Information & Ethics Committee on Jan. 31st, 2011

[David Eaves]

What I would love to see is this group model itself a little bit after the Australian task force to make similar recommendations. Then I would love to see the government look at those recommendations and figure out how to fit them into their agenda. I think there is an enormous opportunity.

One of the things that makes me most excited about the open-data agenda is how much appeal it should have across the political spectrum. In the United Kingdom, you have a Conservative-led coalition government that is using open data very strategically to try to rethink how government operates, how it spends money, and how efficient and effective it is. Meanwhile, you have governments at the local level here in Canada that have a much more social agenda. They are trying to think about discovering the types of challenges in our communities. Also, they're trying to rethink how we deliver government services to make them more effective.

For me, the model that is most exciting is one that has a strong committee like this one making some very clear recommendations that could have some pan-partisan appeal and a government, given its ideological roots, that could probably grab some of those recommendations and run with them.

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

Thank you.

I will now move on to a different topic to ensure that you—

[David Eaves]

You wanted to talk about bilingualism...

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

I'm just getting to it. We met with the Information Commissioner, Ms. Legault, who talked about four or five issues related to establishing access to information within a transparent government. In her fourth point, she talked about difficulties we could encounter, such as privacy, security, copyright and official languages.

We will be meeting with the commissioner of official languages soon. Nevertheless, in one of your articles, you explain how we can avoid costs or other hurdles limiting access to information. You suggest translations by Google or similar tools. Could you elaborate on this thought? I would like to submit this process to Mr. Fraser to determine whether it's feasible.

By the way, I find Google Translate to be rather trying. These types of translation tools would need to be greatly improved before being able to translate a text into proper French.

Explain to me how you would address the bilingualism issue, that is, the official languages issue, in access to information.

[David Eaves]

I'm going to speak in English, just because when it comes to Google stuff, I really want to make sure that I get it right.

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

That's one of the official languages.

[David Eaves]

The article you are referring to is an article I was very despondent to read. An RCMP detachment in British Columbia was forced to pull down I think it was 2,000 old press releases, because they weren't available in both official languages. They had previously been using Google Translate to translate the English releases into French. I'm floored by the fact that what we have functionally done is made our government more opaque. So now no one in either English or French can ever see these documents, right? This is a terrible outcome.

At the same time, I am a product of bilingualism.

My French is less than satisfactory, but I can understand and speak a little.

So then we've said, okay, you can't use Google Translate. The danger is that you're looking at Google Translate as it exists now. That's right. Google Translate 12 months ago was far worse, and Google Translate 12 months from now is going to be significantly better.

Look at what Google did with spell check. In a very short period of time, they built the most effective spell checking system in the world, simply because everybody was constantly updating it for them. They were able to draw on millions and millions and millions of users. They are doing the exact same thing with Google Translate. So the rate of improvement of Google Translate is logarithmic. It's probably getting better faster and faster.

We've actually extricated ourselves from a system just as it's about to get phenomenally better. If we actually want to make Google Translate better still, someone should call Google and say that this is a system that gets better when you can compare documents. There is one organization in the world that has an enormous quantity of documents in both English and French, and that's the Government of Canada.

If we really want to make Google Translate very effective tomorrow, someone should call Google and say, “Why don't you take all of our documents that we have in both English and French and put them into your computers? It will dramatically improve the effectiveness.”

I think it also has a nice piece as part of it, which is that Canadian French and Canadian English would then become even more predominant within the Google ecosystem. That aside, if we want to make Google Translate better, it's in our power. At least we could ask Google. In fact, we probably don't have to ask. Someone could just create a software program that fed both into their systems without their desire, and we would make Google Translate significantly better.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Madame Freeman--

[David Eaves]

But I think we have a shared interest, in that I want documents to be available in both languages. Most importantly, I want documents to be available in at least one language, and if a document is only available in French, I want to know, because then at least I can ask to translate it.

I think the huge opportunity around data is that most data don't need to be translated. You don't need to translate an Excel spreadsheet, except for maybe the headers across the top. So when I think of the places where we can move most quickly, one of the reasons data comes to mind is that it's the easiest place to go.

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

I would like to end by saying that, in a digital world, we could translate these documents into several languages, such as Spanish. This could be done.

[David Eaves]

I think this will become a reality in the very near future.

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

I think so too.

Thank you.

I had other questions, but unfortunately, my time is up.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you, Mrs. Freeman.

Mr. Siksay, you have seven minutes.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Eaves, for your testimony today. It has been very helpful, as have your writing, your blog, and all kinds of other things as well.

