Information & Ethics Committee on March 2nd, 2011

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

Can we hope that, by having to report to the United Nations, there will be enough interaction to force reluctant governments to move forward?

[Dr. Beth Simone Noveck]

Again, I hope so. My sense is that in the intervening months there will be ongoing conversations where there is a best-practice sharing that's not dissimilar to the work among the federal agencies in the United States that's been done in the inter-agency group. The President's memorandum on the first day, followed by the open government directive that was issued--the memorandum was in January and the directive was issued in December--set out a loose set of principles and guidelines. Much of the work that's taking place has been about conversations between agencies sharing best practices. People want to know how NARA is using social media so they can copy it in their own agency.

Especially since I left government, I now see in my work that kind of conversation among and between governments all the time: What have you done, how did you move toward open data, etc.? There is something called the transparency initiative, which is a consortium of seven major global foundations who got together to invest in and promote open government practices around the world and are there precisely to try to encourage this kind of best-practice sharing in the lead-up to the UN meeting.

So I think a lot of conversation is happening, and we should be sure that the right people from Canada are participating in those discussions.

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

Thank you.

My next question is for Ms. Pustay.

In terms of the Freedom of Information Act, you have 97 agencies that have to prepare reports on the volume of access to information requests.

What are the main reasons for some agencies not responding fairly quickly or refusing to give...? Ms. Pustay, what methods do you use to ensure compliance with the Freedom of Information Act?

[Melanie Ann Pustay]

Hello.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to see any of you, so I'm just listening to this whole conference. I hope that you all can at least see me when I'm talking.

There are a whole lot of reasons, obviously, as you might expect, why some agencies have significant delays in responding to requests. Now, let me just say that out of 97 agencies, we have a significant portion that don't have significant delays. That's primarily because they're lower-volume agencies or the type of data they get is not complicated to process, so they're able to respond more quickly to requests.

I think the main reason why some agencies have backlogs—and certainly some can have significant backlogs of requests being many years old in some cases—is just the crush of incoming requests. The Department of Homeland Security, portions of the Department of Justice, the FBI, for instance, are just exceedingly popular with the public. They get lots and lots of requests, tens of thousands of requests every year. The crush of what's coming in the door literally overwhelms the system. Then obviously there is the complexity of the request also. It's not unusual for requesters to ask for things that involve boxes of material or file cabinets full of documents or thousands of e-mails, all of which have to be individually reviewed.

One of the things I'm focusing on in our new website is the ability to mash data. It's going to very helpful to me as well as to the agencies. I really want to stop lumping all backlogs in one big term, because we do ask agencies to report the time it takes them to respond to requests by type of request. They do distinguish between simple requests and complex requests, for example.

I think that one of the key ways we're going to tackle backlogs is to realize that we have different tracks in agencies and that it's most important that simple requests be responded to as promptly as possible. Requesters should have the option of saying that they will make a simple request that is low volume or low complexity, in exchange for the speed they will get by doing that. That way, that request isn't sitting behind a researcher who isn't as concerned with time but wants lots and lots of material, so their request is necessarily going to take longer.

Those are some of the issues we're wrestling with in terms of trying to manage it. At the end of the day, agencies will always say if you would just give us more people, more resources, more bodies to actually work on the request, that would be helpful. Looking for efficiencies, improving the way they handle the requests, and to try to be more efficient can go a long way.

Also, I think just our analysis of the issue needs to be more nuanced than it's been in the past.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Madame Freeman.

We are now going to go to the representative from the New Democratic Party, Mr. Bill Siksay. Mr. Siksay, you have seven minutes.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Ms. Pustay, I'll stay with you, since we're seeing you right at this moment. I wanted to ask if compliance and backlogs and delays have gotten better since the President's directive. Have you seen any change in that at this point, and what kind of change?

[Melanie Ann Pustay]

Yes. Actually, it's one of the things I'm most pleased about. Between 2008 and 2009—the first year of implementation under our new guidelines—the backlog went down across the government by about 60,000 requests, so almost half. Almost half of the backlog was reduced. It was really a tremendous reduction in backlog, and that backlog trend is continuing. We're seeing that the backlog continues to go down.

