When I went to New Zealand, I was there working as a consultant with the State Services Commission, which is sort of an oversight body, kind of close, I think, to what Treasury Board Secretariat is here. It focuses on public sector management. In particular I was working with the e-government program there in New Zealand. This was back in 2006.
At the time, they were advancing ideas, and one of the key streams in their e-government strategy as a public service was the idea of participation. A key gap that I think is clear in most jurisdictions is trying to understand how well members of Parliament actually manage to cope with all of the input they get from the public when the public does engage.
I'm highly sympathetic to members of Parliament with regard to the challenges they have with information management and the challenges they have in terms of hearing from the public and how they understand what comes in to them when people communicate with them. I remember sitting across the table from a cabinet minister who had just recently come from a television interview and had wound up with 6,000 e-mails in his inbox in the moments after his television interview. The question was, as a function of good governance, was that member and that minister really going to be able to listen when there was that much information?
I think for members of Parliament in particular, open data has a huge potential, not only in terms of your role of scrutiny of government, in your role of holding government to account, but also, I think, because good information management practices that are embedded in things like open data can make your jobs a lot easier if you can bring this data together.