Evidence of meeting #47 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was data.
A recording is available from Parliament.
3:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
I will call the meeting to order.
I want to welcome everyone here. Can everyone hear me? The witnesses in Washington and New York, can you hear me okay?
3:35 p.m.
David Ferriero National Archivist, United States National Archives and Records Administration
Yes.
3:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Okay.
On behalf of all members of the committee, I want to welcome you before us. This is the meeting of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics of the House of Commons of Canada. We are continuing our study on open government.
Before I introduce the witnesses, there is one very quick administrative issue I want to deal with, because I might forget at the end of the meeting. Excuse me, witnesses; this will just take a minute.
Members, you have before you the upper limits of a budget for the lobbying study we're going to undertake in about three weeks' time. We have 10 or 11 witnesses lined up. Most of the witnesses are from the Ottawa area, so I don't expect it to come anywhere close to that, but you've seen the list of witnesses and the chair would invite a motion that this budget be accepted.
Mr. Siksay.
3:35 p.m.
NDP
3:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Okay, back to business. Sorry for that brief interruption.
Today the committee is very pleased to have by video conference three very interesting witnesses who are very much familiar with and were involved with the United States initiative on open government.
First, we have from the United States National Archives and Records Administration Mr. David Ferriero. He is accompanied by Mrs. Pamela Wright, who is the chief digital access strategist. We also have, representing the United States Department of Justice, Ms. Melanie Ann Pustay, Office of Information Policy.
Appearing from New York City as an individual is Professor Beth Noveck, a professor of law. I should point out that Professor Noveck served two years as the United States deputy chief technology officer for open government and she also led the White House open government initiative.
On behalf of every member of this committee, I extend to each and every one of you people a very warm welcome. I thank you for appearing before this committee and providing your assistance.
What we're going to do, as is the normal procedure, we're going to ask each of the witnesses for his or her opening comments. We're going to start with you, Mr. Ferriero, and then we'll go to you, Ms. Pustay, and then we'll go to you, Professor Noveck.
Mr. Ferriero, am I pronouncing your name right?
3:35 p.m.
National Archivist, United States National Archives and Records Administration
Ferriero rhymes with stereo.
3:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Okay. We'll start with you, sir. Again, thank you for coming before the committee.
3:35 p.m.
National Archivist, United States National Archives and Records Administration
Thank you very much, Mr. Murphy.
Greetings to members of the committee. I am David Ferriero, the national archivist of the United States. As you indicated, Pam Wright, who is our chief digital access strategist, is with me also. Pam also represents the National Archives on the White House cross-agency working group on open government.
The day after his inauguration, President Obama addressed his staff, saying:
Our commitment to openness means more than simply informing the American people about how decisions are made. It means recognizing that Government does not have all the answers, and that public officials need to draw on what citizens know. ... I’m directing members of my administration to find new ways of tapping the knowledge and expertise of ordinary Americans--scientists....
3:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Mr. Ferriero, may I interrupt you just for ten seconds? Because this committee operates under two official languages, your comments are being simultaneously translated into French. If I could just ask you to slow down perhaps by about 30%, it would make it helpful to the staff.
3:35 p.m.
National Archivist, United States National Archives and Records Administration
Of course. Sorry.
I'll go back to the President's address.
On his first day after inauguration, President Obama addressed his staff, saying that:
Our commitment to openness means more than simply informing the American people about how decisions are made. It means recognizing that government does not have all the answers, and that public officials need to draw on what citizens know. ... I’m directing members of my administration to find new ways of tapping the knowledge and experience of ordinary Americans--scientists and civic leaders, educators and entrepreneurs--because the way to solve the problem of our time is...by involving the American people in shaping the policies that affect their lives.
On December 8, 2009, the Obama administration issued the open government directive, with the goal of creating a culture of transparency, participation, and collaboration in and among federal agencies that will transform the relationship between government and its citizens.
In responding to the President’s request of all agencies and departments, the National Archives developed its own open government plan. And in keeping with his open government initiative, we are working to encourage more participation and collaboration in our work, both within our staff and especially with the public. An example is our citizen archivist program.
My experience in libraries over the years convinced me that we learn more about our holdings when researchers help us better understand and describe what we have. These researchers may be interested in a particular person, event, or period in American history and become more familiar with our records than the busy professional archivists. And they can be of great help in writing descriptions of these records in collaboration with our professional staff. This is a way the public can make major contributions in describing and understanding the records being preserved for their use.