Definitely the focus on backlogs is certainly one of the.... We have many planks to the guidelines that we have under the Freedom of Information Act, but one of the planks is backlog reduction, and we are seeing concrete statistics that show us that the backlog is going down. Then we balance that against the other key thing we're trying to accomplish, which is to just be more transparent. That means not only increasing proactive disclosure, the data sets that Beth has been talking about, but also just having agencies work to anticipate interest in records and to put to records on the website before the flood of FOIA requests comes in.

We have a really nice example of agencies doing that in response to the BP oil spill. Agencies immediately started establishing websites devoted to the effects of the oil spill, and across the government we had multiple agencies with their own websites containing information connected with the oil spill: water samples, soil samples, air quality, etc.

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

Okay, thank you. That's helpful. I want to get on to a couple of other questions.

I wanted to ask Ms. Pustay and Mr. Ferriero what the relationship is between the Office of Information Policy and the Office of Government Information Services. They seem to be doing similar things, in your description. Could you give a quick explanation of what the relationship is or what the different roles are?

[Melanie Ann Pustay]

The shorthand way of distinguishing them is that the Department of Justice gives guidance to federal agencies and establishes employer policy and has oversight of all the agencies for compliance.

What the new office in the National Archives does is something that is new and distinct, and that's offering mediation services to resolve disputes. The idea there is that as a non-exclusive alternative to litigation, a requester could go to OGIS's new office and go through a mediation process if they have a dispute with an agency.

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

Dr. Noveck, I wanted to ask you a question. You talked about the economic value that's generated and you used the example of NOAA and the weather data. You talked about it in general, the price they got for weather.ca.

Can you address the economic value in terms of employment, in terms of jobs created and specific kinds of jobs created? We often hear about volunteers participating in this process and doing apps or engaging in contests, but I'd be interested to know what the experience is around direct employment, around full-time, family-supporting kinds of jobs. Is that something that's happening as a result of this change in government culture?

[Dr. Beth Simone Noveck]

Yes, so let me speak to both of those.

First, I think it's not to be discounted, the value of what we might think of as civic hacking or civic participation or civic engagement of all these varieties. The value that has to us as citizens in a democracy should not be underestimated, obviously.

That said, there are wonderful examples of businesses being founded using open government data. Unfortunately, they are examples at this point. We don't have systematic data yet, and that's something that is imperative to work on. Obviously, there are great stories about things like weather services, and NOAA has a website, economics.noaa.gov, that features all of these stories about new jobs, new businesses, and new wealth and value that's being created as a result of their data that's being put out. There are stories like that of the GPS industry, of the genomics industry, none of which would exist without open government data.

I'll give you just one recent example. The Department of Labour has a wonderful new data inventory, their enforcement database, and as a result of the open government movement they're putting out scads of data sets, including information about the fees that employees pay to their companies' retirement plans. There is a little start-up called BrightScope, which has been written about, which discovered this data and used it to build the BrightScope business, which essentially is intelligent. In the same way that there are businesses that track intelligence about mutual funds, they track intelligence about retirement plans. Their entire business is based on government data. From one year to the next, in the start of the Obama administration, they went from zero to 30 employees, if I recall correctly. This story has been written up recently in the press as a result of government data.

Now that I'm out of government and I'm back in the research world, one of my primary focuses in the coming months will be the intersection between job creation and economic value and open government data, so that we can make the case that open government is not just a nice-to-have for our democracy, but is also must-have in really tough economic times.

I think the question is very well put, and we ought to have even better and more empirically grounded answers than I can give you today.

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

Mr. Ferriero, I wanted to ask you a question, as you're someone who oversees an important agency that has a lot of workers who have engaged over many years in the work of the agency. It seems that creative pieces of the work of the archives are being taken and farmed out somewhere else, off-loaded. I'm using negative language, and I'm not as negative as I sound. But how do they feel about all this creative work, which they've probably never had the opportunity to get to before because of the pressures of the organization, going elsewhere to other people? Is that a morale issue in the agency? What's that like?

