specifics of the file formats one should publish in, but I think there are a lot of good practices out there. For example, if you look at the City of Vancouver's open data portal, very frequently they will share data sets in several different types, in several different formats. That way the user can choose the one that most fits their need. It means that you can use it in formats that are broadly more open, but if you want a format that's more closed you can do that too.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
Just so that we delineate the line between machine-readable and non-machine-readable, is there some sort of definition that you can provide beyond the notion that PDF is not, but other forms are?
As an Individual
I think the short of it is whether I can play with the data, because if I can't play with it, then it's not open.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
The third one was if a legal framework doesn't allow it to be reproduced. Are you referring there to copyright, to government copyright?
As an Individual
Yes. Sometimes it's copyright, sometimes it's a licensing agreement. For example, this used to be true in Vancouver before we wrote the open motion. There was information that was shared on the city's website, so there was data that was available, but they actually had a disclaimer that says you can look at this, but don't dare use it to do anything. Don't use it in your company, don't use it in your non-profit, don't use it to do any of these things. So it's not particularly helpful for me if you share data with me and then tell me I can look at the data, play with it, and do amazing things with it, but I can't share it with anybody. The moment you say that, then what am I supposed to do?