Besides this interaction with citizen archivists, our open government plan strengthens the culture of open government at the National Archives, develops web and data services to meet our 21st century needs, strengthens transparency at the National Archives, and provides leadership and services to enable the federal government to meet 21st century needs. Our government-wide 2010 employee viewpoint survey was the first step to improving employee engagement.
The results of this survey created a baseline for improvements that will be made in the areas of employee engagement in open government activities. We published a strategic human capital plan, highlighting the human capital challenges facing the National Archives. Our internal open government working group looked at a variety of ways to increase employee engagement and reduce barriers for innovation within the agency.
Over the past 18 months the National Archives has worked to develop presences on Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, and Twitter. We are looking to expand on these, as well as monitor new media where the public may expect to hear from us across our records. In the process of developing this open government plan we engaged the public using a social voting platform called IdeaScale.
We developed our open government forum and closely monitored ideas, comments, and votes. As our internal open government working group met, we carefully considered each idea and the feasibility of executing each idea. Our flagship initiative for open government is to develop online services to meet our 21st century needs. We intend to move the National Archives toward increased online participation and collaboration with the public by a social media strategy that includes developing our current catalogue into a social catalogue that allows our users to contribute information about our holdings.
We will also develop streamlined search capabilities for our online holdings that will unlock online records from previously stove-piped systems. We redesigned archives.gov to be more user-focused, and we approach digitization strategically as well as transparently with the ultimate goal of providing greater access to our holdings online.
Other ways in which we advance open government involve three important offices within NARA that have government-wide responsibilities. They are the National Declassification Center, the Office of Government Information Services, and the Information Security Oversight Office.
In the National Declassification Center we are reviewing, on an expedited basis, a backlog of about 400 million pages of records that have been classified for years. The goal is to declassify as many of them as possible. Records with high public interest and those with a high likelihood of being declassified are getting priority. Each year we accession 15 million additional pages of classified information, creating the potential for a future backlog. That’s why it’s important for us to eliminate the current backlog and develop a plan to avoid future backlogs.
The National Declassification Center oversees all this work with the motto “releasing all we can, protecting what we must”.
In September 2009 we established the Office of Government Information Services, which monitors activity government-wide under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. Its mission is to improve the FOIA process and resolve disputes between federal agencies and FOIA requesters. Described by Congress as the FOIA ombudsman, this office is specifically charged with reviewing policies and procedures and compliance with the act by departments and agencies. And it recommends to Congress and the President any changes needed to improve FOIA administration. We work with the Department of Justice as well as with other agencies, requesters, and freedom-of-information advocates to find ways to make the act more effective and efficient.
Our Information Security Oversight Office oversees the classification programs of government and industry, ensuring public access where appropriate, but safeguarding national security information. This office also reviews requests for original classification authority from agencies, and does on-site inspections to monitor compliance with security requirements. Not all sensitive information is classified, however, and this office is leading the effort to reform the system for managing sensitive but unclassified or controlled unclassified information.
This open government initiative is also the trigger for the culture change here at the National Archives. We are implementing a plan to transform ourselves into an agency focused on the new and ever-growing needs of both our customers and our staff in a quickly changing digital era. These transformations include working as one NARA, not just as component parts; embracing the primacy of electronic information in all facets of our work and positioning NARA to lead accordingly; fostering a culture of leadership, not just as a position but as the way we all conduct our work; transforming NARA into a great place to work through trust and empowerment of all of our staff, the agency’s most vital resource; creating structures and processes to allow our staff to more effectively meet the needs of our customers; and opening our organizational boundaries to learn from others.
We now have a transformation launch team implementing the plan for the reorganization, but a reorganized agency will not in itself change things. The change will come from our staff--the best and brightest there are--equipped with the proper tools in an environment where success is possible.
Mr. Murphy, I thank you for this opportunity and I look forward to your questions.
3:45 p.m.
Melanie Ann Pustay Director, Office of Information Policy, United States Department of Justice
Thank you.
Thanks for pronouncing my name correctly that time. It is Melanie Pustay.
I'm the director of the Office of Information Policy at the Department of Justice. We have a twofold mission connected to implementing the Freedom of Information Act here in the States. First of all, we're responsible for encouraging agency compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. We then also ensure that President Obama's memorandum on the FOIA and Attorney General Holder's FOIA guidelines are fully implemented across the government.
