Okay.
In science communities, having open data helps create wider standards for more data sharing and enables a culture of scientist-citizen. In education, notable institutions enable free access to the world's best information.
We talked about poisonous data and systems that assume individuals would never get access to their own health care record, as well as inspiring science from GCPedia and our geomatics community.
Others have spoken about how open data can make access to information more efficient and useful. Business is exploring more open and social modes. Consumer-serving openness is a competitive advantage. We talked about creating a culture of innovation and problem-solving built on the fact that so many Canadians are online and how what we're building can create consistent, reusable knowledge systems for everyone, through which a 14-year-old or 80-year-old can access the same data and networks as a researcher, organize it according to their perspective, and connect with others. We talked about how people can stop using their computers as typewriters and instead create reusable data, about how many more people can be deeply involved in democratic processes, and about how this can be used to build up trust in government.
I want to talk about a specific open data project. Today, if I go to a health clinic, I may be told I can't be seen that day. If I search many completely different sources of health clinic information, I might get a better idea of the best clinic to visit at that moment. Modern Internet-based software can provide easy solutions to these kinds of problems. In an afternoon, I scraped the locations of hospital emergency departments across Montreal. I put them on a map and included the user's current position and the closest hospital, and added scraped information about capacity and resource usage. Even this effort would be useful for someone trying to form an informed opinion and take more responsibility for their own health. It could help many people waste less of their own time sitting in a waiting room and help balance the health system by choosing the clinics closest to them and those likely to be least crowded.
However, if hospitals and clinics intentionally published information as quality open data, much more could be built. We could learn where clinics are best for different conditions and develop real-time and predictive views of when to go to particular locations. Past the technical design, people could contribute their experiences to help measure problems and successes. This would result in a low-cost harmonious feedback loop for individuals and their health system. With open data, lightweight Internet tools, and crowd-sourcing, the budget impact would be minimal and the effects profound. Because hospitals are fragmented, we may never have an official comprehensive system, though with a minimal level of open data support we can have useful, constantly developing systems that institutions could never build in the foreseeable future.
Many people like me are able to create this kind of system in an afternoon, because it's what we do during the day. We work with free world-scale systems that let us put interactive data into the best and most recognized web interfaces in the world. The proprietary and custom interfaces often used by institutions usually can't compete with this. They make the user relearn a system that's usually not nearly as good as the best in the web, and cut and paste an address to get transit directions or see what's nearby. They don't let users easily add information that can be helpful to others.
In the last few days I have read two news items about governments not taking advantage of the best the Internet has to offer. In one case, the U.K. government paid a consulting firm £200,000 to create a system that collapsed under load when put online. An individual wrote a system in eight spare hours that was more robust. In another case, the BBC announced that it had to shut down 172 content websites for budget reasons. An individual scraped and archived them using a $4-a-month hosting plan.
Using the best low-cost tools online today for free, people use digital maps to find restaurants and bus routes that suit them perfectly. Craigslist demolished the newspaper classified business with a free, easy-to-use, volunteer-based service. People count on looking up information on the collaboratively created Wikipedia. Fine-grained news travels quickly in social networks, with personalized comments. Sites like openparliament.ca publish and allow finer examination of proceedings. These are examples of the benefits of digital networks. A basis of open data enables people to effectively reuse information, to participate in democratic processes, and to enable lifelong learning.
In a generation, the Internet will be deeply embedded in everything we do. We'll continue to see problem-solving waves of innovation from the best and most motivated minds around the world. Most people may not profoundly interact, but some will, and it will affect everyone.
All of this potential is based on the existing features and design of computer data in the breakthrough web created by Tim Berners-Lee, who leads open data development in the United Kingdom government. Berners-Lee's mandate is to make data open and accessible, including individual direct involvement.
Openly learning from, using, and advancing efforts in standards around the world must be a key part of the Canadian approach. We know there are qualities of open data ranging from the opaqueness of a PDF to richly organized and connected data using open standards and licences.
“Accessible” means that data need to be consistently organized according to many perspectives in a culture that embraces the idea that this is the right thing to do. Although most people are online and computers can be equalizers for vision- and mobility-disabled people, one-third of Canadians are not online and may never be, so we look to social networks to connect people.
Many two-way knowledge translators will be required inside and outside government. This is an enormous undertaking, but it's an investment that will yield smarter, more capable people, and genuine quality-of-life improvements in a knowledge economy. There will be short-term rewards, but we need to create long-term goals, visions, and concrete milestones with the open involvement of many people.
If we think about real steps forward, we see that as more information becomes available, it needs to be carefully organized using systems like CKAN; otherwise, it will never be found, or it will be redundant and opportunities will be lost. Data directories that don't use these structured standards are a step backwards.
Licences need to be determined. For many reasons, Creative Commons by attribution could be considered the best; it's well-recognized and creates links with the origins of data.
Government needs to negotiate openly with firms like Google to make sure that data available in cloud-based services don't become dependent on any provider, and instead become standards like those developed for transit services. My experience in hospital systems informs me that there are clear aggregated sets of data that can be shared, and others that can't. Government departments need to enable their existing experts and appoint people to determine how to draw clear lines in data reuse, as well institute an open data culture.
Getting people to widely understand how data are reused is a harder problem, but government could serve many purposes by working with media, producing an awareness and participation campaign, and supporting privacy and anti-fraud interests to instill an entertaining and realistic culture of inquiry in social networks. That attitude is the best starting point to create a trustworthy, participatory culture.
Finally, if government is going to conduct an e-consultation on this topic, that sounds like a great opportunity to work openly in a first real step to organize issues and truly involve individuals in these discussions as first-class participants.
Thank you.