I wanted to ask you first off.... Not to spend a lot of time on this, but you describe yourself as a public policy entrepreneur. Can you say a little bit about how you understand that and how it relates to the discussion we're having today?

[David Eaves]

Mostly I try to find places where I think there is an opportunity to make significant leaps in the way we engage in solving a problem--usually one that has a kind of public policy angle--and I try to write, think, and wherever possible act in order to do that.

For example, even here in the open data space, people on the committee may not know, but along with some colleagues I created the data portal for the Canadian government. Since you didn't have one, I said, I'll create one for you. So you can go to datadotgc.ca; I'm obviously not allowed to own a “.gc.ca” website, as only Government of Canada officials can do that. I created that website, and then several colleagues and I just kind of mapped where all the data was already.

Because you actually already share. I mean, the exciting thing about what you guys are doing is that there's already a policy infrastructure to share data in the federal government. So I was like, why don't we just go find it all, bring it into one site, and then we've created the open data portal for you? I think that site actually helped push the government and helped public servants. I think it brought this to the fore here. It has pushed the government to start thinking about this stuff.

So as an entrepreneur, I think I've been able to push the agenda by defining high-leverage places like that.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Now, I know some of it is out of the goodness of your heart, but you're trying to make some money doing this. How does a public policy entrepreneur make money doing this in this kind of process? Because clearly you're talking about people earning a living, making money, and contributing to an economy by doing this. As somebody who's doing that, how does that happen?

[David Eaves]

If the question is about how David Eaves makes his money, David Eaves makes his money through a combination of negotiation and consulting. I advise Fortune 500 companies and some other groups. I advise them—

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

I didn't really mean for you to explain that--

[David Eaves]

—and I do a lot of public speaking. But one of the things is do I hope there are going to be companies that are going to emerge out of this space? Absolutely. Am I someone who would think about launching such a company? If the right opportunity came up, I definitely would, so I wouldn't want to be seen as totally impartial.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

What other kinds of job titles or job descriptions would people have who are interested in using this kind of thing? Who is interested in doing this and taking this information...?

[David Eaves]

Just to show you how significant the issue of data is, whether it's from government or anywhere, two or three weeks ago I was at LinkedIn in San Francisco, at their head offices, for a presentation. This guy from LinkedIn had this great chart and showed the number of people who had analytics in their job title, graphed over time. It started off infinitesimally small, and now we're into skyrocketing growth. It's just taking off.

You have to understand that our entire economy is being digitized. The moment you say that, well...it's going to digitize how? Well, into some form of data. So I would actually be wandering around and looking: okay, what are the companies that are making use of data? What are the companies that are figuring out ways to make themselves more efficient and more effective?

It's everything from people at Natural Resources Canada who are using federal government data around where our resources are in this country to figure out how they can be more effective and how they can harm the environment less, to people over at RIM who are figuring out how to create applications that make lives more useful.... I think there will be a number of interesting companies and a number of interesting uses that will arise.

Every jurisdiction is going to have a different one. In Vancouver, there's a group I'm involved in--and maybe we'll do something more interesting with it--and in Vancouver the garbage day changes every time there's a statutory holiday, because they don't want you to go two weeks without getting your garbage picked up. That means your garbage day might be Monday one month, but then it might be Wednesday the following month, and obviously people have a hard time keeping track of that.

All the government does is give you a printout at the beginning of the year with a map of what zone you live in and what your garbage schedule looks like. Because they made that data open, we put that data into Google Maps, so you can just go to a website called VanTrash and click on the zone, and it tells you what your schedule is. But then you can also download that schedule into your iPhone or your BlackBerry, which currently the government can't do, or if you give us your e-mail address, we'll e-mail you the day before garbage day to remind you. That's a very, very small type.... And maybe that could be a company, right?

That's a very, very small example, but I want you to begin to think about it. What are all of the services that we offer? What is all the information we have? What are all the ways it can be helpful for people? It's going to be baked into our economy to make our lives more efficient and more effective, and I think there the opportunity is not insignificant.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Right now Luke and Kevin, who are doing the VanTrash site, are sort of begging for donations to keep the site going. It's not an economically viable thing for them at this point.

[David Eaves]

I've been working with them very closely. Come back to us in about two months and we'll have a different answer for you.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Okay.

I wanted to ask just a quick question about the Australians' 2.0 commission. Just to be clear, that wasn't a parliamentary committee. It was a task force established by government with non-political people, basically--

[David Eaves]

That's correct.