We do that in a number of ways. We first have an overall FOIA guidance responsibility. We carry out that function in a variety of ways. We develop and issue policy guidance on the proper application of the FOIA for all agencies. We publish a legal treatise that's called the Justice Department Guide to the Freedom of Information Act. It's relied on not only by government officials but also by private sector individuals and open government groups who are interested in having a comprehensive discussion of all the FOIA case law and all the FOIA principles in one place. We also have an online website for FOIA posts where we give guidance to agencies. We disseminate FOIA news and generally share information about FOIA on an ongoing basis.
We provide a lot of training to agencies. A key part of what we do is to provide training. There are thousands of agency employees in the U.S. who work with FOIA either full-time or as a collateral duty. We have an entire range of training programs where we cover every aspect of the FOIA, all the procedural requirements, the exemptions from disclosure, and litigation considerations. Of course we now focus in particular on President Obama's FOIA memorandum and the Attorney General's FOIA guidelines. It's one of the key ways in which we're spreading the word about the new culture of openness, the presumption of openness. We give concrete guidance to agencies on how they can actually implement those principles when they respond to the Freedom of Information Act.
We also provide individualized counselling services to agencies. We have a dedicated phone line that's called our FOIA counsellor line. We have an attorney from my office who is assigned to that phone line every day. The volume of calls is such that it pretty much takes all day for that person to answer the calls that come in. There are usually 20 or 30 calls every single day from agency employees wanting to talk through a particular FOIA issue that they're having and wanting to get legal advice from us on how to proceed.
We have found that over the years the public has become aware of our FOIA counsellor service. We actually ended up getting quite a few calls from the public, where people asked how to make a FOIA request and where to make a FOIA request. We actually answer about a thousand calls a year from members of the public who have a question about the FOIA.
But in addition to this big guidance role that we have to lead agencies in compliance with the FOIA, we also have an oversight role. There are two principal ways that agencies report to the Department of Justice on how they're doing with the FOIA. First, they have to report every year to the Department of Justice. They have to submit a report that's called an annual FOIA report. It contains a tremendous amount of very detailed statistics about the number of requests they've received and processed, the disposition of the request, how many records were released in full, how many requests had records released in part, the procedural reasons for denying a request, and the many details about the time it takes to respond to a request, time increments, and money allocated to processing FOIA requests. It's a tremendous amount of information about all the nuts and bolts of the FOIA process within each agency. It's also required to be broken down by the components of each agency.
The Department of Justice, my office, developed guidance for agencies on how to fill out that report. We provide training to the agencies so they know what it is they are supposed to include and how to compile the statistics. We then review all the reports in draft form. There are 97 agencies that comply with the FOIA in the U.S. All those agencies send their reports to us first in draft so that we can review them and make sure they've covered all the elements that are required. We also find all types of things that are missing from their reports, math errors, or data that's not correctly carried over from year to year.
For all those reasons, we do a review of the reports before they are finalized. Then they get cleared and they get posted. DOJ then posts all those annual FOIA reports on our website so they are in one single place so it's easy for people to look at them. And then we also conduct a completed summary of those reports so that we get overall statistics about how the government is doing.
Since the issuance of President Obama's FOIA memo and Attorney General Holder's FOIA guidelines, we have a new reporting requirement that we imposed on agencies, and that's to complete every year a chief FOIA officer report. That report is a narrative, and it's a detailed narrative description of all the steps that the agency has taken to implement the presumption of openness. It has required elements that need to be addressed, like the agency's use of technology, what steps they're taking to improve proactive disclosures of information.
So we wanted to take the key elements of President Obama's and Attorney General Holder's openness principle and give agencies the ability to showcase to the public and to the department the steps they're taking to learn from one another by looking at each other's reports. And we have the same sort of process in my office, where we've given guidance on how the reports should be completed. As part of our training, we encourage agencies to do things that they then know they have the satisfaction of being able to report in their chief FOIA officer report. We also then create a summary. Last year was of course the first time that we had a chief FOIA officer report, so then we created an extensive summary of how agencies did in implementing the new guidelines, and we gave new guidance to agencies to move us now to the next step down the road. Those things together are the ways we conduct oversight.
