Information & Ethics Committee on Feb. 2nd, 2011

[Vincent Gogolek]

The federal government does not provide a lot of services directly to the public, apart from those provided to veterans and First Nations. But billions of tax dollars are transferred between levels of government, between federal and provincial levels and other bodies. Things like the amount of money, the objectives for it, and reports from the other governments on how federal funds have been used, and why, will all give us an idea of how well our federal system is working.

I leave that with you as an illustration of the kind of data that could be considered and could be put in a format that anyone interested, and the general public, could look at, consult and interpret in their own way.

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

We can talk about access to raw data that we already have and that we bring to the attention of the public, but there are also the interactive tools that will let the public get involved in what might be called cyberdemocracy.

How do you see the move from one to the other?

[Vincent Gogolek]

I feel that Canadians have to be able to get involved. If we create an open government system, every Canadian has to have access to it. It is not just about finding a computer in a library and sitting down at it. It has to be in a useful form that people can use without a degree in computer science.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you, Madame Freeman.

Mr. Siksay, for seven minutes.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

I want to thank all of the presenters for what you've brought to the table this afternoon. It's all been very helpful.

Mr. Hume, I wanted to ask you a question. I understand there's great potential here and that it's sort of a new area, especially around open data.

I appreciated hearing about the Apps for Climate Action process and contest. I know Mr. Eaves talked the other day about the Vantrash application that was developed as well. And we've heard about other apps that have been developed.

I get that there's some use to those. Some of them are just kind of fun, some of them are kind of cool, and some of them don't strike me as major moves forward to solving major issues.

You talked about how this could be an opportunity for public collaboration in solving some major problems. Could you say more or give an example of where, on a larger public policy issue, there's been a significant change because of some use of open data?

[David Hume]

It's a tough one to answer because it is quite new.

I think what we're getting right now is people learning to understand that the resource is available. Especially for public servants, who are just beginning to work in this area, they've got some questions. They know it's useful, but there needs to be some innovation and creativity applied before we're really going to hit that mark.

I think the biggest challenge, and this is the most fundamental thing, is the switch from thinking that as governments we're in an industrial kind of business where we pull all the raw materials out and we shoot the car out the other end. I think we're going to increasingly need public servants who have the ability to think broadly and collaboratively to bring people together on an ongoing kind of basis so that there's energy and movement.

My experience in leading sessions using open data is that it creates a really profoundly focused kind of public discussion, in that you get people who, at certain points, would disagree on a particular issue, but when the data is in front of them that expresses a particular reality, they're much more inclined to engage each other in a really solutions-focused kind of way.

That's just what I've seen in working in sessions.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Wallace, I saw you shaking your head, but I wonder if the budget visualization is sort of a next step in this kind of process. It's something that I haven't seen, so I wonder if you could say a little bit more about what that looks like and how that helps public policy development or how that helps a city come up with a better budget, that kind of thing.

[David Wallace]

I think that's a very good question. As David was saying, this is all new. In our budget world, we've always produced budget reports, usually in PDF; they're nice to look at, but you can't do much with them. If you wanted to use the data, you'd have to then be a programmer, scrape it and do some type of work, and then do a lot of work to actually then mash it up and work with it.

There are two sides of the visualization approach. One is to make the data very easy to use, so you can use the data from the budget to explore different ways and ask sensible questions about your local community or about your government. I know the federal government is a bit more arm's length, but there's a lot of important information—Statistics Canada, of course, budget information, and performance aspects, and so on—and there are large decisions being made with lots of money, taxpayers' money. At the municipal level, there's a lot of engagement around what's also happening in the local community.

Visualization is a way of seeing what's happening across the city in different wards—different kinds of requests, different kinds of variances, and different kinds of things happening in the different communities—and people can start to then grow together and work together to help solve those community issues. So visualization is a much easier way and allows sort of a ready-made way of helping you understand the data better, versus in the past, where you would have to be someone who would have to actually construct all that yourself.

One of the things we're hearing over the last few years, and more and more, is about the ability to mash it up and look at it very quickly, but with not a lot of computer science or detailed needs. If you think of teenagers and people doing school projects or people who want to be engaged at that age, where we want to bring young people in, if they have to have a computer science degree, that's not going to be very easy for them to be involved. What we've seen is young people involved from schools and new civic engagement links, because people can do it easily.

So the concept of getting the budget out there, because it is so fundamental, also allows people to see that the government is now delivering on its promises and being able to cut those costs or improve services and offer better services, perhaps better services from that direct input from the clients.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

So you get better informed citizens because of this process. How does it change the decisions-maker's role?

