Thank you very much to the committee for having me. It's a great chance, actually, to be of service today, so I hope my remarks to you are helpful.
In my day job, I'm a public servant with the British Columbia public service, as the chair mentioned. My focus there is on citizen engagement in policy development and service improvement. But I would like to make clear to the committee that while my remarks are certainly shaped by that experience, today I am on my own time. I took some vacation to come out, and I'm speaking for myself, so the views expressed here are my own and do not reflect the views of British Columbia.
With that disclaimer, let me briefly lay out what I'd like to cover today.
First is why open government matters, not just as a democratic principle but as a strategy of public management; an example of how open strategies, based on open government approaches, can help solve public problems in new ways; the importance of thinking beyond provision of data and information to working to engage people with data and information; and a short word about the requirements of political leadership around open government.
One thing we need to recognize is that the skills of governing in the 21st century are very different from those needed in the 20th century. We face two significant and basically unavoidable problems in government in Canada, as does the rest of the world: we are mostly broke, and our demographics dictate that our public sector workforce is likely to be shrinking dramatically very soon. So if we have little money and very few people, how are we going to get good things done for the country?
My basic answer to that question is that governments will need to learn to collaborate. Whereas before they could afford to be top down—“we think it, we decide it, we do it” kinds of organizations—today governments find themselves grappling with highly complex issues that they cannot solve alone. Challenges such as poverty and climate change cannot be legislated out of existence; nor can healthy communities and safe streets simply be created, as much as we want them. Instead, these problems require coordinated and collaborative action from many actors, including individuals, for us to make progress.
This theme has lately been taken up by political leadership in the U.S. and the U.K. One version of this theme is President Obama's campaign tagline, “Yes we can”. Another version has come from Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom, who said during the launch of his campaign:
We can deal with our debts. We can mend our broken society. We can restore faith in our shattered political system. But only if millions of people are fired up and inspired to play a part in [their]...future.
Taken in this context, open government, and particularly open data, becomes more than a discussion about transparency and democracy. It can be seen as a strategy to empower the public to collaborate with government and with one another to understand and accomplish goals. It's about effectiveness as much as it is about principle.
I recognize that this is a broad statement, and some folks may think it's a bit of a wild claim, but my recent experience demonstrates that such an approach is possible.
A project that I was involved with in my work in B.C., called Apps for Climate Action, was a contest for web and software developers to take freely available government data and apply their ingenuity to creating web and mobile applications that help people understand and deal with the impacts of climate change. The contest produced 16 qualified entries, some of which I would say were frankly brilliant. And the contest helped B.C.'s Climate Action Secretariat make the most of new technology, create media interest, and reach out to a whole new demographic of people to inspire them to get busy around taking action on climate.
The important thing I want to point out is that while it was coordinated by the provincial government, the contest was sponsored by businesses and not-for-profits that had an interest in open data and climate action. The $40,000 in cash and prizes that we raised for the contest entrants came from sponsors. We also received “in kind” contributions from sponsors. For example, the contest website was developed by a small web company based in Vancouver, contest entrants had access to usability experts from a Vancouver firm to help make their apps more user-friendly, the Vancouver Aquarium hosted the awards ceremony, and David Eaves, who spoke to you earlier this week, also donated his time and advice.
We made the sponsorships work not by doing a classic procurement whereby government commissions specific solutions to specific problems. Instead, B.C. issued an opportunity notice that described the problem we were trying to solve, signalled the kinds of resources we were looking for to help us, and then invited those who were interested in helping us achieve the goal to apply. Basically, we were open to working with anyone who wanted to work with us, and the response was really excellent and significant. Really, what we wound up with were groups that were passionate about climate action and were prepared to meaningfully commit their resources, with us at the province, to help create a great contest.
As I hope is clear, the result of being open—this is connecting back to open government—to other ideas and resources meant the provincial government could accomplish far more than it ever could accomplish on its own.
There have been a series of open, data-based apps contests around the world, and they have their strengths and weaknesses. Many have been far better structured and have enjoyed more success than the one I was involved with. I commend Apps for Ottawa and Apps for Edmonton, which were two recent contests in Canada, as examples of how open data can be used to engage the public. Those were both, I think, wild successes.
But for me the lesson of the contest was how effective data-driven collaboration can be and how many resources are out there for governments to leverage, provided they know how to ask.
I spent a lot of time at public events promoting the contest, showing people data, brainstorming with programmers and non-programmers, looking for patterns that could spark a prize-winning idea. The conversations with members of the public were amazing. There was passion, positivity, focus, creativity, and analysis. There was a true creative ethos, and participants were looking to themselves to take the next steps on the part of the problem that meant the most to them. They weren't waiting for government to offer solutions; they were looking to create and implement their own. It was an awesome citizenship, let me tell you, and there is a lot of it out there.
This brings me to the gap that I see in many open government strategies, particularly around open data. It's not enough to simply publish data or information. Work needs to be done to focus people on it, build community around ideas and analysis, see how it applies to real problems, and set the norms of responsible use of this valuable public resource. Otherwise, the data may not meet its full potential.
In my view, this is the new definition and challenge of public policy work for public servants: to find ways to benefit from the insight and expertise of those outside government's walls prepared to work on it together in a shared agenda, because, returning to the theme of demographics and finances, we're going to need those people in the very near future.
We're seeing early signals of this approach internationally. The U.S., for example, has appointed what's called an open data evangelist to reach out to communities, schools, educational institutions, and others. It is building partnerships with educational institutions to build more capacity for data literacy in the United States.
New Zealand is integrating open data into its public consultations, particularly around technical subjects, to encourage a common basis of analysis for those who provide submissions.
While I can't authoritatively say how well these experiments are working, I do know that they are important. Should you recommend open data to the government, I believe you should also recommend that resources to encourage engagement with the public come along with it.
Since this is a political venue, I want to say one quick thing about the importance of matching open government and political leadership in Canada. I'm hopeful that our leaders, you, begin to see the power and possibilities of using mechanisms of open government to collaborate more deeply with the public; that instead of simply offering solutions to win votes, political leaders can see how effective and necessary asking the right questions is to bring the right people together so that lasting solutions to the big problems that challenge us—health care, climate change, to name two—can be meaningfully addressed.
This means that our leaders challenge groups and individuals to take responsibility for problems and commit their own resources to solving them. It also means that all concerned are accountable for delivering their piece of the puzzle. Government has a part, but isn't necessarily on the hook for delivering the whole.
Open government, and in particular open data, offers a way of working towards this possibility because of the collaborative capacity it creates. Open data can become a platform for collaboration between government and the public, and I hope we as a country can seize it.
As the committee continues its work, I'm looking forward to seeing how you draw on the remarkable reservoir of Canadian expertise in thinking about governance and public engagement. Many of the ideas you've heard from me are inspired by people like Don Lenihan of the Public Policy Forum and Thomas Homer-Dixon of the University of Waterloo. I brought a list of other folks whom I can refer you to if you're interested, and we can get into the conversation.
In particular I would like to recommend colleagues in British Columbia to speak to you about British Columbia's Government 2.0 plan, which includes references to open data and open information. In particular, the deputy minister of the Ministry of Citizens' Services, Kim Henderson, and Allan Seckel, the head of the British Columbia public service, would be excellent spokespeople for the provincial government's direction in this area.
With that, I'll thank you very much. I'd like to conclude my remarks.