Information & Ethics Committee on Feb. 2nd, 2011

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

I understand the idea of assimilating the patterns and themes from the input. We have used the term “two-way street” often in our conversation today, and I think that's appropriate and important. What kind of feedback or response, then, do those 4,100...? Can they expect to receive a personal response to all of that as well?

[David Wallace]

I'll give you an example of where we actually used some Web 2.0 technology once we got a certain sense on Jarvis Street of what people were feeling about how the streetscape should change. There was a project going on to change how the streetscape was going to look—the removal of the centre lane and some changes to the way it was going to look, safety elements, and so on.

The transportation department decided to use Facebook to go out there and solicit information. Instead of having the same people coming to the same old meetings again and again—they even got to know them by first names—it actually opened up, especially to young people, a whole new space: “This is what I'd like to see on the street.” So there was a lot of different information, but they were able to again open it up and get a lot better information.

As a result, they fed back directly, up on the site, the comments they were receiving. People took that and built on it further, and you got this collaborative spirit of shaping that street. At the end of the day, then, they fed it back and said, “Here's what we're now doing with the design. What do you think about that?” And then they got further designs, and by the time they actually got to doing it, it became very popular because people knew they were being listened to.

You can't just use traditional tools. You have to expand by using the Gov 2.0 or Web 2.0 tools as well, and go out to the people in their own environment and work with them directly.

I'll give you an example of firefighters who were having a real problem. They couldn't get new firefighters. But the real issue they were concerned about was misuse of information on the web that was being scraped. People were looking at the mean time for a fire truck to get to a site and it was incorrect. They said, “We want to go on Facebook and put the right data up, and we want to show that it's authorized.” So that's why they did it. But in the process of doing it, they said, “By the way, if you're interested in joining the Toronto Fire Department, here is a link”, and so on. All of a sudden, all these people became interested in being firefighters, where they just couldn't get anyone interested before. It had a completely different purpose because they were reaching out into the community.

So using the new techniques and new knowledge tools can help you deal with all that information. But it also allows the government, people, and politicians to make better decisions, I think, in the long term.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

That, colleagues, concludes the first round.

Before we go to the second round, there is one issue I want to explore briefly with you, Mr. Wallace. I believe you mentioned in your opening comments that since you went to a more open government format within the City of Toronto management, your access to information requests have dropped significantly. Did I hear you say that?

[David Wallace]

Yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

What percentage are we talking about?

[David Wallace]

About 50%.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Do you have any idea of the savings in money? Can you give us a ballpark figure? I know you don't have the exact--

[David Wallace]

That's not that easy to calculate because you're talking about people's time, and so on. One of the things we've discovered.... Our city clerk, Ulli Watkiss, is probably best to answer this because her area deals with it. But from what I know in dealing with these kinds of complex areas—because in IT I have to delve through thousands of e-mails and different kinds of unstructured data to help answer requests sometimes—my staff spend thousands of hours. And all you need to look at is that they could be working on projects.

So we do have some numbers. I can get that information to you if you like.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

I think that would be beneficial if we could have that information.

[David Wallace]

There are definite time savings. When you look at a year where you had 4,100 and now you have 2,100 requests—just that amount—there are fewer of these ambiguous requests. Now they are more focused requests, and they're a lot easier and faster to answer.

Because people can find the regular information or the wider information from other means now, when they do come to you, they're very well prepared and it's easy to get that information to them. So even when you're answering FOI requests, it's more efficient when you do have to use that process.

But it's still a challenging process, and I think Vincent was very correct that there is still a lot of room to improve in that area. We believe that proactive and routine disclosure are a means, and the open data can really help, and it has helped us. There have definitely been productivity gains, and I can get you more information on that later.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

If you could, we'd appreciate that.

We're going to start the second round.

Five minutes, Mr. Bagnell.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Thank you.

Thank you all for coming.

I have a bunch of questions, so if we have really quick answers, I can get through them all.

The first one is very simple, though; it's really on basics. In Toronto do you list all the employees and their phone numbers? The Yukon government does that, and it's easy to find people, but in the federal government in that city there are some offices where they won't give out a phone number. You have to use a 1-800 number to Ottawa. I got a call yesterday from someone who was very frustrated that they couldn't phone their office in their hometown. They had to go to a 1-800 number. It was Revenue Canada.

Do you have all your staff and their phone numbers for most people who have a phone?

[David Wallace]

The entire organization chart and information is there, but we basically invite people through our 311 service to ask any question they want, and they hook up the people through that service. We used to have at least 40 different access points, different phone numbers if you had tax questions, water main breaks, or something, and it was very complex. We have found the 311 one-number access point has been a huge way....

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

If someone had a pothole problem, is that where they'd call?

[David Wallace]

That's right. Instead of remembering that it was Fred I dealt with last time and I'd better go back to Fred to solve my problem, I just go through 311 and I get an answer. It's less to do with specific people and more to do with the service you're getting in terms of our level.

However, there are certainly areas of specific specialty and interest--the engineers and IT people and privacy lawyers. They are available. You can get access to that information. Again, that is something that is not difficult to get and it is easily accessible in terms of who to speak to, but what we have found is there is less to do with that now and more to do just through 311, and then it's an organized way of getting the information back to the power of servicing the public.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Vincent, you made a good point about it being great to have it there, but you need to figure out the accessibility of it. Ten years ago Industry Canada had a quarter of a million pages on its website. I worked in that area and I didn't even use the website because you wouldn't know where to find anything. The federal government, of course, is huge. That's only one out of 50 departments and agencies. So an important point, I assume, is how to navigate these things.