The last thing I wanted to mention is that at the Department of Justice we had our own open government plan. As our flagship initiative under the plan, we have developed a brand-new website that's going to be called FOIA.gov. It's a website that's devoted to all things FOIA, and it combines our leadership and our policy role with FOIA. It's totally developed by DOJ. But it was born from the results of when we were developing our open government plan. We got ideas from the public, and this was one of the most voted on suggestions for a flagship initiative for DOJ.
There are two main elements to this new FOIA website that we're going to be launching actually in the next couple of weeks. First of all, what the website does is take all that detailed data that I was just mentioning that's collected in annual FOIA reports, and it displays all the data graphically. This means that you can go into this website and compare data, mash data, compare across agencies, and compare over time, and be able to see graphically how agencies are doing.
For example, if you just wanted to compare the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Health and Human Services, and you wanted to see which of those agencies gets the most requests, and which of those processes the most requests, you can select those three agencies, select their criteria that you want to look at, and the data will pop up in graphs, and you'll see graphs showing the differences between the agencies. You can compare and contrast in a myriad of ways. It really makes the data living and meaningful. We think it's a really nice way to shine a light on agencies' FOIA compliance.
And one of the things we're going to do in our management role is we're going to run reports ourselves and then post them on the site so that we can highlight the five top agencies that have made the most releases of record, or the agencies that have reduced their backlog most significantly. So we'll highlight different things that we think are useful for people to see and that will also in turn be an encouragement to agencies to try to race to the top so that they can get on one of our lists of the top five.
Secondly, FOIA.gov will have an educational component. We have a full description on the website of how the FOIA works, what to expect when you make a FOIA request, where to make your FOIA request. We have contact information for all 97 agencies. We have the names of officials you can call in each agency when you have questions about your request. We have the websites of each agency. We also even have videos embedded in the website so that we can explain just in conversational tone and terms how the FOIA works, what exemptions are, what the process is. We think that aspect of the website is very valuable in terms of educating the public to help them understand what to expect and then also to make it easier for them to know how and where to make a FOIA request. So we're really looking forward to launching that new website in the next couple of weeks.
3:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Thank you, Ms. Pustay.
I am now going to go to Professor Beth Noveck.
3:55 p.m.
Dr. Beth Simone Noveck Professor of Law, As an Individual
Thank you, Chairman Murphy and members of the committee.
Thank you for the honour of appearing before you today to reflect on the meaning and value of open government and to share some of my insights and experiences in working to create an open government culture and practice.
I'm hoping to tell you for a few minutes about the White House open government initiative and what we did to begin the process of trying to create a culture of open government. I will then share ten principles for designing open government institutions, and conclude with a few thoughts about open data.
Let me at the outset make clear that the views I express are entirely my own, as an individual, and not those of my former employer, the United States government.
Let me start by laying out why I think open government matters. Open government goes far beyond transparency, which sometimes people confuse because of the term “open”. Opening up how institutions work first and foremost enables greater collaboration, what we might think of as open innovation. It affords the opportunity to use network technology to discover creative solutions to challenges that a handful of people sitting in Washington or Ottawa cannot necessarily devise by themselves. Washington government doesn't have all the answers. And in the network age, 21st-century institutions are not bigger or smaller institutions—they are smarter ones that can leverage the somewhat anarchic technologies, the kinds of social media we've heard about today, within tightly controlled bureaucracies to connect the organization to a network of people in order to devise new approaches that would never come from the bureaucracy itself.
When we can use new technology to build those kinds of connections between institutions and networks, we can come up with new and manageable and useful ways for government and citizens to solve problems together. I start from the assumption that everyone is an expert in something, and that many people would be willing to give of their time and participate if they had the opportunity to bring their skills and talents and enthusiasm to bear for the public good.
As President Obama recently said, “We cannot win the future with a government of the past”. The real motivator, I believe, for changing how government works, for moving towards open government, is to make government more democratic. Providing opportunities for citizens to collaborate is vital to fostering an engaged citizenry. Particularly in an era when the journalism industry is in economic transition, we have to look to new strategies that leverage technology to create democratic accountability and make citizens the co-creators and partners in governance with the public sector.
On his first full day in office, the President signed the memorandum on transparency and open government, in which he called for “unprecedented openness in government” and creating institutions governed by the three values of transparency, participation, and collaboration.
We started this White House open government initiative as a collaboration between the White House and all the agencies, including the National Archives and the Department of Justice, from whom you've heard today, and coordinated by White House counsel, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy in an effort to implement this memorandum on transparency and open government.
