Government Operations Committee on April 1st, 2014

[Ray Sharma]

There is going to be a natural evolution in this market. As with any technology sector, we'll go through a period of hype. We're not quite there yet, but there will come a time when the opportunity will get overestimated in a sense, and it will go through a natural cycle.

In the maturity part of the cycle, you'll start to see tools being developed by independent developers that will make the development of these technologies easy to use, even for the layperson. There's a product on the market called GameSalad. With GameSalad my nine-year-old son was able to create an Angry Birds look-alike in 15 minutes. If you can use PowerPoint, you can use GameSalad.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

GameSalad...?

[Ray Sharma]

GameSalad.

That type of product doesn't necessarily emerge in the early part of a cycle. It will emerge in the more maturing part of the cycle.

[Colin McKay]

An important addition to your point is that any organization is not overloaded with technologists. Ray's company and mine are exceptions. So the expectation is not going to be that society has to ramp up and learn programming languages and applied mathematics. In fact, adopting these tools will be the most profitable and the most useful for us.

As Ray mentioned, we're going to get to a phase where both identifying an idea and then finding a way to implement it become much easier, because—you're right—at the moment products are created by truly obsessive and dedicated individuals who have a very specific goal in mind, which is extremely admirable, but we need to see widespread adoption across the entire economy and across our whole society.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you, Mr. Hillyer. Your time is up.

We will now go back to Ms. Day for five minutes.

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am pleased to have the floor again.

I have two questions.

In your opinion, what are the success factors that would make data.gc.ca really favourable for our companies and our economic development?

Also, what would be the right way of evaluating data.gc.ca so that it is constantly up to date and people have access to the right data at the right time?

[Colin McKay]

I think in my discussion I already mentioned the ready accessibility of data sets that are relevant, well structured, machine readable, and regularly updated. I think one of the key measurements, luckily for everyone, is the actual use of the data. The data portal itself has unlocked this information from cabinets and from offices and has freed it from bureaucratic restrictions. We can, today, go and see which data sets are actually downloaded and used.

The transition from making them available to making them useful will be harder to measure, because that will involve measuring both how often they're downloaded and how they're used from the portal, as well as trying to get an impression of how Canadian citizens are benefiting from that data. That in some ways is a hidden productivity gain and a hidden efficiency gain.

We already see examples elsewhere in the world that whether crowd-sourced or developed by a business for a specific commercial purpose, applications do create markets and do identify revenue streams and customer bases in very sizable numbers, with great relevance.

There's an opportunity here. The metrics will be developed alongside the opportunities.

[Ray Sharma]

There are a couple of intangible ways to measure success, at least early on. The fact that the CODE hackathon had so many participants is actually a very good sign. It's a lot easier to get people to develop code for a game than it is for something like open data. The fact that the participation rate was that high was a good early indicator.

A couple of months ago I actually nominated data.gc.ca for an award for its excellence. You'll see, I think, that it is recognized internationally and where it stands.

Actually, I strongly agree with something, Colin.... Maybe I misspoke earlier. I would say that the Canadian government is one of the leaders, but not the leader. On balance, it's maybe in the top three to five worldwide when it comes to the open data initiative.

There is one thing the U.S. does. Colin has pointed to the U.K. and the U.S. I would agree that those are two of the leaders we can learn from. The U.S. government has this site called Challenge.gov. If you have not seen it, I would strongly encourage everyone to take a look at it as a reference point. You'll see things there such as NASA putting up a $15-million challenge. If someone can help them improve battery life on their Mars rover, NASA will give them $15 million, because that will save NASA $100 million. There are many examples of that type of thing. The Department of Energy is doing stuff. It's just taken off. Now they have this website—Challenge.gov—that allows government bureaucracies to benefit from putting these challenges out there.

To specifically answer your question, over time the way we'll be able to measure its success is by looking at the number of times the data is pulled from the website. Every time somebody pulls on the data, it'll result in something called an “API call”. That's a technical term, but it just means the number of times they're accessing the data. As we track the number of times the data is accessed over time, we'll be able to see whether or not this is a successful initiative.

[Colin McKay]

Just to add to that point about Challenge.gov, kaggle.com is how the private sector conducts exactly the same experiment. They put up challenges for business questions and ask statisticians and data experts to help them solve them for financial awards.

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

You spoke about positioning. My understanding is that, with Google, the more a site is visited, the better chances it has for appearing in the top 10 or 20 hits when someone does a search.

Government data are beacons of knowledge, since our public servants and our research centres are interrelated. I think people have access to mapping by satellite, which provides a great deal of information.

How can we make this data more popular? How do we get Canadians to use data in the many portals of cities, provinces and the federal government? How do we ensure that this data is not completely forgotten and the most interesting economic data appear easily and enable our employers to be informed and our businesses to grow?

[Colin McKay]

Once again we're in a typically Canadian conundrum. There's a small number of companies that already understand this and are looking to the data portal to improve and to provide them with information that they can use in their business practices—in many ways they are. But there are also a lot of individuals and businesses in Canada that really haven't grasped onto the potential of using the tools and the technology available to them.

Ray mentioned the simplicity with which you can scale up your information technology services without a substantial investment thanks to open source software, thanks to online services, and thanks to ready access to the Internet. They haven't seized on the value of data in helping them make decisions, whether that's at the government level or the commercial level.

