First of all, I can only obviously comment on the jurisdictions where I have personal experience.
I would say a couple of things. If I back up a little bit and re-clarify what I said earlier on, I think where we see a top-down approach such as in the U.K. and the U.S.... And what we mean by a top-down approach in open data terms is where guidance is given by the national government in ways that data can be shared, how departments can share that data. They provide guidance and frameworks to enable that to happen as part of the business of government. That's what we mean by that top-down approach.
What we tend to see is that governmental departments, then, become more encouraged to share data because they have been given a mandate by the national government, if you like, and it becomes more baked into the process of government rather than being seen as, “Well, we do government, and oh, we also do open data.”
I think there's some good learning there for Canada, certainly.
Canada is in the position where it can certainly exploit some of this learning that we see in the U.K. and the U.S., but that's not exclusive to other countries. If we look at Germanic countries—for example, Austria, Germany, Switzerland—again what we see there is that this is very much city-based. The national governments are looking at open data initiatives, they are looking at open data policy, but by and large, to date, the way that the citizens have engaged on open data is through city and provincial open data initiatives.
I would say the same for Italy, for example. If we look at some work that's been done with the Italian Ministry of Health to share data, if we look at the initiatives that are going on throughout Italy, they are largely city- and provincial-based. And there is a reason for this.
If you think about data—the value of data and its relevance to citizens—national data, of course, is interesting; statistical information, of course, is interesting. It's particularly interesting to data researchers and data scientists.
However, if you look at the average citizen, they're interested to know when their garbage is available, what the health situation is in their local school area, for example. Local data has a lot more relevance to the average citizen in many cases than, say, national trending data. That's why we see these initiatives evolving in different ways and citizens engaging and taking up that data in different ways.