Two years later, every cabinet department and major agency in the United States has a brainstorming website for getting good ideas from the public and from employees. They can visit the General Services Administration’s apps.gov platform to get access to new social media tools, also for free. The White House alone has eight Twitter accounts, and we started from scratch with an open government account that now has—I'm pleased to report—150,000-plus followers. And many cabinet secretaries, as well as their departments, tweet.
Every institution now has a fully articulated open government plan, of the kind you heard the archivist describe, that lays out concrete steps for making this culture change real in practice.
We have a national data portal, Data.gov, where the U.S. government has put up hundreds of thousands of data sets. In addition, many agencies are developing their own inventories, searchable through Data.gov, where they're putting up further data. They're using new platforms like Challenge.gov, the new national website offering rewards for the development of creative solutions to problems.
In its first two years, the United States experience has been that of trying some new initiatives, experimenting with collaboration in day-to-day governance. You heard already about the citizen archivist program. When the Department of Health and Human Services wanted to help policy-makers and citizens make more informed decisions about their health care, it made hundreds of public health indicators available online—so-called community health data—and then invited people to create useful tools and visualizations with those data. In the first three months of that initiative, people outside government developed two dozen innovations to improve community health. And since that time they have developed many, many more.
I had the personal experience, working with my students at New York Law School, of collaborating with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to build the nation's first expert networking system that allowed volunteer scientists and technologists to work with the patent office to get better information for informing the decisions of the patent office.
This notion of open government, transparency, participation, and collaboration is by no means a U.S. mantra alone. Ten countries now have national data portals. The British Parliament is currently debating amending the Freedom of Information Act to provide for provisioning data in raw, downloadable formats for citizen reuse. Poland and Brazil are considering open access legislation. Ten Downing Street, like the White House, provides spending data and contracting data online. The Australian government has the Government 2.0 taskforce, which is exploring opportunities for citizen engagement. This is very much an initiative that runs all across the world as well as from federal to state to local levels in the United States.
The way we undertook beginning the process of creating an open and collaborative culture in the United States really required a combination of three things: policy, platforms, and projects. We started, of course, with significant policy initiatives on day one, setting out the ideals of openness and collaboration, to inspire the kind of change you've heard about today. We created new platforms, such as Data.gov and Challenge.gov, to translate policy into practice in concrete ways. Then we encouraged the launch of a multiplicity of projects to really let 1,000 flowers bloom and spawn innovation all across the public sector so that open government would be the work of thousands of people, not just a few people in the White House.
Let me add one note on the role and value of high-value data in this process. The open government directive very specifically provides for an inventory, via agencies, of high-value data. This goes beyond what we might think of as traditional accountability data, like spending data or the schedules of cabinet secretaries. It actually focuses on the data people want and are requesting, whether through the Freedom of Information Act or other open government processes, and ensures that open government actually serves the needs of the public.
Starting with high-value data allowed us to steer clear of national security data or personally identifiable private information. It allowed us to really focus on what we could do in terms of releasing and publishing data about public safety or patent filings so that we could create widespread culture change quickly.
High-value data, most importantly, puts the emphasis on information that improves people’s daily lives, not just the government's. There's a wealth of government data out there that can translate into useful knowledge that empowers people and policy-makers.
Finally, publishing high-value data allows government and the public to start developing a collaborative relationship, a productive relationship--the kind of partnership I referred to before--which allows people to make good and productive uses of that data in partnership with one another to the end of not just helping government but of creating jobs and generating economic value.
Let me conclude with ten quick principles for achieving open government in practice. I list these in greater detail in the written testimony you have before you.
How do we get from here to there?
First, we have to be open. Governments should do all of their work in the open. Contracts, grants, legislation, regulation, and policy should all be transparent, because by being open we give people the information they need about how their democracy works so that they can participate.
Second, open government includes open access. Work created by and at the behest of government and of the taxpayer, whether through grants or contracts, should be freely available. If taxpayers pay once, they shouldn't have to pay twice.
Third, we should make open government productive and not adversarial. Create that collaborative nature of the relationship by giving people the information they want.
Fourth, be collaborative. It's not enough to be transparent. Officials actually have to take the next step. They have to not just put out data but have to solicit people to use that data.
Number five is data, data, data. Love data and more data. The more data we put out, the better we can design policies, informed by real-time data, that generate value for both the government and the private sector.