[David Wallace]

Again, we're just starting in this space where there's this two-way street. I think what people are saying is, in our case, where are those efficiencies? Could there be more efficiencies? Maybe I've got an idea on some type of service delivery that we could do in the community that could help the strapped resources in the government. Maybe there's a way that my company, my service, my idea, my innovation, could augment what's already being done to provide an even better service. We saw this, interestingly enough, through the United Way and those kinds of community areas, where there were people right out in the streets working with homeless and so on, who were there all the time. They, in fact, supplied information back up to us, where our social workers could—there are only so many of them.... They actually gave us even more in-depth information about their communities. So there was that actual transfer of data back from these local efforts. Then they look at the budget and say, “Well, wait a minute, if we work with you, you could actually take that money and spread it around or do this and we could actually make services better.”

So it helps engage people in the budget debate, not just from a finished product perspective, as David is saying—from an assembly line, let's look at the budget at the end—but during its formation. And because budget is always evolving, you have a say not just in the next one but even how the money is being spent right today.

That's the concept of making that budget data very available and very usable.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

I'm struggling a little bit with the role of decision-makers, the councillors who are actually going to vote. You engage all these citizens in this process. You give them all this information. You're going to generate interest, obviously. You're going to generate a certain amount of opinion, not necessarily well-thought-out opinion, that kind of thing. How does an elected person sort through all of that? What resources do they get, do they need, to do that kind of work? Does it increase the pressure on those decision-makers? Does it change their job in some way because of this kind of process?

[David Wallace]

That's a very good question. There's no question that it opens up the doors, but they get many, many calls today in more traditional means, I'll call them, many, many e-mails, which they never actually get to. In this way, if people are more informed and can ask questions and be involved more, they can understand. Then in fact what happens is they actually are more informed and they actually can be in a better debate and assist with their local politician. What it means is that you get a more efficient exchange, a more informed exchange, versus someone who is just asking a blank question because they just don't understand the workings of government. They actually can be part of the process of government.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you, Mr. Siksay.

Mr. Albrecht, seven minutes.

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

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.

[David Wallace]

Yes, I think I understand it. Let me know if I don't answer your question.

I don't think there's anything ever wrong with opening up the doors wider.

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

Right.

[David Wallace]

The fact is that at the municipal level there are many people who come and do deputations. They get five minutes and they make their point. They've been doing that since town hall meetings, and now, in the electronic age, we're engaging them through this meeting management system where they can put it through on e-mail. In the future, we're going to have perhaps even web chats, and who knows.

We have, in our clerk's area, ways of looking at the types of input coming in: what are the themes of the input, what are the areas of concern? There are many input elements, but there are many like areas of focus. One of the visualization techniques is that as you get and receive the information in, you can start to see what the patterns are and where the interest areas are. Then you can engage the public and drill further down and say, “Let's explore that topic. Let's talk about it. Perhaps we can have a focus session on that topic.”

So what happens is that you get this much more two-way street. In the old days, you would come and say your peace. You'd say thank you very much, and it would be recorded. You'd take some element from it, I'm sure, because you'd get a sense of the feeling out there, but you'd never really get a sense of what exactly it meant to the larger issues.

If you can now start to get to where you can see the patterns and work with that, especially in an electronic way, then you can start to work intelligently with all that input. What knowledge-based systems can allow you to do--technology can help us here--is they can look for those patterns and point out, say, a couple of injunction points that perhaps the standing committee on planning and growth, or on economics or environment, really needs to explore further; maybe we need to look at some of the things that were in our capital plan, even though we're in the middle of the year, and say, “Wait a minute. Do we have the right investments or do we need to make some changes?” So you get a better pulse from citizens.

Now, at the federal level it's very challenging--you have a country to work with--but that's where your partners at the other levels of government can help. They can funnel up some of the issues. A good example is people who don't have identity. How do we give them benefits? How do we provide proper care to them? How does that work when the federal level says you must have identity to have a bank account, and yet you have challenges? So we're working on that problem, but we're working with our provincial level and our federal level to determine how we make sure that we can equally engage these people who don't really have a voice today.

So this is how we work with that. I think one of the most exciting things is that when you see that in 2007, the page views on the website in this area were zero, and now we have--

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

How can that be?

[David Wallace]

We had just very basic information, so people never went there.

Quite frankly--

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

So in 2007, the City of Toronto--

[David Wallace]

In that area, talking about meeting management and looking it up--

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

On this one particular--

[David Wallace]

--on this one particular view.

And now, today, we have it available on BlackBerry. You can look at the calendar and have a two-way street semantic calendar. In other words, it's not just PDFs anymore of reports you could download and somehow work your way through. You have a very flexible way of getting in on what's going on in your government at that moment.

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

Do I still have some time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

One minute.