The key thing for me is it's never really good practice to do a consultation when you're not very clear on what you need to know from Canadians. As well, it's not a good idea to have a consultation in which information, background, and context for people aren't well developed, understood, and presented in ways that are accessible and usable.
You want to try to have a structuring conversation so that a lot of different perspectives can come forward--public service, advocacy groups, developers, software communities, and others--and try to show the spectrum of things that open government, open data as a piece of that in particular, could really mean for the country.
Within that, you can start to look at the big questions. When you begin to examine that you can present it to people in a way that's really simple for them to access, really clearly and quickly, if possible, but also in a way that offers an opportunity to draw them into deeper conversations, maybe face-to-face conversations in their communities, maybe in a way that offers them chances to bring groups of people together to talk to one another and to report back in creative ways, in different ways--not necessarily through text but through video, through audio, through other forms of presentation--to the committee what the possibilities are, what the concerns are, and these kinds of issues.
That would be a great place to start. Be clear about what the process means, what kind of information and what kinds of questions it really needs, where those will be going, how they will be used, and how you as a committee can report back to Canadians about what you've heard from them and how it's incorporated well into the process. That would be my advice.