I'll point to the most frequent interaction we have with government on open data at Google, in a product we call “crisis maps”. This is a service we provide when there's been a substantial crisis. You mentioned nuclear radiation, such as after Fukushima. Our local team of Googlers jumped on the opportunity to provide information to the victims and families of people who suffered in that crisis. In the case of Fukushima, we took our map product and overlaid our street view imagery and our geospatial imagery so that the first-response rescuers would have a very effective idea of where they could and could not go.

We then overlaid data we got from the Japanese government about radiation exposure. We overlaid data from the responders about where to find the retreats and the rescue centres where people had been evacuated to, and for individual Japanese we created a site called “Person Finder” where you could type in your relative's name and see whether they were in a specific rescue centre, or if they had unfortunately been identified as a victim of the tsunami.

It's in that sort of crisis point where you have five or six days to go to hydro companies, to go to local municipalities, to go to the nuclear authorities and ask what data they have available right now that is relevant to the crisis that can be overlaid on that map and made available to the public. It's “real-time”, as Ray said. That really pushes people to realize the impact of this data on their everyday lives.

What we find after those crises is that engagement is longer term. That's the sort of thing that encourages Calgary to move to open data. That's the sort of thing that has in the past encouraged the U.S. to make their open data sets available, because they've had a crucible point.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

I have to stop you there to give the last five minutes to Mr. Trottier.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, guests, for being here today.

You mentioned some examples of the kinds of customers for open data. You talked about a couple of municipal examples, such as transit and traffic.

I'm trying to think of customers of federal government data. We think of fishers and farmers and miners who have dealings with Fisheries and Oceans Canada or Agriculture Canada or Natural Resources Canada. Based on your discussions you've had with different players in the Canadian economy, who expresses the greatest need for more government data?

I'll give you an example. You talked about productivity. If you're a fisher and you require some historical map information from way back in the 20th century, you'd go to one of these libraries and put in a request. You'd lose a day of fishing to get there, and you'd get a paper map. Today they want that instantly, and they want it online, and they want it accessible from a boat via satellite.

There are benefits in government operations; it's more efficient and so on. But there are also huge benefits for the customers.

Who are the customers out there that are asking for federal government data?

[Ray Sharma]

Presently the most popular data sets are the immigration data sets. You'll find that more than half of the top ten data sets are immigration data sets by nature. If you think about it, there will always be at least several million international folks who will be interested in what's going on with the latest trends in immigration. The biggest subset of data sets of the 200,000 is natural resources. About 80,000 to 90,000 of the data sets are in that world. So the way you framed the question is very appropriate given that it seems to be where a lot of the data sets are coming from.

One of the key points in the Ontario report that I think I would be remiss in not strongly emphasizing here today is that we really need to start thinking of data as a public asset. It is not only incumbent upon us to look at it from a transparency perspective but this data, just because it's intangible, does not make it of any less worth than a physical asset. It is an asset that belongs to the people and we should be doing things—this goes back to Mr. Martin's question earlier—to ensure that the government is preserving the data. The day we announced the report it was completely washed away by the gas plant scandal, because that's all that people would talk about that particular day. But that points to the whole centralized issue of data as an asset.

We have to find balance because Google's an awesome company, right? How many companies can build a multi-hundred-billion dollar business from free Gmail, free Google search, free everything? It's awesome. One of the things Google is doing right now is that they are 3-D mapping the world, so for highways and overpasses they're making 3-D representations of these physical assets.

The question becomes, is that a public asset or is that a corporate asset? We don't want to discourage Google from doing something that's so awesome like that because it is in the interest of the public. At the same time, the government is producing data that should be considered an asset of the people. You know, we're going to have to find that balancing act, I think.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

Okay.

What about you, Mr. McKay, in terms of customers who you have encountered, people saying, we want more data from the government?

[Colin McKay]

I think Ray, in his examples points out—once again I'm coming back to the transition point—that there are some easy victories, which are natural resources data, which for Canada are extremely valuable. It's traditionally been the sort of data that companies have had to collect themselves and have had to make heavy investment in in order to get to a point where they can arrive at a natural resources discovery, whatever the sector they're in. Those data sets being collected by the government and being made available by the government will help those traditional industries grow.

But the transition point is that there's much more esoteric information. So, for example, I'll admit to being a cross-border shopper and I access cross-border wait times on a horrible website. It's a brutal 1998 HTML framework website that isn't useful to me and I have to scroll. This is information that's not just useful to me as an individual but to the hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks that are actually conducting business across the border every day. It's information that if made more easily available to logistics companies, to our manufacturers, allowing them to make decisions about which border crossing was the most efficient, and it importantly provided that analysis over time, would inform infrastructure investments, would inform routing decisions on their part. It's the sort of data analysis that firms like Purolator and FedEx and UPS already make every day. But it's also information that's so easily available it could help inform many of the much smaller companies that also co-exist along our shared border.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you, Mr. Trottier.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

It is 10:45 a.m. and that is the end of the meeting.

Thank you both for being here and for sharing your expertise. We will be pleased to share the results of our study with you.

I would like to thank the committee members for being here. On that note, I adjourn the meeting. We will meet again on Thursday at 8:45 a.m.

The meeting is adjourned.