[Vincent Gogolek]

Yes. It has to be available, we think, to citizens. It can't just be the digerati. It can't just be people who are sophisticated users. It has to be available to citizens. It has to be in a format they are able to use.

I'm assuming that the 250,000 pages were all in 10-point courier type as well, for ease of reading.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Along the same line, newspaper editors say you have to write a newspaper for grade 10 or grade 8 because that's the average Canadian citizen, which is a lot lower than people would think.

How many people do you think have the ability to navigate your various websites and have the education and the technical ability?

[David Wallace]

We have found that most people have a number of basic purposes for coming to the website. First of all, they have a service that they need to get done, they want to register this, or they want to do this, they want to do that. We tried it through the 301 self-service part of our website, to ask what was their request, what did they need--very simple.

Other people come because they need information. They want to find out about something happening in their community that is coming up. What we are working toward is a “My Toronto” capability, where everything you're interested in, you are always interested in, and when you go back in it's always there.

The third reason people are interested is that they want to be involved, as we said earlier, in their local government. They want to take part. They want to be involved in some of the decision-making and so on, and they want that to be in an interactive way, and as we said earlier, they want to see that their input made a difference. So the website that we're rapidly moving toward is organized in an easy-to-access point from that perspective and from the whole navigation perspective. What we did, believe it or not, is we went out to the libraries. We went out to donut shops. We went out to the guy in the street and we asked what he thought of the website. After a lot of noise we said, “Thank you very much”, and then we said, “Put your comments online.” We opened up a Web 2.0 perspective. We got lots of input, so we started evolving and making the website better.

We still have some work to do. We also have 50,000 static web pages to then bring into a dynamic content. We are actually working on that with some advanced tools in our business areas, and they are going to start putting the data in themselves versus having to go through communications people, which means it will be much faster to get relevant, up-to-date data. So together, the new tools and a better organized website itself, based on those three basic uses and listening to people on how to improve access, are helping to make navigation better and information on that website more relevant for their use.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Mr. Bagnell.

Ms. Davidson, five minutes.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thanks, Mr. Chair, and thanks very much to each of our presenters for being here this afternoon. Certainly, I think we're getting a good feel for your different perspectives as you envision open data and open government. It's been extremely interesting.

One of the things that I know we discuss and we wrestle with as a committee is how we are going to roll this out, how we are going to determine what needs to be in it, what's important to the Canadian public, how they should be able to interact with us as we go into this exercise and provide open data and open government processes. Is there a role to be played by the electronic world that we live in today, through Twitter and Facebook? Is that a viable way of getting information back to us from the public, do you think?

Could each of you comment on that?

[David Hume]

I would say the answer is yes, provided you're ready and willing to be able to capture that information, sort through it, and begin to work with it, and that you're also ready and willing to be engaged in conversations with people. Twitter and Facebook can be remarkable push technologies, but they can also be remarkable from the perspective of hearing back and forth and opening certain kinds of discussion. Twitter being Twitter, you only get 140 characters, so it's not necessarily going to be deep, but that's okay, because what it can do is you can use it as a really terrific pointing tool to focus people on a more discursive kind of content that might be housed on a website somewhere, or to point people to an event they can attend, highlight other kinds of resources that you are examining, point people to the ParlVU website, to let them know that these kinds of conversations are happening. So provided you understand your strategy in terms of the kinds of things you want to do for people and what kinds of conversations you want to lead, I think they can be remarkably helpful for you.

[David Wallace]

Believe it or not, we use Twitter in a number of ways. We have an Open_TO, a Twitter account where, as we listen to the community, we trial balloon out some ideas and types of data that we're thinking of putting out there and see what people think about that. It's a great way, as David is saying, of feeling the pulse and understanding it in short bursts, but you certainly get it quickly. You also get some very quick reactions, so you don't have to go through these long, drawn-out interplays. You know very quickly what's actually happening.

Another aspect, believe it or not, in our 311 Twitter area, is they're actually keeping their finger on the pulse for another reason. If they're starting to see a theme developing out on Twitter, they actually could go and say, “Wait a minute, let's go and put someone out there”--if there's graffiti or potholes or something. They could actually go out and fix it before a request comes in, in terms of a proactive service request. What that does is this. They have technology that says there were 3,000 people who asked for the same thing. Let's do it once.

So what Twitter does is it actually allows you to see what is happening out there, and you get a sense of it in terms of the day-to-day and minute-to-minute goings on in your local community. You could also expand that out, but I agree, you have to understand it. You have to start to understand the types of language and the way you can leverage it and use the different kinds of hashtags. There are different ways you could do it.

It's interesting. We worked with the University of Toronto on some ideas around perhaps putting some metadata around Twitter and tweets, to get a sense of what we could do to improve the depth of it. It's a very short burst. There are ways you can put links and all that so you can see what people are really getting to in a deeper sense. But is there a way to actually make the feed itself more intelligent? So there's some thinking going on in that space that could even improve it further.

In its current state, it's still incredibly useful. The themes and rooms out there, the discussions, are great to follow. As I said, we're using it in a number of ways, testing what we're doing out there, but also monitoring out there to see what's happening so we can proactively service the citizens.

[Vincent Gogolek]

I just have a very short comment. One is that you should not rely exclusively--I don't expect that you will--on Twitter and Facebook.

The other thing is to come back to a theme that Mr. Hume and Mr. Wallace raised earlier, which is that you constantly need to go back and see what people are saying and what new information they might want, changes they might want to see. So it's an ongoing process.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Ms. Davidson.

Madame Thi Lac.