[David Ferriero]

It actually enhances their ability to work with the next user who comes in, because they know more about what we have than they did before that. Citizen archivists share their information.

It's not as if we're giving away the keys to the kingdom in terms of processing or describing. What they're doing, basically, is sharing information about what they have discovered in our records.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Mr. Siksay.

We're now going to go to a member of the governing Conservative Party, Pat Davidson. Ms. Davidson, you have seven minutes.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to each of you for being witnesses here today at our committee. Certainly it's been extremely interesting. And it's nice to talk to somebody who has been involved with the process and perhaps can help to steer us in the correct direction.

One of the things we've been wrestling with at this committee is how we get the public involved in determining what they would like to see and what kind of government data and information is important to them. I'd like to know how you engage the public, what kind of a process you used in getting public input. And I'd also like to know how departments and agencies determine what data and information should be released. Once you find out what the public is interested in, how do you determine what you can go ahead and release?

Mr. Ferriero, would you like to start, please?

[David Ferriero]

Sure. I'm going to let Pam Wright talk about this also, because she has been responsible for our data.gov contributions. I think we have 29 archives data sets now available on data. gov. I would say that since this agency is becoming very much customer-driven, user-focused, we have selected those data sets that we know are in great demand by our users. But Pam can be more specific about that.

[Pamela Wright, Chief Digital Access Strategist, United States National Archives and Records Administration]

What was exciting about working on the open government plan was the opportunity to really create a plan based on open government. The process we used was to ask folks for their opinion. What would they like us to release? What kind of data do they want to see up there? We used a social media tool, IdeaScale, to ask the public to participate and tell us what they'd like to see available.

They said a lot of the things that folks on our staff who work with the public already knew were important--census records, native American records. But they confirmed that through this IdeaScale tool. We took that back to the folks doing digitization in the work we're doing now and we prioritized it based on their comments.

What was really interesting with the open government plan was that a lot of the information we gathered over the months, where we asked the public for input, actually got incorporated into the plan. In years past, when we put things online we'd get a lot of comments right away. There wasn't that much comment when it came online because they had already done so much commenting, other than to confirm that they were happy with what we had done.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you.

With the type of data and information you're releasing--you're releasing what's important to the public because you had that feedback first--can you tell me who's using most of the data? Is it the general public? Is it other public servants? Is it being shared between departments and entrepreneurs, professors? And there was one question about whether good jobs are being developed with the information that's obtained through this open data. Could you respond to that, please?

[Pamela Wright]

Sure.

We've always surveyed and tried to get a good bead on who is using our data. In opening it up on opengov, it's no different from what we've known traditionally. We have a wide variety of users--educators, researchers, veterans, the general public--who are looking at our data and using it. And we get that same feedback through the open government process as well.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Are there instances when entrepreneurs have taken good advantage of this data and developed businesses with it? Do you know that?

[Pamela Wright]

I don't have any--

[David Ferriero]

I can cite the story of two guys in a garage in California who worked with us to create the web 2.0 version of the Federal Register, the government's daily newspaper, basically. They have created a web-based version of the Federal Register that looks very much like an online newspaper, written in English, so for the first time the general public can actually understand what the proposed legislation is. It is easy for the public to comment on proposed legislation. There is a button to push. There is a calendar of events. It has really transformed, I think, the way the general public has access to the workings of the government.

This was all done, as I said, by two creative guys who had an idea and used the Federal Register content to create this new way of looking at the work of government.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

When the data sets were first opened up and published, or made available for open access, were they in a form that was readily usable, or was it a lengthy process to put them into a form where they were readily usable?

[Pamela Wright]

The data sets were in XML, so that was easily put on to data.gov. In part, some of the data sets that we chose were the low-hanging fruit, what is easily put on to data.gov. We used XML, and that works well.

[David Ferriero]

I must say that this is a cultural change for the government. For some agencies and some departments it's been a difficult decision to put out raw data. The desire is to make it as clean as possible, to massage it, instead of the intention being to get it out there, let people use it, and see what they can do with it. That's been a tension that has existed in the creation of data.gov.