Sixth, be nimble. Where possible, invite people to innovate in short time spans—90 days or less. Forcing people to act quickly discourages bureaucracy and encourages innovation.
Number seven is do more and spend less. By being open and engaged, we can design solutions that allow us to do more with less. Instead of just cutting a service to save money, we can come up with creative solutions, often using technology that helps us to save money.
Number eight is invest in platforms of the kind we've discussed, like data.gov, like the foia.gov that we've heard about.
Number nine is invest in people. To change the culture of government, we can't simply do it through policy. We have to do it by empowering the people to actually do the work of being innovative.
Lastly, we should design for democracy. By that, I mean we should always ask if legislation is enabling active and constructive engagement that is using people's abilities and enthusiasm for the public good. We can't simply sort of throw social media at a problem; we actually have to create processes for manageable and meaningful participation from both officials and the public.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and the committee. I look forward to answering your questions.
4:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Thank you very much, Professor Noveck.
Just before I go to questions from the members of the committee, I want to explain that, unlike the United States, the Canadian House of Commons has four parties versus two. We have the governing Conservative Party and the opposition, which is the Liberal Party, the Bloc Québécois, and the New Democratic Party. So we rotate in an order.
We're going to start with the first round of questioning, and that is seven minutes each. The first spot will go to the official opposition, the Liberal Party. The first questions will be from Dr. Bennett.
Dr. Bennett, you have seven minutes.
4:05 p.m.
Liberal
Carolyn Bennett Liberal St. Paul's, ON
Thanks very much.
Thank you for these excellent presentations. It's quite remarkable that the progress is so fast. Obviously it started with the speech from the President or the directive from the President on his first day. I guess we have heard from a number of witnesses that this actually starts at the top, and it's difficult to create an open culture underneath if that's not the message coming from on high.
I would like to ask three things. First, in your statement of “releasing all we can and protecting what we must”, how is that determined, as to what has to be protected, and who makes that determination? It's quite clear from all of the testimony that in the United States the default position has now become “open”, so there must sometimes be some things that are determined that must be protected.
We've heard a little bit about how you've changed the culture of the normally risk-averse public service, to actually change it and transform it into one that embraces openness. I was wondering how you've done that. Is that incorporated in performance appraisals? How do you actually incent that kind of behaviour that's quite a change from the way they've probably operated for a great length of time?
Third, in having most things out and in the open, have you noticed any change in the need for staffing or the budget for access-to-information requests?
4:10 p.m.
Liberal
4:10 p.m.
Professor of Law, As an Individual
Sure. Let me take the first question first.
On releasing all we can and protecting what we must--and I'm sure the others will speak to this as well--let me say first, on the process of just getting started and the process of releasing data, one of the reasons we indicated this concept of high-value data and made the definition quite broad was precisely in order to encourage the hard work of trying to get the data that we could.
It's not simply an issue of political will or of dealing with controversial data that may be protected by national security or may deal with private information. There is data that is sitting on paper and that is not digital. There is data that is digital but isn't searchable. There is data that is sitting on servers that are essentially so creaky that if you tried to download the data from those servers you would crash the whole office, which is the case, for example, in the patent office and the reason why the patent office did a no-cost contract with the private sector to search the data for it while it tries to redo its back-end infrastructure.
We wanted to create this culture of transparency by starting the practice of being open as a way of effecting that culture change, and that really meant beginning with information that would be uncontroversial and starting to get into the habit of putting out that data. That said, there also are processes when information goes up on Data.gov for conducting a national security review of the information that's posted, but it's really about creating that culture through practice.
That partly gets to the second question, about incentives for behaviour change. The more we do, the more we can celebrate what we do. We invited to the table not simply White House oversight of the agency data inventory process, but outside groups, good-government groups, open-government groups, to be part of the process, hopefully both to celebrate and to criticize when that work isn't going fast enough, and also to help with the very hard process of actually building data inventories, which is a very hard technical process, not just a difficult political process.
4:10 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Okay, we are going to go to Mr. Ferriero now.
I want to point out to the witnesses that the video part of the technology is sound-sensitive. It moves, so when you were shuffling papers there we had a situation where the video went to another witness. I just want you all to bear that in mind.
Mr. Ferriero.
4:10 p.m.
National Archivist, United States National Archives and Records Administration
I'm sorry for shuffling papers.
That “releasing all we can” came from me in the context of the national declassification standard that has been established here at the national archives.
