The British model inspired me a great deal. The history of open digital data can be traced back to England. The story actually goes back 400 years, to the astronomers and scientists who were the first to develop data hundreds of years ago. They had always worked together and shared their data, because they knew that the data on lakes and forests needed to be organized and shared.
In point of fact, England had the most regressive policy in place with respect to cost recovery, as well as the most regressive licensing system of all countries that, like us, had adopted the Westminster system. The Guardian newspaper launched a campaign calling for the public dissemination of data. In the area of public sector information management, there are open data and access to information policies such as the European Union open data policy and the Europe INSPIRE initiative.
England organized its institutions looking to broad European Union policies for inspiration and in the spirit of open government. Everything I've talked about today can be found in that country.
Another example to consider is that of the United States. However, their case is unique in that they already have in place a system whereby documents created in the United States are deemed to be in the public domain.
Here in this country, we have a bit of a problem because data is not subject to a public domain system, but rather to the Crown copyright system. We, the citizens, are subjects to the Crown.
We are not citizens in the same way as citizens in the U.S.
However, government responsibility for data dissemination is somewhat different.