Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank our witnesses for being here today. This has certainly been an engaging topic we've embarked on. I think there's pretty wide agreement that we need to move ahead with this as quickly as possible, but your input has certainly been valuable.
I want to focus most of my questions toward Mr. Wallace.
I certainly appreciate the summary you've given us here. Just working through some of the different apps that you've highlighted, whether it's restaurant inspection reports, transportation schedules, or even the visualization, I certainly see a lot of value in that. But I want to come back to page 6 of your presentation, primarily, where you focus on and use the term “open government”. I think many of our witnesses have tried to help us understand there's a difference between open data and open government. You make a number of statements here that I'd just like to follow up on.
You say that open government is not just offering data sets on the web; it's much more than that. You talk about civic engagement and so on. Further down on that page, you talk about the full record of council and committee decisions being posted during the meetings. I'm wondering if you would have an idea as to how many people are actually tracking the meeting while it's going on.
In the final paragraph, you say that public participation in the decision-making process is increasing--and that has to be our end goal, public participation--and that the number of deputations at council has increased from 2,000 in 2007 to more than 4,100 in 2010.
My question sort of follows up on what Mr. Siksay was getting at in terms of the number of deputations: 4,100. Obviously, most of those were online, and possibly some of them were delegations appearing before council; I don't know if you would have numbers on that. How do you handle that volume?
Subsequent to that, how can we be sure that those deputations that are arriving...? First of all, are they read? Secondly, if they're read, are they absorbed? Is there any potential for action on them? Is there a staff member or multiple staff members assigned to deal with those things? There are a lot of questions surrounding that. Are we increasing expectations unrealistically and possibly shortchanging the process somewhere along the line?
I hope you can follow my line of thinking there.