The executive order from the President that established the centre specifies two categories of content that must be protected: weapons of mass destruction and national security. Any of the 400 million pages that deal with those need to be protected. Everything else is up for review, and the intention is to make them open.
The process through which those documents are being reviewed involves the agencies that hold equity in the original classification, so we work through a process to involve those agencies in reviewing large groups. What I didn't say in my testimony is that we have a mandate to finish this review process of the 400 million pages by the end of 2013. Large clusters of documents have already been reviewed, and we have opened 12 million pages worth of content so far.
Should we handle all three questions at the same time?
4:15 p.m.
National Archivist, United States National Archives and Records Administration
Okay, then I'm speaking to the cultural change. I can speak from my own experience as an agency head. I've been on the job now for 15 months, so the open government directive came at an opportune time for a new guy coming in to take over an agency. It gave me the luxury of creating a new organization and a new culture that for the first time empowered the staff to contribute to thinking about the future.
We used every social media tool possible to involve the staff across the country. I have 44 facilities, from Seattle, Washington, to Atlanta, Georgia. My staff is all over the country, so social media tools have been key to involving them in the creation of this new plan, which in itself has changed the culture in terms of expecting the staff to contribute to decision-making.
On the third question you asked, this transformation we're undergoing right now has also built into it the driving out of duplication and repetitive kinds of processes around the country, creating a much more efficient and nimble organization that brings with it resource efficiencies. So despite the current budget climate here in Washington, I'm really optimistic about reallocation of resources within our own budget to meet some of the challenges we have carved out for ourselves.
4:15 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
I have to move to the next witness, because Dr. Bennett's time is up. They will get another slot later on, and she can come back with the next questions.
I'll move to Madame Freeman for seven minutes.
4:15 p.m.
Bloc
Carole Freeman Bloc Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC
Thank you to the three of you for your fascinating presentations.
I would first like to address Ms. Noveck. In the text of her presentation, she mentioned that President Obama called upon every nation to make government more open and accountable. In addition, the President asked that the other countries return to the United Nations this September and bring specific commitments to promote transparency.
Could you expand on the scope of President Obama's request? I am asking this question because, here in Canada, we are having trouble with becoming a transparent government; we are meeting some resistance. In the United States, you have obviously been dealing with a specific request on President Obama's part for open government and open data. We are still very primitive here.
What does the President expect when he asks other governments to report to the United Nations? Could you answer that, Ms. Noveck?
4:15 p.m.
Professor of Law, As an Individual
Thank you.
Let me be clear, of course, that now I'm back in the private sector as an academic teaching law, so I'm sure current plans are under way of which I may not be aware and can't speak to. But let me give some sense of what was contemplated at the time I was in government when the President made his seminal speech before the United Nations. This also gets to the comments I was making about high-value data.
The idea was to call on each country to do what it can to begin to build this kind of open innovation culture. So whether it is greater transparency for the purpose of government accountability, whether it is more data availability to promote scientific growth and collaboration, whether it would create jobs and economic value, whether it's to build more of a culture of civic engagement, everybody should start thinking about doing what they can and come back together next September, when the UN will reconvene for the General Assembly, and provide a report to one another to begin to foster a community.
Not too long after that speech, the President travelled to India and announced an open government partnership with the Indian Prime Minister. Conversations also happened around the same time on partnership around open government with the Russian government. So I think a lot of conversations are taking place among and between governments to exchange and share best practices, to generate ideas, and for each to figure out the strategy that works within the national political culture and climate for moving toward a culture of innovation and collaboration.
Let me also point out one thing in the written testimony that I did not have time to mention earlier, and that is some of the data about the generation of economic value and job creation that comes from greater transparency. Earlier today I had an opportunity to talk with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who I cite in the paper, and the volume of economic growth that was generated just by putting out weather data. Our national weather service in the U.S. has a billion-dollar budget. Weather.com, one website that was created as a result of open government data, was recently sold for $3.5 billion. NOA estimates that the multiplier of the value they invest in generating and putting out data to the public being generated in growth in the economy is at least 100 times what the agency's budget is.
So whatever the strategy, whatever the reason, whether it's to promote greater accountability and transparency in a traditional sense than we've typically thought about openness as a way of holding government accountable or whether it's to generate economic value, I think different countries will come to this agenda for different reasons but that everybody can get under what I think is quite a big tent of changing the culture, of moving toward greater openness and collaboration.
